The good news: C.C. The bad news: James Shields and the gluten-free Yankee offense.
1. Gardner CF
2. Suzuki RF
3. Cano 2B
4. Hafner DH
5. Almonte LF
6. Overbay 1B
7. Nunez SS
8. Cruz 3B
9. Stewart C
Never mind the carbs:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
“The Artist’s Studio in the Afternoon Fog” By Winslow Homer (1894)
Over at SB Nation Longform, here’s Jorge Arangure Jr on Brooklyn’s Field of Dreams:
In East Brooklyn, carved out among an urban dystopia of car washes, donut shops and fast-food joints sits an unlikely baseball field, the main field at City Line Park.
Although no one will mistake it for a professional field, the surface is almost immaculate. The infield dirt is well groomed and the foul lines are painted in perfect symmetry. In stark contrast to the dull grays of the surrounding streets and concrete sidewalks, the grass is a lush, rich green.
As much as a baseball diamond cut into a cornfield in Iowa, its presence here seems out of place. Yet if that place is known as the Field of Dreams, then surely this park in Brooklyn, at the corner of Atlantic Ave and Fountain Ave., is the Field of Broken Dreams.
Writing in the New York Times, here’s Oliver Sacks on the Joy of Old Age:
Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over. My mother was the 16th of 18 children; I was the youngest of her four sons, and almost the youngest of the vast cousinhood on her side of the family. I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.
I thought I would die at 41, when I had a bad fall and broke a leg while mountaineering alone. I splinted the leg as best I could and started to lever myself down the mountain, clumsily, with my arms. In the long hours that followed, I was assailed by memories, both good and bad. Most were in a mode of gratitude — gratitude for what I had been given by others, gratitude, too, that I had been able to give something back. “Awakenings” had been published the previous year.
At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive — “I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” to which Beckett answered, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”) I am grateful that I have experienced many things — some wonderful, some horrible — and that I have been able to write a dozen books, to receive innumerable letters from friends, colleagues and readers, and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “an intercourse with the world.”
Food 52 gives grilled peaches. Hell, yes.
My wife and I were standing on the subway platform at Chambers Street last weekend when I saw a guy holding something familiar.
“That guy’s got a bullworker,” I said.
“Excuse me?” said my wife.
“A bullworker.”
“I don’t understand what you are saying.”
I told her to hang on and went over to talk to him. Sure enough it was a bullworker.
My father had one back in the early 1980s in one of his periodic attempts to be fit. I said as much to the guy who said he bought his off some guy on the street. Showed me the model–made in 1969. He said it’s indestructible and that he uses it all the time. Said it’s making a comeback.
The Bullworker. I’m not kidding.
It’s not so much that we’re watching a non-gluten Yankee offense, that would imply trying to be healthy for the sake of winning. Maybe something like what George had in mind with his misbegotten Bronx Burners project in 1982 (never mind power, we want speed). This Yankee team is more like offensive crudite: Zoilo, Ishikawa, Romine, Luis Cruz, Alberto Gonzalez. There’s just not much there. So you can’t blame them entirely when they’ve got situations set up nicely but don’t follow through. Last night the most dramatic scene came in the 9th with the Yanks down 5-1. They loaded the bases with nobody out and then the next three hitters struck out and the game was over.
That’s just the pill we’ve got to swallow right now.
Final Score: Royals 5, Yanks 1.
[Photo Via: Cookthink]
It’s Phil Hughes, hot weather, and the some sort of theory that says Hughes just can’t continue to pitch well.
Here’s your no-frills lineup:
Brett Gardner CF
Zoilo Almonte LF
Robinson Cano 2B
Travis Hafner DH
Vernon Wells RF
Travis Ishikawa 1B
Luis Cruz SS
Alberto Gonzalez 3B
Austin Romine C
Never mind the humidity:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Image Via The Libertine found at This Isn’t Happiness]
Second batter up cause the first got served.
Here’s Lou Reed on the new Kayne West album:
Kanye West is a child of social networking and hip-hop. And he knows about all kinds of music and popular culture. The guy has a real wide palette to play with. That’s all over Yeezus. There are moments of supreme beauty and greatness on this record, and then some of it is the same old shit. But the guy really, really, really is talented. He’s really trying to raise the bar. No one’s near doing what he’s doing, it’s not even on the same planet.
People say this album is minimal. And yeah, it’s minimal. But the parts are maximal. Take Blood on the Leaves. There’s a lot going on there: horns, piano, bass, drums, electronic effects, all rhythmically matched – towards the end of the track, there’s now twice as much sonic material. But Kanye stays unmoved while this mountain of sound grows around him. Such an enormous amount of work went into making this album. Each track is like making a movie. Actually, the whole album is like a movie, or a novel – each track segues into the next. This is not individual tracks sitting on their own island, all alone. Very often, he’ll have this very monotonous section going and then, suddenly – “BAP! BAP! BAP! BAP!” – he disrupts the whole thing and we’re on to something new that’s absolutely incredible. That’s architecture, that’s structure – this guy is seriously smart. He keeps unbalancing you. He’ll pile on all this sound and then suddenly pull it away, all the way to complete silence. And then there’s a scream or a beautiful melody, right there in your face. That’s what I call a sucker punch.
