Monthly Archives: June 2010

Or…Mongo!

Here’s a good way to stay cool…

[Photo Credit: Soda Head]

Armed with that memorable Fu Manchu mustache, Luis Tiant pitched only two years for the Yankees, but it seemed like a much longer stretch of seasons, four or five at least. Curiously, he will forever be embedded in my memory as a Yankee, more so than any other team, perhaps because of those horrendously humorous hot dog commercials he used to make. I’ll also remember those newspaper images of a shirtless Tiant smoking a cigar while soaking himself in a hot tub. (According to eyewitnesses, Tiant also used to take cigars into the shower with him. I wonder how he kept those cigars from being doused.) Tiant always seemed to have something in his hand, whether it was a hot dog, a cigar, or a baseball.

When Tiant made his major league debut for the Cleveland Indians in 1964, he fulfilled a dream of playing in the big leagues, a goal that inspired him more than most; he felt particularly motivated after his equally talented father was denied major league entry because of the darkened color of his skin. Luis Tiant, Sr. was a respected left-hander who forged a representative career in the old Negro Leagues during the summers and the Cuban League during the winters. Fiercely competitive and armed with a torturous herky jerky delivery, the elder Tiant deserved a bigger stage, but the shameful wall of segregation kept him from ever achieving his own major league dream.

As a rookie in 1964, the junior Tiant proved that he belonged in the big leagues. Pumping fastballs with his potent right arm, Tiant won 10 of 14 decisions and posted a 2.83 ERA. The following year, he hurled three shutouts and became a fulltime member of the Cleveland rotation. Tiant remained a solid No. 2 starter for the Indians until 1968, when he vaulted himself into the elite class of American League pitchers. Achieving one of his first tastes of national stardom, Tiant was featured on the cover of The Sporting News, the renowned “Bible of Baseball.” Although the summer of ’68 became known as the “Year of the Pitcher,” Tiant’s numbers transcended the context of the era. Tiant spun a league-leading ERA of 1.60 and held opposing hitters to a .168 batting average, while allowing just under 5.3 hits per game. Even in the dead ball era, which was not all that different from the season of 1968, those numbers would have remained impressive.

Not coincidentally, the ‘68 season also marked the unveiling of El Tiante’s unique set of deliveries. Debuting the new motion against the California Angels, he first began to use his trademark pirouette windup, replete with exaggerated hesitations, body spins, and bobblehead movements. Tiant began to incorporate the strange delivery more and more often, making it a regular part of his already diverse pitching repertoire. On days when his fastball and various breaking balls lacked their usual snap, an innovative Tiant found himself turning to an even wider array of his unusual wind-ups and deliveries, fully replete with spinning torso, head-turning bobs, and assorted other machinations.

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Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, much like the racetrack heist is portrays, is a finely tuned machine – an intricate meshing of myriad moving parts, some big, some small, and all of them integral to its success.  Although not Kubrick’s first film, The Killing was his true arrival on the scene as a cinematic force to be reckoned with.

The Killing is the story of ex-con Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), who assembles a make-shift crew of would-be crooks to rob the Bay Meadows racetrack of $2 million dollars during a big money stakes race. In addition to the Hayden, who starred in another classic film noir caper, John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, Kubrick assembles a fantastic group of underutilized character actors to round out the gang.

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Tyler Kepner on the one and only, Vin Scully.

[Picture by Bags]

Yanks have the night off, but feel free to fall through and chatter about whatever catches yer fancy.

Stay cool now, y’hear?

[Picture by Bags]

An Arnold Palmer on a hot day…how civilized.

[Photo Credit: The Stir]

Joe Kubert

When I was a kid my old man briefly worked for SNL as a unit production manager. He went to spring training one year (must have been ’78 or ’79) to shoot a segment that became famous as the “baseball been berry, berry good to me” routine. I didn’t know about that at the time, only that he was going to spring training. Too bad he was going to see the Mets not the Yankees.

My disappointment continued when he returned home and I peppered him with questions about the players. The Old Man didn’t much care for jocks, with few exceptions, so they didn’t make any impression. Except for one.

“Who was your favorite, Dad?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Bobby Valentine.”

Bobby Val–wait, who? This scrub?

Many years later, when Valentine became a manager, I grew to appreciate him as one of the game’s great characters. He’s full of himself, sure, but in a way that is endlessly amusing to me. I understood what my old man must have seen him him–the charisma, the intelligence, the arrogance. Anyhow, as much as I like watching Bobby V on ESPN, I can’t wait for him to get back in the game and stir it up.

