Costas and Smoltz are calling the Red Sox-Angels game. Angels got four in the first, Kazmir’s given half of it back.
It’s much cooler in the Bronx tonight. Ideal, really. Only a handful of nights this lovely every year in the city.
The picture was taken by Bags.
Early Sunday Morning, By Edward Hopper (1930)
There is a big Hopper exhibition in Rome right now. Last weekend, there was an interesting piece in the Times by Michael Kimmelman about the the show:
I quizzed some Italians and also a few New Yorkers at the exhibition, and it wasn’t that the Italians didn’t “get” Hopper, or didn’t like him. He’s world famous by now, beloved, and the Italians easily brought up the links to film noir and Antonioni. But New Yorkers, naturally, spoke quite differently about him.
…It’s about projection, in other words, which all good art provokes, whether by Sargent, Zille, Moore or Hopper, whose laconic and merciless drawings can, seen by a New Yorker passing through Rome, have a kind of Proustian eloquence. I stared at the ones he did of summer in the city and the sun splashing across Lower Manhattan before carrying my tracings of two of them to a favorite Sicilian bakery a few blocks away from the Piazza Colonna. It was unconscious, deciding to go there, but I realized it was because the cannoli reminded me of ones I fetched as a boy from a cafe on MacDougal Street, where the owner used to pack them in little white cardboard boxes tied with striped red string. I carried the pastries home to my family, past the Hopper-like brownstones, through the concrete park that faced our house, and across Sixth Avenue to our apartment, under what in my memory was forever a dusky Hopper sky.
Since the Yanks are headed up to Boston for the weekend and all…
The Yankees have gone 10-5 since I introduced this feature on April 19. On the season, they have won eight of their nine series, sweeping two. Their only series loss came in Anaheim against the Angels two weekends ago, a series in which both teams scored 15 runs in three games. The Yankees visited the White House and the Walter Reed Army Medical Center the Monday after that series and seemed to have a bit of a hangover from that day in their loss to the Orioles on Tuesday. Since then, they’ve won seven of eight despite a mounting list of aches and pains and one major injury to an every day player.
Curtis Granderson suffered a Grade 2 strain of his left groin in the Yankees’ one loss in the last eight days and is expected to be on the shelf for at least a month. With Brett Gardener shifting over to center field, Granderson’s place in the lineup is being filled by a left-field platoon of Randy Winn and Marcus Thames, while his place on the roster is being taken by Greg Golson. Golson has thus far made just one appearance, as a defensive replacement in center pushing Gardner back to left (a head-scratcher of a move, but one that seemed to pay off with Golson making a key eighth-inning catch up against the Yankee bullpen to preserve a 3-1 lead, though I imagine Gardner could have easily made the same catch).
Winn had made just three starts before Granderson’s injury and had just one hit in 13 plate appearances, but in his two start since, he’s gone 2-for-6 with a stolen base and a three-run home run that was the difference in a 4-1 win over the Orioles. In the game after Granderson’s injury, Thames took his first 0-fer of the season, but did get on base via a hit-by-pitch and is still hitting .429/.515/.643 on the season.
Gardner, meanwhile, is 12-for-27 in his active eight-game hitting streak, homered the day after Granderson’s injury, is second in the American League in steals (and has only been caught once), and is hitting .346/.430/.432 on the season. Rounding out the outfield, Nick Swisher seems to have finally conquered his home park, going 9-for-23 with three homers on the just-completed home stand, raising his season line to .295/.380/.547.
The Yankee offense as a whole has been remarkably reliable. Just once in their first 27 games have the Yankees scored as few as two runs in a game and they are averaging 5.6 runs per game, second only to the world-beating Rays in all of baseball. Robinson Cano remains among the league-leaders in most major categories, having hit .379/.446/.707 since I last checked in. Derek Jeter is off to another fine start (.310/.341/.474), is on pace for 25 homers and 130 RBIs (the latter thanks to strong performances from the bottom of the order, Gardner in particular), and has gone hitless just five times in 26 games. Mark Teixeira, a slow-starter who had his worst April ever (.136/.300/.259), has gone 7-for-20 since the calendar flipped to May. Alex Rodriguez, however, remains cold, having hit just .208/.241/.264 since last homering on April 20.
