Frustrating loss for the Yanks yesterday. 4-3. They got out of bases loaded jams in the sixth and in the ninth and had the tying run on base a few times, but came up short. Nick Swisher hit a long home right that bounced off the facade of the upper deck in right but the game can be summed up in the final at bat. Robinson Cano was up with Jeter at third. The count was 1-1 when Cano raised his arm to the home plate ump for time. He was too late and time was not granted. The pitch came and Cano, unsettled, swung. It happened too fast; he didn’t mean to swing. But he did and hit an easy ground ball to short for the final out.

Speaking of futility, check out this fine profile of Kei Igaway by Bill Pennington in the Times: 

The five-year saga is a story of a giant mistake of a contract and an overmatched pitcher, a huge organization digging in and a quiet, somewhat mysterious Japanese pitcher with a sense of honor and a durable love of the game. The Yankees made it pretty clear Igawa would never pitch again in the Bronx, but they were determined that he pitch somewhere for his $4-million-a-year salary. They tried to return him to Japan, too. Igawa refused to go, standing fast to his childhood dream of pitching in the American big leagues.

And so, the stalemate — remarkable, if almost entirely un-remarked upon — continues.

The Yankees let him gobble up innings before small crowds in distant outposts as a cavalcade of younger prospects push past him on their way to Yankee Stadium. Igawa never complains, and in a tribute to either willpower or lower level longevity, he has set farm system pitching records. And with just a few months left on his contract, he still dreams of the major leagues, if no longer as a Yankee.

About two weeks ago, on a rare day off, Igawa celebrated his 32nd birthday alone at his Manhattan apartment. He did not consider attending a Yankees game in the Bronx, nor did he tune them in on his television.

“I don’t watch their games anymore,” Igawa said. “I never follow them.”

Excellent piece.

On the hottest day at Yankee Stadium since 1999 the Yankees and A’s play for close to four hours. The game was almost as brutal as the weather but there is little for Yankee fans to complain about because their team put a beatin’ on the A’s to the tune of 17-7. Mark Cahill is a good pitcher, honest, but he doesn’t fair well against the Yankees and they crushed him last night. Dig the box score for the gory details.

If there was one concern for the Yanks it was that Phil Hughes didn’t pitch long enough to get the win. But Nick Swisher homered and had five RBI, and Mark Teixeira hit a grand slam. Also, Derek Jeter batted second again last night, this time with Curtis Granderson in the lineup (Grandy hit third).

It’s another scorcher out there today.

Keep hydrated and Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Thomas Longo]

The Bombers are back home. This weekend gives the A’s of Oakland. Cliff has the Preview.

Dreaming of relief from this heatwave, we stay inside, in the a.c., and drink cool, refreshing beverages as we cheer:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photograph by Nekto Nektov]

Oh, yeah.

The other day, I hopped on a 1 Train for one stop. I wanted to slide next to the door to make a quick exit because I was running late, but a guy was blocking my path. He was more than a head taller than me and twice as wide. He had a gut, but he wasn’t fat so much as extra-large. I thought of Andre the Giant. If aliens find our skeletons next to each other in a million years, they’ll probably classify us as different species.

I turned towards the other door and standing right behind me was a shaggy college kid with dark facial hair leaning on a fencing sword. He was standing stone straight, both hands folded over the hilt and the point of his epee wedged between his toes in his sandal.

I noticed a lot of eyes drifting between the sword, the kid and the giant. Were we all thinking the same thing?

I got off at my stop, but I kind of wanted to linger and see if a man in black was going to board…

With all of the focus on the Yankees’ alleged pursuit of Ubaldo Jimenez and sundry other pitchers, most of the mainstream media has lost focus on the team’s other concern: an inconsistent and hardly overpowering offense. The Yankees have not scored a ton of runs since a time from before the All-Star break–with the sorry output against James Shields on Thursday being the latest example. Very quietly, the Yankees have fallen to third in the American League in runs scored, trailing not only the Red Sox but the resurgent Rangers.

In the last 11 games, the Yankees have been held to one run four times. In another game, they scored two runs. They haven’t scored more than seven runs in any game over that stretch. And they haven’t reached double figures in runs since June 28. This ain’t a powerhouse any more.

It should be no secret that the loss of Alex Rodriguez is playing a role. A-Rod should be back within the next month, but will the Yankees be able to score enough runs to stay close to the Red Sox during the interim? Even with a small resurgence since his dreadful start, Jorge Posada is still having a terrible season; Derek Jeter remains a middle infield mediocrity; and Mark Teixeira is struggling to keep his batting average above .240. Frankly, the Yankees need some help, and it will probably have to come from within since Brian Cashman will be saving most of his trade chips for a pitcher.

