Monthly Archives: June 2013

Picture by Ken Price via Je Suis Perdu.

Three nice pictures by Robert Herman via This Isn’t Happiness.

Next Up: Game 7.

[Photo Credit:  Larry W. Smith/EPA]

The ballgame in the Bronx was called tonight. They’ll make like Ernie Banks and play two tomorrow (1 p.m. and 7 p.m.).

Meanwhile, there’s Game 6 of the NBA Finals. These two teams have been trading bolo punches all series so logic would have the Heat winning tonight and forcing a deciding game. They’ll put up a good fight but it says here that the Spurs win their 5th title. I’m rooting for them though part of me wants to see a Game 7 for the pure drama.

Anyhow, enjoy the evening you guys.

[Photo Credit: Greg Nelson/SI]

Injuries and rain and Phil Hughes.

Brett Gardner CF
Jayson Nix SS
Robinson Cano 2B
Vernon Wells LF
Thomas Neal DH
Ichiro Suzuki RF
David Adams 3B
Lyle Overbay 1B
Chris Stewart C

It’s going to be a late night.

Never mind the hospital bills:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Painting by Gregory Thielker]

The Yankees and Dodgers are scheduled to play a two-game series in the Bronx starting tonight (if the weather permits). Nice job by SI.com’s Jay Jaffe today recalling the 1978 World Series and Game 2’s classic final out when Bob Welch whiffed Mr. October. Featured is the following take on “Casey at the Bat”:

“Destiny, Ah Fate, Mighty Reggie has Struck Out!”

by Jules Loh, AP Special Correspondent, 1978

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Yankees in L.A. The score stood 4-3, two out, one inning left to play. But when Dent slid safe at second and Blair got on at first Every screaming Dodger fan had cause to fear the worst. For there before the multitude — Ah destiny! Ah fate! Reggie Jackson, mighty Reggie, was advancing to the plate.

Reggie, whose three home runs had won the year before, Reggie, whose big bat tonight fetched every Yankee score. On the mound to face him stood the rookie, young Bob Welch. A kid with a red hot fastball — Reggie’s pitch — and nothing else. Fifty-thousand voices cheered as Welch gripped ball in mitt. One hundred thousand eyes watched Reggie rub his bat and spit.

“Throw your best pitch, kid, and duck,” Reggie seemed to say. The kid just glared. He must have known this wasn’t Reggie’s day. His fist pitch was a blazer. Reggie missed it clean Fifty-thousand throats responded with a Dodger scream. They squared off, Reggie and the kid, each knew what he must do. And seven fastballs later, the count was three and two.

No shootout on a dusty street out here in the Far West Could match the scene: A famous bat, a kid put to the test. One final pitch. The kid reared back and let a fastball fly. Fifty-thousand Dodger fans gave forth one final cry… Ah, the lights still shine on Broadway, but there isn’t any doubt The Big Apple has no joy left. Mighty Reggie has struck out.

Also buried by Welch’s sensational performance in Game 2 was when Reggie got his revenge in Game 6.  The Yankees were up 3 games to 2 and leading in the 7th inning by the score of 5-2 when Jackson faced Welch again.

This time he hit a long home run–they didn’t call him Buck Tater for nothing–the icing on the gravy of the Yankees World Series win.

Tex goes back on the DL. Oy.

[Photo Credit: Victor Decolongon/Getty Images]

Here’s my Introduction to Southwest Passage: The Yanks in the Pacific, available now. 

When he went off to cover the war in the Pacific in January 1943, John Lardner was twenty-nine years old and, thanks to his weekly column in Newsweek, already a major figure in sportswriting. Nothing at Madison Square Garden or Yankee Stadium, however, could match the lure of what awaited him overseas. “The war was everything,” he said. “I was glad to be in it, speeding along with it.”

Lardner’s first stops were Australia and New Guinea, and what he wrote there became the backbone of the book you hold in your hands, Southwest Passage: The Yanks in the Pacific. Originally published seventy years ago, this was a buried treasure in Lardner’s considerable body of work as a reporter during World War II. It’s blessed with Lardner’s unmistakable humor, and it captures the immediacy of what was then, to Americans, a new theater of war.

“There was more to be seen, heard, and felt in this war, of course, than the fighting of it,” he wrote. “It took Americans to a strange world, with a strange flavor, and gave many of them a long time to look around between bullets.”

