Monthly Archives: September 2010

I always mix these tunes up in my head for some reason…

Yo, check out this great spoken word recording from Boris Karloff via my man Steinski.

I don’t know too much about Susan Orlean though I really enjoyed  a profile she once wrote on Felipe Lopez. She appears to be a gifted, dedicated writer. I do know that she has a blog at the New Yorker and it’s worth checking out.

From a recent post:

There is nothing at all novel about the peculiar, ambient intimacy of social media if you have spent any time living in New York City. Life in Manhattan is like living inside a gigantic Twitter stream. What you get to know about people you don’t know simply by accidental adjacency is astonishing. For a few years, a guy who lived in the building across the street from me practiced piano every day in the nude. He had double-height windows in his apartment and had positioned the piano to take advantage of the nice western exposure, and would plop himself down every afternoon and begin his etudes wearing not one stitch of clothes. I had an unobstructed view of him from my living room. I wouldn’t have recognized him on the street and I didn’t know his name, but I knew him, or at least knew his body, and knew this odd habit of his. To put it in social-media terms, it was as if @weirdneighbor were tweeting, “I like playing piano in the nude. Whatever.” Because of the slant of the sun and the size of my windows, I don’t think he could see me, so our relationship, as it were, was less like Facebook, where the exchange is mutual, and more like Twitter: in other words, I was “following” him, but he wasn’t following me.

[Night Windows, By Edward Hopper (1928)]

The questions remains…

The Best American Sports Writing turns 20 this year. Peter Gammons is the guest editor and the book will be available in a few weeks. As always, it’s a must-read for anyone who cares about good writing.

To celebrate, here’s an excerpt from the forward by series editor Glenn Stout (I’ll have a Q&A with Glenn up shortly).

Dig:

Twenty years ago, in the foreword to the inaugural edition of this book, I repeated an anecdote I heard Tim Horgan, long time sports columnist for The Boston Herald, tell at his retirement dinner. He said that when he was approached by aspiring students of sportswriting he always asked why he or she wanted to write about sports for a living. Invariably the students would respond to Horgan by saying, “Because I love sports.”

“Wrong,” Horgan would admonish. “You have to love the writing.”

I have never forgotten those words. They are the reason, as I explained in that first edition, why this book is called The Best American Sports Writing, two words, and not The Best American Sportswriting, the compound word, which would be a different collection entirely. First and foremost this is and has always been a book for those who love writing. That the writing is about sports is, of course, not insignificant, but my goal has always been to seek out stories that are so well written that the subject matter hardly matters, stories readers will enjoy, not simply because of the topic, but, just as a non-athlete can enjoy the artistry of an athlete, because of the artistry displayed by the writer,

A great deal has changed since I began the work of this book twenty years ago, both for me personally and in the field of sports writing. When I began serving this book as series editor, I had just turned thirty years old and lived in an apartment in Boston’s South End and freelanced while working as a librarian at the Boston Public Library. Over the ensuing twenty years BASW world headquarters have moved, first to a house in the suburbs and now to Vermont, hidden in the fields and woods alongside Lake Champlain near the Canadian border. I have married, buried both my parents and watched my daughter grow up amid the clutter of this book for each of her fourteen years. Eighteen years ago I quit my job and have been a full time writer ever since. I rehabbed an old rotator cuff tear, started playing baseball again, pitched in over-30 baseball leagues for ten years, and retired once more. I have coached girls softball and Little League, learned to ski and snorkel and kayak and skate, make my own beer, maple syrup and applesauce, given dozens of talks, visited scores of schools, written hundreds of columns and features, over forty juvenile books, a full dozen adult titles and edited several other anthologies. I’ve made some friends I’ll have for the rest of my life, and lost track of some because, quite frankly, the curse that every writer lives with is that every hour and minute we spend doing what we love are also hours and minutes we spend away from those who we care about. I easily spend six or eight hours almost every day writing (I usually have to ask my daughter, to her amusement, what day of the week it is), and hours more each day reading, usually for this book, sometimes while sitting on an exercise bike, or on the porch, or at the kitchen table eating, or in my chair watching a ballgame. The work of this book never ends, but has surrounded me for so long I sometimes barely notice.

In an earlier edition of the book I told the story about how I came to be selected to serve as Series Editor, something for which I am forever grateful and still a bit mystified, because, to be honest, I did not know how to do this when I started. I cannot imagine that anyone would know how to do this, really. Like the act of writing, this is a “learn by doing” experience.

