Monthly Archives: April 2013

Beautiful pictures by Harold Feinstein

…over at Everday I Show.

Hiroki Kuroda worked quickly tonight, the Oriole hitters swung early to a most pleasing result: ground balls to Yankee infielders. Robinson Cano made several graceful plays, especially a double play to end the eighth inning. Kuroda had his back-door slider going, the splitter splitting, and, of course, his sinker sinking. Gave up five hits and didn’t walk a batter.

Staked to a 3-0 lead highlighted by a 2-run home run by Brett Gardner that hit high off the right field foul pole, Kuroda took a shutout into the ninth inning. Jason Nix made a one-our error and in the bullpen the TV cameras showed Mariano Rivera roll his eyes and give a little smile. Then Adam Jones tapped out to Kevin Youkilis at third and the hot-hitting Chris Jones, who’d already struck out twice, whiffed to end the game.

Tidy, efficient, satisfying.

Yanks 3, O’s 0.

[Photo Credit: Virginia Woods-Jack]

Yanks look to win the weekend series tonight.

Brett Gardner CF
Vernon Wells LF
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkilis 3B
Ben Francisco DH
Brennan Boesch RF
Francisco Cervelli C
Lyle Overbay 1B
Jayson Nix SS

Our man, Hiroki…

Never mind yesterday’s hiccup:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: Kingman Photo]

Ah, you know what? I missed the whole damn thing so I don’t have much on what went down yesterday. I checked the box score, saw that each team had a bunch of hits, so I guess the Yanks had their chances just couldn’t get her done.

They lost, 5-3, and the modest but promising, four-game winning streak is over.

Phil Huges didn’t get bombed but he wasn’t good, either:

“I can’t remember the last time I was as bad as that,” Hughes said. “Just not being able to locate the fastball, or any offspeed pitch for that matter. Any time I did have to come in for a strike, it was out over the middle of the plate and just got hammered somewhere.”

Unless of course, a better assessment is this one…

“The fastball command wasn’t there,” Francisco Cervelli said. “We get behind all the time, and especially when you can’t throw strike one, that’s a problem. … When we miss location, this is the big leagues, you pay. Sometimes they hit a base hit, sometimes a homer. Today was three bombs.”
(Via Chad Jennings)

And here’s some more weirdness.

Hiroki Kuroda will get the start tonight as Andy Pettitte’s got some back pain and will skip a start. Yanks and O’s make like The Game of the Week tonightski on ESPN.

In the meantime, it’s sunny here in the Bronx. Hope everyone has a fine day. We’ll be back tonight with a game thread.

For now, dig the Andrew Wyeth picture above and listen to this:

“Stray Cat Blues” (Live) The Rolling Stones

It’ll be Phil Hughes this afternoon.

Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkilis 3B
Travis Hafner DH
Vernon Wells LF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Francisco Cervelli C
Lyle Overbay 1B
Jayson Nix SS

Never mind last night’s good fortune, time to win another:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]

“S’posin'”–Fats Waller

[Picture Via: Aberrant Beauty]

A cold, rainy night in April does not equal much baseball fun, for the players or the fans in the seats. Such was the scene tonight in the Bronx but any discomfort was eased by a quick pace. The game zipped along, lots of strikeouts, and the Yanks held a 2-1 lead in the seventh inning. With a man on first, CC Sabathia was called for a balk by the first base ump. It was hard to detect, even after looking at a couple of replays. The pitcher certainly didn’t think it was a good call and when Sabathia gave up a single that tied the game, his frustration grew. He had a chance to turn a double play soon after–after already starting two earlier–and botched the throw to second. He got out of the inning without giving up another run and as he walked off the field the camera showed him saying that most fragrant of baseball words: “Horseshit.”

That was just the start of the real horseshit but the Yanks were on the good side of the stink. In the bottom of the seventh, they scored three runs on no hits–three walks and an error by Adam Jones. With two outs, the O’s center fielder went back on a well hit ball by Vernon Wells, tracked it down, and began to blow a bubble as the ball arrived and clanged off the heel of his glove.

The cycle of horseshit was complete in the eighth when the O’s put the first two men on base and then hit into a triple play. Cano fielded a ball on a short hop–it looked at first as if he’d caught it on a line–flipped to Nix at short for the first out. Nix and Youkilis ran down the lead runner for the second out and then the trail runner was caught between first and second. Youk threw to Overbay who then threw the ball to second for the triple play. The infielders jumped in the air and smiled as they ran back to the dugout. Rich men overcome with spontaneous, childlike joy.

A few hours after learning that Jonathan Winters is dead, the was appropriately knutty.

Mariano got the save as the Yanks steal one from the Boids. A fine way to beat the cold.

Final Score: Yanks 5, O’s 2.

C.C. goes first. Be curious to see if the Yanks and O’s pick up where they left off last season. Man, they had some spirited games last year.

1. Gardner CF
2. Cano 2B
3. Youkilis 3B
4. Hafner DH
5. Wells LF
6. Suzuki RF
7. Nunez SS
8. Overbay 1B
9. Cervelli C

Never mind the raindrops:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Hermann Hirsch]

Stupefaction celebrates the end of an era as Bleecker Bob’s closes for good.

S”long, Mr. Winters.

Over at SB Nation’s Longform, check out Flinder Boyd’s piece on Chris Copeland:

An hour and a half before the Knicks-Pistons game in London’s O2 arena this past January, Chris Copeland was already shooting around, sweat dripping off his practice jersey, and the squeak of his sneakers echoing off the nearly empty seats. I was in town for the week to analyze the game for the BBC and looked forward to catching up with my old teammate.