Lardner crisscrossed Australia for four months, piling up ten thousand miles as he filed dispatches for the North American Newspaper Alliance and Newsweek. A lesser writer may have sought to dramatize what he saw, but Lardner pared away the extraneous with impeccable reporting. In the opening chapter, Lardner writes, “I want to tell the story with as few profundities and earth-shaking conclusions as possible.” It’s this unpretentious approach to reportage that keeps Southwest Passage fresh for us today.

Shortly after he arrived, Lardner observed an American soldier opening diplomatic relations with an Australian in a bar in Sydney.

“Well, boy,” said the American, “you can relax now. We’re here to save you.”

“Ow is that? I thought you were a fugitive from Pearl Harbor.”

About the locals, he wrote: “There can hardly be people in the world more fiercely and fanatically independent than Australians. The notion that the Yanks had come to ‘save Australia’—well, some of us had it, sure enough, and there was no quicker way of tasting the quick mettle and genial scorn of the fellow we came to save.”

No wonder Orville Prescott of the New York Times called Southwest Passage “as personal, informal and chatty a book of war correspondence as has yet come along. Mr. Lardner has the happy faculty of taking the war seriously without taking himself seriously.”

Lardner’s equanimity came naturally. He was, after all, the son of Ring Lardner, who was America’s most famous sportswriter before he became its most famous literary wit. Like his father, the son was serious about writing. As he said in a letter home: “It seems pretty plain that the best thing to do during the war is to work hard at whatever work you have to do, wherever it may be. Working is the only way I’ve ever found of being happy in a bad time.”

Lardner had been witness to the pitfalls of being labeled a sportswriter. His father never fully escaped being typecast as just a sportswriter. But John wasn’t just a sportswriter; he was one of the best. His reputation was cemented when he began a True magazine piece about a hell-bent prizefighter with these words: “Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.” Lardner’s fellow sportswriting legend Red Smith called it the “greatest novel ever written in one sentence.”

Like his contemporaries W. C. Heinz and A.J. Liebling, Lardner was a war correspondent, and if he didn’t enjoy their longevity or the lasting renown of Smith or Jimmy Cannon, he was every bit their equal. Heinz, in fact, is on record as calling Lardner “the best.”

“Time has a way of dimming the memory and achievements of writers who wrote, essentially, for the moment, as writers writing for journals must do,” Ira Berkow, a longtime columnist of the New York Times, told me. “But the best shouldn’t be lost in the haze of history and John Lardner was a brilliant writer—which means, in my view, that he was insightful, irreverent, wry and a master of English prose.”

John was born in 1912, the first of Ring and Ellis Lardner’s four boys. Their father was a study in reserve, a poker-faced observer of human folly who ushered his sons into the family business, although not by design. When his third son, Ring Jr., sold his first magazine piece, the father said, “Good God, isn’t any one of you going to turn out to be anything but a writer?”

The Lardners moved to the East Coast from Chicago in the fall of 1919. Early on, they lived in Great Neck, Long Island, the model for the fictional West Egg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (for a time, Fitzgerald was one of Ring’s closest friends). Another friend was Grantland Rice, who succeeded Lardner as the most celebrated sportswriter in the country. Whenever Ring took his sons to Yankee Stadium, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig always came by to pay their respects.

In his memoir, The Lardners: My Family Remembered, Ring Jr. wrote about the striking similarities he and his brothers shared with their father: “Intellectual curiosity with a distinctly verbal orientation, taciturnity, a lack of emotional display, an appreciation of the ridiculous. It was a matter of course that you mastered the fundamentals of reading and writing at the age of four, and by six reading books was practically a full-time occupation.”

John was all of ten when he broke into print with this ditty for the New York World:

Babe Ruth and old Jack Dempsey,

Both sultans of the swat
One hits where other people are,

The other where they’re not.

Ring Jr. claimed that John, more than any of his brothers, patterned his life on his father’s. John was bright and restless, and perhaps he pushed himself because he didn’t want to be known only as Ring’s son. He wasn’t given to talking about his motivations, but it is no stretch to assume that his father’s considerable talent gave him something to shoot for.

“John grew up in the shadow of a father who was a great writer,” Liebling wrote. “This is a handicap shared by only an infinitesimal portion of any given generation, but it did not intimidate him.”

