Old Timers’ Day should prove to be especially sentimental this year with the Godfather Joe Torre in the House. Sweet Lou Piniella and Sweet Pea Bernie Williams will also be there.

Here are some pictures I took at last year’s Class Reunion:

Hot and sunny in New York. Nostalgia followed by Yanks and Rocks.

Enjoy everyone!

C.C. was everything we expect from him today. His stuff was dynamite and he pitched eight strong, allowing just one run and a walk while he struck out nine. The Yankees pounded the Rockies, 8-3. Six players had at least two hits, including an increasingly banged-up Alex Rodriguez, who is now hitting an even .300.

The bad A.J. Burnett showed up on Friday night–Bad A.J, Bad, Bad!–while the good Ubaldo Jimenez appeared for the Rockies–Bad A.J, Bad, Bad! The result was a 4-2 win for the Rockies. Yeah, five walks for Burnett just doesn’t cut it. About the only good thing to be said for the entire evening was that the Red Sox lost too, 3-1, in Pittsburgh. Oh, and if you are a Jason Giambi fan, and why the hell not, count me as one, you got to see the erstwhile Yankee have a good game. Giambi went 3-4 with a walk. He hit a monstrous home run into the right center field bleachers.

“I wasn’t touching the ground,” said Giambi, according to Brian Heyman. “I was excited. There’s an incredible energy playing in this stadium with the fans that they have here. It was like old times to have that opportunity to play in front of them again. I went up there, and I think he could’ve thrown the resin bag 2-and-0 and I would’ve swung at it. …

“I couldn’t have dreamed for a better game to have.”

Here’s hoping his sweet dreams lasted just one night.

[Picture by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images]

The Yanks vs. the Rockies. The Rocks? Okay…very well, then.

1. Gardner LF
2. Granderson CF
3. Teixeira 1B
4. Rodriguez 3B
5. Cano 2B
6. Swisher RF
7. Posada DH
8. Martin C
9. Nunez SS
Burnett P

We’ll be rootin’:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Minh Dam]

It’s Your Density

I was born in New York. I grew up outside the city. Since I moved back over a decade ago, I’ve lived in four different neighborhoods around Manhattan. So naturally when I think of great bagels, I think of … New Jersey.

This is an opinion I usually keep to myself. But I think most bagels in New York aren’t anything special. Going on reputation alone, you’d think you could get a good bagel, like a good slice, just about anywhere in New York. Ever since the puff-pastry style bagel overwhelmed the marketplace, it’s been difficult to enjoy a dense, crunchy, chewy bagel in the city.

If I had to sacrifce either the thin, crunchy exterior or the dense, chewy center, I’d lose the crunch. Where I grew un in Bergen County New Jersey, you can still get both.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. In New York, the bagel is such a menu-icon, every place has got to offer you a bagel. From diners to delis. So that eats away business from the bagel-specific shops. There’s not one within walking distance of my current apartment.

I thought Tal Bagels on 86th street did an OK job of keeping their bagels de-flated, and I liked that they answered “no” if you asked them to toast it. At least eight years ago they answered that way. Now they probably serve you a bagel that looks like a beach ball and will gladly slide it on a belt toaster for you.

Over at ESPN, Andrew Marchand has a piece on Jesus Montero:

Right now, there is one thing Montero is certainly not: He is not ready to start, let alone star, in the big leagues.

“It is all in becoming a first-rate professional and he is still in the middle of that process,” said Mark Newman, the Yankees’ senior vice president of baseball operations, who heads up the team’s minor leagues.

…Monte — as everyone in Scranton calls him — is developing at beautiful, tree-lined PNC Field in front of crowds that average around 4,000 fans per game. When you walk into the stadium a sign greets you, saying the Bronx is 128 miles away. Sometimes, it seems, that is where Montero’s head is located, too.

“I just get the feeling that Monte is so blessed physically — and I hate to say it — he is almost bored here in Triple-A,” said Scranton hitting coach Butch Wynegar, a former Yankees catcher. “Maybe if he went to the big leagues tomorrow, this kid might just go off and he just might lock in.”

