Don Mattingly turns 50 today.  Happy Birthday to Donnie Baseball!

(image: Topps Heritage)

Just to show that we appreciate more than the female form round these parts, dig this beauty, none other than the great Baryshnikov.

I was All-Schoolyard, tell her, Max.

“Sports to me is like music…It’s completely, aesthetically satisfying. There were times I would sit at a game with the old Knicks and think to myself in the fourth quarter, This is everything the theatre should be an isn’t. There’s an outcome that’s unpredictable. The audience is not ahead of the dramatist. The drama is ahead of the audience, and you don’t know exatly where it’s going. You’re personally involved with the players–they had herioc demensions, some of those players. It’s a pleasurable experience, though not intellectual–much like music. It enters you through a diferent opening, sort of…

You see, life consists of giving yourself these problems that can be dealt with, so you don’t have to face the problems that can’t be dealt with. It’s very meaningful to me, for instance, to see if the Knicks are going to get over some problem or another. These are matters you can get involved with, safely, and pleasurably, and the outcome doesn’t hurt you.”

Woody Allen to David Remnick, 1994

Well said, though I’m sure some fans would argue about not being hurt. Last night’s loss was a tough one, doesn’t matter that the Celtics should have mopped the floor with them. Carmelo Anthony was brilliant but Jared Jeffries will be the memory that doesn’t go away from this one. And that hurts, man.

R.I.P. Michael Sarrazin.

With Jane Fonda in Sydney Pollack’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

Sure, the Knicks kicked another one away tonight in Boston but at least we’ve got the Yankees who took at 5-3 lead into the ninth inning. Enter Sandman…

Mariano allows a lead off double.

No sweat.

(more…)

Alex Rodriguez is not in the line up tonight but we’ll still be cheering.

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Image from Winter Leaf.com]

Ah, Natalie…

…to the great white north.

Yanks at the Jays tonight. Cliff has the preview and so does SNY:

Hipster Spidey…

[Drawing by Allison Smith as found via This Isn’t Happiness]

The Grilled Cheese Invitational? Are you kidding me? Bred-Butter-Cheese-Victory!

Saveur has the skinny–or the chubby, as it were. Oh, and some nifty recipes for grilled cheese.

It’s been an entire year since Guru died.

Salute.

The 2011 season marks the 10th season of baseball on the YES Network, and YESNetwork.com. I was there for the first five and remember the trials, tribulations, sweat, tears, conniptions and aneurysms that went into putting forth a top-flight product on a daily basis. Looking at where the overall coverage is now compared to 2002, the difference is like listening to a song in Mono and then flipping to Stereo.

Technology made my job easier, just as it has made the jobs of beat writers and columnists more efficient. Hardware, software and fiberoptic advances made it easier for scribes to file stories on deadline, fact-check, and ensure accuracy of quotes. Laptop computers, digital/tape recording devices, headphones, WiFi access to the Internet, and the Internet itself have helped reduce the latency that previously existed for the written word to reach fans. These products and services were available in 2002, but have become consistently better over time.

Due to the immediacy of the publication and distribution of information of all kinds, sports teams and leagues reacted accordingly. I don’t know what the current Social Media policies are for MLB, or the Press Box protocol for it. When I was covering games regularly, Social Media as we currently know it didn’t exist. If the Yankees had information to be released, they made it clear to both Mark Feinsand — who at the time was the Yankees.com beat man — and I that we could not publish the info to either Yankees.com or YESNetwork.com before the team OK’d it.

It was made clear that we were not allowed to break certain stories. (This most commonly occurred when players were named to the All-Star ballot or All-Star team, and other similar stories.) So, we would load the items into the system and wait for the go-ahead from Yankees’ PR staff. Twitter, Facebook, and other microblogging services must be a nightmare for team PR staffs looking to maintain a certain level of control over the flow of information.

In addition to the publication advances, informational sites like Baseball Almanac, Baseball Reference, Baseball Prospectus, Fangraphs, and tools like those available at Inside Edge, ESPN.com’s Gamecast and MLB.com’s GameDay do the heavy lifting, to where the writer can provide the originally intended core function: storytelling.

Even storytelling has gotten a facelift. Perhaps no single entity has affected the craft like Twitter. Many of the writers’ handles are affiliated with their employers, so they are easily identifiable. Follow them during games, you can time the tweets of key plays and events to when they appear in GameDay or Gamecast. In a way, it’s replaced the “running” game story that was once a staple of the beat writer’s portfolio.