As for himself, John wrote, “In the interests of learning to read and cipher, I made the rounds at a number of schools, my tour culminating in Phillips Academy, Andover, and Harvard University (one year), where I picked up the word ‘culminating.”‘

He went to Paris for another year to study at the Sorbonne, worked for a few months in Paris on the International Herald Tribune, then returned to New York in 1931 and landed a job with the New York Herald Tribune. He covered local news and quickly earned bylines—no small achievement at what was considered the city’s best-written paper. “We are all swollen up like my ankles,” his father boasted.

At twenty-one, John left the Herald Tribune to write a column for the North American Newspaper Alliance. It was the Depression, and he was pulling down an impressive $100 a week, but his father would not live long enough to see him cash any paychecks. Ring died in 1933 after suffering for years from tuberculosis and alcoholism. He was forty-eight.

In the late ’30s, John began his transition to magazine writing. He published a story for the Saturday Evening Post on the Black Sox scandal and launched the Newsweek sports column that would run for eighteen years and establish his reputation. And yet, for all of that, the rumblings of the coming war were impossible to ignore.

Finally, in 1940, he wrote a letter to John Wheeler, his boss at NANA:

A year or so ago you suggested—not at all in a definitive way, but simply as something to think about—that in case of real action abroad, perhaps involving this country, you might consider sending me to do some work there instead of, or in addition to, the people that usually do the stuff of that kind for you and the Times. The idea stuck in my mind, naturally, but I haven’t given it any serious thought until recently. I think I can do other work as well as or better than most newspaper men and writers, and that a time may be coming shortly when that work will be more important and valuable to both you and me. This sounds swellheaded—but if I didn’t feel the way I do about writing, I wouldn’t give a damn about being a writer.

John got his wish not long after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. During his voyage to Australia he wrote to his wife, Hazel: “I have now stated for the 143rd time that I don’t think Billy Conn can beat Joe Louis. This opinion is not censorable, and I will pass it along to you, too, for what it is worth, though you probably knew it all the time.”

Lardner traveled with four other American reporters during his twelve weeks in Australia. All proved more than happy to break up their considerable downtime by arguing about the following: “Food; Russia; women; the Louis-Schemling fights; the art of Michelangelo; the Civil War; religion; the Newspaper Guild; Cornelia Otis Skinner; tattooing; the best place to live in New England; William Randolph Hearst; war production; venereal disease; the Pyramids; walking-sticks; dining out as opposed to dining home; the private life of Hedy Lamarr; marriage; For Whom the Bell Tolls; prizefight managers; education for children; Enzo Fiermonte; Paris; this war and all others; Leopold and Loeb; San Francisco restaurants; Greek and Roman architecture; Seabiscuit; the comparative merits of Cleopatra and Mary Queen of Scots. And several hundred others.”

As consistently amusing as Lardner is in Southwest Passage, he strives for more than comic effect in his dispatches. Take his description of Darwin, the ghost town “at the topmost pole of the dusty road across Australia, brooding over its scars”; or his account of the nurses who survived brutal air raids in the Philippines with “their hard-bought shell of resistance.” Nothing showy, nothing fancy—just a world-class observer at work, as Lardner was when he encountered a swing band performing for a U.S. Army outfit near Darwin a few days after Easter. “The night, following a day without bombs, was moonlit, and the Southern Cross blazed above. The musicians brought their guns as well as their instruments.”

Lardner downplayed any personal jeopardy he faced, but as Liebling said, “John was naturally brave. When he saw blinding bomb flashes by night, he used to move toward them to see better.” Lardner himself might have chalked that up to poor eyesight, but his courage is evidenced by his trip through hostile waters to Port Moresby on a freighter dubbed the “Floating Firecracker,” whose cargo consisted of bombs and drums of gasoline. On another occasion, after successfully bombing their target off the north coast of New Guinea, the plane Lardner was aboard stopped to refuel at a barren little base. The men ate bread and marmalade in the mess shack while Lardner talked to one of the soldiers about the ice hockey playoffs for the Stanley Cup.

We got our last thrill of the day then, thrown in for good measure and absolutely unsolicited. Doggedly the Zeros [Japanese fighter planes] had trailed us south, and with them carne bombers. The alarm sounded, and the crews on the ground beelined for their planes, for there is nothing more humiliating, useless, and downright impractical than to be caught on the ground, in the open, with your aeronautical pants down.

There is nothing more scary, I should add, because something always goes a little wrong when you try to take off under the condition known as “or else.” One of the engines missed. Then the door failed to shut tight . . . but we did get off, after sitting there for what seemed like a couple of minutes longer than forever.