In the first bit here, you’ll see the old H&H Bagels in the background as Henry Winkler and Shelley Long cross 80th street and Broadway:

Morning, Sunshine:

“Just a Guy at Oxford” (Bill Bradley)

“The Great Wall of Boston” (The Green Monster)

“Sam, You Make the Ball too Small” (Sam McDowell)

“The King of the Jungle” (Walter O’Malley)

George Vecsey, right, with his arm around the wonderful Ray Robinson

I recently exchanged e-mails with George Vecsey, the veteran columnist for the New York Times, who started his career at Newsday under Mann.

Here’s our chat. Enjoy:

Bronx Banter: When Jack Mann took over the Newsday sports department was he influenced by any sports editors that came before him? I’m thinking of someone like Stanley Woodward.

George Vecsey: I don’t know. He came up through the news department at Newsday, had some college, was well read, surely knew about sports editors, but was so much an outsider that I doubt he would consider himself an acolyte of anybody.

BB: How would you describe to young readers what the climate of the press box was like in 1960? And how did Mann and “his Chipmunks” differ from the older writers?

GV: Well, the dichotomy was not as clear as I guess we would like to have thought. It may have been a function of age. But Isaacs and Len Shecter of the Post and Larry Merchant of the Philly Daily News were not children, and were capable of thinking for themselves, with Jack only part of it. The Chipmunks were young and energetic and brash. The split was probably on the same generational lines of the Kennedy-Nixon election – new vs. old (politics excluded). Even in 1960, some of us (me at least) were anticipating the forces of the mid-60’s in style and music and attitude. But we all were pretty traditional, except in comparison to the older writers, who were often hooked into the free drinks of the press room and the party line of the clubs they covered, or so we thought. Sounds pretty simplistic, looking back.

BB: Who else writing for the New York papers in the early 60s were like-minded? I’m thinking specifically of Shecter at the Post. Who else was part of the new breed?

GV: Len Shecter, Isaacs, Merchant, of course. And Stan Hochman A lot of the younger guys were Chipmunks just because we chattered a lot, and hung out together. Looking back, it would be hard to put one label on me, Steve, Maury Allen, Vic Ziegel, Phil Pepe, Paul Zimmerman, Joe Donnelly, Joe Gergen. We (or at least I did) admired Dick Young, who was no Chipmunk, but I knew him through my dad when I was a little kid, and Dick was very gracious to me when I came along as a young writer. I was friendly with older guys like Harold Rosenthal (more acerbic than any of us) and Barney Kremenko (a kind man, a friend), and I learned a lot from Leonard Koppett, one of the great people of the business, and I adored Jimmy Cannon. I don’t know that Bob Lipsyte considered himself a Chipmunk, but he and I hung out a lot in those days, and his excellent early work as a sports columnist (in his first tour of duty, I emphasize) re-defined the genre. So it’s hard to define Chipmunk, at this late date. Every generation has its new look. When I came back to Sports in 1980, there was Jane Gross, Allen Abel, Michael Farber, Jane Leavy, Phil Hersh, all good pals of mine. New faces.

BB: And now, the climate is different from then.

GV: The one difference between then and now was that everybody talked in the press box. Talked about the game. Argued about politics. Bickered about where we were going to dinner. Nowadays, the kids are all hunched over their machines, with headsets on, tweeting and facebooking and blogging and goodness knows what else. Nobody talks in the press box. I miss arguments. I miss human contact. I think we had more fun than the Thumb Generation. But the output in the New York Times is really good, probably better than ever, which is what matters.

(more…)

Michael Sokolove has a measured and insightful piece in the New York Times Magazine about aging athletes. Derek Jeter is a feature player:

The careers of elite athletes, enviable as they may be, are foreshortened versions of a human lifespan. Physical decline — in specific ways that affect what they do and who they are — begins for them before it does for normal people. The athletes themselves rarely see the beginnings of this process, or if they do, either do not acknowledge it or try to fight it off like just another inside fastball. They alter their training routines. Eat more chicken and fish, less red meat. They try to get “smarter” at their sport.