My first editor, undoubtedly trying to impress me with the magnitude of my task, told me that the series editor for another Best American title kept file cards of publications and dutifully checked them off each time they arrived, notated the cards in regard to their contents, and that I should do the same. I bought a big box of file cards and dutifully began creating a similar card file system.

Then I looked at the pile of material waiting to be read and decided that anything that got in the way of reading should probably be ignored, and tossed the cards. I have kept things simple and never used any kind of grading or ranking system for the stories I read over beyond this: stories I want to read again go in one pile. Stories I don’t go into another, and when that much larger pile topples over, those stories either get recycled or go into my woodstove. As the deadline approaches I keep going over the “read again” pile until it gets small enough to send to the guest editor.

Of course, any changes in my life pale when compared with the changes that have taken place in writing and journalism. Twenty years ago – before anyone had ever called me “sir” – I had just made the transition from writing features and other freelance assignments in long-hand and then going into work early to type them out on an electric typewriter. I was beginning to work on a Magnavox Videowriter, a first generation word processor that, to a non-typist like myself (I use my thumb and two fingers on each hand and type at the speed of my mind, which is not very fast) seemed absolutely magical. When I was selected to edit this annual collection it came with the caveat that I had to buy a computer. It cost most of my advance and now my wristwatch probably contains more computing power.

Writers for newspapers and magazines were making – or had just made – a similar transition to computers, and there was, of course, no such thing as the online world which has changed almost everything everywhere, but few places more so than the commercial worlds of newspaper, magazine and book publishing. There is no point to hash over the obvious here, but anyone involved in any of these businesses knows that everything has changed, and in the last few years of economic recession, not for the better. There are, unquestionably, fewer print outlets for writing than there were twenty years ago, and space in those that remain has become more precious. The online universe, which did not even exist, now offers outlets to everyone, ranging from purely commercial platforms, to the virtually non commercial world of the blog. This is both a bad thing, because the best writing is generally done by professionals, and a good thing, because the best writing is not always done by professionals. Quality, not bylines, matter.

It has never been easy to earn a living as a writer, and it is particularly difficult now, but it probably never been easier to write. Resources are instantly accessible. In an hour I can research what used to take me weeks to do. But those same resources are now also at the fingertips of the reader, who does not always want or even appreciate the care and talent it takes to turn raw facts into fine writing.

In these pages we argue otherwise, because the only thing that has not changed over the last twenty years is the most important thing of all – the quality of the writing. I am amused that every three or four years some magazine (or, now, website) sees fit to run a story that bemoans the “death of sportswriting,” or some similar, “get off of my lawn” nonsense, and then sends it to me for consideration in next years’ edition.

Although I agree that a great deal has died over the last two decades, and perhaps a small portion of that compound word “sportswriting” has reached an end, I am something of a historian of both genres and believe that rumors of the demise of either are highly exaggerated. While I have yet to meet the writer who has become better at his or her craft by going on television or the radio, there always have been and continue to be great writers who value the written word above all others. But the notion of some kind of “Golden Age” of either sportswriting or sports writing is simply the kind of selective nostalgia that still prefers Mom’s meatloaf to any other.
From my chair sports writing seems to be doing quite well. The reason, of course, is the writer. Despite the conveyor belt of change, both in technology and the marketplace, that has been rocketing past, the writers who have appeared in this book and who I read each year have neither cowered in fear before the word and nor been frozen into silence.

Quite the opposite. Many of us who retain faith in the page probably write more and better than before. It’s in the blood, and despite all the logical arguments that can be made against pursuing writing of any kind as an avocation, at the end of each year I end up with a box of about two hundred stories that I want to read again, stories that I worry over as the pile gets smaller and the decisions more difficult, just as I did twenty years ago. At the end of the process, I still seem to find seventy stories or so that I feel are worthy of being sent to the guest editor. Unless they have collectively chosen to lie, each has had a difficult time selecting the twenty to twenty five stories that eventually appear in this book, not because they can’t find enough stories, but because they have a hard time paring the number of stories down to a manageable size.

Now I am the one who regularly gets phone calls or letters or emails from aspiring writers who call me “sir” and approach me in much the same way they approached Tim Horgan. I tell them the same thing he did; you have to love the writing. That, among all else, has not changed and I do not think it ever will.

Foreword” by Glenn Stout from THE BEST AMERICAN SPORTS WRITING 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

For more on BASW, peep Glenn’s website.

Over at PB, Steve Goldman writes that Joe Girardi is not to be confused with John McGraw (or even Billy Martin).

I’ll tell you what I see.  Sure, the Yankees dropped a tough game — and a tough series — to the Tampa Bay Rays, and will spend at least two days in second place, but things aren’t as bad as some people might have you believe.