Given his natural reticence, there is little to be found in Lardner’s papers revealing his feelings about Southwest Passage. In letters home he didn’t much talk about himself or the content of his work, just the conditions under which he produced it. “As far as I know the stories I’ve been writing have not been done by others,” he wrote to his wife. “The main trouble with being frontward and one of the reasons I’ll have to spend more time here is communications and censorship. You can’t be sure how fast your stuff is getting to headquarters and clearing from there, and you have no way of knowing what’s being taken out of stories. It’s like writing in a void.”

Lardner came home to resume his sports column in the summer of 1942, but by the end of the year he was a war correspondent again. His first stops were North Africa and Italy, then it was back to the Pacific, where he went ashore at Iwo Jima only a few hours after the first wave of marines. By the time he covered the invasion of Okinawa, now also writing for the New Yorker, he was haunted by the deaths of two of his brothers: Jim was the last American volunteer to die in the Spanish Civil War, in 1938, and David was killed in 1944 by a landmine in France. You can practically feel the shadow of mortality on him in the letter he wrote to his wife after filing his dispatch from Okinawa: “That was the last one, baby. During the last few days I was there, I got one or two small and gentle hints, much more gentle than the one at Iwo Jima, that my luck was beginning to run out and I had better quit while I was still in one handsome, symmetrical piece. By the time I get home it will be practically three and a half years since I started covering the war which I guess will be enough.”

Like his father, John had considerable health problems for much of his adult life: TB, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis. Undeterred, he worked hard and steadily as he gave up his syndicated newspaper column to write long magazine pieces for True and Sport as well as the New Yorker. Along the way he published two collections of his columns, It Beats Working and Strong Cigars and Lovely Women, and a history of the golden age of boxing called White Hopes and Other Tigers.

A certain mystique rose up around Lardner. He was forever described as someone who could stay at the bar all evening, nursing a Scotch, smoking, and scarcely saying a word. “He was as easy to like as he was hard to know,” said Liebling. And yet he was far from morose. “I’d like to fend off at least a few tragic overtones in the account of John Lardner,” his daughter Susan once wrote. “Those of us who knew my father . . . remember him as a song-singing, piano-playing, butter pecan ice cream-eating cat rancher and driver of Buick convertibles, who drank more milk than whisky and who often and rightly referred to himself as Handsome Jack.”

John had always told friends he wouldn’t outlive his old man, and he was right. He died of a heart attack in 1960 six weeks before his forty-eighth birthday. That day, he was writing an obituary for an old family friend, Franklin P. Adams. “F.P.A. was always a poor poker player and often a bore,” he wrote before collapsing with chest pains. When the family doctor arrived, he took Lardner in his arms and said, “John, you can’t die. John, you’re a noble human being.” Lardner looked at him and said, “Oh Lou, that sounds like a quotation.”

In September of 1943, Lardner sat down in a stone house in southern Italy to compose his latest dispatch from the war. He had written in less commodious surroundings as he bounced from Australia to New Guinea to North Africa, but he neither complained about them nor reveled in this rare taste of comfort. Usually he was glad for mail call, too, even if it came in midsentence. But not this day.

Lardner was hoping for a letter from his wife and instead received a legal notice from the midwestern law firm of Duffy, Claffy, Igoe & McCorkindale. The letter concerned a column he had written about a former outfielder from St. Louis named Bohnsack, who seemed not to have been memorable except that he once threw an umpire off a moving train. Lardner, who knew something worth writing about when he saw it, happily included the incident in his column. Now Bohnsack’s lawyers were claiming the anecdote was “false and misleading,” and they urged Lardner to settle out of court. Then as now, there was nothing like a little moola to ease a fellow’s “grievous social and mental damage.”

Lardner seethed: “Bohnsack annoyed me because he showed me that his world, which had also been my world, had great vitality, and that it took considerably more than a global battle to kill its self-preoccupation,” he wrote. It wasn’t just that Bohnsack had told Lardner personally that he’d thrown the umpire off a train, or that the first piece of mail he had received in the battle zone was not from his wife. “It was most of all that now, in the midst of the great and bloody planetary adventure of war, these barristers chose callously to call me back to the world of petulant outfielders and remind me that I was a sports writer.”