Eric Chavez appears on the verge of returning from the DL, and it’s can’t come at a better time. Once he’s activated, he should immediately be made part of a third base platoon with either Eduardo Nunez (who hasn’t hit much since the A-Rod injury) or prospect Brandon Laird.

Then the Yankees should address the DH situation, where Posada and aging Andruw Jones simply aren’t cutting it. For the umpteenth time this summer, I’m calling for the promotion of Jesus Montero. Once he comes off the minor league DL, it‘s time to let him make his debut as a Yankee. (As Bill Parcells once said about one of his kickers, “It‘s time to take those Huggies off.”) For crying out loud, bring up Montero once and for all, put him in a platoon with Posada, and let him back up Russell Martin ahead of the useless, fist-pumping Francisco Cervelli. It’s beyond me why the Yankees continue to play with a 24-man roster, which is essentially what they’re doing with Cervelli.

None of this is meant to say that the Yankees should ignore their pitching concerns. They shouldn’t. But they need a boost of hitting, at least until Rodriguez returns. And they need it now…

***

As usual, there will be a nice Yankee presence in Cooperstown this weekend for the annual Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony. The Hall of Fame contingent includes plenty of pinstriped blood: Yogi Berra, Wade Boggs, Whitey Ford, Goose Gossage, Rickey Henderson, Reggie Jackson, Phil Niekro, and Dave Winfield. Plus, let’s not forget 2011 inductee Pat Gillick, who once worked for the Yankees as an executive and had extensive input on the trades that brought Willie Randolph, Mickey Rivers, and Ed Figueroa to New York.

There will be other ex-Yankees in town, too. Jim Kaat, who once honeymooned in Cooperstown, will attend Sunday’s ceremony. Favorites like Ron Guidry, Dwight Gooden, and Paul Blair will be signing autographs on Main Street. And others who made relatively overlooked appearances in pinstripes will also be signing, including Jesse Barfield, Bert “Campy” Campaneris, and Elliott Maddox.

Five of these six ex-Yankees have become Cooperstown regulars. The exception is Maddox, who has not visited in years. He tends to be a forgotten Yankee, having been acquired in a straight cash transaction from the Rangers, but at his peak, Maddox was one of the game’s premier defensive center fielder, a player who appeared destined to succeed Blair as the game’s premier flychaser. He had it all: loping speed, the knack for lightning quick jumps, and a powerful arm. On offense, he was a contributor, finishing fourth in the AL in on-base percentage in 1974. The Yankees thought so much of him that they moved Bobby Murcer to right field just to make room for Maddox in center.

And then Maddox had the misfortune of slipping on the wet outfield grass at Shea Stadium (which didn’t drain particularly well) and badly tearing up his knee. It happened in 1975, when the Yankees were playing out the string at Shea as they waited to move into the renovated Yankee Stadium. Maddox was never the same after the incident, for which he sued the Yankees, Mets, and anybody else he could think of, including the City of New York. He lost the suit, not to mention any chance of being a premier player.

But man, at one time, Maddox could go get them better than most, and that includes Mickey Rivers, Bernie Williams in his prime, and even Curtis Granderson. Elliott Maddox was that good.

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

"Reflection with Two Children" (1965)

Lucian Freud, one of the great painters of our time, died yesterday.

Lying by the Rags (1989-90)

He was 88.

Freud’s work is stunning.

"Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" (1995)

He painted the human figure like nobody else and was an artist who got better with age.

"Double Portrait" (1985-86)

"Reflection...self-portait" (1985)

Rest in Peace.

“I really don’t like it myself but I like it because other people don’t like it.” —Kool Keith.

Makes sense to me.

James Shields must have liked what he saw when handed the Yankee lineup card this evening. No Arod. No Granderson. Two guys with slugging percentages over .416. A couple of tough outs for sure, but after spending his whole career in the AL East, this had to be the weakest Yankee lineup he ever faced. He had come up a loser in the last game before the All-Star break falling one to nothing in an exquisite pitcher’s duel with CC Sabathia. Tonight he turned the tables and hung the tough loss on Sabathia 2-1.

CC had to keep a clean sheet or close to it to give the weakened Yankees a chance, but Evan Longoria hammered a hanger into the left field seats in the bottom of the first. It was a slow breaking ball high in the hitting zone and might well have been screaming “hit me” as it tumbled into Longoria swing arc. I don’t know, I can’t hear my TV over the AC.

