Just felt a minor tremor here in midtown. Everyone on the floor is buzzing about it.

[Photo Credit: Set Babies on Fire]

If you’ve never read “The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, I suggest picking up a copy. Here is the title essay:

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of fight pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines .of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed ten ounces. They were signed “Love, Martha,” but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.

The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wrist watches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds, depending upon a man’s habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-size bars of soap he’d stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. By necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed five pounds including the liner aid camouflage cover. They carried the standard fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle boots-2.1 pounds – and Dave Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl’s foot powder as a precaution against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was 2 necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RT0, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, Carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man, his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated. Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.

[Photo Credit: Addiction Inbox]

Salsa Verde with Avocado from the outstanding food blog, The Year in Food.

Here’s Tracy Daugherty, in an adaptation from his biography on Joseph Heller, on the War for Catch-22:

The novel, you know,” people whispered whenever Joseph Heller and his wife, Shirley, left a party early. From the first, Joe had made no secret of his ambitions beyond the world of advertising. In later years, he floated various stories about the origins of his first novel. “There was a terrible sameness about books being published and I almost stopped reading as well as writing,” he said on one occasion. But then something happened. He told one British journalist that “conversations with two friends … influenced me. Each of them had been wounded in the war, one of them very seriously The first one told some very funny stories about his war experiences, but the second one was unable to understand how any humour could be associated with the horror of war. They didn’t know each other and I tried to explain the first one’s point of view to the second. He recognized that traditionally there had been lots of graveyard humour, but he could not reconcile it with what he had seen of war. It was after that discussion that the opening of Catch-22 and many incidents in it came to me.”

The Czech writer Arnošt Lustig claimed that Heller had told him at a New York party for Milos Forman in the late 1960s that he couldn’t have written Catch-22 without first reading Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished World War I satire, The Good Soldier Schweik. In Hašek’s novel, a mad state bureaucracy traps a hapless man. Among other things, he stays in a hospital for malingerers and serves as an orderly for an army chaplain.

But the most common account Heller gave of the hatching of Catch-22 varied little from what he said to The Paris Review in 1974: “I was lying in bed in my four-room apartment on the West Side when suddenly this line came to me: ‘It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.’ I didn’t have the name Yossarian. The chaplain wasn’t necessarily an army chaplain—he could have been a prison chaplain. But as soon as the opening sentence was available, the book began to evolve clearly in my mind—even most of the particulars … the tone, the form, many of the characters, including some I eventually couldn’t use. All of this took place within an hour and a half. It got me so excited that I did what the cliché says you’re supposed to do: I jumped out of bed and paced the floor.”

In all likelihood, each of these scenarios is true; they don’t contradict one another, and they probably occurred at some stage in the process of imagining the novel. But we also know from a letter to Heller in California from the editor Whit Burnett that, as early as 1946, he’d been considering a novel about “a flier facing the end of his missions.”

[Photo Credit: Vanity Fair]

I can’t wait to get down to the Mall to check it out.

Tyler Kepner on Miguel Cabrera:

Only five players in major league history have had 1,500 hits and 250 homers, while hitting .310 or better, through their age-28 season. They are Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott, Hank Aaron, Albert Pujols and Cabrera.

That is heady company, but Cabrera said he did not think much about his place in history.

“It’s too early,” he said Friday night after the first victory of a three-game sweep over the Cleveland Indians. “You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow or next month or next year.”

The man is a monster talent.

[Photo Credit: CBS News]

Every now and then I have to be at work very, very early. Walking to the subway as dawn creeps up from below the elevated IRT lines. Sharing the subway with a sparse collection of early risers. Arriving at the office and flipping the lights on before anyone else has even turned on the shower.

I’m exhausted at the start. Can barely keep my eyes open.  But damn, if those aren’t the most beautiful commutes.

Thanks to Matt B for pointing out this killer gallery of Swedish book covers over at 50 Watts.

Murdoch Descending

By John Schulian 

The world changed for everybody at the Sun-Times when the paper was sold to Rupert Murdoch in 1984. It was one of those things that I, forever blind to the realities of business, thought would never happen. I’d seen how he’d trashed the New York Post with his lowest-common-denominator journalism. I wasn’t wild about the Boston Herald, either. Then again, the Herald might have gone out of business if he hadn’t shown up. And it did provide a showcase for the stellar sportswriting of George Kimball, Charlie Pierce, and Michael Gee. But that was small consolation to those of us counting down the days until Murdoch took over in Chicago.