In fact, Lardner wrote about a variety of topics: lexicography, jury service, and New York history; for the New Yorker he contributed occasional film, theater, and book reviews and in the last three and a half years of his life wrote a column for the magazine on TV and radio. “Sportswriter” was a label that he, like his father, would never escape. This slim volume of his war reportage proves that Lardner was a quick-witted and assured writer no matter the subject. As Stanley Walker, the Herald Tribune’s city editor, said, Lardner “came close to being the perfect all-around journalist.” Never were those skills put to a stiffer test than on the battlefields in Europe and the Pacific. In the thickest drama, the unflappable man remained unflappable, at his best writing what Red Smith called novels in a single sentence.

Over at Dodger Thoughts our old pal Jon Weisman and I talk about the two-game Yankee-Dodgers series. I leave off with telling him to kiss my ass, which is a Dodger Thoughts polite way of telling him to go fuck himself. Welcome to the Bronx.

Serious Eats gives 17 Greatt Cold Noodles in NYC for hot summer days. 

A friend tells me that Charles Ives wrote his Second Symphony while commuting from Danbury to NYC and back on the train to and from his insurance job. Could be apocryphal.

Lovers on the Street by Claire Streetart (via fer1972).

From Humans of New York.

From our pal Diane Firstman comes This Technology Has Been Disconnected:

We drove up to the Angels Stadium parking lot, and we weren’t asked to pay for parking. Our tickets were scanned at the turnstile, and we were directed down instead of up. When we found the entrance for Section 113, the usher politely asked us to walk down the steps to the fifth row, and then turn left. My son and I took seats 6 and 7, and my wife and oldest daughter sat directly behind us. We were high rollers, at least for a day. As I stood blinking in the sun, only twenty feet or so from the infield grass, a line from a Talking Heads song popped into my head. “Well, how did I get here?”

I teach 7th grade English. Last Thursday was the last day of school, and it was a sad day. Not only was it my last day with the amazing group of seventh graders that I had taught since September, it was also the last day I’d see the graduating eighth graders I’d taught the year before. Included in that graduating Class of 2013 was a group of ten girls who ate lunch in my room every day this year.

We had our final lunch last Tuesday, and they surprised me with a few gifts — a framed photograph that they had all signed, a book I’ve been wanting to read for years, and a fistful of my favorite candy bars. That was already more than generous, but then they gave me one more present — four box seats to see the Yankees on Father’s Day. All of my students know of my love for the Yankees, so these girls certainly knew it would be the perfect gift: something I’ve always wanted but would never have bought for myself.

I thought of those girls as we sat on the third base side, five rows up, about midway between the mound and home plate. The best seats I’ve ever had for a game. An anthropologist could probably do a fairly in depth study comparing and contrasting the different social groups in the different corners of a major league ballpark, and it took only a few minutes to gauge the folks in Section 113. There were other tourists like us, people who took photos of everything because they’d never been there before and doubted they would ever come back. They looked around with wonder, first marveling at how close they were to their heroes, then sneaking glances to the upper reaches of the stadium where they knew they belonged.

And of course, there were the locals — the season ticket holders who sat in these seats 81 games a year and had lost sight of how special this section really was. They arrived casually, an inning or two late, and walked to their seats without direction. One family of six sauntered in with drinks in hand, sat down in the front row, and simply started chatting amiably amongst themselves as if they were picnicking in the park. Imagine Dorothy stepping into Oz and simply saying hello.

I’ve been going to watch the Yankees in Anaheim for more than thirty years now, and the biggest difference between now and then is that Angels fans actually care about their team now. They wear the red, they swing rally monkeys over their heads, and they cheer for their favorite players. They just aren’t as loud as Yankee fans.

When Brett Gardner rifled a double down the left field line to start off the game, I stood and shouted out to him as he stood at second. “There you go, Gardy!” When that rally fizzled, and two innings later another one looked to be headed in the same direction, I worried that this game — that these amazing seats — might not have a happy ending.

But then Travis Hafner did the improbable. With two outs and two strikes, he launched a home run to center field, and suddenly the Yankees were up 3-0. Before the inning was over they had scored five runs, and it felt like fifty. Two older men in their sixties, one wearing a Yankee cap and the other an Angels cap, returned to their seats in front of us after missing the third inning. The Yankee fan turned to me and asked with a smile and a wink towards his friend, “Hey, did we miss anything?” We laughed.

