Higher Loinik:

[Photograph by Ruth Orkin, NYC: 1947]

A super-heroic game from Arod inspired both Alex and me to choose images of Superman after last night’s performance. Thanks to Rodriguez the Yankees won 4-3 and gained a game on both the Rays and Sox, moving back into the penthouse of the AL East. The one I chose is a picture by George Perez from the Avengers-JLA crossover a few years ago. This drawing is from the climactic battle. The Vision has just been killed, and Thor is under a pile of bad guys. With his last act, the Vision drains his power jewel into Superman, essentially supercharging their strongest gun. Thor whips him his hammer, Captain America flings him his shield, and Superman puts everything into one swing with the mighty Mjolnir which saves the day.

Yeah, last night was kind of like that.

I’m not picky when it comes to wins. AJ Burnett going seven innings and allowing three runs, even if it was tough to watch at times, is cause for optimism. The offense was brutal, no getting around it, and they’ll have to be better if they want to win the series with Tampa next week. But they have two more games in Baltimore to put on their hitting shoes and I think they will.

I did not think the pitch Alex took for ball two in the ninth was a strike. It required a little restraint from the home plate umpire, but to me it was not overly close and would have been a harsh way to end the game. Though I guess from Balitmore’s perspective, having Arod plaster one into the night is pretty harsh too.

Alex said that Arod expressed his inner-Reggie last night. Coming up big at the biggest times is how heroes are made, and we sure needed hero during this recent stretch. I hope Arod is ready to assume that role for the duration.

When Alex smushes one like that, I imagine the ball flattening upon impact and then snapping back to form as it hurtles into space. It’s a testament to the good folks at Rawlings that the ball did not explode. Next time, he should try the hammer.

Hot damn. Shades of Tino and Mark Langtson as Alex Rodriguez saves the day. Jon will have the recap shortly…

Is Carl Crawford’s time in Tampa close to being over? Ben Shpigel reports in the Times:

…With every game this month and next, the clock also ticks louder toward Crawford’s free agency — and his likely departure from the only organization he has ever known. It is the perpetual challenge for small-market teams like the Rays: how to prevent a homegrown star from bolting for a big payday.

The Rays’ payroll has steadily increased over the last four years, to roughly $71 million from about $24 million in 2007, but their principal owner, Stuart Sternberg, said in spring training that it would plunge below $60 million for 2011. Even with the money they receive in revenue sharing, team revenue has not increased in lock step with the Rays’ success. Devoting what could be a quarter of their budget to one player would run counter to their operating philosophy.

“We could sign just about any player in baseball,” said Andrew Friedman, the Rays’ general manager. “The issue is whether we could field a competitive team around that player. Our job is to balance that. We certainly can’t win a bidding contest for any top player. It’s kind of Math 101 when you look at our resources relative to most every team in the game.”

Check out our old pal Joe Sheehan on the Triple Crown:

“Triple Crown” is one of those phrases that has an tinge of antiquity to it, like the word “mitt” or referring to “base ball” or the mythical creature called the “doubleheader”. Leading the league in the traditional “big three” categories of batting average, home runs and RBI just isn’t done any longer. No baseball fan under 50 has a memory of seeing a Triple Crown, the last being achieved by Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. For three players — Joey Votto, Albert Pujols and Carlos Gonzalez — to be making a run at the Crown is highly unusual.

To some, the lack of Triple Crown winners in modern baseball is, like the lack of complete games or the decline in contact hitting, a sign that today’s players lack skills that their forefathers did. As with those issues and a host of others, the reasons have more to do with evolution and math than they do any change in the character of baseball players. It’s harder to lead the league in three categories now because it’s harder to lead the league in any one category now. The baseball Triple Crown went from an achievement that happened now and again to a rarity the minute baseball expanded past eight teams per league. The table at right shows the relationship of league size to Triple Crown winners.

R. Crumb

Frank King.

Walt Kelly.

Milton Caniff.

Been thinking a lot about the term “recluse” this weekend. There is such a negative association with it. But is it such a bad thing? Anyhow, this caught my eye–a short interview with the “reclusive” creator of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, Bill Watterson, in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved — and are still grieving — when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?

BW: This isn’t as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say.

It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.

I think this is a rare quality in a writer, columnist, artist, you name it–the ability to leave sooner rather than later, especially when you are a success. I was duly impressed with the visual wonder of Avatar but I would have been that much more impressed if the movie was an hour shorter.

Last night PBS ran a documentary on Herge, the legendary creator of the Tintin comics. He was a classic Belgian character–proper, tasteful, disciplined, droll and very Catholic. As a kid, the Tintin comics had an enormous impact on me. Though they were translated into English, Tintin never caught on in the States like he did elsewhere around the world. Herge is national treasure in Belgium; he’s very much their Walt Disney.

My mother is from Belgium, and we visited her family periodically when I was growing up. I vividly recall visiting my grandparents home–an old, stone farm house that was roughly thirty minutes outside of Brussels, and even closer to Waterloo–and reading all of the comics I could find. And there were plenty to have.

My grandparents home had amazingly steep staircases. I would stay in the attic room when I visited. It wasn’t a small room, but it was cozy, as the walls were slanted in a triangular shape. A drafting table was next to the staircase. A twin bed lay in the middle of the room, above it a moon window. A small sink was tucked into the corner, a large, old radio nearby, where I’d pick up a BBC station and listen to soap operas and crickett matches–anything to hear English! Lined on the floor next to the bed was a series of comic books (or dessins animés as they are called in French): fifty, sixty of them. They belonged to my mother and her siblings, leftover from their childhoods in the Belgian Congo. (The room was closed off from the other side of the attic space by a wall with a door–on the other side were crates and crates from my family’s days in Africa.) Jackpot.

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