Daily Archives: May 24, 2010

Old friends…Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud.

Sox-Rays tonight. Go Sox? Funny as it sounds, the answer is, “Yes.”

[Photo Credit: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images Europe]

The below are a collection of photographs that I took from the dugout and the field prior to Sunday night’s game between the Yankees and Mets (roll over for captions, click image to enlarge).

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It took me almost thirty years to connect with avocados but now that I have it’s hard to remember life without them. When I was growing up, my mother would cut one in half, remove the pit, and then drizzle olive oil and red wine vinegar over them, add salt and pepper, and eat them just like that. I am game to try them in just about any way now, but I usually have them just like Ma did.

Here’s a quick rundown of avocados from Saveur.

[Photo Credit: Travelling Yogi]

Happy Birthday, Bob.

“Not mother?”

It’s a line that’s become part of the regular banter between my brother, sister and me. Amazing how quoting movies can influence your life, huh?

At his silliest, like in this sequence from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Steve Martin is a family favorite:

Sweeney Murti says it’s not time to press the panic button:

But feel free to hit that button if you think CC Sabathia won’t win again the rest of the year. Hit the button if you think Mark Teixeira will hit .209 for the season. Hit the button if you think Mariano Rivera is done. Hit the button if you think Derek Jeter is done. Hit the button if you think Toronto, Boston, Detroit, and Oakland (the only other non first-place teams currently over .500) will all be better than the Yankees over the next 118 games.

I’m not ignoring everything that’s gone on the last few weeks. I just know there were many panic-button moments last year for this team as well, but the talent was there to right the ship. The Yankees could lose at least 50 more games the rest of the way and still make the playoffs. Let’s not call 911 after every single one.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is one of those runaway best-sellers you see everywhere–on the street, in the subway, in airports. It was the first of three books–the third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, has just been released here in the States–by Stieg Larsson, a Swedish left-winged journalist-turned-novelist. The Millennium Triology have been an international sensation but the story behind the books may be equally as compelling. Larsson died before the books were published and his long-time companion has been in a painful fight against Larsson’s father and younger brother.

Eva Gabrielsson, Larsson’s partner, has been portrayed sympathetically in all the accounts I’ve read of the story; she doesn’t come across as the villain in Charles McGrath’s fine–and fair–piece in yesterday’s Magazine, but Larson’s father and brother are not demonized either:

The Larssons do not strike me as greedy people. They drive small, inexpensive cars and live in modest apartments, and if they wanted to change their lifestyle they would probably have to do it somewhere other than Umea, where conspicuous consumption is frowned upon. I got the impression, in fact, that Stieg’s estate was a burden, a weighty responsibility they weren’t prepared for, perhaps didn’t feel quite up to and are still trying to figure out. Joakim gave me a long explanation, which I couldn’t quite follow, of why the Swedish tax laws make it hard to give money away, and yet slowly they have begun to do so, recently donating five million kronor, or $660,000, to Expo, the magazine Stieg co-founded.

…But ultimately the dispute is really about Stieg Larsson himself, an exceptional young man, idealistic and artistic, who in classic fashion left the boondocks and made something of himself in the wider world. Who was he, really — a Norrlander or a Stockholmer? And who gets to claim him now? The emotional stakes on both sides are huge. No matter how close he was or wasn’t to his family, he was clearly a central figure to them — someone to be admired and cherished — as he was to Gabrielsson. The tragedy is that they can’t figure out a way to share him.

[Photo Credit: Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times]

Give the Yankees this: they’re in a team-wide slump right now, but they’re still not boring. Even in a game in which they look listless, they’re almost a sure bet to put together a late-inning rally that falls just short of the necessary number of runs to qualify as an actual comeback.

They did it again Sunday night. For the third time in his last four starts, CC Sabathia was off his game, his pitches staying up in the zone, two of them leaving the park. Sunday night it was Jason Bay who turned around, in Joe Girardi’s words, “a changeup that cut” and a sinker that was up in the zone, tripling his home run output on the season. Those two blasts, one over the 384 sign in the left-field gap, one more than 400 feet to the opposite-field gap, plated three Mets runs. Prior to Bay’s first shot, in the second inning, a single by lefty Alex Cora, a last-minute sub for the aching Luis Castillo at second base, plated the Mets’ first two runs. After Bay’s second shot in the fifth, rookie lefty Ike Davis singled and was driven in by a David Wright double.

That made it 6-0 Mets and prompted me to comment in my liveblog from the pressbox, “I’m calling another just-short late-inning rally tonight.”

Bingo.

Johan Santana gave up three singles in the first three innings, but only CC Sabathia, who singled to lead off the third, got past first base. From the third through the seventh, Santana retired 13 straight Yankees. Then in the seventh, the Yankees finally broke through when Nick Swisher worked a two-out walk, and Francisco Cervelli hit a ball off the top of the left-field wall, inches below the foul pole for a long single.

Down, 6-1, the Yankees loaded the bases on a pair of walks and a Mark Teixeira slump-busting single in the eighth as Santana passed 100 pitches, but Jerry Manuel brought in side-arming lefty Pedro Feliciano, who got Robinson Cano to pop out to strand all three runners.

Finally, the Yankees put an honest-to-goodness rally together in the ninth against Ryota Igarashi, a first-year Japanese import fresh off the disabled list. Another Swisher walk was followed by a Cervelli single, Kevin Russo fielder’s choice, Juan Miranda pinch-hit RBI single. That forced Manuel to go to his closer, and Derek Jeter greeted old foe Francisco Rodriguez with a big RBI double to make it 6-3. Brett Gardner followed with an RBI groundout to third, failing to get a close call, though replays showed he was out by the tiniest of margins.

Teixeira followed with a flare that dropped in front of Cora for a hit, putting the tying run on and bringing up Alex Rodriguez for a big time confrontation with K-Rod. Rodriguez battled Rodriguez for eight pitches, getting ahead 2-0, then 3-1, fouling off four pitches in the at-bat, two of them with the count full, but once again the Yankees fell short. The third 3-2 pitch in the fourth full count of the inning was a changup in the zone that dipped just below Alex Rodriguez’s swing for strike three.

Mets win the game, 6-4, and the series.

The Yankees take a travel day and head to the new ballpark in Minneapolis. Here’s hoping they don’t run out of gas in St. Paul.