On my way to the grocery store yesterday I stopped and tilted my nose in the air like I was a dog. It was warm in the sun and I thought I smelled it–the distinct odor of spring, which can only mean one thing: “Baseball.” It is the smell of soil, carried through the breeze. Eh, I think I might have been straining.

This morning, however, there it was again. Sure, this is a false spring we’ve got on our hands this week in New York (it is supposed to reach 50 degrees today), but I’ll take it.

Couple of Yankee notes fuh ya:

Brain Cashman has some tough love for Joba Chamberlain and Keith Olbermann is even tougher on Derek Jeter.

Update: Oh, and some cool news in the Yankee blogosphere–the Yankeeist and Yankee U have merged to form The Yankee Analysts. Be sure to drop by and check ’em out. I’m sure they’ll be doing some fine work this season.

[Picture by Richard Diebenkorn]

Pitchers and catchers report.

We cool out:

Ben Shpigel profiles the Yankees’ new pitching coach Larry Rothschild today in the Times:

At every stop Rothschild, 56, has burnished his reputation as one of baseball’s premier pitching instructors, renowned for his meticulous preparation, troubleshooting abilities and communication skills. Along the way, those assets have allowed him to connect with volatile personalities like Carlos Zambrano and Kevin Brown; free spirits like Jose Rijo and Al Leiter; and, yes, even “idiots” like Charlton, who called Rothschild “as good as it gets.”

“He learns how to get into guys’ heads but have them trust him,” [Norm] Charlton said in a telephone interview. “The reason he’s able to do that is because he’s right 99 percent of the time. What he says works.”

[Photo Credit: Tim Souers]

Hubba Hubba.

Grey skies, snow flurries in New York.

Stay warm, eat well, be happy.

[Picture by Bags]

Here’s Bruce Weber’s obit in the Times.

Let’s get groovy:

Thanks to the ongoing marvel that is Netflix Streaming, many previously hard to find and slept-on films are finding their way to our televisions, in fairly stunning quality. Recently I stumbled upon a movie I’d been seeking out for years and had basically given up on, Robert Culp’s 1972 detective film Hickey & Boggs.

Hickey & Boggs was one of a spate of revisionist private-eye movies that proliferated in the late 60s and early 70s, along with better known examples like The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973), Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975) and Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). For years I only knew of it because it was always referenced in books about 1970s cinema, genre revisionism or neo noir – I’d never seen it on TV or in a video store. To me, Hickey & Boggs only existed as still photographs of director-star Culp and his co-star, Bill Cosby, holding .44 Magnums, so I was more than happy to find it available for instant streaming.

Despite the presence of Culp and his I Spy co-star Cosby, the film, written by then-rising star Walter Hill, is a downbeat affair. Al Hickey (the Cos) and Frank Boggs (Culp) are partners in a two man Los Angeles private eye firm, ex-cops and divorced losers. Boggs is an alcoholic whose stripper ex-wife likes to taunt him from the stage (“Eat your heart out.”) and Hickey is desperate to repair his family and be a father and husband again, but his ex (Rosalind Cash) is having none of it.  Hickey and Boggs are broke, financially and spiritually.

The two are hired by a creepy, possibly pedophile lawyer named Rice to find a missing girl, which brings them deep into a web of gangsters, thugs, black militants and stolen mob money.  The closer they get to cracking the case, the deeper the hole they dig themselves. The bad guys want them dead and the cops want them out of the way or in jail. What’s worse is that they can’t even figure out why they’re putting themselves through all of this. “It’s not about anything,” Hickey repeatedly complains. And while they carry the same enormous, deadly pistol as Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan, they don’t share his deadly accuracy. “I gotta get a bigger gun,” Boggs complains, “I can’t hit anything anymore.”