Florida, you say? Sounds good to me.

Isner-Mahut, Day Three: Keeps on Tickin’…

69-68, Isner as I type this…

Update: Isner wins, 70-68.

“The site is supposed to be located on an ancient Indian Burial Ground…”

 Is The Shining a scary film? I don’t know. It certainly sticks with you and comes back to you, not always at the best of times. I think it’s because Stanley Kubrick has seared a few incredibly disturbing images onto our collective consciousness – an accomplishment that stands up just as well as if he had made a great film. Or maybe that’s the same thing.

The movie was not well received in 1980. But it would have taken a visionary critic to have foreseen the lasting impact of this film, and there is a lot to criticize even if someone had been such a visionary. Roger Ebert gave it a “Thumbs Down” initially, and then in 2006, he reconsidered and included it in his reviews of Great Movies.

To get the plot out of the way, because that is the least important thing about The Shining, Jack Torrance (a revved up Jack Nicholson) agrees to become caretaker of a haunted hotel and almost instantly loses his marbles and tries to kill his wife (Shelley Duvall) and son (Danny Lloyd). Though he is pretty much off-the-deep-end after the first snowstorm, his madness is fairly directionless until a couple of experienced ghosts counsel him on the finer points of axe-wielding and wife-hacking. The breakneck speed of Jack’s descent and the ultimately useless side story of the telepathic son and chef (Scatman Crothers) are poorly draped around some of the spookiest and most indelible images from the entirety of horror-film history:

The winding mountain road.

Danny’s ever present Big Wheelish Trike.

The blood in the elevator.

The twins.

Jack’s demonic facial contortions.

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Leeches; Orcs; Johan Santana’s recent talks with the Mets’ PR department; Abe Vigoda’s armpit; C.H.U.D.s; this guy; Newark; the 2010 Orioles; Don Mossi.

What do those things have in common? They’re all prettier than tonight’s steaming pile of an excuse for a ballgame. And yet, in the end… I wasn’t totally sorry I watched. That’s thanks to the go-ahead Curtis Granderson homer in the 10th inning, and Marian River’s ultra-dramatic white-knuckle save to preserve the Yanks’ 6-5 win. But, lord, you did not want to watch them making that sausage.

I began the evening feeling sorry for Dontrelle Willis – a fun, charismatic player who I loved watching in his prime, which feels like it was a long, long time ago now (…but then, the third inning feels like it was a long, long time ago now). An hour or two later I mostly felt bad for myself and anybody else still watching the slow-motion tragicomedy of errors well after 1 AM on the east coast. The fact that the Yankees eventually came back from their self-dug grave and pulled a win out of their caps made it more bearable, of course, but still, all traces of this game should probably be scrubbed from the archives immediately to protect the public.

You will, I hope, forgive me for not giving you a complete blow-by-blow of this game, but it’s late, I’m tired, I had to delete most of the writeup I had ready in the ninth, and this is a family website. Willis went just 2.1 innings, gave up two hits, and walked seven. It was excruciating to watch, and he left, head hanging, after walking Alex Rodriguez to force in a run. The fact that the Diamondbacks got out of that inning with the score tied at 2 is a testament to how sloppy the Yankees were playing all night – numerous outs made on the bases, often dumb ones; swinging at all kinds of things they shouldn’t be swinging at. By the end of the game the Bombers had amassed 10 hits and 13 walks (!) with six runs to show for it; early in the game that ratio looked even worse. Damaso Marte added some nice flourishes in the sixth inning with a balk and a wild pitch. Going into the ninth, the Yankees were down 5-4 and I was not exactly brimming with confidence, despite the reassuring presence of old friend Aaron Heilman on the mound.

“They play 162, and they can’t all be Rembrandts,” someone wrote to me on Twitter while I was bemoaning this festering eyesore. Which is true. But surely there’s plenty of middle ground between a Rembrandt and this, which is really more of a monkey-painting-the-cage-wall-with-its-own-feces sort of a game.

Or at least that’s what I was thinking before the ninth and tenth innings. It wasn’t a Rembrandt but maybe it was, I dunno, a lesser Basquiat or something. In the end, I was glad I’d stayed up for it – it certainly wasn’t dull. That said, as I wrote last night: just because you made it home okay, doesn’t mean it was all right to drive drunk and high on meth, you know?

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Runner-up titles for this post:

This Game’s so ugly, it couldn’t get laid in a prison with a handful of pardons.

