Daily Archives: January 29, 2010

The City Never Sleeps that’s What Sinatra Sang…

[Photo Credit: Boris Miller]

A few weeks before I began my junior year of high school I was in Belgium visiting my grandparents. I stayed in the attic room where I daydreamed about the girl who lived across the street and all the other Belgian women who customarily sunbathed without a bikini top. 

I listened to BBC serials on the radio and read French comic books and sometimes opened the door to the storage room that occupied the other half of the attic and went inside and poked around the dusty old furniture and suitcases hunting for treasure. I once found an old copy of Oui magazine (For the Man of the World), an offshoot of Playboy, I think, which led me to believe there was more pornography waiting to be discovered. I was wrong.

I spent mornings there, sleeping late, and afternoons too, after lunch, when my grandparents took their naps. This is where I first read The Catcher in the Rye and I remember the warm sun coming through the skylight onto my bed as I tore through J.D. Salinger’s most famous book. I liked the idea of reading it, though I became impatient at times and skimmed over passages. But it was the right time and place. I got it. When I returned home, I read his three other books and liked Nine Stories best. Franny and Zooey made me feel grown-up (plus, the Glass family lived on the Upper West Side); the last one lost me.

I have not revisited Salinger’s work since, during which time I’ve met as many people who were turned off by him as those who love him. But I got to thinking about him this morning when I read his obit in the Times:

In the fall of 1953 he befriended some local teenagers and allowed one of them to interview him for what he assumed would be an article on the high school page of a local paper, The Claremont Daily Eagle. The article appeared instead as a feature on the editorial page, and Mr. Salinger felt so betrayed that he broke off with the teenagers and built a six-and-a-half-foot fence around his property.

He seldom spoke to the press again, except in 1974 when, trying to fend off the unauthorized publication of his uncollected stories, he told a reporter from The Times: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

And yet the more he sought privacy, the more famous he became, especially after his appearance on the cover of Time in 1961. For years it was a sort of journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters to New Hampshire in hopes of a sighting. As a young man Mr. Salinger had a long, melancholy face and deep soulful eyes, but now, in the few photographs that surfaced, he looked gaunt and gray, like someone in an El Greco painting. He spent more time and energy avoiding the world, it was sometimes said, than most people do in embracing it, and his elusiveness only added to the mythology growing up around him.

Depending on one’s point of view, he was either a crackpot or the American Tolstoy, who had turned silence itself into his most eloquent work of art. Some believed he was publishing under an assumed name, and for a while in the late 1970s, William Wharton, author of “Birdy,” was rumored to be Mr. Salinger, writing under another name, until it turned out that William Wharton was instead a pen name for the writer Albert du Aime.

He was an odd bird, no doubt. Gifted writer though.

The Times also has a piece about why The Catcher in the Rye was never made into a movie.

Back in the late 1980s when I worked in radio, my broadcast partner Danny Clinkscale was asked by a caller about the possibility of the Yankees acquiring a left-handed hitting catcher. Danny wasn’t optimistic. “Finding a left-handed hitting catcher is like finding the Rosetta Stone,” he said, using a rather creative analogy, while extinguishing the dream of the hopeful caller.

With those words firmly planted in my mind, I remember hearing the news that came in the middle of the 1990 season. The Yankees had acquired Matt Nokes, who only three years earlier had hit 32 home runs as a rookie catcher for the Tigers. In the midst of an otherwise disastrous season, I was ecstatic that the Yankees had acquired a left-handed hitting catcher of such prominence and relative youth.

Little did I know that the Matty Nokes of 1990 was not quite the same as the rookie phenom of 1987. American League pitchers began to realize that Nokes could kill low fastballs, but struggled against curveballs. On a broader level, just about everybody’s offensive numbers received a bump in 1987, not because of steroid use but because of something that appeared to be going on with the manufacturing of baseballs. Nokes would never hit 32 home runs again; in fact, he would never come close, achieving a high of 24 home runs for the Yankees in 1991. He also lacked patience at the plate, a heightened concern for a player who usually batted in the .250 to .260 range That’s not to say that Nokes was a bad offensive player. He hit with real power for the Yankees in 1990 and ‘91, putting together a series of multiple-home run games during the latter campaign. (For what it’s worth, Nokes could hit a low fastball like few hitters I’ve ever seen, sometimes falling to one knee to golf a pitch off his shoe tops.) He just wasn’t the second coming of Lance Parrish or Bill Freehan, as some Tiger fans had been led to believe during the summer of ‘87.

Even more significant problems with Nokes could be found on the other side of the ball. When it came to the defensive skills required of a catcher, Nokes came up short just about everywhere. He moved stiffly behind the plate, making him a liability on pitches in the dirt. He didn’t throw well, hampered by bad mechanics and lackluster arm strength. And just to complete the trifecta, he had little understanding of how to call a game. Yankee pitchers didn’t like to throw to Nokes any more than Tiger pitchers had during his first three major league seasons.