The Sun-Times had become a first-rate tabloid, solid from beginning to end and, on its best days, capable of driving the stolid, well-heeled Tribune into Lake Michigan. The newsroom was packed with aggressive young hard-news reporters–Jonathan Landman, now a ranking editor at the New York Times, was one–and they were always breaking big stories and doing great investigative work. There was plenty of good writing, too. My goal every day was to have the best-written piece in the paper, but I’m not sure how many times that happened, not when I was surrounded by Royko and Roger Simon, another fine city columnist, as well as a corps of lively feature writers that included my old friend Eliot Wald, who went on to write for “Saturday Night Live” in the Eddie Murphy years.

And then there was Roger Ebert, who could out-write us all. I always thought Roger was too generous in his movie reviews, but his features were exquisite. It didn’t matter whether he was writing about John Wayne or a B-movie queen, his prose sang. And when a movie star died, Roger soared higher still. A copy clerk would fetch him clips from the paper’s library. He’d scan them and then write 1,200 of the most beautiful words you’ve ever read in 15 or 20 minutes. Sometimes it seemed like his fingers never touched the keyboard–he just waved them like a magic wand and, abra-ka-dabra, a masterpiece appeared.

It’s for someone else to say how many masterpieces appeared in our sports section. I just know we won more than our share of honors, that out-of-town writers regularly took the time to say how much they enjoyed what we were doing, and that I was proud to be part of it. I was in the company of pros who cared deeply about what they did for a living, guys like Jerome Holtzman, Ron Rapoport, Phil Hersh, Ray Sons, Kevin Lamb, and Brian Hewitt. If I was covering something with one of them, it was easy to divvy up the workload. We knew what the stories were, and one of us would look at the other and say, for example, “Smith or Jones?” There would be an answer, not a debate or a clash of egos, and then we’d get busy with what we were there for: the work.

Our era of good feeling lasted until Super Sunday 1984, the day Murdoch and his zombies took control of the paper. There must have been three or four of us in Tampa for the game – that’s the way we did things back then–and we gathered around the phone as Rapoport called the city desk and asked, “How bad is it?”

The answer came in a headline: “Rabbi held in sex slave ring.”

It ran on page three, which was prime tabloid real estate but hardly the place where the previous administration would have played the story if it had run at all. Looking back, I confess that the headline doesn’t seem that terrible. But I have to remind myself that it wasn’t so much that I was offended by the presence of the dirtbag rabbi in the paper. I was offended by what the story about him portended. Murdoch’s people were just getting warmed up. Overnight they had changed the look of the paper, turning its bright, lively design into something garish and cheap, the print equivalent of a streetwalker addicted to rouge and eyeliner. It stood to reason that the stories would be increasingly tarted up, too.

But when Murdoch tried to foist his trademark crap on them, the good people of Chicago just said no. The Sun-Times’ circulation dropped like a shot put in a goldfish bowl. Murdoch’s henchmen were forced to pull back on the cheap thrills and gaudy garbage. The paper would never be what it had been, nor would it lure back all of its readers, but at least it regained a modicum of respectability. The readers who refused to roll over and play dead were better than Murdoch deserved. The same was true of the editors, reporters, and columnists who didn’t abandon the sinking ship. They would endure, some would even prosper, but when you looked around, there was no ignoring the empty desks.

The biggest departure, of course, was Royko, who jumped to the Tribune, which he had hated and baited throughout his career. In sports, we lost our top two editors, Marty Kaiser and Michael Davis, plus Phil Hersh, who went to the Tribune by way of the Philadelpia Inquirer and became, with Randy Harvey of the L.A. Times and Mike Janofsky and Jere Longman of the New York Times, a reigning expert on Olympic sports. I like to think that Roger Ebert stayed at the Sun-Times because he truly loved the paper where he has spent his entire career.

Would that I could say the same about myself. Truth was, I wanted no part of the Murdoch regime. I would have gone anywhere that could afford me, but the columnist gigs at papers fitting that description were locked up. The editors who had looked out for me at Sports Illustrated were gone, Inside Sports had been taken over by nickel-and-dimers, and The National had yet to become a gleam in Frank Deford’s eye. Maybe I should have tried freelancing, maybe I should have gone to work on a screenplay or a novel. But I liked the idea of a steady paycheck. When the new regime offered me a contract that would pay me six figures a year for three years–big money in that era–I forsook my principles and misgivings and signed on the dotted line.