CC made a go of it over at Grover Cleveland, keeping the game in reach. But with two outs and nobody on in the fifth, he got sloppy and walked the eighth hitter Elliot Johnson. The walk looked harmless enough, but with two strikes on the ninth hitter, he tried to put him down with a slider low and away. It stayed up and in the middle and Sam Fuld smoked it into the right-field corner for a run-scoring triple.

Two bad breaking balls, two runs on the board.

The score seemed to go from 1-0 to 20-0 with that run as the Yankees couldn’t even get a man to second base from the second through the seventh. Shields put some guys on base, but squashed any hopes with his off speed stuff. A well-disguised change-up was my number one fear as a hitter, and, anecdotally anyway, the pitch I feel that gives the Yanks the most problems.

In the eighth, Derek Jeter and Robinson Canó rapped doubles to pull one of the runs back. All of a sudden those two little runs CC allowed didn’t seem so formidable. Canó’s double chased Shields and Swisher got to face Brandon Gomes with the game on the line.

One of my best coaches advised me to be ready to hit the first pitch from any relief pitcher because he’s expecting you to take and might groove a heater. That must be especially true with a patient hitter like Nick Swisher. But Gomes out-guessed the guesser and threw an 82 MPH change-up on the first pitch. Swisher thought he was all over it, but after contact he knew he was out in front. Nurtz.

Kyle Farnsworth struck out three in the ninth, though I didn’t give up hope until Granderson was retired (he pinch hit in the seventh). I thought he could handle Farnsworth’s heat, but he just fouled it back. Professor Farns eventually got him to chase a slider in the dirt.

CC Sabathia was the loser, throwing a complete game and striking out eight. He was a notch below his recent ridiculousness walking three unintentionally, but good enough to win on most nights. Hate to lose with him on the mound, but with this powerless lineup, he needed to better than he was.

The Yankees are now two full games back of Boston in the AL East and would be wise to fatten up on the upcoming home stand versus Oakland, Seattle and Baltimore. It would be nice to make up a game or two, though with the way the Sox have been going, they might have to win all ten to make up any ground.

Tonight gives a rematch of C.C. Sabathia and James Sheilds. Great as the big man is, my hunch says that C.C. will finally have a bad outing. Yeah, I know it’s his birthday. I know the Rays aren’t a good hitting team. What the hell am I talking about? Mabye the heat is getting to me.  So here’s hoping I don’t know dick and that my hunch is all kinds of wrong.

In the meantime: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Yeah, it’s roastin’, man. Too hot to type.

But not too hot to dream.

[Photo Credit: From Up North and Jeffreywithtwof’s]

A music critic listens to the sounds of summer:

For all the hubbub of constant sound it is amazing how clearly the crack of a bat, the whoosh of a pitch (at least from the powerhouse Sabathia), and the leathery thud of the ball smothered in the catcher’s mitt cut through the textures. And if the hum of chattering provides the unbroken timeline and undulant ripple of this baseball symphony, the voices that break through from all around are like striking, if fleeting, solo instruments.

The most assertive soloists are the vendors. My favorite was a wiry man with nasal snarl of a voice who practically sang the words “Cracker Jack” as a three-note riff: two eighth notes on “Cracker,” followed by a quarter note on “Jack,” always on a falling minor third. (Using solfège syllables, think “sol, sol, mi.”) After a while I heard his voice drifting over from another section, and he had transposed his riff down exactly one step.

(Be sure to listen to the audio.)

[Photo Credit: beerhawkers.com…ah, the old place]

I think David Price will pitch a great game tonight, don’t you? I’m thinking he’s got some payback on his mind.

Here’s the lineup:

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

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Over at BP, our man Kevin Baker considers realignment:

I’m old-school. That is to say, I’m a hidebound, head-in-the-sand, troglodyte traditionalist. Especially when it comes to baseball.

I was vehemently opposed to the entire idea of including a wild card in the playoffs. I hated the idea of inter-league play with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. I even viewed the original idea of dividing the leagues into divisions, a-way back in 1969, with a gimlet eye.

(One exception: I have always liked the designated hitter, mostly because I can’t stand watching professional athletes do something they can’t do, i.e., pitchers trying to hit. We don’t make linebackers kick field goals or goalkeepers—hockey or soccer—take penalty shots. Do those games suffer for it?)

So I’m none too happy with the latest proposals to expand the baseball playoffs yet again—and not just because they’re likely to extend the season through Thanksgiving.