The next five innings were delightfully uneventful. CC Sabathia looked like an ace on the mound for the Yanks, and his dominance combined with the Southern California sun to slowly send Angels fans home. By the seventh inning at least a dozen of the actual ticket holders in our section had gone home and had been replaced by interlopers, always a father and one or two boys. A Yankee fan and his four-year-old son, both in pinstripes, slid into our row for a while, then bounced from one seat to another as they saw fit. When the entitled family in the front row got up to leave in the eighth, they weren’t out of the aisle before their seats were filled. Some things never change.

When Sabathia struck out Peter Bourjos to end the eighth inning, there was a mass exodus of Angels fans — because no one rallies from a 6-0 deficit in the ninth — but Yankee fans stayed put, clearly hoping to see Mariano Rivera record the final three outs. When Sabathia came back out to start the ninth, I was momentarily disappointed, but then I realized I was being greedy to hope for that on what had already been a near-perfect day.

It didn’t make much sense to my wife. “Isn’t it a bit odd that he’s their best pitcher, but they aren’t letting him pitch?” Indeed.

And then it happened. Mike Trout led off with a double to left, and Albert Pujols walked. There was no cause for concern, of course, but it was enough to force Girardi out to the mound. The lower level from the visitors’ dugout to the right field foul pole has traditionally been filled with Yankee fans, but at this point in the game they outnumbered fans of the home team by about ten to one. The second Girardi raised his right arm to signal the bullpen, every Yankee fan in the park stood to give CC an ovation, including that huge contingent across the field from me. It gave me goosebumps.

Also, it gave me hope.

As Robertson was having trouble throwing strikes and looked ready to load the bases after allowing the Angels’ first run, I leaned over and told my son, “I’m not sure if I’m rooting for a walk, or an out.”

As Robertson threw ball four, my eyes immediately found Girardi in the dugout. He didn’t hesitate, and the buzz began as soon as he hit the top step. Everyone knew what was coming.

The bullpens in Anaheim are staggered, with the visitors’ pen elevated and behind the Angels’, so it took longer than usual for Rivera to appear after Girardi signaled for him. When the gate opened up and Mariano broke into his familiar trot, the entire stadium — even those wearing red — rose to give him a standing ovation. I got my son’s attention and then turned to my daughter. “Watch everything he does,” I said. “If you watch baseball for another fifty years, he will still be the best pitcher you’ll ever see.”

Erick Aybar grounded out weakly to first base for the second out, but a run scored from third, cutting the lead to 6-2. My son noticed this. “Daddy, it’s six to two now!” Don’t worry, I told him. It’s Mo.

Four batters later, after three of the cheapest hits you’ll ever see and a walk that loaded the bases, everything had changed. The stadium was in a frenzy as Albert Pújols, the greatest hitter of his generation, came up to face Mariano Rivera, the greatest closer of all-time. With the score suddenly 6-5, any base hit would almost certainly win the game for the Angels. There was a woman in her sixties standing four seats to my left. We were both wearing identical Rivera t-shirts, and we looked at each other for the first time all day. You know the look.

I watched as Pújols walked slowly towards the plate, and the words “rock bottom” started swimming around my head. It would be bad enough to lose this game, a game that would be their sixth loss in a row, but to lose a six-run lead in the ninth inning with Rivera on the mound? A loss like that could potentially destroy the entire season.

But then I looked away from Pújols and focused on Mariano. In that moment I knew everything would be okay. Who else, I thought — in the history of the game — would I rather see on the mound for the Yankees right now than this man? He had yielded four consecutive base runners, something I’m guessing he’s done less than ten times in his nineteen-year career, but nothing about him had changed. He looked in to Chris Stewart to get the sign, bowed slightly as he came to a set, then placed the ball exactly where he wanted for strike one. His next pitch was fouled off for strike two, and the volume turned up a notch as Yankee fans begged for the strikeout.

Rivera’s third pitch to Pújols was meant to tantalize. It was well above the letters, but by the time Pújols realized it was up out of the strike zone, it was too late. He wasn’t able to stop his mighty swing, and the game was over.

The texts started coming in almost immediately. First, a report from New York saying I could be seen celebrating in the background of the YES replay of the final pitch, then two more from people who had seen me on the local Angels broadcast. My brother-in-law sent along a clip of the video, and there we were, all four of us. As Pújols swung and missed, I could be seen pumping my fist in the air in celebration.

