Daily Archives: April 8, 2010

Three Musicians, By Pablo Picasso (1921)

The Yanks have the night off. But feel free to chat about art, baseball or the weather. Whatever’s clever, y’all.

No game today so no battle rhymes. How about happy times, like this classic remix by Pete Rock from the days when everything Pete touched turned to butta:

These are words that occur to me while watching Brett Gardner swing the bat: flick, flip, flail, fling, wisp,  slice,  slash,  stab,  slap, poke, yank, jerk, and (perhaps a case of wishful thinking) drag and bunt. Doesn’t this unique hack deserve a nickname?

I have a batting tee set up in the living room for my two young sons (one and two-and-a-half) and occasionally they paddle over and take a swipe at the ball without provocation and sans instruction. The bat we’ve got is a little too hefty for the one year old to manage on his own, so he turns it around, holds the barrel, and addresses the ball with the handle. He doesn’t blast the ball off the windows, but he makes contact. 

Brett Gardner has never gone up holding the wrong end of the bat (though in his debut season, he had considerable difficulty holding onto the right end – I personally saw him chuck the bat on a swing and miss three times in two games), but he has taken a similar approach to hitting. He has developed a convoluted swing that allows him to make consistent contact against Major League quality pitching. This is no small feat, but the result is not pleasing to watch. In his brief time in the Majors, I have developed a strong negative opinion of him as a player because of this swing and the often meager results. I’ve never looked forward to watching his at bats.

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From the vaults, dig this classic 2006 Harper’s magazine article by Frederick Kaufman, Debbie Does Salad: The Food Network at the Frontiers of Pornography.

Couple of good pieces on the nature of fame this week in Sports Illustrated. First, from Charles Pierce’s profile of Phoniex Suns point guard, Steve Nash (and what a pleasure it is to see Pierce back in the pages of SI):

His globalized upbringing and the cosmopolitan view of the world that it developed in him have given Nash a firm sense of who he is and, with it, the freedom to explore all the aspects of who he is. It armored him against the way that celebrity can be isolating. It gave him ways out of the bubble. He was a globalized man before the NBA became a globalized product, and that has made all the difference. It made him free to run around in his bachelor days with Dirk Nowitzki, when they were both young and Mavs together, just as he is free today to bring his family to New York City for the summer, and to play in his soccer games and drink beer with his teammates afterward. It has enabled him to avoid being “authentic” by remaining genuine.

“Sometimes,” he says, “it takes a lot of dusting off to say, ‘Where am I? What am I doing?’ because it’s such an all-encompassing pursuit. It’s such a marathon, whether it’s a season or a career, that you can easily lose track of what’s taking place. A little bit of you, I think, disappears every day. You’re city to city, and you’re in such a routine and it takes so much to get through it that you just kind of get numb to it and, in the process, you lose a certain amount of consciousness of what you’re actually experiencing, every day. You don’t see anything anymore.”

Also, be sure and check out S.L. Price’s excellent profile of Tiger Woods:

“One thing Tiger’s not is vulnerable,” says John Daly. “It could be worse for us, I think. I think he’s going to come out and just kick everybody’s ass.”

Woods knows that only winning can begin to dilute the sewage surrounding his name. Playing, though, will be the easy part. Tiger has never shown much ability to laugh at himself, and he is now a global joke. It’s unclear how, aura dissolved, he’ll react to the thousands of faces staring, to the once-ignored crowd that now knows him, in a twisted way, better than his wife ever did.

After 15 years in the cultural firmament Woods has become three-dimensional at last: The crash and the stint in therapy, his February statement of remorse and his self-immolating critiques revealed a champion at war with himself. To have him detonate the biggest public-relations bomb in the history of sports feels almost tragic, until you recall that his marriage and career still draw breath. Nothing died but an image.

The Masters starts today.

There are few filmmakers that have enjoyed the kind of run that Preston Sturges had during World War II when he made seven stellar movies in four years, including The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Mogran’s Creek, and Sullivan’s Travels. He was never the same after that, and maybe it’s greedy of us to expect much more from one man. In the current issue of Vanity Fair, Douglas McGrath examines Sturges’ brilliant streak:

Whatever combination of alchemy, talent, and luck had existed to make those years so fruitful, the next 16 would be a series of humiliating setbacks. His public fell off and the critics found valleys where once they’d seen only peaks. His confidence was shaken. And a style like his cannot survive self-doubt: the success of the work is tied to his ability to sustain a tone, so much trickier than merely sustaining a plot.

And sustaining a tone was difficult for him even at the top of his game. It must be said that even the seven wonders of the Sturges canon have their problems, and the problems can always be traced to an instability of tone. Not one of these movies is a perfect picture, the way The Shop Around the Corner is perfect, or The Wizard of Oz or Zelig or The Godfather is perfect. Each of those films clears its throat and sings its song, and there is never a moment when you tilt your head and wonder, What was that?

But there is always that moment in a Sturges movie. It comes when the champagne of his dialogue is flattened by the pneumonia of his slapstick.

Sometimes his slapstick doesn’t work because of poor execution or a lack of convincing motivation (Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake and then the butlers falling into the pool in Sullivan’s Travels). Sometimes the heavy-handed way he frames and shoots these sequences, often at odds with his otherwise flowing and graceful photography, kills the fun. Other times, our laughter dies from a sense that the slapstick isn’t true: there are times when someone falls too fast, as if the film is sped up (Henry Fonda going over the couch in The Lady Eve). His slapstick lacks the loopy inevitability of Lucy’s getting drunk on Vitameatavegamin or the hypnotizingly hilarious boxing match in City Lights.

A fact worth repeating: he made seven films in four years. Perhaps the race to get them done explains the sometimes jarring tonal shifts. One wonders, had he spent a little more time on each film, if they might have achieved a more balanced and integrated tone. And yet, who knows if it wasn’t the speed with which the films were made that infused them with their appealing pep and lack of pretension? God knows, I’d rather see The Lady Eve twice than Vincente Minnelli’s labored The Pirate once.

Joel Sherman has a good column today about the development of Robinson Cano, who approached Alex Rodriguez for some advice after practice last month:

On a back diamond at George M. Steinbrenner Field, it was just Cano, A-Rod and batting practice pitcher Danillo Valiente. For 40 minutes, Rodriguez would create RBI scenarios such as second and third, one out. Cano would take 15 swings and then A-Rod would break down not just the mechanics, but — just as vital — the mindset.

Rodriguez felt–and Cano concurred–that the talented second baseman was too fixated on making contact, not impact. Stop feathering the ball to left-center, A-Rod lectured.

…”A-Rod kept telling me, ‘Stop trying to just put it in play,’ ” Cano said. “He saw that my swing got lazy in these situations. But it was more than the swing. He got me to realize I am going to come up three, four, five times a game with men on base, and have to be ready to do something.”