Can I kick it?

Aw, yes you can.

Man, I miss El Duque, don’t you?

There’s a nice appreciation of Elia Kazan by John Lahr over at The New Yorker to mark the release of a new 18-DVD set, The Elia Kazan Collection:

“I’ve never seen a director who became as deeply and emotionally involved in a scene,” Marlon Brando wrote in his autobiography, “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” “Kazan was the best actors’ director by far of any I’ve worked for. [He] got into a part with me and virtually acted it with me.” Arthur Miller wrote, in “Timebends,” “Life in a Kazan production had that hushed air of conspiracy. A conspiracy not only against the existing theatre, but society, capitalism—in fact everybody who was not part of the production.” Kazan didn’t razzle-dazzle his actors with talk. Instinctively, when he had something important to tell an actor, he would huddle with him privately, rather than instruct in front of the others. He sensed that “anything that really penetrates is always to some degree an embarrassment,” Miller noted, adding, “A mystery grew up around what he might be thinking, and this threw the actor back on himself.” Kazan, who was no stranger to psychoanalysis, operated on the analytic principle of insinuation, not command. He believed that, for an interpretation to be owned by an actor, the actor had to find it in himself. “He would send one actor to listen to a particular piece of jazz, another to a certain novel, another to see a psychiatrist, another he would simply kiss,” Miller recalled. Kazan’s trick was to make the actors feel as though his ideas were actually their own revelations.

Kazan’s ability to submerge himself in a story served writers as creatively as it did actors. “I tried to think and feel like the author so that the play would be in the scale and in the mood, in the tempo and feeling of each author,” he said. “I tried to be the author.” Kazan is remembered primarily as a director, but his invisible contribution to writers is equally important. Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, Willy Loman, Big Daddy, Brick, Maggie the Cat, Chance Wayne—defining figures in the folklore of the twentieth century—all bear the marks of Kazan’s shaping hand. Of the many playwrights with whom he collaborated—William Inge, Arthur Miller, Archibald McLeish, Thornton Wilder—he had no partnership that was more intimate or influential than his work with Tennessee Williams. “It was a mysterious harmony,” Kazan wrote. “Our union, immediate on first encounter, was close. . . . Possibly because we were both freaks.” Kazan and Williams also had in common an oppressive father, a doting mother, a faith in sexual chaos as a path to knowledge, and a voracious appetite for success.

Kazan’s 1988 memoir, “A Life,” is well-worth tracking down.

Here’s Joe Sheehan, writing for SI.com:

There’s an assumption that the Yankees will use prospect Jesus Montero to acquire someone to fill the Lee-sized hole they see at the front of the rotation. They traded Montero once, remember, agreeing to a deal with Seattle for Lee himself back in July before the Mariners decided to trade him to the Rangers instead. The idea that the Yankees will use Montero, who compares to Mike Piazza both offensively and defensively, to get Zack Greinke has been in play for some time, but it’s not a particularly good fit. Greinke is a very good pitcher, but he’s signed through just 2012. If the Yankees are determined to trade Montero, who is one of the top five prospects in baseball, they should target less-obvious candidates who can contribute for more than 70 starts — even if it seems like these pitchers will, or should, be untouchable.

…The Yankees were unable to use their money to add a frontline starter, because the situation wasn’t entirely in their control. What they do with Montero is entirely in their control, however, and their disposition of this fantastic young hitter will tell us a lot about the Yankees’ creativity and imagination in solving problems that writing checks can’t fix.

Your move, Cash.

Maybe I ain’t got no soul…

Haven’t you ever met a man that made you happy?

Sure, lots of times.

From the City of Brotherly Love…

According to a report, the Yanks have signed Russell Martin.

Since the end of the 2009 World Series, the following star pitchers have become available via trade or free agency: Cliff Lee, Roy Halladay, John Lackey, Cliff Lee, Roy Oswalt, Dan Haren, and Cliff Lee.

Since the end of the 2009 World Series, the following second-tier pitchers have have become available via trade or free agency: Ted Lilly (twice), Shawn Marcum, Jake Westbrook (twice), Edwin Jackson (twice), Javier Vazquez (twice), John Garland (twice), Brett Myers, Carl Pavano (twice), and Hideki Kuroda.

