Daily Archives: January 15, 2010

If you want to play the dozens well the dozens is a game, but the way I f*** your mother is a goddamned shame.

–George Carlin

We lost Todd Drew on this day one year ago.

Here is his penultimate post.

We miss you Todd, as a Banterer, as a writer and as a good soul.

I find it nearly impossible to believe that 20 years have passed since the Yankees put arguably the worst team in franchise history on the playing field. Unfortunately, I remember that team all too well. The 1990 Yankees won a mere 67 games, finishing 21 games out of first place in the American League East. Not only did they end up dead last in the seven-team division, but they checked in last among all American League teams. And the Yankees deserved every bit of that futile finish. The Yankees’ offensive capacity, with a past-his-prime Jesse Barfield representing the most reliable power threat, was putrid—last in the league in runs scored. Their pitching, led by staff “ace” Tim Leary, his 4.14 ERA and 19 losses, proved almost as impoverished.

Injuries made a bad team more horrid. Free-swinging left-handed power hitters Mel Hall and Matt Nokes, who would have been complementary players on a good team, looked like baseball royalty on the 1990 Yankees, but each spent significant time on the disabled list. With Nokes hurt, the Yankees had to play Bob Geren, a career minor leaguer, the majority of the time behind the plate. Steve “Bye-Bye” Balboni, the regular DH, batted a cool .192. Two-thirds of the triumvirate of Luis Polonia, Eric Plunk, and Greg Cadaret—extracted from the A’s as part of the previous summer’s Rickey Henderson deal—failed to deliver as hoped. Polonia was traded after only 11 games, sent to the Angels for Claudell Washington, 35 years old and over the hill. Only Plunk performed capably, but even that came in the role of middle relief, often a moot point because of the Yankees’ poor starting pitching.

Amidst the wreckage of a lost summer, Yankee fans found some hope in the middle of the season. It arrived in late June with the call-up of Kevin Maas, a young left-handed slugger that few fans had known much about at the start of the season. Almost from the start, Maas showed himself to be a cut above pseudo-prospects like Jim “The King” Leyritz and Oscar Azocar, who were falsely hyped as part of the Yankees’ new wave youth movement. (Leyritz became a good bench player, but hardly a building block for a team in need of mass renovation.) Although Maas had little defensive value as a lumbering first baseman-outfielder, it was plainly evident that he could hit. Unlike Leyritz and Azocar, Maas possessed a keen and discernible eye at the plate; he rarely ventured out of the strike zone to swing at stray pitches. He also possessed a picturesque swing, which seemed to be cut out of the pages of a hitter’s manual. With a little bit of an uppercut and a tendency to pull pitches to right, Maas looked like he was sent directly from heaven to Yankee Stadium.

Maas also looked chiseled in appearance, with his lantern jaw and muscular but lean physique. Maas became all the rage at Yankee Stadium, prompting some women fans to remove their “Maas tops” and wave them after he hit another home run into the right field stands. (The ladies were eventually barred from entering the Stadium.) Statistically, Maas’ numbers supported the superficialities of his appearance and swing. In 254 at-bats with the Yankees, Maas hit 21 home runs, slugged .535, and reached base 36 per cent of the time. Only his batting average of .252 carried any kind of blemish, but that became far more tolerable in light of his wholly impressive slugging and on-base numbers.

Given his second-half rookie performance, I felt the Yankees had found a keeper in Maas. It looked like he would perennially top 30 home runs and 80 walks in a season, making him a legitimate left-handed slugger, a younger model of Ken Phelps. Perhaps he wouldn’t be good enough to bat cleanup, but his hitting talents had him pegged to bat fifth or sixth, at the least, with ample production to justify such an important place in the lineup.

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I went to see Avatar last night in 3-D IMAX because, well, when in Rome, right? It is a spectacle, a true epic in the tradition of Griffith and DeMille. The story is forgettable, the dialogue and acting border on camp it is so leaden (I laughed a lot at the corny lines), but who cares when you are witness to such a gluttony of wonderment? The movie feels fully-realized, as if James Cameron got exactly what he was looking for, and it is some accomplishment, in many ways remarkable. But I have to admit, after an hour, I got bored, and found the assault on the senses, tedious. There is so much to absorb, I became numb. Avatar is something to see, but I’m glad I don’t have to see it again.

The 3-D didn’t make me motion-sick, but it still took me a while to get used to the glasses. When it was over, I felt woozy, even ten minutes later when I got on the uptown IRT. Reading will settle me down, I thought, so I pulled out a splashy GQ story on former Colts wide reciever, Marvin Harrison. At first, the words hurt to look at, but I adjusted quickly enough.  The story comes out guns-ablazing. It is so full of adreneline that it picked-up where Avatar left off.

The writer, Jason Fagone, has done some crack reporting but he’s so infatuated with his angle that he muscles-up the prose and steamrolls the reader. It is like an Oliver Stone production, pounding away with self-importance:

Robert Nixon’s jeans are scuffed. His hands are folded in his lap. His glasses give him a sort of professorial, beatnik vibe—a pudgier version of Cornel West. He calls me “sir.” In fact, Nixon is deferential to the point of meekness until the moment I ask him about Pop’s murder. Does he think it was meant to send a message to any other potential witnesses? “Are you kidding?” Nixon says, startled. “Do you think it was a message?” Nixon shoots a look to his attorney, Wadud Ahmad, a powerfully built black man who is sitting in on our interview, and the two of them explode into howls of laughter, as if I just asked the dumbest question in the history of white people.

…Say this for Marvin Harrison: He tried to be his own person. He succeeded on a level that most of us can only dream of reaching. But he either never realized or flat-out denied the destabilizing effect of his presence in a poor and desperate part of the city. Much as he insisted that he was a normal working person like any other, he was never going to be seen that way. He was always going to be a target for the hopes, resentments, and ambitions of other people, a reality that rippled and swirled around him in unpredictable ways. And the proof is still there, scattered across the city, for anyone who cares enough to look.

The writer is aiming beyond The Best American Sports Writing–he’s writing for the Ages. Which is too bad because Fagone is talented, his reporting is crisp and he knows how to tell a story. But he undermines the narrative with his ambition and lack of restraint. It is as if he couldn’t help himself.

Hey, more is more, right?