Wait ’til you get to the Salsa Division and the Keillor-Terkel Raconteur Division. It’s a hoot.

Demon Rum

By John Schulian

Where there are sports writers, there is booze. It’s been that way since the first scribe raced a deadline and decided he deserved a pop afterward. Or maybe he was drinking while he committed his deathless prose to paper, just a little something to kill the pain of knowing that the desk was going to make a hash of it. All these years later, I’ve seen it work both ways, heard the funny stories that the sauce inspired, and the sad ones, too.

I was supposed to give a certain shaggy wordsmith a ride to the airport the day after Sugar Ray Leonard’s first comeback, in Worcester, Mass. But my hirsute friend never showed up in the hotel lobby, and he didn’t answer his room phone, so I had to take off without him. The next week I called him at his paper to make sure he was all right, and he told me the tale of how he’d fallen in with, if I recall correctly, a toothless barfly and her one-armed boyfriend. (The mind boggles at the proposition they must have put before him.) Somewhere along the line, they slipped him a mickey, stole all his money, and left him unconscious in a fleabag hotel. It was like listening to Charles Bukowski when he told the story, laughing and coughing, savoring every dirt-bag detail. Some guys you just can’t derail.

And then there was Pete Axthelm, a genuinely good soul and a great talent who was undone by alcohol. How lucky we are that he wrote “The City Game” when he was young and the lost nights had yet to take their toll. Ax wasn’t even 50 when he died, but in the clips of his final TV appearances, he could have passed for 75. That’s not the way his friends want to remember him. Better to think of the big smile on his face as he cashed a winning ticket at Churchill Downs.

The curious thing is, sports writers of my generation will tell you it was the old-timers who drank like they had hollow legs. The king of them, as far as I could tell, was Red Smith. As Wilfred Sheed once said, “Weight for age, Red was the greatest drinker I’ve ever seen.” He favored Scotch, lots of it, but only after he had worked so hard on his column that he had sweated through his Brooks Brothers oxford-cloth shirt. He was lifting a glass to his parched lips after the Preakness one year when his hands trembled so badly that Bill Nack’s wife grew visibly alarmed. Red put down his glass, took her hand, and, patting it gently, said, “Don’t worry, dear, it’s an old Irish affliction.”

With drinking, as with writing, the wisest thing to do was to admire Red, not compete with him. In Montreal during the 1981 baseball playoffs, I wound up at dinner with him, Roger Angell, Tom Boswell, Jane Leavy, and Mike Downey – not a bad lineup, huh? – and Red got into the Scotch pretty good. Before the evening was over, he was telling us about the annual Christmas party the New York papers used to have and how people would rewrite carols and holiday songs to make them fit the occasion. And then he sang “Hark the Herald Tribune” in that wonderful old man’s voice of his. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I’d taped him.

Myself, I’ve never been much of a drinker. Don’t like the taste of the hard stuff, and I can go years between beers. I’ll drink wine with dinner, but that’s about it. The last time I got stupid with alcohol was at a party in Baltimore in the early 70s. I drank bourbon from the bottle until I was sufficiently inspired to do somersaults down the hallway of a friend’s apartment. A nice lady drove me home in the wee small hours of that cold winter’s night but refused to come inside with me, if you can imagine that. I went into a full pout and curled up on my front porch, saying I’d just fall asleep there and probably freeze to death. In her infinite wisdom, the nice lady said, “Have it your way,” and drove off. Eventually, I stumbled inside and didn’t come out for two days. I was so hung over, my eyelashes hurt.

It’s a good thing I knew I couldn’t run with the big dogs before I hit Chicago. Otherwise, I might have drowned in what the city’s newspaper booze hounds called the Bermuda Triangle of Drinking, three bars they tried to take down to the last drop every night: O’Rourke’s, Riccardo’s, and the Old Town Ale House. You could get decent Italian food at Riccardo’s, so I ate there once in a while, and I loved the jukebox at O’Rourke’s – it was one for the ages, with classical music, Miles Davis, and Hank Williams side by side. But get stupid drunk at any of those joints? No thanks. I just listened to the stories they generated, like the one about the night Nelson Algren and a Sun-Times columnist named Tom Fitzpatrick threw drinks at each other. Or were they spitting? Hell, I can’t remember. And if Algren and Fitz were still around, they might not remember, either.