Since the end of the 2009 World Series, the following other interesting pitchers have have become available via trade or free agency: Max Scherzer, Joe Saunders, JA Happ, Colby Lewis, and Jorge De La Rosa.

I’m sure the list is not complete and that there are legit quibbles about who is interesting and who is a star, but the points are macro. One should be comforting, the other should be troubling.

1) The Yanks will have shots at all sorts of pitchers if they stay on top of it. Guys who are obvious targets and guys we might never predict.

2) The Yanks knew their long-term rotation was in trouble ever since they gave up on Chamberlain and were forced to gamble on a three-man rotation to win the Series. And the only guy they were able to get on the above lists was Javy the Hated.

Actually, there’s one big mistake here. There is no way Joe Saunders can be considered “interesting.”

I read the novel “True Grit” by Charles Portis recently because I wanted to see what compelled Joel and Ethan Coen to remake the original movie. The novel, by Charles Portis, is short, and written in a straight forward style. It is funny and engaging and it didn’t take long to figure why the Coens loved it–it reads like one of their movies. The material is right in their wheelhouse.

There was a piece on Portis, a private man with no interest in celebrity, this past weekend in the Times Magazine:

There’s a special challenge in adapting a writer like Portis for the screen, because so much of his craft lies in that combination of word-music and sensibility called literary voice. Borrowing his dialogue is a start, and the Coens have done that, as well as employing voice-over passages plucked from the novel. And the dialogue they have added sounds suitably Portisesque: “He has abandoned me to a congress of louts,” for instance, and “I am a foolish old man who has been drawn into a wild-goose chase by a harpy in trousers and a nincompoop.”

But filmmakers have other ways to mimic the effect of literary voice. Think of film noir’s use of low-key lighting to express Chandler’s dark vision of his characters’ inner lives or how different directors try to catch Philip K. Dick’s signature feeling of creeping unreality with trippy special effects or extreme close-ups. And then there’s acting style. John Wayne’s mannered presence, his declamatory line readings and mincing he-man gait, suited him well to Portis’s mock-epic tone. Similarly, the actors in the Coens’ “True Grit” communicate a winning sort of self-importance by puffing themselves up, portentously matching words to actions (“I extend my hand”) and gnawing their lines as if extracting tobacco juice from them.

For more on Portis, check out Tom Wolfe’s famous story, “The Birth of the New Journalism”:

…At the desk behind mine in the Herald Tribune city room sat Charles Portis. Portis was the original laconic cutup. At one point he was asked onto a kind of Meet the Press show with Malcolm X, and Malcolm X made the mistake of giving the reporters a little lecture before they went on about how he didn’t want to hear anybody calling him “Malcolm,” because he was not a dining-car waiter—his name happened to be “Malcolm X.” By the end of the show Malcolm X was furious. He was climbing the goddamned acoustical tiles. The original laconic cutup, Portis, had invariably and continually addressed him as “Mr. X” . . . “Now, Mr. X, let me ask you this . . .” Anyway, Portis had the desk behind mine. Down in a bullpen at the far end of the room was Jimmy Breslin. Over to one side sat Dick Schaap. We were all engaged in a form of newspaper competition that I have never known anybody to even talk about in public. Yet Schaap had quit as city editor of the New York Herald Tribune, which was one of the legendary jobs in journalism—moved down the organizational chart, in other words—just to get in this secret game.

…As for our little league of feature writers—two of the contestants, Portis and Breslin, actually went on to live out the fantasy. They wrote their novels. Portis did it in a way that was so much like the way it happens in the dream, it was unbelievable. One day he suddenly quit as London correspondent for the Herald Tribune. That was generally regarded as a very choice job in the newspaper business. Portis quit cold one day; just like that, without a warning. He returned to the United States and moved into a fishing shack in Arkansas. In six months he wrote a beautiful little novel called Norwood. Then he wrote True Grit, which was a best seller. The reviews were terrific . . . He sold both books to the movies . . . He made a fortune . . . A fishing shack! In Arkansas! It was too goddamned perfect to be true, and yet there it was. Which is to say that the old dream, The Novel, has never died.