[Photo Credit: Martha Cooper]
Guest Post
By Peter Richmond
Not that Mark Sanchez dancing with Alana (a former “bottle service girl” at the San Diego club Voyeur) and Janna (a “socialite,”) wasn’t the best sports-video clip of a really slow day last week, although I was disappointed at the glaring absence of Katie, Jessika, Jenna, Nikki, Emi, Danielle, Krista, Gina, Ashley and the rest of the Jets Flight Crew 2013 swimsuit wall calendar gang. What brought me down was the flashback.
Last time I spoke to EK was when we were passing each other in the hallway at school in June 2008. She was a ninth-grader. I was her brother’s English teacher. She said, “Hi, Mr. Richmond,” and I said, “Hi.” That was the usual exchange between us. Nice kid. Good student. A few days later, she graduated from our private middle school and went on to high school, and I resigned after deciding that my day gig should no longer involve having to call out ninth-grade girls for violating the dress code by wearing Uggs in my classroom.
The next time I saw the girl was on the web in February of 2011. This was a few days after her cell-phone photographs of Mark Sanchez’ bedroom had hit the web after Deadspin broke the tale. I recognized the girl immediately, despite the noticeable increase in layers in makeup, because she didn’t look much older than she had three years earlier in ninth grade. At least to me, she didn’t. Apparently, though, glimpsed through the giddily romantic New Year’s Eve atmospherics of Lavo (“an Ultralounge!” raved New York), she was only seventeen.
At that point, according to the girl’s account, Sanchez was gentlemanly enough to respond that he couldn’t see her until she was 18. Mark clearly had the schoolgirl’s best interests at heart — at least, until she corrected him: in New York, she told him, to be seventeen years of age was to be (Yes! The initial ruling at the table is overturned!) of legal age. This news apparently cleared the way for the girl’s subsequent photographs of Sanchez’ bedroom in his place on a Jersey golf course.
The last time I saw a picture of the girl was in a paparazzi-tabloid shot taken in her Connecticut hometown a week after it all broke, wherein, caught outdoors in her village, in a parka, her expression vibed panic, on the verge of teenaged tears. This was the ninth-grader I used to see at the salad bar.
That summer, six months after his quarterback’s alleged tryst, alleged New York Jet coach Rex Ryan, alleged star of one of the great foot-fetish role-playing videos of all time (wherein he allegedly plays the cop drawn to the woman’s bare feet sticking out a car door; his alleged wife allegedly plays the woman), named Mark Sanchez his captain.
Talk of Sanchez’ schoolgirl dalliance quickly and mysteriously muted, and then mutated: In a GQ profile that allegedly appeared in September of 2011, allegedly eight months after the alleged liaison, the alleged affair is referred to thusly in a brief aside near the end of the piece: “A 17-year-old high-school student…told a gossipy sports site…they went on a date.” Indeed they allegedly did; the writer of the story identified an object in Sanchez’ bedroom that the girl had photographed with her phone.
(In a highlight in the annals of profile hilarity, the piece led with an anecdote in which then-linebacker Bart Scott chides Vladimir Ducasse about leaving a party the night before, despite their being so many “hos” at poolside. Ducasse complains that they were too old. Scott asks Sanchez, “Were those ho’s too old?”
(“Define old,” says Mark.)
As a lover of freakazoid behavior in the National Football Lockstep, a league sport that thinks it’s a branch of the Pentagon, I’m all for aberrance, as long as it stops short of a 24-year-old quarterback texting a high-school girl at 2 a.m. asking if she wants to go out that night, and she has to answer from her bedroom in her parents’ suburban Connecticut home, “I have school tomorrow,” and his head coach names him captain. Doesn’t a captain of a football team have to exhibit something approximating leadership qualities?
If teaching larval teenaged girls for three years taught me anything about larval teenaged girls, it’s that lots of them like to dress up and make-up to look more mature than they are, but have less idea of what they actually look like to older men as goldfish who want to look good to other goldfish in the tank in the dentist’s office know what they look like to people awaiting root canals.
I have no doubt that the girl wanted to look alluring at the ultralounge. I also have no doubt that to any rational adult in that club that night, which Mark Sanchez allegedly was, she looked exactly like what she was: someone beneath accepted legal age.
In 2011, the Jets went 8-8. They were 8-5 before losing their last three by a combined scored of 93-50. Mark completed 56 percent of his passes and threw only 18 interceptions.
In March of 2012, the Jets extended Mark’s contract, which guaranteed him $20 million. “It gives the team,” Mark said, “just a reminder that I’m the leader of this team.”
By that fall, Mark had put aside such childish things as the teenager I’d known. By the start of training camp, he was going out with Eva Longoria, the thespian known for, among other things, playing a detective in the wildly underrated Senorita Justice. Eva was 12 ½ years his senior. She’d already had an ugly breakup with Tony Parker. I figured her worldliness and experience would help the Jets’ leader grow up.