A great many of us, their fans, live in our own version of denial — even in this age of super-slow-motion replay and ever more granular statistical data. We want to think our favorite players have good years left, great accomplishments ahead of them, just as we would hope the same for ourselves. The writer Susan Jacoby, who happens to be a devoted baseball fan, is the author of “Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age.” “Fans don’t like to watch aging in these relatively young guys,” she told me. “It makes us uncomfortable. We think, If it happens to them, what the hell is going to happen to us?” Jacoby, a self-described insomniac who listens to sports-talk radio in the middle of the night, said she has been appalled at the “venom” she sometimes hears directed at Jeter. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘The hero is not performing.’ Well, he’s gotten older.”

Older, for ballplayers, begins much sooner than we think. “A lot of fans, if they really studied it, would be surprised at how early players really peak, especially hitters,” Jed Hoyer said when he spoke to me by phone from San Diego, where he is general manager of the Padres. Previously he was an executive with the Red Sox, one of the more data-driven franchises in baseball. “The years of 26 to 30 are usually the prime years,” Hoyer continued, “but you’ll see plenty of guys start to trend down, even if it’s subtle, before they’re 30.”

It is almost impossible to age gracefully as an everyday player. You can transition to a role player like Jason Giambi has done in Colorado, but Jeter is in a tough spot and Sokolove is dead-on in describing Jeter’s career as “charmed.” Yet Jeter’s relative good fortune has changed over the past year. Everything about him these days is touchy:

The prospect of this article did not sit well with the Yankees, or at least elements of its hierarchy. Jason Zillo, the team’s media director, would not grant me access to the Yankees’ clubhouse before games to do interviews. I have been a baseball beat writer, have written two baseball books and have routinely been granted clubhouse credentials for a quarter-century, as just about anyone connected to a reputable publication or broadcast outlet usually is. “We’re not interested in helping you, so why should I let you in?” Zillo said, before further explaining that he views his role as a “gatekeeper” against stories the Yankees would rather not see in print.

I was surprised that he would deny access to The New York Times Magazine. But if I learned anything over the course of working on this article, it is that aging is a sensitive issue. It happens to everyone, but that doesn’t mean we’re comfortable with it. Jeter has become a lightning rod on the topic. We see him getting old, but we’re supposed to pretend he is just in a prolonged slump. “The reason the response to athletes’ getting older is so powerful is that the decline occurs in public,” Susan Jacoby told me. “We don’t see it when a man has trouble with an erection for the first time. Or a mathematics professor forgets something. It’s not Alzheimer’s, but it’s age, and it’s difficult. But it’s private.”

This is a long story but well-worth reading. Fine job by Sokolove.

[Photo Credit: David Goldman/AP]

Sometimes a place closes and you feel nothing, like the girl in “A Chorus Line.” That’s the way it is for me and H&H Bagels. I’ve known the store my entire life. It opened the year after I was born and was located on the southwest corner of 80th Street and Broadway just a few blocks from where my grandparents lived. Next time you watch “Night Shift,” you can see the old store front in the background as Henry Winkler and Shelley Long cross the street. That was a few years before H&H blew up and became a big deal, “the” place for bagels.

H&H was famous for it’s fat, doughy bagels, extravagant prices, and for its no frills (you could buy butter or cream cheese there but they wouldn’t put it on the bagel for you). It was a yuppie phenomenon. The bagels were tasty, but they were bloated and overrated. And again, way too expensive (these days one cost $1.40). If you preferred a meaty bagel, though, it was heaven.

But it’s also a neighborhood place so many Upper West Siders are upset that H&H is closing without ceremony. I appreciate that even if I don’t share their sense of loss. What I will miss is the smell. You walked past the place and the air smelled comforting and inviting.