Part of being a Yankee fan–especially those of us who grew up during the Steinbrenner Era–means getting what you want come the off-season. But for every success story like Reggie Jackson, Goose Gossage or CC Sabathia, there are even more busts–Davey Collins, Steve Kemp, Jack Clark, and Jose Contreras leap to mind. Still, reflexively, we expect the Yanks to get their man. This year, the Bombers wanted Cliff Lee in the worst way. They made him the biggest offer. And he turned them down.

Sometimes the best gift is the one you don’t get. I think Lee did the Yanks a favor. Brian Cashman and the Yankee brass might be furious at the moment, and certainly, there are a lot of Yankee fans who are vexed this morning, but there is no reason to panic. Seven years for Lee was insane. He would have turned into the Ryan O’Neal of great pitchers for that many years in this town–not built to last.

So kudos to the Phillies. And now Cashman has to get creative. Good. I’m curious to see what he comes up with. Just because we don’t have a splashy big name to keep us warm during the holidays doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do let alone it being the end of the world. Nothing is f***** here. We don’t need to be un-Dude. (And thank goodness George still isn’t running things because heads would roll and dumb moves would be made.)

Hey, think of it this way, at least now we’ll get to read columnists and bloggers and blog readers offere their genius solutions. Ready to revive the Joba-to-the-rotation spiel? (God no, please no! It might make all the sense in the world for Chamberlain to start but that’s a moot pernt becuase the Yanks seem hell bent on keeping him in the pen.)

Who knows what surprises are in store?

I’d be shocked if Lee signs with the Yanks at this pernt–and I’m with Bruce Markusen in thinking they should just take their offer off the table–but if he goes back to the Phillies after all of this, well, that’d be pretty clever.

Know one dude who’d be happy:

[Photo Credit: the Morning Jog]

Leave to Marty to elevate things to another level:

It’s obvious, I know, but fitting…

Let’s hope today is the day for this putz, Lee. Go to Texas and leave us to get on with it.

In the meantime, bop your head to this:

The Cliff Lee Drama promises to unfold shortly–tomorrow they say–and I for one am fed-up with all this waiting. I hope he signs with Texas, stay the bad guy (and I think he’s lock to go back). Look, if he comes to the Yanks, I’ll bellyache about the contract, because it’s insane, but I’ll be pleased that he improves the team in the short term. If he passes, I’ll be relieved and eager to see what the Yanks do next.

That said, this waiting game isn’t endearing Lee to anyone. Not that he does–or should–care.

It’s raining in New York this morning. The Jets play the Dolphins in the late afternoon game out in Jersey. I wonder if football players wake up bummed when they hear raindrops or if it just doesn’t matter at all to them as they gnaw on a slab of raw meat.

In the meantime, check out this loving appreciation of Vic Ziegel and Maury Allen by Harvey Ararton in today’s New York Times.

Araton gets props over here.

In the meantime, the Knicks are on early this afternoon. Yes, the Knicks. Amare has been so much better than I ever expected. What a nice surprise. It’s been awhile…

UPDATE: The first half of the Knicks-Nuggest game today at the Garden is enough to turn fair-weather Knicks fans like me back on. 66-65 Knicks at the half, a shoot-out. Lots of fun. Nene vs. Amare has been spirited, Amare came close to getting his second tech and tossed in the second quarter. Refs gave the Knicks a hometown call. Nene’s thrown down three dunks, the last one, emphatically! over Amare.

Can’t remember the last time I was actually excited about watching the second half of a Knicks game…

UPDATE: Knicks win a good one…that’s their 8th win in a row, something they haven’t done in 16 years.

Celts and then the Heat come to the Garden this week. Nice.

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News and Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images]

Happy weekend.

Some You Tube fun on a cold winter night:

My favorite Scorsese flix (his ma makes the sauce):

Love this movie:

Bouton as Terry Lennox…

Mr. Barbar.

When I was in high school, Mike Nichols directed a celebrated version of Samuel Beckett’s play, “Waiting for Godot.” It featured Steve Martin, Robin Williams, F. Murray Abraham and Bill Irwin. It ran for a short time at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater and tickets were not sold to the public. A lottery was held for Lincoln Center subscribers and my former French teacher scored a pair. I applied the full-court press and she took me on the condition that read the original version of the play (Beckett was Irish but wrote Godot in French first).

