M’enfin.

The one and only…Drew Friedman. (Thought I was going to say Hackenbush, didn’t ya?)

From a Tintin exhibition:

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Sun]

This is how Diane’s heart stays warm on a cold day:

Peep this fun site, The Monkeys You Ordered (and thanks go to Brad for pointing it out):

Our dog is f****** huge.

The great Charles Addams:

The Great Will Eisner.

“Bottom line is, there was a price to pay for waiting for Cliff Lee. Now, part of that price is definitely going to be a loss of previous opportunities that were existing,” Cashman said Tuesday. The Yankees general manager added that in addition to a dearth of pitching talent now available on the market, lefty Andy Pettitte is “leaning toward retirement,” and “not officially in play.”

“There’s no official announcement that (Pettitte’s) retired. We’re obviously focused on those players in the free-agent market and trade market. Andy currently is not one of those guys,” Cashman said. “If he chooses to be, obviously he knows we’d love to talk to him.”
(Christian Red, N.Y. Daily News)

Not much of a Christmas for Yankee fans. Poor little rich boys!

Tyler Kepner on Mariano Rivera:

Mariano Rivera, who turned 41 on Monday, has continued to defy age. Every year since turning 35, he has pitched fewer innings than he did the year before. Starting in 2004, Rivera’s innings have gone from 78 2/3 to 78 1/3 to 75 to 71 1/3 to 70 2/3 to 66 1/3 to 60.

Rivera pitches less often, but when he does pitch, he is basically as effective as always. He has stayed strong enough to dominate in the postseason, allowing just one run in 28 innings over the Yankees’ last four appearances.

…There are no comparable players to Rivera. The closest is Hoffman, the only pitcher with more career saves than Rivera’s 559. But Hoffman has had two seasons with an earned run average less than 2.00; Rivera has had 10. Rivera has logged more innings in fewer games, and the workload of roughly two extra seasons across all those Octobers.

Okay, we can now go back to fretting about Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte and Cliff Lee (for the record, I say the Yanks start the season with all three–four, including Rivera–on the roster).

I was in a book store on Friday night and this caught my eye: Denys Wortman’s New York: Portrait of the City in the 30s and 40s.

I’d never heard of Wortman before but I was immediately taken with his work.

Yesterday, the Times ran a long feature about Wortman who is the subject of a show at the Museum of the City of New York through March:

If there is a single constant in the creative world, it is that fame has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight. One prime example is the cartoonist Denys Wortman, who from 1924 to 1954 contributed six drawings a week to The New York World and its successors.

His feature, “Metropolitan Movies,” was admired for its strikingly naturalistic portrayal of daily life in Gotham. Using a single panel and a conversational caption, Mr. Wortman adroitly summoned up an entirely believable world of housewives talking across fire escapes, girls in the subway hashing over last night’s date, and men and women trying to make a buck in diners, offices, music halls and factories — or struggling to keep afloat during the Great Depression. Mr. Wortman’s drawings were also beautifully composed and finely worked, a legacy of his art school years, when he studied alongside future Ashcan school painters like Edward Hopper and George Bellows, and with their guru Robert Henri.

Even then “there was nothing quite like it,” said the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who enjoyed the drawings as a boy. “His work didn’t seem studied. It was as if you were looking out the window — or my window in the Bronx.” And because it was syndicated nationwide (as “Everyday Movies”), Mr. Wortman’s world spread far beyond the Hudson.

But in 1958, four years after his retirement, Mr. Wortman died of a heart attack. By then cartooning had become character-driven and graphically streamlined (think of Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts”) while art was ruled by the Abstract Expressionists. And when The World’s successor The World-Telegram and Sun folded, he was as forgotten as yesterday’s fish wrap.

The book and the show look like a must.

From Jon Heyman via the indefatigable Craig Calcaterra:

The Yankees are busy with Derek Jeter and Cliff Lee, but after that’s all said and done, Mariano Rivera will be tops on their priority list. Jon Heyman reports today that, when they do get to him, they’ll find that he wants a two-year deal, not a one-year deal.

This should not be a problem. I think you pretty much give Mariano Rivera whatever he wants. At least within reason. He earned 2011 by continuing to be awesome in 2010. While, sure, he might fall off a cliff eventually, who has a greater right to ask for an extra year than Mariano Rivera? He’s carried them for 15 years. They can carry him for one if, for some reason, next season is his last effective one.

Agreed. No problems here. Two years sounds beautiful to me.

[Drawing by Ricardo Lopez Ortiz]

Ozark Ike: You gotta keep your eye on the ball. Eye. Ball. Eye-ball. That’s a gag, son. Gag that is.

Garry Wills just published a memoir. He’s also got a piece on Gary Trudeau in the New York Review of Books celebrating 40 years of Doonesbury:

Most comic strips run out of creative energy after their initial inspiration. Trudeau has just kept improving, year after year, in part because he stays so close to changing events. He still has his ear for the way young people talk through all the varying slang fashions (perhaps helped by his children). At any rate, he has never been better than in the last six years. B.D., who always wore his football helmet when he was not wearing an army helmet in Vietnam, goes to Iraq as an aging National Guard adjunct and his tank is hit by an IED. The strip blacks out, and when he emerges from the darkness, he is seen for the first time without a helmet of some kind—and we find his hair is white at the temples. But that is the least shock—he has also lost a leg. The beloved original character of the strip is tragically maimed.

