Sunday Night baseball. Let’s see what Masahiro’s got.
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Brett Gardner LF
Carlos Beltran RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Brian McCann C
Chase Headley 3B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Stephen Drew 2B
Didi Gregorius SS
Never mind the standings:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
It’s early but the thud you hear is your 2015 New York Yankees. Yesterday’s version was scored an 8-4 loss.
Picture by Bags.
There’s plenty of it today here in the Bronx. It’s nice in the sun, supposed to get up to the mid-50s later on, but there’s still a little wind and it’s cool in the shade. It’s that white spring light–almost like there’s too much treble–sun high in the sky.
Yanks and Sox were up late last night but they’ll be at it again for us early this afternoon.
Never mind the hangover:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Credit: Richard Estes via the Marlborough Gallery]
The Yankees rallied 3 times against the Red Sox last night, starting in the 9th inning, but they couldn’t do it a fourth time and so in just under 7 hours, they lost 6-5 in 19 innings. It was the kind of a game that is every beat writer’s nightmare. You wondered if it’d ever end. There was good pitching, sloppy fielding, nice fielding, poor hitting, and clutch hitting. There was boredom and excitement and by the end, a lot of sleepy fans.
There was a 15 minute delay in the bottom of the 12th inning when a few of the lights went out. The organist was pressed into emergency service. I suppose the JumboTron was out of scheduled routines. The announcers didn’t know at first how long the delay would last and so as they talked it over the organist vamped–was that “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” he was playing? What an unexpected pleasure, the sounds of the organ pumping out a medley of pop tunes.
Anyhow, for the Yanks it was a drag of a game to lose.
The pace of play is supposed to be faster this season, and perhaps it will be, but the Yankees vs. Red Sox, well, they’ve got their own rules to abide, don’t they? And the two teams are back at it in a few hours this afternoon.
Take two and pass.
[Photo Credit: Mikko Lagerstedt]
Those guys again. This year–no pitching, fearsome hitting.
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Brett Gardner LF
Alex Rodriguez DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Brian McCann C
Chase Headley 3B
Chris Young RF
Stephen Drew SS
Gregorio Petit 2B
And our first look at Eovaldi.
Never mind the Cavity Creeps:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
Neither was that game last night. One lousy inning was enough to sink C.C.’s first start of the year. Rodriguez and Teixeira homered but otherwise the Yankees couldn’t make good on their scoring chances and they lost, 6-3.
Let’s raise a a glass to C.C. Sabathia and his pursuit of morphing into some kind of Hot Buttered Soul Junk Pitcher in the second part of his career. If he’s 3/4 of what Andy was as an older pitcher he’ll build a nice case for the Hall of Fame. If his body doesn’t cooperate I guess it could get ugly fast and be over quick. Either way, I’m pullin’ for the big fella.
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Alex Rodriguez DH
Carlos Beltran RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Chase Headley 3B
Chris Young LF
John Ryan Murphy C
Gregorio Petit 2B
Didi Gregorius SS
LHP CC Sabathia
This is one raggedy-ass lineup, man. A Rod’s in the 2 hole.
Never mind the Scubbineez:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Picture Credit:“the Upside of Down” by Christopher Barbour via Rob Kalmbach]
The baseball season begins in warm, sunny places like Florida and Arizona. Then the teams move north to the cold. Last night, I flipped around and saw rain in Washington and Philly and the Bronx. Ah, April baseball.
It was not a pretty game at the Stadium last night–the fielding was rusty and you have to figure the wet and cold played a part in that–but the Yankees rallied late and beat the Jays, 4-3. Chase Headley and Jacoby Ellsbury had two hits; Michael Pineda pitched well, and so did the bullpen (though Dellin Betances was rusty).
Funny thing: Although Alex Rodriguez is now an old man, he still gets more of a rise out of the crowd than any player on the Yanks. There were boos and cheers every time he came to bat. It’s almost as if the fans still boo him because it’s something familiar not because they’re especially vicious. After all, we’ve just begun the post-Jeter era and who knows what to make of this team? Who knows who the next heroes and villains are? Rodriguez is a sure thing. Muscle-memory says boo the sombitch. Or cheer. Rodriguez didn’t get a hit last night–he put a good swing on the ball in his third at bat, it had a good sound, but he hit it too high and in that wind no fly ball stood a chance of leaving the park–but he was booed plenty when he struck out looking in the 8th inning with the bases loaded.
Old reliable.
[Picture by Bags]
Man, you’ve got to have a lot of heart to be at the Stadium tonight. I can understand sitting in the cold in October, but April? Thank you, no.
Pineda goes for the Yanks and that should be fun. He’s one of the few guys on this team I’m really excited about (I guess Tanaka’s worrisome health and got me distracted from dwelling on Pineda’s worrisome health).
Be hilarious if Alex takes a knuckler deep. Be great if they can beat up R.A. Dickey and the Jays:
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Brett Gardner LF
Carlos Beltran RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Brian McCann C
Chase Headley 3B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Stephen Drew 2B
Didi Gregorius SS
Never mind the chill:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
*Post title refers to this, just cause.