[photo credit: highlowfooddrink]

The Reds began the second game of Wednesday’s split doubleheader with concerns about Johnny Cueto’s stiff neck, but before the first inning was over, Yankees’ starter Brian Gordon was the one suffering the effects of whiplash.

Fresh off his debut against the Texas Rangers, Gordon was hoping to write another chapter in his feel good story. However, after surrendering three home runs, there wasn’t much chance for a happy ending. In fact, the beginning was anything to write home about either.

After Chris Heisey’s lead off home run, it soon became apparent that Gordon was merely the foil in someone else’s fairytale. Heisey followed up his opening salvo with a second homer off Gordon in the fifth that extended the Reds lead to 4-1. Then, with the game no longer in doubt, the Reds’ center fielder punctuated his historic night with a third home run off Hector Noesi.

Three Homer Games Against the Yankees, Since 1919

Source: Baseball-reference.com

Although Heisey’s power surge was historic, the real star of the game was Cueto. The ace right hander was supposed to start the first game of the series, but a sore neck forced the Reds to push him back. If only they had decided to hold him out one extra day.

The only real blemish on Cueto’s record was a second inning home run by Nick Swisher that tied the score at 1-1. After the homer, Cueto set down 15 of the next 16 batters, a stretch that was interrupted by Alex Rodriguez’ seventh inning single. In that frame, the Yankees loading the bases, but Cueto turned the rally aside by retiring Ramiro Pena and Jorge Posada, who was making a bid to play hero in both games of the doubleheader.

When the Yankees failed to capitalize on their threat in the seventh, the game was basically over, but that didn’t stop the Reds from tacking on six more runs against Noesi en route to a 10-2 victory. The double-digit outburst was unique for two reasons. First, it exceeded Cincinnati’s combined run total over the previous five games. Secondly, it was only the third time all season that the Yankees lost by more than five runs. I guess they were due.

By dropping the night cap, the Yankees not only forfeited a chance to take over first place, but also failed to even their regular season record against the Reds. As a result, Cincinnati remains the one team against which the Yankees do not have at least a .500 record. Considering how infrequently the two team meet, the Yankees will likely have to wait at least another few years before getting another crack at the Reds. I wonder if the team will be able to sleep on the plane ride home?

So the Yanks went out and won with their second unit today. Freddy Garcia pitched seven innings, a couple of unearned runs scoring thanks to an error by Ramiro Pena. David Robertson chucked a scoreless eighth and threw a fastball, right down the middle, past Joey Votto to end the inning. Man, don’t try that at home, kids.

Mariano struck out two in the ninth and got the save. Brett Gardner helped turn a nifty double play and the deciding hit came from Jorge Posda, who hit a two-run home run in the sixth.

Final Score: Yanks 4, Reds 2.

Good news with Johnny Cueto on the hill for the Reds tonight.

Brett Gardner LF
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Nick Swisher RF
Russell Martin C
Eduardo Nunez SS
Ramiro Pena 2B
Brian Gordon RHP

Smile, it won’t mess up your hair…and:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit:The Under Girl]

The Bombers are fielding their B squad this afternoon.

Brett Gardner LF
Curtis Granderson CF
Nick Swisher RF
Robinson Cano 2B
Jorge Posada 1B
Eduardo Nunez SS
Ramiro Pena 3B
Francisco Cervelli C
Freddy Garcia RHP

Yet we still root:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Painting by Roger Patrick]

The butterscotch pudding at Community Food and Juice is yummy but rich.  I could not eat the entire thing by myself. Better of sharing it with a friend or two.

Man, I miss our pal Todd Drew. I think about him often and feel as if he’s still with us.

Here is a picture taken last week from his box seats at Yankee Stadium.

The Book of Dreams

By John Schulian

The stars were beginning to align for me even before I headed to Nashville in early 1974. The previous fall, I’d sold my first story to Sports Illustrated, and it ran a month after I scribbled my last notes at the Grand Ole Opry. The story was about a promoter in Baltimore who put on fights at Steelworkers Hall and ran a gym that was above a strip joint on the Block. I don’t think the guy could have existed anywhere else.  The smell of the sausages at Polock Johnny’s across the street drifted into the gym when the windows were open. You could feel the music downstairs coming through the floor. The promoter’s best fighter kept getting the clap from the dancers. And I thought I captured it all perfectly. A fat lot I knew.