I would pay for it.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

Another sure shot from Pete Dexter. From the May 31, 181 issue of Inside Sports.

The Apprenticeship of Randall Cobb: The Late-Booming Karate Fighter From Abilene Wants to Be The Baddest Ass In Boxing

By Pete Dexter

The face suggests more than 21 fights, but that’s how many there have been. Counting the two as an amateur. There is a scar over the left eye, a missing tooth. The nose is flat and soft, without cartilage.

Apart from that, it’s a face that’s been hurt.

On March 22, a 26-year-old fighter named Randall Cobb lost a majority decision on national television to Michael Dokes. Two of the judges gave the fight to Dokes, one called it a draw.

Dokes was supposed to win. He is the fastest fighter in the division, maybe the most talented. He was schooled through a long amateur career and brought carefully through 20 fights as a professional. The only problem Dokes ever had was a lack of size, and in the last year he has grown two inches to 6-2 and filled out to 218 pounds, and there is a feeling among some people that after Larry Holmes retires, Dokes doesn’t have any problems at all.

Given all that, there are people who like the other guy’s chances.

At 22 years old—a long time after most professionals were polished fighters—Randall Cobb had his first amateur fight. He had a second and then turned professional, saying he was going to be the heavyweight champion of the world. Ali was the champion then. Cobb would have had trouble naming five other men in the division.

He spent three years knocking out people like Chebo Hernandez (the former heavyweight champion of Mexico) and then, with 18 lifetime fights and 18 days to get ready, he crawled into the ring with Earnie Shavers and won on a TKO in the eighth.

He lost a split decision to Ken Norton and then dropped the fight to Dokes. In each of the fights he got better, and he is still just learning. He has the best chin in boxing and in the Dokes fight—when he caught much of what Dokes threw on his gloves and arms—the people who have watched Cobb got their first sign that he wasn’t going to be proving it the rest of his life.

After the fight Cobb sat with ABC’s Keith Jackson, who asked if he had been surprised Dokes hadn’t run more. Cobb said, “I don’t know how it looked from here, but to me it looked like I was running my ass all over the ring trying to catch him.”

As he said that Dokes dropped into the chair next to him. Cobb smiled. “We’ll have to do this again, Mike.”

Dokes shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “No, I don’t think so.”

“I’m going to go back and start all over,” Cobb said later. “I’ll do whatever I got to do and I’m going to keep doin’ it until it’s right.”

His mother heard that and nodded. “Some day that dog’s going to lie in the sun,” she said.

Randall Cobb is my friend. I know him, he won’t cheat himself. And after it’s over—it doesn’t matter how many times he’s hit in the face—he’ll be able to look in the mirror and not be afraid of what he sees.

(more…)

 

Mornin’.

[Photo Via I’ll Keep My Eyes Fixed on the Sun]

I was at Citifield on Saturday afternoon. The Mets were losing 7-1 then rallied to take a 9-7 lead. They went ahead against K Rod of all people.

Then,  in the 9th, they blew it. Went something like this:

The worst part was that K Rod got the win.

Nick Blackburn loaded the bases in the second inning and then came out of the game with a lateral forearm strain. But the Yanks did not score and there still was no score in the bottom of the fifth when Nick Swisher and Curtis Granderson botched a fly ball putting runners on second and third with nobody out. Then Ivan Nova, who had several pitches working today (fastball, curve, change-up), struck out the next two batters and got a ground ball to get out of it.

Robinson Cano doubled in the next inning–a line-drive to left field–tagged to third on a deep fly ball by Swisher and scored on a sacrifice fly by Russell Martin. In the seventh, Granderson, who has seemingly done it all for the Yanks this year, added to his resume when he hit a long fly ball off the top of the wall in right center field. The ball came back into the field but bounced far enough away from the outfielders to give Granderson a shot at something more than a triple. He ran all the way home and slid across the plate just ahead of the throw, good for an inside-the-park home run. Mark Teixeira followed with a line drive home run the old fashioned way, over the fence, and the 3-0 lead was enough.

David Robertson got into a pickle in the eighth, but even with the bases loaded, he escaped unharmed. Mariano Rivera put heads to bed–killing them softly–in the 9th and Yanks return to the Bronx heppy kets. Alex Rodriguez did not get a hit in his return but that was a footnote to Granderson’s heroics and seven shutout innings from Nova.