Some beat reporters use Twitter in a unique and innovative way. For example, Marc Carig of the Newark Star-Ledger makes it part of his modus operandi to Tweet quotes from certain players as they’re drafting their recaps. Maybe those quotes will appear in their stories, maybe they won’t. But the preview gives you the reader a definite reason to check. I’m amazed at the level of multitasking these men and women can endure.

(more…)

Anthony McCarron has a piece in the News today about the Yankees’ offense. Here’s a quote from general manager, Brian Cashman:

“Jeter is not hitting up to his ability, (Curtis) Granderson is not hitting for average and Gardner is struggling mightily. Those guys are our foot soldiers and since they are not firing, it makes us look one-dimensional. No biggie. We’re capable of running you down, hitting, hitting the ball over the fence.

“We have full capabilities. We just haven’t shown it yet.”

An innocuous quote. But what strikes  me is the term “foot soldiers.” We hear this kind of thing all the time in sports–so I don’t mean to pick on Cashman–where professional jocks are described as “warriors” who “do battle,” ready to “go to war.” Guys who play sports for a living, often guys who are paid handsomely and are in fact celebrities. These statements are made in an unthinking, self-absorbed manner and should not be taken literally. But still, they are words and words have power and at a time when our country is at war these military metaphors are gross and foolish.

More rain in the forecast for tomorrow. Bring yer umbrellas…

In the meantime, Yanks have the night off, so whether youse watching the NBA playoffs or waiting for Elijah to come knock-knock-knockin’ on your front door, feel free to fall through and kibbitz away.

[Picture by Jean Jacques Andre]

Over at SI.com, here’s Will Carroll on Alex Rodriguez’s recent injury:

More speculation? Yes, the chatter got pretty loud when Rodriguez came out of Saturday’s game with what was described after the game as stiffness in his oblique/back. Was this a situation related to his history of hip issues? Simply put — no. This kind of vagueness is a result of the precision we normally see from MRIs not being available on manual testing. Rodriguez’s injury is in that overlap zone where it’s difficult to tell without more advanced tests exactly where the problem is. So why not do it? It’s unnecessary cost and time. The Yankees knew at that point that it was a day-to-day situation, using the experience of their long-time Athletic Trainers. The weather was a factor, I’m told, as the cold day in the Bronx contributed to the tightness. Rodriguez was held out of Sunday’s game, but feels he caught it before it got more serious. The Yankees will watch him closely, but I think knowing there was an off-day Monday tipped the decision to rest him.

[Photo Credit: Herve Bertrand]

Pauline Kael on Woody’s first trip into heaviosity, Interiors:

The people in Woody Allen’s Interiors are destroyed by the repressiveness of good taste, and so is the picture. Interiors is a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past, and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however the eroticism of Bergman.

Interiors looks so much like a masterpiece, and has such a super-banal metaphysical theme (death versus life) that it’s easy to see why many regard it as a masterpiece: it’s deep on the surface. Interiors has moviemaking fever, all right, but in a screwed-up form — which is possibly what the movie is all about.

The movie is so unfunny it’s not even funny. Actually, it’s so unfunny that it’s funny, which is funny because the last thing it wants to be is funny.

More brilliance via the Subway Art Blog.

[Picture by VH McKenzie]

At the gym during my lunch hour today, the place scattered with middle-aged men an women grunting, working out their demons, relieving stress, shaping up their bodies for the summer. Two men stretched out on mats next to each other doing crunches.

One says to the other, “They laid off a bunch of people at my work last week.”

“No way.”

“Way. I’m feeling very vulnerable now.”

They work in silence for a moment and then:

“Well, I’m sure you’ll be okay. You are a hard worker.”

“Yeah, that and $2.25 will get you on the subway.”

They go back to grunting.

The wife has new photo notecards, fresh direct for Mother’s Day.

Check ’em out at her site, Blue Pear Prints.

So while I celebrated Passover with my family in a cramped Upper West Side apartment–loud, sweaty, funny–the Knicks were busy breaking their fans’ hearts with a 87-85 loss to the Celtics and the Yanks were engaged in a rainy affair with the Rangers at the Stadium. C.C. didn’t have his best outing but the Yanks kept him in the game. I got home in time to see him walk off the mound with a one-run lead in the seventh and settled down in time to see Joba cough it up.

But the Yanks went ahead in the bottom of the eighth when Eric “Caesar Salad” Chavez ripped an RBI single up the middle off Arthur “Fonzarelli” Rhodes–hey the game was on ESPN, excuse me if the spirit of Chris Berman has taken over, maybe I’m just jacked up on rugelach.

Mariano pitched the ninth and here is how that went.

Final Score: Yanks 6, Rangers 5.