Hickey & Boggs was the only film Culp directed, and it’s a pity he didn’t go behind the camera again. The film is well-paced, well-acted and Culp has a good sense of the city and the contrast between the dark places the characters go and the bright, sun-bleached, wide open expanses the action often plays itself out in (the L.A. Coliseum, the beach, a collapsing hillside mansion). Hill’s script was supposedly written for Jason Robards and Strother Martin, which makes one wonder if the original intent was to get Culp’s good friend Sam Peckinpah to direct. No matter, Culp makes the most of the material and gives a very generous performance, allowing for really nice work from the rest of the cast (including a very young James Woods and Michael Moriarty) to shine.

The biggest impression is made by Cosby. Cosby gets a couple sardonic one-liners in, but this is a straight dramatic role, with his character going to some pretty dark places emotionally, and he’s excellent. He’s always believable and always seems to be giving each scene the proper energy.  Sadly, the film didn’t do well, and Cosby spent the bulk of the remainder of the 1970s in silly (albeit fun) comedies with Sidney Poitier. What a shame that he wasn’t given more of a chance to shine as a dramatic actor during those peak years. Hickey & Boggs provides a tantalizing “What if?”

For fans of Cosby, Culp or neo-noir, Hickey & Boggs is a must-see.

Over at Fangraphs, Dave Cameron has a good post about Alex Rodriguez’s time with the Rangers:

The problem is that Rodriguez more than held up his end of the bargain, and if the Rangers front office had behaved with even moderate competency, they could have put some good teams together. The blame for the failure of the 2001 to 2003 Rangers does not lie with Alex Rodiguez’s large paychecks, but instead with the total wastes of cash that they surrounded him with. You want to know why those teams failed? Look no further than Park, Gonzalez, Everett, Oliver, and Rogers. In their attempt to surround Rodriguez with talent, they brought in a never ending series of terrible players who had name value but lacked ability. It didn’t have to be that way. They had enough resources to put good players around Rodriguez – they just failed to identify which players they should actually be giving money to.

Alex Rodriguez’s first contract was far from the worst deal in baseball history. In fact, given his performance in the years after he signed the deal, Rodriguez was actually worth the money he was paid. Unfortunately, the narrative of the deal lives on, despite all the illogical hula hoops you have to jump through in order to reach the conclusion that MacPhail suggested yesterday. Don’t believe the hype; A-Rod was not the cause of the Rangers failures, and the contract they signed him to was actually a wise investment. The problem is that was the only good investment that franchise made in those three years.

While you are there, check out Cameron’s take on the news that the Twins are open to trading Francisco Liriano:

Dealing Liriano to the Yankees is likely the big question that the Twins will have to answer. If they make Liriano available, you can be sure that Brian Cashman will pick up the phone. If the Twins see 2011 as something of a consolidation year, with World Series contention more of a hope than a legitimate reality, then you can justify sending your best pitcher to a league rival if you think you’re getting the better end of the deal long term. But if the Twins think that Justin Morneau is going to be 100 percent this year and they want to make another run at a championship while they have Jim Thome and the M&M boys in their primes, then they shouldn’t be in the business of strengthening teams they will need to beat in October.

I can see the reasoning behind considering dealing Liriano now, but it would likely require the Twins to admit that 2011 is probably not their year, and that’s a tough case to make to the rest of the team right as spring training opens up. If this was a path they wanted to pursue, it probably would have made more sense to be aggressive in dealing Liriano earlier in the winter, when they might have been able to ship him to Milwaukee or Chicago, getting quality prospects in return and getting him out of the American League. Now, faced with the choice of sending him to New York or taking an offer that is likely less impressive in return than what the Yankees would put on the table, the Twins are left with two less than palatable options. At this juncture, I think the Twins are probably best served hanging onto Liriano until the summer. By then, they may have more clarity about their own chances of making a splash in the playoffs, and there might also be an NL contender willing to get in on the bidding.

The simple pleasure of roasted garlic–from Joy the Baker.

Louie Malle’s “Pretty Baby” is playing at BAM tonigh at 6:50.

I don’t live in luxury.  I don’t reside in one of those pre-war Park Avenue buildings with those heavy glass and wrought-iron doors and the subdued dark wood paneling on the walls. Nor do I live in one of those gleaming apartment “towers” that dot the skyline.