It was a good Sunday.

And that’s word to Rabbi Marshak:

Alex Rodriguez is back.

Derek Jeter DH
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Russell Martin C
Brett Gardner LF
Eduardo Nunez SS

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

The Bombers look to secure another winning series with a victory tonight.

Alex? Here’s hoping for a Saturday Night Special.

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Cool out.

[Photo Credit: bitchassbidness]

For the past two years, in mid-August the Minnesota Twins have been competitive enough to defuse the inevitable Brett Favre melodrama. Favre is out — supposedly — Donovan McNabb is in, and Republican presidential hopefuls who win straw polls in neighboring Iowa and confuse celebrity birthdays and deathdays are providing the melodrama. The Twins, they entered tonight’s game 15 games under .500, 11 games behind the division-leading Detroit Tigers, almost irrelevant in the AL Central.

But for the Yankees, the Minnesota Twins are relevant. They’re on the list of “teams we should beat whenever, wherever” en route to the postseason. Thursday night, with C.C. Sabathia on the mound, mission accomplished. Friday night, with Phil Hughes going, the team performance was even more impressive.

First let’s take the offense. The first time through the batting order, Derek Jeter, Robinson Canó, Nick Swisher and J Martin were the only Yankees to swing at the first pitch against Kevin Slowey, who was making his first start of the season for the Twins (his previous six appearances had been in relief). None of the four first-pitch swingers put the ball in play. Martin was the only one to keep his in fair territory, however. He crushed a hanging curveball into the leftfield seats not unlike someone named Trevor Plouffe did in the first inning for the Twins.

Martin’s solo home run tied the game and allowed the offense to collectively exhale and get into the rhythm. They scored a run in the fourth and in the fifth, which Martin led off with a single, the top of the order wore out Slowey. With Gardner on first base (he reached on a fielder’s choice), Jeter squibbed a single up the middle on an 0-2 pitch. The at-bat may have been the turning point in the game. It set up first-and third with one out, and Curtis Granderson followed with a double that tightroped the first base line and skidded off the bag before barreling into the rightfield corner. Gardner scored, Jeter to third. Mark Teixeira followed with a sac fly to make it 4-1 and the Score Truck had a head of steam. The coup de grace came in the sixth, as J Martin unloaded again. This time, it was a two-run shot to left that broke the game open. With Scott Brosius doing a guest spot in the YES booth in that same half-inning, it seemed fitting that the best No. 9 hitter in recent Yankee memory observed the current No. 9 hitter have arguably his best offensive night as a Yankee. The Yankees posted another two-spot in the ninth inning to complete the rout at 8-1.

Now, let’s take the pitching, specifically Phil Hughes’s outing. Despite Freddy Garcia’s placement on the disabled list and what that means for the temporary settlement of a five-man rotation, Hughes still has pressure on him. Every start is an audition to present his case to remain in the rotation through September and into October. Given what happened in Boston when he appeared in relief, perhaps Hughes has readjusted his brain chemistry to be a starting pitcher.

Hughes cruised much the way he did in Chicago on August 2. He pounded the strike zone with his fastball, changed speeds effectively, and maintained his aggressiveness with two strikes. That aggressiveness didn’t manifest itself in strikeouts as it had in Hughes’s previous two starts against Chicago and Tampa Bay, but it did lead to weak contact and routine outs. Between the home run he allowed to Plouffe in the first inning and the walk he issued to Plouffe to lead off the seventh, Hughes only allowed one Twin to reach base.

Joe Girardi allowed Hughes to start the eighth, and pitcher rewarded manager by retiring the first batter. The next two at-bats didn’t go quite as well. Luke Hughes (no relation) singled to left on a 1-2 curveball and Tsuyoshi Nishioka followed with a screaming liner that caught Gardner in left more than Gardner caught the ball. That was it for Hughes.

Credit Girardi for relieving Hughes when he did — not because of the pitch count, but because in the last eight batters he faced, Hughes issued two walks, a hit, and a loud out. Overall, Hughes was as dominant as he was in the rain-shortened effort against the White Sox. He is 3-0 in his last three decisions as a starter and his fourth straight quality start. Since returning from the DL on July 6, he’s lowered his ERA from Chien-Ming Wang (13.94) to Sergio Mitre (5.75).