Tasty new spot on the Upper West Side. Corner of 81 and Amsterdam Ave. Twenty-five years ago there was an ice cream shop called American Pie in the same space. Used to serve pies from Umanoff and Parson–the strawberry rhubarb was slammin. The place didn’t last long but my brother, sister and I spent many hours there with our old man, who worked down the block in a hardware store.
The neighbhorhood is much different now, but the Tangeled Vine is worth the trip, especially the Pork Montaditos (Berkshire pork belly sliders, pickled radish,garlic dijonaise) and the Grilled Hanger Steak (duck fat smashed potatoes, watercress, red wine escargot butter).
I also loved the Charcuterie but I’m a sucker for that stuff on any day.
Dig this column the late Ron Fimrite once wrote about his old man for Sports Illustrated. A friend e-mailed me about it, said he was 14 when he read it and it made such an impression he tore it out of the magazine and kept it in his wallet:
Then, inevitably, we drifted apart. No, that’s not it; our split was a lot more like atomic fission. The shrinks say this is perfectly normal, that the son must metaphorically slay the father in order to live his own life. But as close as we had been, our breakup was pretty painful for both of us. Suddenly, Trux and I couldn’t agree on anything. His politics seemed to me to have moved overnight from New Deal liberalism to somewhere to the right of Calvin Coolidge. The very man who had put food in my mouth during the Great Depression now looked to me like some sort of Babbitt. For his part, I was headed straight for hell in a handbasket. I didn’t know the meaning of a dollar, and I insisted upon living in San Francisco, a city that, he felt, made Sodom and Gomorrah look like Peoria and Waukegan. The bay that separates Oakland and San Francisco might as well have been an ocean. We had even lost our shared interest in sports. He was an Athletics fan; I was for the Giants. He loved Al Davis’s Oakland Raiders; I was a 49ers man. We didn’t like the same movies. He wouldn’t read the books I sent him, most of which cruelly portrayed the American businessman as either misguided or pathetic. I turned down his suggestions that I “grow up” and buy a house in the suburbs. It was not a good time for Trux and me.
Hilarious profile of Buzz Bissinger by Sandy Hingston at Philadelphia Magazine. I knew the guy had the red ass but dag, he comes across like the lead in an Oliver Stone movie:
The funny thing is, Buzz’s Inquirer writing verges on the sort of Internet screed he says he despises. He utilizes a blogger’s ramped-up emotional outrage. And while the columns draw on his reservoir of knowledge of the city, they don’t break new ground. “That’s become the norm in the blogosphere and increasingly in print — strong opinion without a lot of new reporting,” Stalberg says. All that sound and fury runs the risk of signifying nothing. Buzz has gone after his old hero Rendell harder than he has anyone, but when Cohen’s asked what Ed thinks of Buzz’s handiwork, “I don’t think I’ve ever discussed the column with the Governor,” he says.
Still, Buzz is proud to be bucking the trend. “Steve Lopez told me, ‘You’re the only person in America who’s gone back into newspapers,’” he says, like it’s a badge of honor. He views his column as a reaffirmation of the power of the press, and to those of a certain age, it is. “Your average newspaper columnist still has considerable influence today,” Stalberg says, “because it’s print, and it stays there.” Well, no. Print gets recycled. Words only live on forever on Buzz’s bête-noire Internet. (“By the way,” Stalberg says, “is he still wearing those leather pants?”)
Speaking of Lopez, when you repeat Buzz’s “eradicate the memory” quote to him, he retorts: “He’s going to eradicate my memory? How, with eight columns a year? Tell the little sissy to write three a week and get back to me.” Then adds, “I love the bastard like a brother.” Buzz has devoted friends, and they cut him the slack they feel he deserves. “Nobody I know is more miserable in success,” Lopez says of his old buddy. Asked if writing his column makes Buzz happy, Ceisler says, “Buzz is not the type of person who strives for happiness.”
I don’t know if there is anything particularly noble about Bissinger returning to the newspaper business. He’s one of the few writers who can afford to make that move. Still, he might have the right amount of ego and outrage to blow up the spot.