All this happened just before newspapers were overrun by tight-assed careerists, so there were still reporters and editors who kept bottles in their desks in case they didn’t have time to duck out for a shot and a beer. And I’m not just passing along the legend. I saw it for myself one Friday night at the Sun-Times when I walked into the city room to get a drink of water. There was a long-in-tooth reporter with a quarter-full bottle of gin in one hand and a bottle with a few splashes of vermouth in the other. He was pouring one into the other, back and forth, back and forth, when he looked up at me with a glassy-eyed smile and said, “Welcome to my laboratory.”

Here’s mud in your eye.

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

There is an appealing interview with Chili Davis over at Fangraphs:

I don’t mind if I rub shoulders with a woman on the subway. Sitting down, a woman next to me, the feel of their skin pushed against my shoulder, it’s okay, you know? But this week, New Yorkers are cranky from the heat. The less touching the better.

I felt bad for this dude. He got on the train this morning drenched with sweat. What a way to start the day.

Colon is back on the hill tonight. Curious to see how he holds up.

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

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Painting by Diego Rivera]

(Note: this story was edited on 7/20)

Derek Jeter got his 3000th hit recently, had you heard? Not only did he notch his safety, he owned the game in which he reached the cherished milestone. I thought that was as remarkable as the career achievement – with so much promised, he still managed to over-deliver on the contract.

The fans didn’t have to wait around for it. He needed two hits and and got them his first two trips to the plate. It was homer to boot. And then he stuck around, got three more hits and won a dramatic game versus a division rival with a tie-breaking hit in the bottom of the eighth. He turned his 3000th hit into an unforgettable event. That’s Jeter’s gift; that’s his style.

I had to wonder if any other member of the 3000 hit club ever rose to the occasion in such a fashion. I remember Pete Rose pursuing 4000 and Ty Cobb’s record. And at that time Rod Carew was piling up hits and sealing his place in rap lyrics. But honestly, how they got there was lost to me.

I wonder if that is an unconscious reason behind the rampant Jeter bashing surrounding the hit and All-Star pass? His performance and Yankee fans’ constant retelling of his performance will make his 3000th hit indelible. But other Hall of Famers are not so lucky. Is it because they didn’t do it with as much style as Derek? Or is it another example of the New York Yankees and their fans blocking out the sun?

Turns out, I think, to be both. I checked out each milestone hit from Pete Rose’s 4000th all the way through Derek Jeter’s 3000th to see what I missed, what I should have seen, along the way. Look, there’s no way around it, Jeter’s milestone game was the best. The homer and the five hits would have given him a solid argument, the game winning RBI in the eighth ends the discussion.

But I had no idea how many other great Hall of Famers just dominated their games like Jeter did. As recently as 2007, Craig Biggio also had five hits on his big day. I confess, until a few mentions in the media after Jeter’s five hits, I had no idea that happened.

Tony Gwynn and Geroge Brett had four hits a piece. Wade Boggs had three hits and was the first to celebrate 3000 with a home run trot (that I remembered). Paul Molitor, who also had three hits, is the only guy to do it with a triple.

I was paying attention as 15 players passed huge hit totals, and ten of them did it with multi-hit games. Seven had three or more. Their cumulative average in these 15 games is .594. It’s too small a sample from which to draw a conclusion, but it does make you wonder if elite players, pumped up for this kind of moment, might benifit from the extra adrenaline or something.

As bad as it was to take shots at Jeter as he approached 3000 (of these 15 players, eight had OPS+ below 100 during their chase and only two or three of them could be considered to have had “good” seasons), it is equally terrible to celebrate his triumph as if it has never been done before.

It’s like the Red Sox fans celebrating the 2004 World Series as if it was the first title ever won by anybody in the history of anything. When you lose context, you piss off everyone but your core constituents. And as much as Derek Jeter deserves to celebrate, the celebration is about putting his name directly underneath and alongside Carl Yastrzemski, Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron and all the other all-time greats in this club.

He didn’t jump to the top of the list just because he went five for five.

That was his gift to Yankee fans.

***

When I revisited this story in my head last night I realized a mistake. It’s not Boston’s fans or Jeter’s fans who are to blame for over-reacting to the 2004 World Series or to the 3000th hit. They’re not the ones who are required to interject perspective during their uninhibited expressions of joy. It’s the national media who are responsible. But instead of playing that role and providing context for the rest of the sporting world, now they pander to the local fan base to make a buck.

And of course, being a good winner about such things and not rubbing it in goes a very long way to dispelling the blowback. So that’s where the fans come in, and as we all knows fans of all stripes, every faction has their guilty parties.

Drawings by Ricardo Fumanal.