Daily Archives: June 14, 2010

The Yanks have the night off. Here’s an open thread for whatever should come to mind…

[Picture by Bags]

How about a week of American comic book artists? Let’s start with the master, Jack Kirby:

In celebration of the recent publication of The Fighter Still Remains: A Celebration of Boxing in Poetry and Song from Zevon to Ali (edited by George Kimbal and John Schulian), let’s do a week of boxing tunes.

First up, a classic:

This’d make a nice, quick lunch. Thank you, Mr. B.

Here’s the recipe.

Things weren’t going so well the last time I checked in with this feature, but since then the Yankees have gone 14-5, kicking things off with a series win against the NL Central-leading Twins in the new ballpark in Minneapolis, then taking a big bite out of the soft part of their schedule by going 11-2 against the Indians, Orioles (twice), and Astros with only a series loss on the road to the upstart Blue Jays in the middle of that run to sour the mood.

That soft part of the schedule has been particularly beneficial to Javier Vazquez, who over his last six starts is 4-2 with a 2.94 ERA and has won each of his last three starts, posting a 2.57 ERA while striking out 22 in 21 innings against just five walks and 11 hits (albeit with four of those hits leaving the park). Vazquez was, however, responsible for the one loss against the Twins, as he gave up 5 runs in 5 2/3 innings, though the offense’s inability to get to Nick Blackburn was equally problematic.

The Yankees’ one loss in the seven games that followed was entirely the fault of the pitching as the offense staked CC Sabathia to a 9-3 lead against the Indians after four innings, but CC and the bullpen couldn’t hold it. Joba Chamberlain was the goat in that one, giving up four runs while getting just one out, blowing the save and taking the loss. That was the last of a bad stretch for Joba in which he gave up a total of 11 runs in three ugly outings, all Yankee losses, over a span of five appearances. Since then, he has allowed just one run in his last seven outings and hasn’t walked a batter.

The Yankees’ one loss in their last seven games was largely the result of the offense being stifled by Orioles pitching prospect Jake Arrieta in his major league debut. A.J. Burnett took the loss in that game, but pitched well enough to win (6 2/3 IP, 4 R). The Yankees also lost Burnett’s previous start, which was equally the fault of Burnett (6 IP, 6 R against his old team in Toronto) and the offense’s inability to do anything against young lefty stud Brett Cecil (8 IP, 1 R).

Cecil is now 7-2 with a 3.22 ERA on the season, and Arrieta is a highly regarded prospect for the O’s, so I can’t get on the offense too much for those two games. As for Burnett, he still has a 3.86 ERA on the season, which is better than his 2009 mark (4.04) and almost a dead match for his career ERA (3.84). His strikeouts are way down, but his walks and wild pitches are down with them. There’s not much to complain about. That he’s being outpitched by the rest of the rotation says more about the rest of the rotation than it does about him.

The only other Yankee loss over this recent stretch was a 3-2 loss in 14 innings to the Blue Jays in Toronto. You can again blame the offense for that one, but again Ricky Romero has a 3.29 ERA on the season and worked the first eight innings of that one, so again, tip your hat to a good young pitcher from the division who could continue to make life hard on the home nine for years to come. Also tip your hat to the Yankee bullpen’s performance in that one as Chamberlain, Damaso Marte, David Robertson and Chan Ho Park kept the 2-2 tie in tact for five innings in relief of Andy Pettitte before Chad Gaudin finally came in and lost it. Gaudin has allowed runs in four of his six outings since returning to the Yankees.

The end result of the Yankees’ recent feast on the soft, supple flesh of the leagues’ weakest teams is that they’ve pulled into a first-place tie with the Rays in the division and for the best record in the majors. Tomorrow they open a three-game set at home against a slumping Phillies team, then continue with interleague against the Mets, Diamondbacks, and the surging Dodgers before finding another soft landing with ten of 13 against the weaker teams in the AL West (including seven against lowly Seattle) before a mid-July showdown with the Rays in the Bronx.

Looking over the remainder of the schedule, the Yankees face the Rays and Red Sox for seven of ten games in early August followed by two against the Rangers, but otherwise they have plenty of landing spots until they hit a season-ending gauntlet that has them play 16 of their last 22 against the Rangers, Rays, and Red Sox, and 13 of their last 19 (or, if you prefer, 10 of their last 13) against the Rays and Sox. All the more reason for the Yankees to fatten up while they can, which is exactly what they’ve been doing.

Maybe his stuff doesn’t date so well, maybe he was imitated too often, maybe he became a parody of himself, his later work turned to schtick, overshadowing the former excellence. Whatever the case, Jimmy Cannon has not aged well. And it’s a shame because at his best, he was not only a terrific big city sports columnist, but one of the best we’ve ever seen.

A friend hipped me to this little piece on him from the Time Magazine archives (circa 1952):

When Jimmy Cannon was a newspaper shaver, the late Damon Runyon gave him some advice: “The best way to make a living is to be a sportswriter.” Cannon followed the advice, and Runyon liked the results so well that before he died he made Cannon “the custodian of my reputation when I’m gone.” At 43, as sport columnist for the New York Post, sad-eyed Jimmy Cannon has also come closer than any other sportswriter to taking Runyon’s place. His favorite columnar character is Two Head Charlie, a thoughtful horse player, who talks like this: “You take a real ugly bum . . . with a face a monkey would be ashamed of. Let him get a shave and a haircut and meet a broad. What’s the first thing the broad says to him, she says you look cute tonight . . . I admit I look like a kangaroo . . . But every broad I take out tells me I’m cute. Soon as a dame says that, I know I can’t trust her.”

Delicatessen Nobility. Bums, bettors, Broadway guys, hangers-on and contestants at every sports arena are material for Cannon’s column; his ear is finely tuned to their talk. “They’re a kind of delicatessen nobility,” says he. “I know lots of guys who talk like Two Head.” Cannon knows them because he was born & raised in their midst, on Manhattan’s lower West Side, still lives in a hotel midway between Broadway and Madison Square Garden. At 17, as a copy boy on the Daily News, Cannon’s skill with words caught the city editor’s notice. Once, when a crank invaded the city room and introduced himself as “God,” Cannon answered: “Pleased to meetcha. Heard a lot aboutcha.”

There is a decent collection of Cannon’s work called “Nobody Asked Me, But…” that you can find on the cheap.

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The first rated “R” movie I ever saw in the theater was Neighbors, a not-so-funny John Belushi/Dan Ackroyd comedy. Came around the time of my parent’s separation. The high school daughter of my dad’s best friend took my brother, sister and me. When it was over, I asked her what it meant to pork someone and she refused to tell me, said I’d find out soon enough (which was the opposite of finding out soon enough as far as I was concerned).

A few months later, I saw Shoot the Moon, a relentlessly grim movie about divorce. I was obsessed with seeing it and begged the adults I knew to take me. Finally, I got my cousin Deborah to bring me to see it. It was a heavy movie for an eleven-year-old–it’s a heavy movie for a grown up–but life was heavy at that moment. And much of it rang true–the emotional violence, the sadness, the confusion and messiness of it all.

So? What was your first rated “R” movie? Were your parents uptight or liberal when it came to such things? Whadda ya hear, whadda ya say?