Yesterday, a couple of people hipped me to this terrific site of Hy Peskin’s photography.

Go, you won’t be disappointed.

Here’s some Yankeeness for you fiends out there:

Over at River Avenue Blues, Joe P links to a Wallace Mathews piece on Kevin Long.

And at IATMS, here’s a note via Buster Olney that C.C. Sabathia has lost 30 lbs.

Joba Chamberlain, on the other hand, has reportedly put on some weight. Check out this great Yankee weigh-in by Steve Goldman. And while you are there, dig the Aceves Challenge by Jay Jaffe.

[Picture by Bags]

Here’s a good movie blog, Some Came Running, by Glenn Kenny. Check out this post about Martin Scorsese’s Vanishing New York.

Homemade Nutella from David Lebovitz.

Yes, please.

M’enfin.

According to Rob Neyer…

There has been a huge buzz about a long New Yorker profile on Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology. Here’s the piece, written by Lawrence Wright,  and  here is a transcript of an interview with Wright on the Terry Gross Show over at NPR.

One last word on football. If you’ve got the time, do yourself a favor and check out Scott Price’s excellent bonus piece on Aliquippa, P.A.

[Photo Credit: LIFE]

From Matt B…

The one thing on a subway that will always get my attention is a lost soul. I mean literally lost. Like the guy has no idea where he is going. This happens a lot on the A Train, because it runs express and pretty quickly takes a rube out of the comfort of Manhattan proper and deposits him at 125th St before he can even figure out what happened.

Being lost can be no big deal if you are one of those self-assured types who feel like they can warp reality to their own will. But it can also make you feel helpless – especially if you’re working against the clock and have bitten off more than you can chew.

Last night, a late teen, early twenties type, looking like a savvy city-chick, turned to her neighbor at 125th st and asked if the train was going to Roosevelt Island. That grabbed me right in the gut. Roosevelt Island? That’s not even close. Her neighbor didn’t speak English, so I pointed her to the map behind her and explained she was about to stop at 145th St.

A glazed look of confusion engulfed her. Another rider quickly noted that she could make it Roosevelt Island fairly easily if she hopped out at 145th, took a downtown B or D to Roc Center and then transferred to the F Train. She staggered off at 145th and the other rider and I both watched her turn in awkward circles on the platform. We made eye contact and we both knew the timely advice hadn’t made a dent.

[Photo Credit: Clara]

Pitchers and catchers don’t officially report for a few days still, but Russell Martin and Jesus Montero are already working out in Florida. Here’s John Harper, writing in the Daily News about the kid Montero:

Baseball America editor Jim Callis, who ranks minor-league prospects based on seeing them himself and talking to more scouts and minor-league evaluators than just about anyone, says he would have a hard time dealing Montero.

“To me he’s the best all-around hitter in the minor leagues,” Callis said recently. “He might be another Mike Piazza, the way he hits for average and power. I’ll be shocked if he doesn’t have a great career as a hitter.”

…But can Montero catch? Callis says the answer might be a matter of how much a team is willing to sacrifice defense for offense at the position.

“It’s not like he’s a total butcher back there,” Callis said. “He has a strong arm, but his transfer when he throws is slow, and he’s not the best receiver in the world. He’s not real athletic, but he has worked hard to become more flexible behind the plate.

“Overall he’s a little below average defensively, and I’m not sold that in five years Montero will be a catcher.

Yeah, the Yanks have issues with their starting rotation but there is plenty to be excited about and it starts with the Jesus.

Hua Hsu on audio cassettes:

There is nothing magic about a cassette, nothing bewitching about an object that can be taken apart and reassembled or fixed with a pencil. A small rectangular box of plastic in which magnetized tape moves back and forth between miniature spools, it is, from today’s vantage, a hopelessly antiquated format. At a time when most of us listen to music that exists only as data, on soundless players that cannot be pried open, the cassette displays its modest mechanics all too transparently. Peer inside the deck as you slide in a tape in, and you see a tiny, busy factory world of belts, wires, and interlocking gears. Press play, and even before the first track begins, you hear a series of hisses and squeals and the faint whir of the motor. When the side ends: a harsh click. Even in the 1980s, when the cassette tape represented the apex of consumer technology, its advances—the workmanlike auto-reverse button; various gradations of Dolby; “IEC Type II High (CrO₂) Position,” whatever that means—seemed puny, stopgaps to tide us over until we could engineer more elegant solutions.

Given that the cassette is widely regarded as a nostalgic curio today, few people were surprised when Sony discontinued production of the Walkman, their once-iconic portable cassette player, last April. The greater shock, for many, was the realization that Sony was still manufacturing Walkmen at all. While we mourn the player’s death and await the iPhone 5, it would be a mistake to dismiss the cassette as merely a transitional technology. Rather, it offered its user a previously unimaginable degree of autonomy, a freedom that is today familiar to us, and was the first music format to raise thorny questions about the concept of fair use and about what it means to own a piece of music.

The L.A. Times Magazine has a photo gallery of the 50 most beautiful women in film:

Plenty of hits and misses in there.

Where are these lovelies?

Over at the New York Times, Jordan Michelman asks, “Who makes the best Vietnamese banh mi sandwich in America?”

Peep, don’t sleep.

[Photo Credit: Plate of the Day]

The 8th Wonder of the World…

Bow down.

Has the regular season lost all significance to us as fans?

In the 2010 stretch drive, we watched the Yankees rest their players for the looming Postseason tournament. While there were voices on both sides of the debate, all parties had to agree their was a heirarchy of achievement in which the World Series placed at the top. This reduced the substance of the argument for those of us gunning for the division crown to purely nominal terms.