Aside from the rare, brief phone conversation, the last time I spoke to Chris Copeland was more than five years ago. He was stuffing whatever clothes he had into a duffle bag in a rundown hotel outside of Santiago de Compostela. We were briefly teammates in Spain before management decided he wasn’t good enough to play for even the lowest of second division teams and suddenly terminated his contract. I still remember his sense of failure and how the fear of the unknown reduced him to an anxious child.

Even at 6’8 it was sometimes easy to forget Copeland played professional basketball. He’s friendly and unassuming, and his round, vibrant face and long lanky arms covered in a layer of baby fat often made him seem younger than he was. When I knew him, there was nothing in his game, at least visibly, to suggest he could ever, even in the most outlandish of clichéd fairy-tale stories, end up playing for the New York Knicks. Yet here he was, a 29-year-old NBA rookie coming off a 22-point master-class performance four nights earlier against New Orleans and in the starting line-up against the Pistons in London. “I can’t explain it,” he said. “It’s just what I always dreamed about it.” Sure, I thought. Every boy who has ever picked up a ball dreams of playing in the NBA, but to make it at his age, with a limited basketball pedigree, after spending the last few years in the roundball backwaters of northern Europe, is not only unheard of, but virtually impossible.

Food 52 gives 9 simple spring salads including this one: Pea Shoot and Baby Arugula Salad with Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette.

Drawings by Massimo Carnevale.

From Colossus of Clout: Happiness.

Via Kottke, this here looks like funski:

And there’s this:

[Photo Credit: David Sprague/L.A. Times]

Yanks finish their visit to Cleveland tonight.

Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkilis 3B
Travis Hafner DH
Vernon Wells LF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Lyle Overbay 1B
Francisco Cervelli C

Never mind the dampness:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Sorin Petculescu]

Houba.

Here’s Glenn Stout on Race, Jackie Robinson and the Red Sox:

At approximately 10:30 in the morning on Monday, April 16, 1945, Boston city Councilman Isadore Muchnick and sportswriter Wendell Smith and three African-American baseball players from the Negro leagues arrived at Boston’s Fenway Park. One month earlier the Red Sox reluctantly agreed to hold a tryout for African American ballplayers. Shortstop Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs, second baseman Marvin Williams of the Philadelphia Stars and outfielder Sam Jethroe of the Cleveland Buckeyes came to Boston nearly a week earlier in anticipation of the tryout.

The audition of the three players took a little over one year to arrange and lasted only ninety minutes. Yet the fallout from that day echoes through Red Sox history almost to the present as an example of the institutional racism practiced by the ballclub under the tenure of Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey. Only in the last few seasons, at the conclusion of the Yawkey era, did the ballclub begin to shed a reputation for racism that many trace to that April morning.

Still shrouded by significant misconceptions and errors of fact, that day deserves examination. Not only do the facts of the tryout deserve explication, but the manner in which both the press and the ballclub reacted to the episode and portrayed it since then is telling. By calling into question the details of the event the defenders of Yawkey and the Red Sox attempted to use it to absolve the ballclub, the owner, and by extension, the city of Boston for any racial liability, perverting the significance of the tryout.

“I believe that Jack is one of the best actors in Hollywood, perhaps on a par with the greatest stars of the past like Spencer Tracy and James Cagney. I should think that he is on almost everyone’s first-choice list for any role which suits him. His work is always interesting, clearly conceived and has the X-factor, magic. Jack is particularly suited for roles which require intelligence. He is an intelligent and literate man, and these are qualities almost impossible to act. In The Shining, you believe he’s a writer, failed or otherwise.” -Stanley Kubrick

I think Kubrick is right. It’s one of the differences between Nicholson and Robert De Niro. I’ve never believed De Niro when he played cerebral guys, like in The Last Tycoon or True Confessions. I always get the sense that when he tries to play brainy guys De Niro is exposed as a mook. But Nicholson, or Robert Duvall, or Gene Hackman, for that matter, can play a certain kind of brainy intelligence convincingly.

I said as much to our pal Matt Blankmon in an e-mail and he replied:

I think DeNiro connects more to Brando and Dean – that emotional physicality. You can buy him as a streetwise guy, a clever guy, but not bookish or cerebral. I don’t know about Duvall as a brainy guy – he’s another guy I feel more as wise, but not intellectual – Tom Hagen, but not Michael Corleone. Nicholson is a guy who just comes across as smart and that’s part of his energy, even when he’s playing a mook like in The Last Detail. The connection to Cagney is apt–Nicholson, however, wouldn’t have been a very good Travis Bickle. I think Paul Newman always projected a certain braininess on screen, so much so that I had trouble buying him as a dumb guy in Pocket Money.

And speaking of The Passenger, what Kubrick is talking about is why you have no problem accepting Jack as a semi-famous world-traveling journalist.

Interestingly – how often has William Hurt played a guy who looks and seems smart, but then is actually kinda dumb? He’s very easy to buy as a scientist in Altered States, but he’s so well suited as the superficially, seemingly brainy guys in Broadcast News and Body Heat who are actually not so smart.

Good points by Matt, especially how all intelligence isn’t the same. And De Niro doesn’t lack intelligence just not the same brand that Nicholson has.

Baguette, anyone?

[Picture via: Roost]