[Photo Credit: The Great Saul Leiter]
Ah, lovely man.
Over at Grantland, Ben Lindbergh weighs in on Masahiro Tanaka’s first start and concludes:
Although on the surface the box score seems like a confirmation of Yankees fans’ worst fears, it’s possible to put a positive spin on Tanaka’s inaugural outing in 2015. Aside from his voluntary renouncement of the four-seamer, Tanaka’s stuff seemed almost the same as it was before we were worried about his elbow. He stills throws hard enough to get swings and misses with his off-speed stuff. And while Tanaka doesn’t have a great sinker, his forsaken four-seamer was worse. It’s probably too much to hope for addition by subtraction, but if Tanaka’s partially torn ligament doesn’t hurt his command,1 the new Tanaka should be a useful starter (if not an ace) for as long as his ligament lasts, even if he nibbles too much to go deep into games. Tanaka has already defied one of our fears — and his own — by avoiding surgery and surviving the spring UCL reaping so far. Now he has a chance to chart the non-fastballs frontier.
[Photo Credit: Charles Wenzelberg]
Mitchell studied at the University of North Carolina without graduating and came to New York in 1929, at the age of twenty-one. Kunkel traces the young exile’s rapid rise from copy boy on the New York World to reporter on the Herald Tribune and feature writer on The World Telegram. In 1933 St. Clair McKelway, the managing editor of the eight-year-old New Yorker, noticed Mitchell’s newspaper work and invited him to write for the magazine; in 1938 the editor, Harold Ross, hired him. In 1931 Mitchell married a lovely woman of Scandinavian background named Therese Jacobson, a fellow reporter, who left journalism to become a fine though largely unknown portrait and street photographer. She and Mitchell lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village and raised two daughters, Nora and Elizabeth. Kunkel’s biography is sympathetic and admiring and discreet. If any of the erotic secrets that frequently turn up in the nets of biographers turned up in Kunkel’s, he does not reveal them. He has other fish to gut.
From reporting notes, journals, and correspondence, and from three interviews Mitchell gave late in life to a professor of journalism named Norman Sims, Kunkel extracts a picture of Mitchell’s journalistic practice that he doesn’t know quite what to do with. On the one hand, he doesn’t regard it as a pretty picture; he uses terms like “license,” “latitude,” “dubious technique,” “tactics,” and “bent journalistic rules” to describe it. On the other, he reveres Mitchell’s writing, and doesn’t want to say anything critical of it even while he is saying it. So a kind of weird embarrassed atmosphere hangs over the passages in which Kunkel reveals Mitchell’s radical departures from factuality.
It is already known that the central character of the book Old Mr. Flood, a ninety-three-year-old man named Hugh G. Flood, who intended to live to the age of 115 by eating only fish and shellfish, did not exist, but was a “composite,” i.e., an invention. Mitchell was forced to characterize him as such after readers of the New Yorker pieces from which the book was derived tried to find the man. “Mr. Flood is not one man,” Mitchell wrote in an author’s note to the book, and went on, “Combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past.” In the Up in the Old Hotel collection he simply reclassified the work as fiction.
[Photo Credit: Therese Mitchell/Estate of Joseph Mitchell]
Richard Price and David Simon schmooze:
David Simon: I’ve seen you answer this question before, but I’ve decided to ask it using my wife, who is a genre writer of some repute. So, Laura Lippman’s take on this was, “Let me understand this: when he was going to write genre, he had to change his name? Is it that bad to write genre? I’ve been doing it for years and I felt no shame until this moment.”
Richard Price: Well, I knew Laura was pissed at me. When I started this book, The Whites, what I intended to do was write a strictly genre book that was going to be an urban thriller—although the problem with thrillers is they are thrilling. It’s like the problem with horror stories is that they are really horrifying. I just thought it was going to be such a departure for me that I wanted to create a persona for this separate type of writing I was allegedly going to do, so I came up with this Harry Brandt.
I use this line all the time, so why not use it again: I know how to dress down, but I don’t know how to write down. And the book kept expanding on me, and the characters kept becoming more, and all of a sudden I was writing about family dynamics in a way that I’ve never done before.
It turned out to be a Richard Price novel after all, and it took four years, just like any one of my cinder-block books, and at this point, I regret using the pen name, because I was foolish to think I could become another person. Laura is still going be pissed at me.
David Simon: To give you some small history in this preamble here: Richard and I have the same editor, John Sterling. He’s here tonight. When I was working on Homicide, he was working on Clockers, and to me at that time Richard Price was The Wanderers; I was like, holy shit, this is otherworldly. Then I was a police reporter in Baltimore, and John laid the manuscript of Clockers on me. Not even the reader’s copy, but the manuscript. I remember reading through it and thinking, “My God, he got to everything.” He got to everything the way it actually is in the project stairwells, on the corners. The Wanderers, I never imagined that it was researched. I imagined it was conjured the way I imagine literature to be conjured. I knew he knew the people of Clockers. They had been transformed to literature, but I knew you knew it, and I don’t think until that moment I had really seriously given thought to the notion that novelists love research.
[Photo Credit: Bruce Davidson]