Video Clip

We lingered in the stands a bit and eventually took a few photos down by the rail as evidence that we had actually been there. As we finally made our way up to the concourse and walked out of the stadium, I thought about the dozens of Yankee games I had seen in the past. I had seen Don Mattingly hit a pinch-hit home run to beat the Angels in that same stadium, I had travelled to New York for Don Mattingly Day, and I had been lucky enough to take my entire family to see a game in New York in the old Stadium’s final season.

None of those games, though, compared to this one. The game itself was phenomenal, and it was an added bonus to see Mariano, but there was so much more to it than that. I was with my family on Father’s Day, sitting in unbelievable seats courtesy of ten students whom I’ll never forget. I’m sure I’ll be watching baseball for the next fifty years, but I know I’ll never see another game like this one.

Speaking of fixing things, check out his article by Kyle Wiens:

I was always in awe of what my grandfather could do. As I was growing up, when a faucet needed fixing or we needed a lighting fixture installed, it was my grandfather who did it. He brought his toolbox with him every time he came over. I remember being enthralled by his workshop, with his oddly large bandsaw and drawers of strange woodworking tools.

Like the tools and the wood that he worked, Grandfather was rough-hewn. He could be hard and gruff. As a child, his demeanor drove me to tears more than once. When I would accidentally interfere with his work, he would grunt, “Get out of my road.” He wasn’t offended by my presence, he just needed to get past me to get things done. Finishing the job was primary. All his intellectual effort went into finding the most efficient way to accomplish the task. Slight emotional casualties along the way were acceptable. It took me years to understand that.

But he was quietly affectionate in his own way. He never spoke praise, but you could see it in his eyes. I remember seeing that look on his face when I became an Eagle Scout, just as he had been so many years before. It was the first time I knew that Grandfather was proud of me.

…When I left for college, Grandpa gave me a hug and a toolbox. I was the only one in the dorms with tools, and I was constantly fixing things for people. (We also used them for more nefarious purposes, swapping bathroom signs and locking the resident advisor out of his room.) Those were the first tools that were truly my own. They were not the last.

“Never force it.” That was Grandpa’s advice for tinkering, and it’s good advice for life. Work hard, but let things come. If what you’re doing isn’t working, try another way.

Painting by Richard Diebenkorn.

Reid Brignac has a sweet, long left-handed swing. Looks like he’s going to crush the ball when you see that swing. Except I haven’t seen him hit any bombs since he’s been on the Yanks, have you? Over at River Ave Blues, Mike Axisa offers some thoughts on how the Bombers can continue to tweak their roster.

“Still Life with Dutch Jar and Bust of Dante” by William Harnett (1884)

Classic.

Here’s John Jeremiah Sullivan on James Agee’s Cotton Tenants, a previously unpublished magazine story that would later turn into Agee’s acclaimed book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

BEFORE THE FAMOUS BOOK, there was the essay, the thing Agee and Evans were sent to Alabama for in the first place. It never got published. Agee wrote it at least twenty thousand words longer than Fortune wanted; he turned it in late; the rubric under which it was supposed to run was done away with by editorial higher-ups, etc., etc. Anyone who’s written for magazines will recognize the thousand mystifying in-house obstacles that doom so many pieces. The very manuscript of this was considered lost, until Agee’s middle child and younger daughter, Andrea, found it a decade ago, and The Baffler excerpted it last year. Now, at the age of seventy-seven, it exists in full, published by Melville House with the title Cotton Tenants.

It’s a very different creature from the book. More restrained. More disciplined, overall—perhaps it’s more correct to say, more confident. Cotton Tenants knows its form: the long, weird, quasi-essayistic, documentary-infused magazine piece, a form older than the novel, despite a heritable instinct in critics to continually be calling it New. Agee was pushing the form—that’s partly what makes it exciting to see and read this new book. He was pushing Luce, too, seeing what he could smuggle into Fortune, stylistically, in a Trojan-horse kind of way. Later, writing for himself and Evans, he was willing to go further.

The earlier constraints had both limiting and salutary effects. It’s a smaller, lesser work, but a more perfect one. Prose is like glass in this respect. The bigger you go, the more opportunities for cracks. We cut more ambitious works slack not out of pity but in just measurement. There are places, like pressures, to which you can’t go without a little weakening of the structure. Cotton Tenants is a smaller pane of glass. Very clear. You can see Agee’s influences, in bud form, but you can also see a couple of years’ practice at writing what William Hazlitt called “periodical essays,” pieces that existed under a certain pressure to keep the attention of distracted readers. Agee had become good at it.

Kurt Schwitters.