Daily Archives: November 18, 2009

Award winner.

Cliff and I talk shop about the Banter with Larry Koestler over at the Yankeeist.

I’ve never taken to Bruce Springsteen’s music but I’ve always like him as a personality. I admire what a great show he puts on, time and time again, and appreciate that he’s enjoyed inspired periods of musicianship and songwriting.

Here’s an old (1975) Baltimore Sun piece on The Boss from my pal John Schulian, “from the days when I was still learning how to write.” The article came out just before Born to Run dropped.

Dig this from Bruce:

“I don’t consider myself a writer, like a novel writer or a poetry writer. Writing songs is just something I do. It’s a real, natural, basic urge. The only thing I can compare it to is when you get hungry. You feel it and you do something about it.”

…”I play for the thrill, man, just like I have since I picked up the guitar,” he said. “Like tonight, I could have played forever if they didn’t have to close the place down at midnight.”

Historian Glenn Stout finds the smoking gun concerning Tom Yawkey’s take on African Americans. From a 1965 Sports Illustrated article on the Red Sox by Jack Mann:

“They blame me,” Yawkey says, ‘and I’m not even a Southerner. I’m from Detroit.” Yawkey remains on his South Carolina fief until May because Boston weather before then is too much for his sensitive sinuses. “I have no feeling against colored people,” he says. “I employ a lot of them in the South. But they are clannish, and when that story got around that we didn’t want Negroes they all decided to sign with some other club. Actually, we scouted them right along, but we didn’t want one because he was a Negro. We wanted a ballplayer.”

Stout continues:

But then comes the first of two smoking guns: “But they are clannish,” Mann quotes Yawkey as saying of African Americans, “and when that story got around that we didn’t want Negroes they all decided to sign with some other club.”

No single sentence could be more revealing – or more pathetic. First Yawkey offers that all African Americans share the same characteristics – in this case, being “clannish.” That kind of stereotyping is damning enough, but when he states that “when that story got around that we didn’t want Negroes they all decided to sign with some other club,” he fantasy land. Yawkey is making the claim that the reason the Red Sox remained white is the fault of the black ballplayers themselves. He is saying nothing less than “African Americans erroneously thought we were racist so therefore they refused to sign with us.”

Memory Lane.

New Yorkers of a certain vintage will remember this budget beauty:

Ah, too much time on my hands, man. Must be the heat…wait, a minute, it ain’t even hot no mo.

So many choices…

Over at Bats, Tyler Kepner examines the Yankees off-season:

After Sabathia, Burnett and Pettitte (assuming he re-signs), the Yankees have a slew of options still under contractual control: Joba Chamberlain, Phil Hughes, Ian Kennedy, Chad Gaudin, Sergio Mitre, Alfredo Aceves and (gulp) Kei Igawa. But what about a high-risk, high-reward gamble from the free-agent market?

Ben Sheets, Rich Harden and Erik Bedard have all been top-of-the-rotation starters in the recent past. All are free agents coming off seasons marred by injury. Really, the Yankees would have nothing to lose by signing one of them. The price would probably be low enough that the Yankees could afford to outbid other teams, and if they sign someone and he gets hurt again, they are protected with the starters they already gave.