I wasn’t given to asking other people their opinion of my work, but this time a voice in my head said I’d better stash my pride. If I screwed up the story, I might never get another shot at SI. So I took my deathless prose to an editor in the Evening Sun’s business department and asked him to read it. He wasn’t a close friend and his conversation usually had an edge to it, but I trusted him to be unsparing. And he was. When he walked up with his verdict, there was a wary little half-smile on his face. “If I was you,” he said, “I’d hit me with a sack of snot for what I’m going to say.” In short, the piece was good enough for the Evening Sun and most any other newspaper, but it wasn’t good enough for Sports Illustrated.

I spent the next couple of nights tearing it apart, reworking the structure and figuring out new transitions. I knew I had a winner as soon as I wrote my first sentence: “Baltimore is a gritty old strumpet of a city where unwritten sociological imperatives require a boxing arena to have Polish bakeries on one side, steel mills on another, and redneck bars all around.”

SI called the story “On the Block — Way of All Flesh,” and it wound up in the old “Best Sports Stories” anthology and put my name in bright lights. Tony Kornheiser told me years later that when he read the piece, he knew there was a new gun in town. He wanted to work at SI as badly as I did, and there were hundreds of other writers out there who had the same dream. SI was the holy grail.

Getting in “Best Sports Stories 1975” was the first time I felt like I’d really accomplished something professionally. I’d been fascinated with the anthology since I discovered it at Northwestern, mainly because it showcased the kind of writing I wanted to do. There were always big names like Red Smith and Jimmmy Cannon in the book, but the ones who captured my attention were writers from places other than New York who were doing great things: Myron Cope in Pittsburgh, Sandy Grady in Philadelphia, Wells Twombly in Houston and Detroit and San Francisco, even a young Philly basketball writer named Joe McGinniss, who went on to write “The Selling of the President” after he infiltrated Nixon’s 1972 campaign.

When the Evening Sun made me a one-man bureau in Harford County, I checked the public library there and found an even better collection of the “Best Sports Stories” anthologies than Northwestern’s. Every now and then, I’d slip down to the library and grab one. And I wasn’t just reading the stories. I was reading the bios of the authors who wrote them. I wanted to see where they came from and if the path I was on bore any resemblance to the one they had traveled. As soon as my story about the fight promoter ran in SI, I knew I was going to submit it to “Best Sports Stories.” I found out I’d made the book when a copy landed on the front porch of my $155-a-month furnished apartment. I was thrilled, naturally, but there was more to what I was feeling than that. I felt like I’d finally done something that would last longer than a day, something with permanence. Hell, my story was in a book.

It wasn’t that much longer before there was a year when “Best Sports Stories” didn’t come out. The editors had gotten old and one of them had died, and nobody had stepped forward to replace them. I wrote an essay for Inside Sports in which I said goodbye and, lo and behold, someone at the Sporting News read it and jumped in to bring the anthology back to life. It’s long gone now, of course, replaced by Glenn Stout’s more sophisticated and vastly superior “Best American Sports Writing” series, but I’m glad I got to do “Best Sports Stories” a good turn. I owed it.

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

[Illustrations by David Noyes]

The Yanks and Reds will play two today. First game is at 12:30 and the second game is at 7:00.

Over at PB, Cliff takes a look at Brian Gordon and other 5th starter options.

[Picture by Jeremie Egry]

Check out these  breath-taking pictures of New York by Irene Suchocki.

Brett Gardner LF
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Russell Martin C
Ramiro Pena SS
Brian Gordon RHP

Cueto is going for the Reds, weather-permitting.

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

UPDATE: As you know by now, the game was cancelled. They’ll play two tomorrow.

[Picture by Bogdan Panait]

Don’t front…original heads.