This Game’s so ugly, I took it to a haunted house and it came out with a job application.

This Game’s so ugly, even the tide won’t take it out.

It’s Dontrelle Willis v. Jav Vazquez tonight in Arizona as the Yanks look to leave the desert with a series win.

The Score Truck made a late-inning pit-stop last night; here’s hoping it arrives early tonight.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

[Picture by Bags]

Walt Simonson

Just a tremendous match–the longest of all-time–going down at Wimbledon. It was called yesterday because of darkness tied at two. Today, they played the fifth set, and it was called again, 59-59 in the tie-breaker. Hol-ee Cow.

A Giant American vs a French Elf.

From Smitten Kitchen…

I don’t feel tardy…

War Pigs

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

–from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751)

Depending on where you want to draw the line, Paths of Glory was either Stanley Kubrick’s fourth feature film or his second. Taking an inclusive view, his first two features were  Fear and Desire (1953) and Killer’s Kiss (1955). However, Kubrick later disowned the former, and both were independent, self-financed films that ran 72 and 67 minutes, respectively, and employed minimal crews comprised largely of family and friends.

Taking the exclusive view, Kubrick’s proper film-making career began with 1956’s The Killing (which Matt will visit later this week). The first of three films (along with Paths of Glory and Lolita) made under the auspices of a production company formed by Kubrick and fellow New Yorker James B. Harris, The Killing was Kubrick’s first experience with a proper crew, an actual budget (though still minimal, it was provided by distributor United Artists), and a real-life movie star, Sterling Hayden (who would later reunite with Kubrick as Brigadier General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove), and it propelled him into the big time.

Still considered an essential film noir, The Killing caught the eye of Kirk Douglas, who lept at the chance to star in Kubrick’s next project, an adaptation of Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 novel Paths of Glory. (Three years later, Douglas would tap Kubrick to replace Anthony Mann as the director of his Roman epic Spartacus.) The novel (and film) center on an abuse of power by French officers during World War I supposedly inspired by the Souain corporals affair in which four French soldiers serving under General Géraud Réveilhac were unfairly executed for mutiny.

The film was Kubrick’s first to be set and shot outside of the United States (set in France, it was filmed in Germany, likely due to it’s portrayal of the French officers; the film was banned in France until 1975), and it was by far his most elaborate and high-profile production to that point. Watching it now, the 87-minute film shot in black-and-white in the old, boxy 1.33:1 aspect ratio with a mono soundtrack, seems modest and quaint by the director’s later standards, which is part of it’s appeal. Paths of Glory is by far the most direct film in Kubrick’s discography. Lolita was nearly twice as long, and Dr. Strangelove, while similar in many ways in terms of format and theme, was far busier and complex. Even The Killing had a fractured chronology, which would later be a key inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s early films.

Paths of Glory, by comparison, is an exceedingly straight-forward film in terms of plot, theme, and structure. The first two thirds play like a typical court-martial film, one obvious comparison being The Cain Mutiny, starring Humphrey Bogart, which came out three years earlier. Paths is neatly bifurcated. The first half of the film sets up and executes the key events and the second half of the film unfolds the fallout from those events, but it is not a trial movie. The court martial itself turns out to be little more than a show trial that takes up just ten minutes of screen time, and the verdict is revealed with a third of the film’s running time remaining.

Warning: Spoilers below

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If it pleases you, discuss the World Cup matches here. And keep us blisslessly ignorant desk jockeys informed of what’s going on. It will be a wild morning with probabilties of advancement swinging drastically with each goal scored in either game.

The Desert Foxes of Algeria still have a slim hope to advance. The, whatever the US is called, have a somewhat better chance, but nothing is for certain.

Scenarios for Group C are as follows:

USA Advances With: 1) A win. 2) A draw and an England loss. 3) A draw and an English draw while maintaining a total goals advatage over England. (currently US is up 3 goals to 1)

ALGERIA Advances With: 1) A win and an England tie. 2) A win and an England win and Algeria makes up goal deficit to Slovenia.

England Advances With: 1) A win. 2) A draw and a US loss. 3) A draw and a US draw,but England ends up with more total goals than the US.

Slovenia Advances With: 1) A win. 2) A draw. 3) A loss and a US draw.

Solely  in terms of US advancement, we are rooting for low scoring draw (0-0 or 1-1)  between England and Slovenia. Under that scenario, the US wins the group with a victory over Algeria and advances in second position with any kind of draw. If England wins their match, America has to win to get in.