I live in a simple, non-descript seven-story brick building erected in 1965 in Queens. But, our building (a co-op in which I am renting) does have one of those items seen in the “classier” buildings . . . a doorman.

Having lived in walk-up brownstones, residing in a doorman building is a treat. You have an added sense of safety when you arrive home. They hold packages for you, rather than you having to trudge to the post office or asking a neighbor to take in an expected parcel for you. They usually know what’s going on in the building before any of your neighbors.

Our building provides doorman coverage from 10AM-11:30PM weekdays, and 2-10PM on the weekends. Our doormen aren’t dressed in matching grey suits and hats like the ones you find “on the avenue”, but they’re always wearing nice shirts, ties and jackets.

I’ve only been in the building for a little over three years, but I understand that our weekday doorman has been in that position for many years. We haven’t been quite as fortunate in terms of night doormen.

The first one I met was a then-recent immigrant in his late 30s/early 40s, who was in the midst of studying for Medical School. He’d have one eye on the front door, and one on his books. It isn’t a bad gig for someone looking to have some quiet time while making a little dough. Sure enough, when he got his notice of acceptance into Med School, he gave up the doorman job.

His replacement was a nice-enough fellow, probably late-40s, wife, two small children. I came home one night to find him polishing the brass handrails. He held the bottle of polish up and asked me somewhat hesitantly “do you think this is safe to use on these rails?” I took a look at the bottle, and assured him it was OK. Another time, I came home at 11:30PM, to find his family waiting in the lobby for him to pack up and go home. Whatever his story was, it was short . . . he was gone within one month.

Next came Silvio, a Hispanic fellow in his early-to-mid 20s with a quiet demeanor and a well-kept ponytail and goatee. Silvio didn’t have any textbooks with him at the desk. Sometimes there would be a laptop, sometimes he’d be chatting on a celphone headset. I often wondered why someone his age would be subjecting himself to sitting behind a desk and collecting the recycling in an apartment building every weeknight. Was he saving his dollars for something? Was he between “real jobs”?

One night a few weeks ago, I came home to find that Silvio had ditched the ponytail. I thought, “hmmm . . . job interview coming up?”  Maybe I was right, as Silvio was gone a week later. His replacement hasn’t been hired yet, but I’m sure he’ll have his own story.

Picking up on her Varsity Letters presentation, here’s Emma’s debut article for Baseball Prospectus:

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the maxim that if you can imagine it, there’s porn about it on the Internet. That’s no joke. It was only a few years ago that I first learned of fan fiction, when a friend explained that one of his coworkers not only contributed to, but ran, an extensive website entirely dedicated to fan-written stories about the characters from the animated series Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers. The stories that turned sexual—yes, stories about cartoon chipmunks that turn sexual—were called slash fiction, named for the typographic symbol in the “Kirk/Spock” liaisons that launched the genre in the 1970s.

Naturally, this prompted my friends and I to go online and see if there was any kind of subject, anything at all, and that did not have something pornographic written about it and posted on the Internet. The answer: not really, no. We couldn’t find anything pairing Jay Leno with bandleader Kevin Eubanks, but that was about it.

What we did discover was a trove of imagined romance and sex between baseball players, on multiple websites. I thought that over the years I’d seen most of the dark corners of sports fandom, but as it turns out, I still was not fully prepared for baseball fan fiction. If you’ve thought about it at all, you might expect to find quite a few tales of Jeter and A-Rod, and those are certainly there. But I was less braced for just how prominently players like, for example, Doug Mirabelli feature. You just do not ever expect to encounter the phrase, to quote one story, “Doug Mirabelli’s huge, unlubed…”

Well—Doug Mirabelli’s huge, unlubed anything, really. Let’s leave it at that.

Hey, Now…

Bowie Friday.