Trudeau has had some kind of career, indeed.

From the New York Magazine archives, here’s the late, great Vic Ziegel on Ali-Spinks II:

he copy of Money magazine offered to Leon Spinks during his flight to New Orleans was full of splendid suggestions for a new career. Soccer coach, that was something the heavyweight champion might want to think about. Nowhere is it written that soccer coaches have to run through strange cities at five in the morning. Or spend great hunks of each day inside expensive hotel rooms that offer baskets of apples and Gouda instead of X-rated film selections. And there aren’t small armies of people telling the cover-boy soccer coach to kick this, do that, no this, no, no, no . . . armies that depend on the heavyweight champion to provide their per diem expenses.

The magazine went unread, of course. Leon Spinks was in Louisiana to defend his title against Muhammad Ali, a 36-year-old body with the staying power of Tutankhamen. Ali was the favorite. Ali was the attraction—the once, twice, and future champion. Leon Spinks? Come on. Just another name on an expired driver’s license.

“Did you hear what Spinks did when he came off the plane?” The lawyer is talking to a sportswriter after the fight. The party is at the Windsor Suite of the New Orleans Hilton. Sportswriters are badly outnumbered by designer suits. Worse yet, the lawyers had heard all the best available fiction.

“Spinks gets off the plane and he does an interview. Everything’s cool. No problems. And then they hustle him into the sheriff’s private car to drive him to the hotel. The first thing he does—this is in the sheriff’s car, right?—the first thing he does is take out a joint and light up.”

Ali won the rematch.

[Art by Neil Adams]

According to Brian Cashman, A.J. Burnett will get a start in the ALCS.

Joe Pos on The Great Mariano:

There’s nothing left really to say about his greatness. We all know the story. He throws that cutter precisely where he wants, it turns left just as it gets to the plate, and there has never been anyone quite like him.

Still, watching him break four bats on Wednesday night — I’m pretty sure he broke Denard Span’s bat when getting the last out of the eighth, then broke Orlando Hudson’s bat, Joe Mauer’s bat and Jim Thome’s bat in the ninth — was another awe-inspiring reminder. He clearly does not throw as hard as he once did. Teams have broken him down on video for more than a decade. We all KNOW exactly what he’s going to do. And still, major league hitters come up, they swing at his cutter, the ball breaks in two inches more than they expected, they break their bat. In Las Vegas, I’ve seen David Copperfield make a car appear out of thin air, and I’ve seen Lance Burton duel someone in a costume who turns out to be Lance Burton. I’m sure I could watch those tricks 50 times and never figure out how they are done. I’m sure I could watch those tricks 100 times and never figure out how they’re done.

But Mariano Rivera has pitched 1,150 innings in the big leagues. He has pitched another 135 or so postseason innings. He has faced almost 900 different big league hitters. And this same trick, precisely this same trick, works almost every time. The Twins may or may not be good enough to come back in this series. They will obviously need to beat up on the Yankees’ second-string starting pitchers, and try to hold their own against this relentless Yankees offense. What they do know is this: They ain’t going to win it in the ninth inning. Mariano Rivera turns 41 next month. He is aging just like the rest of us. But for one more year, it sure looks like nobody is going to beat the Yankees in the ninth inning.

Yanks-Sox and the last weekend on the regular season. There is something at stake here, of course, the best record in the American League. Looks like the Sox have something to play for after all.

The Yanks are stumbling toward a playoff berth. Last night, the offense showed some fight, which has me feeling good. However, the formidable J. Lester goes for the Sox later this afternoon on Fox (doom, doom!) and Dustin Moseley will start for the Yanks tomorrow night so a Red Sox sweep is not hard to imagine.

Still, I’ll be keeping the faith like De La, and root-root-rooting for the home team.

Fug whatchu hoid: Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

[Picture by Frank Miller]

Okay, so 1960 is a most horrid thought for most Yankee fans but this is too good not to share.

For you skeptics out there, last night’s loss is proof that this is not a magical year, that this Yankee team will get bounced from the playoffs in early October. We’re always looking for signs and the Yanks have not played well over the past month. This morning, the papers took notice.

In the Post, George King begins his recap:

Joe Girardi and CC Sabathia better be correct. Because if they are wrong, the Yankees’ October experience is going to be a short one.

The manager and ace both said the max-effort pitching duel between David Price and Sabathia less than two weeks ago in St. Petersburg, Fla., didn’t bankrupt the Yankees ace’s tank.

In the News, Mark Feinsand writes, “The standings still show the Yankees in sole possession of first place in the American League East, so why does it feel like they lost the division Thursday night?”

Nobody was happy in the comments section here at Banter last night, either. So? What does it all mean? Can this team turn it on and go back to the Whirled Serious? Or is this 2006 and a first round bump?

I don’t think the Yanks will repeat but also would be surprised if they don’t at least make it to the ALCS.