To their credit, the Yankees didn’t give up on Nokes. They hired former big league catcher Marc Hill as their bullpen coach, assigning him the responsibility of working with Nokes one-on-one. A onetime catcher with the Giants, Cardinals and White Sox, Hill had developed a reputation for two attributes: strong defensive fundamentals and a joy of eating. The second attribute didn’t figure to help Nokes much, but the first one fit Yankee needs to a tee.

Working with Nokes on a day-by-day basis, the oversized Hill, who was fondly nicknamed “Booter” by former teammate Willie McCovey, helped the novice catcher improve his mobility behind the plate, his throwing mechanics, and his pitch-calling acumen. Anyone who watched the Yankees faithfully that season–as I did that long, scorching summer–could see the improvement in Nokes by July and August. He had become a passable defensive catcher, which coupled with his offensive firepower, made him one of the few assets during an otherwise dismal season.

So how did the Yankees reward Hill after the season? They fired him, of course. Citing nebulous deficiencies in other areas of his coaching, the Yankees considered those issues more important than his success with his No. 1 reclamation project. Predictable results ensued. The following season, Nokes fell back into all of his bad defensive habits and resumed being a liability behind the plate. His offensive play also fell off, perhaps a by-product of his defensive woes.

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Brought to you by Matt B:

Hideki Matsui was my meal ticket.  This may smack of metaphor, but it’s almost literally true: every time Matsui homered, the curry shop/Matsui Shrine nearby my office handed me a coupon good for a $2 discount on a future meal. He helped put hundreds of dollars in my pockets over the years – in July 2007 I cleared over $20 bucks just by scheduling my curry fix to coincide exclusively with Godzilla’s crazy dinger binge. Other periods were not so lucrative.

His lengthy injury bouts took a toll on my bank account (pack a lunch? never!) but even a few months on the DL had not prepared me to contemplate a Matsui-less (ergo curry-for-more) future. Based on the resurgent 2009 campaign topped off with the two pillars of Yankee immortality, the World Series Championship and MVP, and the lack of superior options, I assumed Hideki Matsui would collect his ring in pinstripes.  And another $50 bucks or so would be in play for me in 2010.

Brian Cashman assumed no such thing. Matsui was either not in his plans for 2010 or he was such a low priority that the Angels could snap him up with some lip service about the outfield and a reasonable 1 year contract.  But whereas Matsui’s water logged knees may have been deemed too risky, Nick Johnson’s taffy tendons and balsa wood bones apparently pass muster. Matsui must have some grim future knee-cap disintegration scheduled to finish second to Nick “the wrist” Johnson in a reliability ranking.

All of this is to say I will miss Matsui. He was a terrific Yankee and, probably because he lacked a readily accessible English-speaking public persona, I created a very favorable one for him. I’ll miss his unorthodox bail-out hitting approach that seemed to preclude anything but a foul ball to the first base side and abandoned the outside corner as scorched earth, but remarkably produced a heckuva lot more variety than that.  And by opening up his front side so early, he got a good look at left-handed release points and smushed them accordingly.

His booming extra base hits in Game 6 of the latest World Series were fantastic representations of his pull-power skill, but it was the opposite field single that was the key hit of the game for me . That 2 out, 2 strike, “getting the job done” liner dulled the razor edge of the game to something less dangerous.  While in the stands for an interleague game versus the Cubs in 2005,  I watched him size up the loogy summoned to preserve a slim Chicago lead and I knew Matsui was taking him deep.

And yet after 7 years as a Yankee, my lasting visual memory of him is going to be from his very first year here.  In Game 7 of the ALCS, Matsui bested a tiring Pedro Martinez during the Yankees epic 8th inning comeback. While I can still picture his ringing double, the indelible image from that inning is not his sweet swing. It’s his celebratory jump and spin after scoring the tying run. Millions of eyes found the spot where Posada’s bloop was going to land and then swung in unison toward home plate to see Matsui tie the game. We all jumped up together.

Go Go Curry plans to follow Matsui to Anaheim with a new branch (the Manhattan location will stay open, phew, but will they continue to celebrate his Angel homers here in New York? It’s a little unseemly, no?)  So will some fans, advertisers and some ticket sales to be sure. Even still, the Yankees coffers figure to be full. But what of their stature in Japan? Matsui grew up dreaming of being a Yankee – an advantage in the initial courtship. Future generations of Japanese stars may dream of Boston and Seattle before the Bronx – especially if the emerging consesus of Matsui’s departure harbors the specter of Yankee disrespect. This is only temporary and in the evolution of Japanese player movement, possibly meaningless, but there’s no need to hasten the Yankees decline in prestige by treating a national hero shabbily.  I hope they treated him well right to the end and he gets the send-off he deserves.

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