I didn’t read it, and it wasn’t until a few years later, when I took a class on Beckett at Hunter college, that the play’s meaning made sense to me. Literally translated from French, the title is “While Waiting for Godot,” and to me that is what the play is all about–what we do while we wait.

This week, we haven’t talked much about food, movies, music or life in the city. We’ll be back at it come Monday. In the meantime, while we wait on Clifton Lee, here are a few links for your face:

Marky Mark’s new boxing movie could be worth the price of admission.

This Led Zep book sounds like fun, too.

Peep Savuer’s banquet of cook books.

Dig this blog about George Steinbrenner as a young man.

And how about this dude who just sold his first book, a baseball novel, for $650,000? Man, I’m sure looking forward to reading it.

(Yeah, and that’s Elia Kazan in Odet’s original version of “Waiting for Lefty” in the photograph above.)

I turned 40 years old today. It was a very casual birthday party, with just my wife and sons, and only 150 of our most intimate household staff. We were going to attend Game 4 of the MEGA-SERIES at Yankee Stadium tonight, but honestly, after winning the first three games against the Mexico City Mets by a combined score of 48-3, we thought we’d enjoy the clincher from our cozy little mansion on Central Park West (as you know I bought the Museum of Natural History from the city during the bankruptcy saga of 2012).

As I reflect on the last five years, it’s hard to imagine things working out any better – and I can trace it all back to when the Yankees passed on Cliff Lee in the winter of 2010. Man, I was such a naïve moron in those days, 35 years dumb, wanting Cliff Lee to pitch for the Yankees at just about any cost. I thought it would be great.

Thankfully, the Yankees did not sign Lee, and instead decided to give the 150 million dollars earmarked for his salary back to Yankee fans in proportion to the amount of tickets purchased in 2010. I got a nice check for $351.26. I took that money, and, well, you know the rest. I now own most of New York City.

The Yankees struggled to compete in 2011. The Boston Red Sox had assembled a better team by spending freely and won the World Series. Little did they know, that would be the last title Boston would ever win. Because of the crippling costs of paying Carl Crawford, the Red Sox cut corners on maintenance of Fenway Park and it sank into the ground during the victory parade.

Having no readily available baseball facility, the Red Sox have been playing in Portland, Maine ever since. Now that Major League Baseball has adopted the relegation system, the “Snow Sox” have been toiling in the Minor Leagues since 2013. If only they had not signed such irresponsible deals in 2010! They would still be kings of New England, head of a nation. Now the players themselves have to clear the field of snow before games. Dustin Pedroia likes it though. He gets to drive the plow.

The other thing that happened in 2011 is that Bud Selig, in his final act before being eaten by jackals, pushed through some big changes to the structure of the baseball Postseason. Certain future World Series championships would be worth way more present ones. If you won the 2011 World Series, you only got one trophy and only were allowed one parade. If you won the 2015 World Series, now the MEGA-SERIES, it was worth five trophies and five parades. And if you won the 2050 World Series, the GOLDEN-SERIES, it was worth 100 trophies and parades and earned you bragging rights for the entire century.

Had the Yankees been saddled with Cliff Lee’s ridiculous contract they would have had no shot at the MEGA-SERIES. They also would not have been able invest on player development with such gusto. In 2011, Yankee scientists discovered the “baseball-gene” by studying the recently acquired tissues of the Alou, Boone and Brett families – another use of the so-called “Lee Moolah.” Thus the Yankees were the only team to develop baseball-primed embryos before President Palin banned science after her inauguration in January of 2013.

The Yankees transferred the embryos to their “incubation center” on the moon. These fertilized eggs will evolve into baseball gods in 2050, just in time for the GOLDEN-SERIES. I will be 75 in 2050 and I think I’ve set it up perfectly for Yankee fans – did I forget to mention I also own the team? Winning that 2050 GOLDEN-SERIES will make the intervening decades of mediocrity so worth it. I can’t wait to attend those 100 parades. You know, if I’m not dead.

When I heard that Ron Santo had passed away, I was immediately saddened by the loss of a beloved baseball icon who would not live to see his eventual induction into the Hall of Fame. Santo was the kind of hard-nosed all-round player that I wish had played for the Yankees in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He might have made those seasons of mediocrity a bit more tolerable.