And the Yankees don’t even hang a little felt pennant unless they win the Series.

But we marginalize the regular season at our own peril. Sooner or later, and possibly even this year, it’s all we’ll have. In those years, I don’t intend to stop being a fan, so I think it’s a good idea to try to realign priorities in order to make that fandom possible. After all, what value is the regular season if losing out on the World Series invalidates everything that preceded it?

Baseball viewed through the prism of the postseason ignores the fact the foundations of championships extend all the way back into April, and even into surrounding seasons. It’s an iceberg viewed from an airplane – most of the mass is underwater.

But no more! We have exhumed the “Lost Classics” of regular seasons past. Games that deserve our attention. Games that defined players and teams, that set-up championships, that were epic poems in and of themselves. Without these games, there are no Hall of Fame inductions, no retired numbers, and no parades. And after all, isn’t baseball a summer game?

THE BIRTH OF COOL (AND CONFIDENT) – July 4th, 1995

Our first extract from the vault of “Lost Classics” hails from the pre-natal days of the most recent dynasty. It was Independence Day, 1995 and the Yankees were visiting Chicago. We need not describe their opponent any further, because way back in 1995, there was no interleague play. Both teams, division leaders at the time of the 1994 strike, were struggling since the return to play and found themselves on the frowny side of .500.

The Yankees had problems in the rotation (I guess as almost every team does almost every year) and were searching for answers.  Even back in 1995, Jack Curry had the goods:

Without Jimmy Key for at least the rest of the season and probably without Melido Perez and Scott Kamieniecki until the second half of the season, the Yankees have desperately searched for starters. They have talked on the phone about trades and searched on the farm for the right prospect.

Rookie Mariano Rivera had debuted earlier in the season and spilled his first cup of coffee with the Yankees right down the front of his brand new uniform. He got the ball four times and was awful three times. In 15 innings, he allowed 18 runs, and even more striking, walked as many men as he struck out – eight. He got battered back to Columbus dragging a 10.20 ERA behind him. But in Columbus, something clicked.

Rivera had not allowed a run in his last 20 2/3 innings in the minors, so when the right-hander returned on Monday for his second stint of the season with the Yankees, he carried a scoreless streak with him. … In his last start, Rivera won a five-inning no-hitter for Columbus against Rochester. … With a microscopic 1.17 earned run average in five starts at Columbus and a 1-2 record and 10.20 e.r.a. with the Yankees before today, Rivera had a goal: to prove he could win in the majors.

Rivera earned another shot in the bigs. He faced the Chicago White Sox who were an above average offensive team – they could hit for average and scored the fifth most runs in the American League. It wasn’t a powerhouse, but it wasn’t a bad representation of the division-winning White Sox lineups from 1993 and 1994. And they couldn’t sniff Mo’s stuff.

He struck out 11 batters, and nine of those were swinging whiffs. When they put the bat on it, they could only manage weak contact as the Sox grounded 12 outs to the infield while getting only four balls to the outfielders. Dave Martinez (later corroborated by John Kruk on Baseball Tonight) offers Curry a likely explanation: “The scouting report we had said that he throws about 85 or 86,” White Sox outfielder Dave Martinez said. “He was throwing a lot harder than that.”

Frank Thomas got him for two singles and a fly out, but in those days, that was not a bad line versus the Big Hurt at his most bone-crushingest. None of the rest of the team had any chance, though the veterans were annoyingly patient and worked all four walks (Kruk twice, Dave Martinez and Ozzie Guillen). Robin Ventura made two loud outs (around a swinging strike out), so I guess he was able to square it up a little bit, too.

Not only was Mariano dominant, he was only in one mini-jam the whole game. It was the type of jam that you’d expect from a rookie, but one that seems totally uncharacteristic given what we know of the pitcher today. After Paul O’Neill staked him a 1-0 lead in the top of the fourth with a solo jack, Mariano committed the cardinal sin of walking the lead off man Dave Martinez in front of Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura. He got Thomas to fly out, but then balked Martinez over to second – that’s one of three balks in his 16-year career.

With the runner in scoring position (the only one he would allow all game), he bore down and struck out Ventura to culminate an eight-pitch at bat. He lost John Kruk on a full count, but rebounded to strike out Warren Newsome to end the threat.

Already cruising, after the fourth he found a higher gear. He allowed only one more single and one more walk, and struck out six to wrap up his night. He left after 129 pitches and eight superb innings and his final line tallied 11 strikeouts, four walks, two hits, and zero runs. The Yankees iced the game with a couple of sac flies and a Bernie Williams triple. John Wetteland wobbled in the 9th and gave up a run but never had to face the tying run as the Yanks won 4-1. I assume there was much rejoicing.

(more…)

I get nervous when I see someone reading their iPad on the subway. I have to fight the urge to tell them, “Put that thing away, don’t you know you could get mugged for carrying that around?” Maybe I’m still living in the ’70s and ’80s when being shook was a daily operation riding the trains (yeah, I was a kid then but the city felt lawless then too). Maybe you have nothing to worry about. But I am cautious about using my iPhone. Change the song, put it back in my pocket. 

Old habits die hard.

Over at PB, Jay Jaffe takes a look at what BP’s PECOTA means for the back of the Yankee rotation.

And while you are there, check out Cliff’s take on Eric Chavez, and Steve Goldman on Jose “Can You See” Cruz.

The one and only…Drew Friedman. (Thought I was going to say Hackenbush, didn’t ya?)