All signs point to Hughes being on the right track.

J Martin said of Hughes, “He’s progressing late in the season. You’d rather have somebody peaking late than peaking too early.”

CURRYING FAVOR FOR GRANDY
Curtis Granderson figured prominently in the Yankees victory, yet again. Midway through the game, Jack Curry joined Michael Kay and John Flaherty in the YES broadcast booth and Curry asked Kay if he had an MVP vote, who he would vote for. Kay believed that Adrian Gonzalez would win, because his batting average entering Friday’s action was more than 60 points higher than Granderson. Curry said he’d vote for Granderson.

Traditionally, the Triple Crown categories have swayed the writers’ vote for Most Valuable Player. If that were to hold true this year, Granderson holds the edge over Gonzalez in both home runs and RBIs. He also has scored more runs than Gonzalez (113 to 81), and has a higher slugging percentage (.596 to .543), and OPS (.973 to .950). Granderson also leads the American League in triples and has 23 stolen bases. His 113 runs scored lead all of baseball, as do his 12 home runs against left-handed pitchers. The only thing Granderson hasn’t done is hit for average. With that in mind, I’ve thought that if Granderson finishes the season within 10 points of .300 on either side, he has a chance to win the MVP.

But there’s a catch.

Six years ago, I wrote a column arguing that Baseball Prospectus’s VORP statistic should be the primary determinant in MVP voting. If that were to hold true this season, Jose Bautista would win, as his VORP total is 69.2 to Granderson’s 57.6. Bautista’s batting average is .314 to Granderson’s .284, he leads the American League in home runs (35), on-base percentage (.455), slugging percentage (.638) and OPS (1.093). The Sabermetricians would put Bautista as the MVP. In terms of VORP, Gonzalez ranks fourth on his team.

So where’s the line? Granderson, compared to Gonzalez and Bautista, is a different offensive player. Not better, but different. Speed adds that other dimension. Perhaps the speed makes Granderson a more complete offensive threat. That completeness is what swayed Jack Curry.

The bottom line: the decision will be subjective, and bias will be involved. If Granderson isn’t the league MVP this season he’s definitely been the MVY (Most Valuable Yankee).

 Good stuff from Alex Rodriguez via Chad Jennings:

“I look at Cal Ripken,” Rodriguez said. “He was always my role model. He played to about 40 or 41. The one thing about third base is (you need) a strong arm and one step and dive. When you think about center field or the middle of the infield, you have to do so much more. As a shortstop, I always felt like that. As a third baseman, even if you have limited range, if you have good hands and a strong arm, I think you can play there forever.

“As long as you’re driving the ball offensively, it’s very important to be out there at third base because it allows your team, your roster and the organization to have a solid bat at DH, or have it as a rotator where you can have guys like Tex, Jeet, myself and Robbie to occupy it. You kind of strangle the team a little bit by just being an everyday DH when you can go out and play third base. You can always go out and find a guy that has a little more range at third, but if you can be a guy that can produce 30 runs, drive in 100 runs and make 10 or 12 errors, I think anybody would sign up for that.”

Here is tonight’s batting order…

Brett Gardner LF
Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Eric Chavez 3B
Jorge Posada DH
Russell Martin C

And that’s word to Sy Ableman.

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Knowing the Yankees’ traditional habit of bringing back old favorites for one more go-round, I would not be at all surprised if a former Yankee rejoins the team for a second stint before the August 31st deadline. The Oakland A’s have made Hideki Matsui available, especially now that he has cleared waivers; he can be traded to any team in either league. The A’s don’t want much: just some salary relief on a player who will leave at season’s end as a free agent, and perhaps a warm body from Single-A ball. If the Yankees end up reacquiring Matsui, they would make him the left-handed DH in a platoon with Andruw Jones, further cementing Jorge Posada’s status as a pinch-hitter and occasional starter at first base.

Matsui’s season numbers are not that impressive–a .738 OPS and a mere 11 home runs–but they are better than Posada’s and have also been on a major uptick of late. (Also, remember that Matsui has had to play half of his games in the barren hitter’s wasteland known as McAfee Coliseum.) Since the All-Star break, “Godzilla” has hit .385 with a .573 slugging percentage. If he can hit at even 75 per cent of that level over the final six weeks of the season, the Yankees would be ecstatic. They would also have a more dangerous DH available to them for the American League playoffs.

