If you are a fan of the sports infographic representations of Flip Flop Fly Ball, then you might also enjoy a site called “MLB Trade Trees“.
From the site’s home page: “Find out how MLB trades evolved from a historian/baseball nerd in Iowa.”
The site isn’t splashy, but its quietly interesting, and the owner promises improvements.
The King of what? King of Style…
In case you missed it, Triumph recently reprinted Clyde Frazier’s classic fun time book, “Rockin’ Steady” (written with Ira Berkow).
Two women on the IRT…
The hits keep coming. My man Eric Nusbaum hipped me to these cherce selections from the Harry E. Winkler Collection of boxing photographs.
Bags hipped me to a most cool site called Scouting New York.
Dig these two then-and-now posts on “Taxi Driver” and “Ghostbusters”:
Kevin Long is a busy man. Over at SI.com, Tom Verducci has a piece on the work Derek Jeter will do with the Yankees’ hitting coach in the coming weeks:
“I feel like Derek always has been the type of player who cares about winning instead of the numbers,” Long said. “I think the contract probably caused him to think more about numbers than he otherwise would want to. It probably did affect his performance.
“Listen, he’s human, just like anybody else. A lot of guys try real hard, and when they don’t get results they try even harder. And sometimes the harder you try the more you fail.”
[Photo Credit: Life Magazine]
For an old-fashioned, no-frills treat, stop by the Donut Pub next time you are on 14th street. Their Boston Creme rules:
[Photo Credit: Juozas Cernius and robobby]
Every once in a while something comes along that is so unbearably tremendous that I can’t help but feel rejuvenated, filled with enthusiasm and faith in the world.
Like this story…
…About the guy who found a treasure and is now sharing it with the world.
Dig this piece by Nora O’Donnell for Chicago Magazine:
On an unremarkable day in late 2007, John Maloof, a young real-estate agent, spent some time at a local auction house, RPN Sales in Portage Park, combing through assortments of stuff—some of it junk—that had been abandoned or repossessed. A third-generation reseller, Maloof hoped to find some historical photographs for a small book about Portage Park that he was cowriting on the side. He came across a box that had been repossessed from a storage locker, and a hasty search revealed a wealth of black-and-white shots of the Loop from the 1950s and ’60s. There’s got to be something pertinent in there, he thought. So he plunked down about $400 for the box and headed home. A closer examination unearthed no scenes of Portage Park, though the box turned out to contain more than 30,000 negatives. Maloof shoved it all into his closet.
Something nagged, however—perhaps a reflex picked up from working the flea market circuit as a poor kid growing up on the West Side of Chicago. Though he knew almost nothing about photography, he eventually returned to the box and started looking through the negatives, scanning some into his computer. There was a playfulness to the moments the anonymous artist had captured: a dapper preschool boy peeking from the corner of a grimy store window; an ample rump squeezing through the wooden planks of a park bench; a man in a three-piece suit napping, supine, in the front seat of his car, his right arm masking his face from the daylight. Whoa, Maloof mused. These are really cool. Who took them?
Vivian Maier, a French ex-pat, that’s who:
After a call to the Tribune left him with a faulty address and a disconnected phone number, Maloof didn’t know where to turn. In the meantime, though, he started displaying Maier’s work on a blog, vivianmaier.com. Then, in October 2009, he linked to the blog on Flickr, the photo-sharing website, and posted a question about Maier’s pictures on a discussion board devoted to street photography: “What do I do with this stuff (other than giving it to you)?”
The discussion went viral. Suggestions poured in, and websites from around the world sent traffic to his blog. (If you Google “Vivian Maier” today, you’ll get more than 18,000 results.) Maloof recognized that this was bigger than he’d thought.
He was right about that. Since his tentative online publication of a smattering of Vivian Maier’s photographs, her work has generated a fanatical following. In the past year, her photos have appeared in newspapers in Italy, Argentina, and England. There have been exhibitions in Denmark and Norway, and a showing is scheduled to open in January at the Chicago Cultural Center. Few of the pictures had ever been seen before by anyone other than Maier herself, and Maloof has only scratched the surface of what she left behind. He estimates that he’s acquired 100,000 of her negatives, and another interested collector, Jeff Goldstein, has 12,000 more (some of them displayed at vivianmaierphotography.com). Most of Maier’s photos are black and white, and many feature unposed or casual shots of people caught in action—passing moments that nonetheless possess an underlying gravity and emotion. And Maier apparently ranged far and wide with her camera—there are negatives from Los Angeles, Egypt, Bangkok, Italy, the American Southwest. The astonishing breadth and depth of Maier’s work led Maloof to pursue two questions, as alluring in their way as her captivating photographs: Who was Vivian Maier, and what explains her extraordinary vision?
Here’s David Dunlap in the New York Times:
What is known about Ms. Maier is that she was born in New York in 1926, lived in France (her mother was French) and returned to New York in 1951. Five years later, she moved to Chicago, where she worked for about 40 years as a nanny, principally for families in the North Shore suburbs. On her days off, she wandered the streets of New York and Chicago, most often with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera. Apparently, she did not share her pictures with others. Many of them, she never saw herself. She left behind hundreds of undeveloped rolls.
Even if you don’t think Ms. Maier has the makings of a minor master from the mid-20th century whose work can now be appreciated, you’ll probably be affected by at least a few of her photos.
And if you’re nearing 60 and grew up Chicago, you’re almost bound to feel — as I do — that a precious past has been rescued that we didn’t even know existed; thousands of blinks of the civic eye, tens of thousands of beats of the public heart.
Thank you, John Maloof. You are doing a great public service.
Enjoy.
For Matt B and all you funky Rock N Rollers out there:
Nice piece on Robbie Cano by Jack Curry over at YES:
While interviewing Cano on his home turf, I was intrigued by how candid he was about wanting to be a megastar. Cano wasn’t cocky, just confident. Cano wants the Yankees to win a title. That’s the most important goal. But the better Cano is, the easier it is for the Yankees to win. Cano’s hopeful words should be refreshing to the Yankees.
“I want to see how it feels to do everything,” Cano said. “I want to see how it feels to win an MVP [award]. I already had a World Series ring. I want more.” He added, “I want to have a Gold Glove, which I have right now, an MVP, a batting title. I always want to know how that feels, to be there. So that’s why I work hard every single day to try and get better.”
The thought of Robbie having another strong season sure is appealing, ain’t it?
[Photo Credit: Billy Weeks]
A few years back I was shocked to learn that the Yankees had once had a ill-conceived and misbegotten mascot, Dandy, which appears to some kind of upsetting bird-type creature although it is honestly quite hard to be sure. Since everyone involved is eager to deny involvement and sweep poor Dandy under the rug, conflicting information abounds. I first read about Dandy in a book about Yankee history, when I researching a chapter in my own book, and in that post I quote a New York Times article, but it turns out accounts vary as to just when and for how long Dandy stuck around, and what he did or didn’t achieve in his short and blighted existence.
Now the great Flip Flop Fly Ball has discovered this fantastic/terrible photographic evidence of Dandy in his unnatural habitat, “on some guy’s Picasa photo album”:
Ladies and gentlemen, the 1980s.
‘Nuff said.
Jet win.
Congrats to the Jets. The punks leave New England stunned.
Hot, damn.
Hard to pick against Tom Brady, but still…
Let’s Go Jets!
When I first met Cliff, he took me to school. He said that proper form is one space, not two after a period. I’d spent my whole life thinking a double-space was the way to go. Not so, Schmucko.