I first noticed it a few days ago coming out of the subway station on 103rd street. The light. Then a few more times this week, including various times this morning. The light. It’s changing. Spring is coming. We know that, of course. Every day, the papers have stories from Florida. Pitchers and catchers report to Yankee camp in three days.

It is still cold in New York and we’ll still have to endure plenty of lousy weather. Bring it on. You can’t stop the light.

I’ll tell you this–when it does warm up, this town is going to blossom like nobody’s business. Man, it’s gunna be a good spring.

Next Monday, the Doughnut Plant will open a second location. This one will be in the Chelsea Hotel.

Be warned, these aren’t your average treats. They’re so stupid they’ll make you use a word that don’t mean nuthin…like looptid.

[Photo Credit: The Gourmetro]

Not only was Danny Kaye a brilliant performer but he was a wonderful cook too.

This morning on the train a couple sat next to me with their toddler. When the father and the child got off, the doors closed and the mother stood up and looked out of the window and waved. I’m always interested in how people say goodbye to each other on the subway. Sometimes, you’ll see a couple kiss and even before one has left the train, they have both stopped looking at each other.

I always look.

When I was growing up, we had a dog who would chase our car whenever we left home. More than a few times, I’ve gotten off the train and said goodbye to my wife, and then run down the platform as a goof to crack her up. That’s my job, make the wife smile, keep her laughing. Or maybe it’s just the K-9 in me.

[Photo Credit: iphonegraphic from the flickr Subway Portraits gallery]

Last week, Emma and I were part of Gelf’s Varsity Letters Speaking Series. There were 15 speakers in all, and we were asked to give three minutes on a defining sports-related moment.

I spent a while thinking about what I would say, then worked on what I thought was a succinct essay. When I was satisfied with my draft, I read it aloud, and it was over seven minutes! So I cut it in half and then paired it down some more. Seven-hundred-and-twenty words and it still ran long, so I went back to work. It was a fun excercise, a good challenge, and I enjoyed preparing the speech. Had and an even better time listening to the other speakers.

Here’s my speech:

Emma followed me (and she’s bust-a-gut funny as is her wont):

Click here for the rest of the speakers, including Jeff Pearlman, Jason Fry and Will Leitch.

Over at The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn tackles the “Mad Men” craze:

Since the summer of 2007, when Mad Men premiered on the cable station AMC, the world it purports to depict—a lushly reimagined Madison Avenue in the 1960s, where sleekly suited, chain-smoking, hard-drinking advertising executives dream up ingeniously intuitive campaigns for cigarettes and bras and airlines while effortlessly bedding beautiful young women or whisking their Grace Kelly–lookalike wives off to business trips in Rome—has itself become the object of a kind of madness. I’m not even referring to the critical reception both in the US and abroad, which has been delirious: a recent and not atypical reference in the Times of London called it “one of the…best television series of all time,” and the show has repeatedly won the Emmy, the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, the Writers Guild of America Award, and the Producers Guild of America Award for Best Drama Series. (A number of its cast members have been nominated in the various acting categories as well.) Rather, the way in which Mad Men has seemingly percolated into every corner of the popular culture—the children’s show Sesame Street has introduced a Mad Men parody, toned down, naturally, for its tender viewers—suggests that its appeal goes far beyond what dramatic satisfactions it might afford.

At first glance, this appeal seems to have a lot to do with the show’s much-discussed visual style—the crisp midcentury coolness of dress and decor. The clothing retailer Banana Republic, in partnership with the show’s creators, devised a nationwide window display campaign evoking the show’s distinctive 1960s look, and now offers a style guide to help consumers look more like the show’s characters. A nail polish company now offers a Mad Men–inspired line of colors; the toy maker Mattel has released dolls based on some of the show’s characters. Most intriguingly, to my mind, Brooks Brothers has partnered with the series’s costume designer to produce a limited edition Mad Men suit—which is, in turn, based on a Brooks Brothers design of the 1960s.

I’ve only seen a few episodes. I’ve talked to some people who say the show is spot-on; others say it is contrived.

What’s all the hubbub…bub?