Little did I know that the Yankees nearly acquired Santo after the 1971 season. That nugget of information comes courtesy of Bronx Banter posting favorite “Williamnyy23” (whose real name still escapes me). During the 1971 season, Santo and Cubs manager Leo Durocher endured a major falling out. With tensions between the two men raging, the Cubs decided to entertain trade offers after the season. The Yankees, who desperately needed a new third baseman to take over for the overmatched Jerry Kenney (no home runs in 395 plate appearances), came knocking. They offered their two top starting pitchers, Mel Stottlemyre and Fritz Peterson, but rather remarkably, they were turned down by the Cubs. The Yankees apparently thought so highly of Santo that they were willing to surrender 40 per cent of their rotation–the top 40 per cent, no less.

Both Stottlemyre and Peterson were 29 at the time, both in the prime of their careers. Stottlemyre had gone 16-12 with a 2.87 ERA and Peterson had won 15 games with a 3.05 ERA. The pair had combined to give the Yankees over 500 innings in 1971. Their departures would have left the Yankees with three younger starters in their mid-twenties–Stan Bahnsen, Steve Kline and Mike Kekich–followed by two gaping holes in the rotation. But that’s how much the Yankees valued the 31-year-old Santo, even coming off a down season in which his home run total had dropped to 21 and his slugging percentage had fallen to .423, his lowest mark in three years.

As it turns out, none of the principals in the proposed trade had much staying power. Santo put up two more decent seasons before being traded to the White Sox, where he closed out his career rather ungracefully in 1974. Peterson had only more good season in New York before becoming embroiled in the infamous wife swap of 1973 and being traded to the Indians in the Chris Chambliss deal. Stottlemyre pitched well for two seasons before tearing his rotator cuff, an injury that basically ended his career in the spring of 1975.

In retrospect, it’s probably a good thing that the Yankees did not make the Santo trade. With Santo in the fold in 1972 and ‘73, the Yankees never would have made the fruitful trade that brought them Graig Nettles during the winter of ‘72. They would have been stuck with an over-the-hill Santo by 1974, putting them in the position of having to trade for another third baseman. Who knows if Nettles would have still been available? Who would have been a reasonable trade option? Buddy Bell, Darrell Evans, and Bill Madlock were all traded during the 1970s, so it’s possible that the Yankees might have made a deal for one of them. All three were fine players, but none would have performed any better than Nettles did for the Yankees from 1973 to 1983.

Still, it’s interesting to think of what might have been. Ron Santo as a Yankee? The Yankees wanted it to happen, but the Cubs had other thoughts. And the rest is history.

(more…)

Cliff Lee has at least one seven-year deal on the table from the Yanks. Actually, he’s got a variety of proposed deals from both the Yankees and the Rangers. And he’s still thinking. To me, this means that he’s going to sign with the Rangers. Maybe later today, or over the weekend. The New York papers will be chock full of panic but our man Steven Goldman says not to worry:

Lee might help in the short term, but if the price is too high, they have other choices. Six months from now, Manny Banuelos could be ready to take his stuff up to the Bronx—again, just because the Yankees handled Hughes and Chamberlain like they’d never had a young pitcher before (in fairness, in many ways they hadn’t), not everyone has to advance by baby steps. There is a school of thought that says that once a pitcher reaches a certain level of proficiency in the minors, all a team achieves by keeping him down there is not greater learning, but a greater risk or arm injury as they roll pitches off his odometer.

…I don’t really want to hear about Lee anymore, because I don’t view Lee as the Ultimate Nullifier, the Encyclopedic Panacea. There are other things that need to happen as well, but we don’t hear about them, because all the eggs seem to be in this one left-handed basket. It may also be that because of these numbers—31, 37, 35, 30, 30, 39, 39, 34, and 41—I can’t get too excited by the addition of a 32, no matter how good. The only way the Yankees are going to continue to win consistently is with the addition of a 22, and a 23, and even the odd 27 if need be. Maybe Lee is the next Warren Spahn and he will pitch well into his 40s. I have no way of knowing if that is the case. What I do know is that there was only one Warren Spahn, and you could wait on the corner for a long time before you see another.