The last impression that Matsui left on Yankee fans was a hearty one: an MVP performance in the 2009 World Series. I, for one, would enjoy seeing an encore in 2011…

***

Another former Yankee happened to be in Cooperstown this week. Joe Torre spent three days here as part of Major League Baseball’s owners meetings. Now working as a vice president of MLB, Torre is handling umpire evaluations and doing his best to improve the performance of arbiters while improving their relations with the players.

Torre is also doing his best as an ambassador of the game. I witnessed first hand how Torre deals with the public. Two families of fans came up to him in the Otesaga Hotel and asked him to have their pictures taken with him. Torre did not bat an eye. Even as one man struggled to make his camera functional, Torre remained patient and gracious. He is one of the people in baseball who simply gets it. We need more like him.

We also need more like him in the Hall of Fame. That should happen in December of 2013, when Torre is next eligible for Hall voting as part of Expansion Era candidates being considered by the Veterans Committee. Now that Torre is retired from managing, he should have little trouble acquiring the 75 per cent of the vote needed for election.

Assuming that Torre makes it, he will go in on the strength of his managing with the Yankees. Any manager who has ever won at least three championships has been elected to the Hall upon retirement; with four titles, Torre has more than enough championship hardware to convince the electorate that he is deserving.

Yet, Torre’s candidacy does not rely solely on his managing. Voters can and should consider a man’s entire career in determining Hall of Fame worth. When you combine Torre’s four managerial championships with what he did as a player–a career average of .297 and an on-base percentage of .365, a 1971 batting title with the Cardinals, five seasons with 100-plus RBIs, and much of the damage done while playing the demanding positions of catcher and third base–it’s obvious that Torre deserves a plaque in Cooperstown.

If he is elected in 2013, then the summer of 2014 will be a fun one for Yankee fans in Cooperstown…

***

Reports of his demise were greatly exaggerated.

Those words would apply very well to Derek Jeter, who has lifted his average to a season-high .291. Right after his extraordinary 5-for-5 game that saw him reach the 3000-hit mark, Jeter fell into a brief slump. Some Internet writers who cannot contain their antipathy for all things Jeter and the Yankees absolutely reveled in his struggles. They treated the 5-for-5 game as a blip on the screen, acting as if Jeter’s subsequent problems were further proof that his days as a serviceable major league player had ended.

Jeter has been on a full-fledged tear since that mini-slump occurred, and though he’s still not the player he once was, a shortstop who can hit .290, reach base a respectable 35 per cent of the time, and run the bases like Jeter does have value. He’s still a better option at shortstop than the scatter-armed Eduardo Nunez or the hitless wonder that is Ramiro Pena.

Yet, some of those critical writers, especially those in the Sabermetric category, have gone quiet on the subject of Jeter. It is no longer convenient to talk about the future Hall of Famer, not when he is going well and again helping the Yankees win games. From them, we hear nothing but silence.

Bruce Markusen writes “Cooperstown Confidential” for The Hardball Times.

Sometimes the simplest thing on the menu is the most intriguing.

My wife and I celebrated our fifth anniversary at Manzo recently. It was our first time at Eataly and we drove ourselves into a ravenous state walking around the market for 30 minutes before our meal. The menu – a fantastic menu for me – swirled before my eyes as every choice seemed better than the one next to it.

I skimmed right past something called ‘tajarin al sugo d’arrosto.’ It was a pasta, though beyond that I had no idea, and I was busy reading menu items which contained words I understood. I got to the end and started to think about my order when I noticed that the last page of the menu contained a glossary of terms.

Tajarin al sugo d’arrosto is a simple dish, ribbons of egg-flour pasta in a light sauce made from the juices of the roast meats. Manzo being a meat place, they have a lot of that juice to go around.

It occurred to me that I rarely order something with such a bare menu description. But the idea of it wormed into my brain and I couldn’t shake it. I asked the waiter to give me his take, ala Alex Belth, and he was a brilliant salesman. He gave me the Indiana Jones “you’ve-chosen-wisely” vibe which made me proud for an instant before I realized I was such an easy mark.

We ordered a lot of incredible dishes, but a week later, I’m still thinking about the tajarin. Still wishing there was one more chunk of bread to wipe in the sauce.

Here’s an attempt to reverse-engineer the recipe, though they have used a different pasta from the one I’m pining for.