But one month into the season, she broke up with him. According to TMZ, in a break-up message, she called him “moody” and “inconsistent.” She did not elaborate on the latter adjective. She did say, “We’ll always have the season opener in Buffalo.” He’d completed 19 of 27, with three TD passes, in a rout, before the Jets lost ten of their next 15 games and finished 6-10. The team, perhaps sensing by now that Jesus was weeping, hired Tim Tebow.
Today, of course, the most viral video of Mark Sanchez remains the game last year when, scrambling, he runs into the butt of one of his lineman, and fumbles. But I am reassured that he is finally dancing on videos with age-appropriate women.
And since he might still possess football talent, I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt: that when he escapes the skeeviness of his current employee (see Favre, masseuses hired as rewards for good games; Ryan Footwear) and gets the start in whatever city the Jaguars are in two years from now, he might win more games than he loses. Being an NFL quarterback is a whole lot more difficult than being a bottle girl.
So how to compute Sanchez’ true Skeeve Quotient? Maybe, emotionally and developmentally, Sanchez is a 17-year-old himself. As Los Angeles’ (“City of Illusion”) former star Trojan, maybe no one ever asked him to grow up. If he’s psychologically stunted, then in his own head he did no wrong, right? When Sanchez allegedly called the girl I knew on an alleged Sunday night after allegedly losing to the Steelers in Pittsburgh in the playoffs, and she allegedly declined to meet him that night, wouldn’t that like, so indicate the melding of two teen minds? The girl saying, “I can’t! I didn’t do any homework all weekend!”
And the guy saying, “So what? Come on! I’m rich!”
Completely understandable adolescent behavior.
But for the sake of any other former ninth-graders I might know who might cross his ultrapath in the future, I would ask Mark to heed the wisdom Joe Namath offered him in the GQ piece. When the writer asks if Joe has any dating advice for his successor in the Lavo limelight, Joe answers: “To really do his homework.”
[Photo Credit: AP; Bert Stern; GQ]
Nice piece of Americana in the Times magazine yesterday. Here’s “The Last Mermaid Show,” by Virginia Sole-Smith.
[Photo Credit: Katy Grannan]
What was it that Ms. Clavel used to say in the middle of the night? Something is not right. Well, that’s the feeling I had watching the game today–not that something wasn’t right, exactly, but that things were fragile, a 1-0 lead perishable. It was another hot summer day in the Bronx and the game proceeded uneventfully, except the two starting pitchers who were in good form. Oh, sure Robbie Cano made a wonderful fielding play but he’s so fluid he makes the remarkable look pedestrian.
The only exciting thing came in the middle innings when Manny Machado made one of those kinds of plays that makes you sit up and remember you aren’t sleeping.
A ground ball was hit to his right. He bent down to field it and the ball knocked off the heal of his glove. Still moving to his right, now in foul territory, he was able to pick up the ball on a bounce. He took another few steps before he could get rid of it, a side armed chuck that somehow zipped over to first base to get the runner–a disbelieving Luis Cruz–by a step. Not many men could make that play. Lucky for baseball fans–particularly those in Baltimore–Machado is here to stay.
The only other excitement came in the 9th and it was unfortunate for the Yanks. With 1 man out Nick Markakis almost hit a home run against Mariano Rivera. It went just foul down the right field line. He singled, anyhow, and then Mo left a flat cutter over the middle of the plate to Adam Jones who hit it over the wall in left field.
And that was that–enough to spoil a sweep, and another impressive outing by Hiroki Kuroda on soporific day at the park.
Drag.
Final Score: Orioles 2, Yanks 1.
I can’t quite believe I’m typing this, but this afternoon the Yankees are going for a sweep of the Orioles and their seventh-straight win. Remember when we used to take these winning streaks for granted? Remember when we only checked the standings occasionally, more out of politeness than anything else? Ah, the good old days.
But some of the good old days might be coming back. Derek Jeter played his first rehab game last night and accomplished his goal — the ankle didn’t break. (Michael Pineda also pitched well; it will be nice to see him in New York finally, perhaps some time after the All-Star break.)
For now, though, let’s focus on the game. We play today, we win today. Dat’s it.
Brett Gardner, CF
Ichiro, RF
Robinson Canó, 2B
Travis Hafner, DH
Zoilo Almonte, LF
Lyle Overbay, 1B
Luís Cruz, 3B
Eduardo Núñez, SS
Chris Stewart, C
Hiroki Kuroda (7-6, 2.95, 1.06) vs. Jason Hammel (7-5, 5.19, 1.40)
Will this be the day that Andy Murray finally finds his destiny and brings home the Wimbledon title for the British masses? (It’s probably been at least a decade since I really cared about tennis, but I have to admit that I’m rooting hard for him.) Early on it certainly looked like it would be Murray’s day, as he jumped out to a two-set and lead and broke the Joker in the first game of the third — then looked to be on the verge of breaking him again two games later — but the tide just might be turning. Djokovic won four straight games to take a 4-2 lead in the third set.
Nothing better than a little drama in the Wimbledon championship.