Let’s take a look at Wednesday night’s game.  With Phil Hughes taking the mound in the deciding game of a three-game set, I can’t say that I clicked on the TV with an overwhelming sense of confidence.  Hughes hadn’t started a game in more than a week, and it’s been months since people were talking about him as a Cy Young candidate, but even with his recent struggles he still entered the night with a respectable sixteen wins.

For most of the night the Rays got the Phil Hughes from April, not August.  After the game he spoke about the importance of using all his pitches, and indeed only half of his 106 pitches were fastballs.  He mixed in curves, change-ups, and even a handful of cutters to keep the Rays in check as he retired the first twelve batters to start the game.

Trouble arose in the fifth, just about two seconds after I caught myself wondering how Joe Girardi might weigh an elevated pitch count versus a potential no-hitter.  The thought shattered as quickly as it crystallized when Evan Longoria ended the mini-drama with a single to center.  Two batters later a guy named Dan Johnson deposited a rope into the stands in right, giving the Rays a 2-1 lead.

That single Yankee run had come in the first inning, but it shoulda been woulda been coulda been so much more.  The suddenly-frisky Derek Jeter led off the inning with a single and stole second base as Curtis Granderson fanned for the first out.  After a Mark Teixeira single and an Alex Rodríguez walk loaded the bases, Robinson Canó started the Score Truck rolling with a single to left.  Rays starter James Shield was struggling, the vultures were circling, and it looked for all the world that the Yankees would get off to a good start… and then Lance Berkman bounced into a double play.

The Yankees would put runners on in every other inning save the fifth for the rest of the way, and Shields always looked on the verge of destruction, but somehow he wasn’t pulled until the seventh inning and the Yankees weren’t able to score again until he left.  Chad Qualls entered the game with one and out and the bases empty in that seventh inning and lined up against Jeter.  Jeter spun away from Qualls’s first pitch, but he wasn’t quite quick enough, as the pitch appeared to have ricocheted off his left hand.  I was on the phone with Alex at the time, and our conversation screeched to a halt as we both visualized a playoff run with Ramiro Peña playing shortstop.  As Jeter was tended to at the plate, we were treated to a replay of the hit by pitch — except there was no hit by pitch.  Just as Jeter had dropped his lead hand from the handle in order to spin away from contact, the ball had hit the bat and bounced harmlessly away.  The shrewd Captain somehow thought to instantly grimace and grab his arm, convincing home plate umpire Lance Barksdale that he had been hit.

As if all that weren’t good enough, the replay caught a moment that was pure Jeter.  As he was spinning and grimacing, eyes squeezed tight to shut out the pain, he opened one eye and peeked from beneath the brim of his helmet to notice that Barksdale was awarding him first base.  You know what they say about Jeter.  He’s got an edge.  (Grandpa Maddon, by the way, was too busy getting kicked out of the game to appreciate any of these theatrics.  As it turned out, the ball had dribbled into fair territory after striking the bat, and after instructing one of his players to field the ball and throw it to first, Maddon expected an out to be called.  He was disappointed and eventually removed from the game.  I’d have loved to have been down the tunnel with him to catch his reaction to what happened next.)  What happened next was that Granderson popped a home run to right, scoring Sir Derek Olivier and giving the Yanks a 3-2 lead and a view to a one-and-a-half-game lead in the division.  (When asked after the game where the pitch had gotten him, Jeter honestly replied, “In the bat.  But the umpire told me to go to first.  What am I supposed to do, say no?”  All that, and honest too?)

You’ll find the bottom of the seventh cross-listed under J for Johnson and K for karma.  Hughes was still cruising, having retired six of seven hitters since the Johnson home run in the fifth, before yielding a two-out single to Matt Joyce.  That Man Johnson came up again and caught a 2-1 fastball that drifted a bit and yanked it out to put his club in front for good.  Sure, the Yanks would mount a decent rally in the eighth, and even manage to get A-Rod up in the ninth as the potential go-ahead run, but Rafael Soriano took care of things nicely and the game was over.  Rays 4, Yankees 3.

So some will have you believe that the Yankees are limping out of town a beaten bunch.  Girardi is inept, the Rays are simply too good, the Red Sox are charging, and even the Minnesota Twins are in the hunt for the best overall record.  Everything, it seems, is falling apart.

Really?  As difficult as this series was, don’t forget that the Yankees played these games without Nick Swisher and Brett Gardner and used the second game — the only game they won — to give Ivan Nova his fifth career major league start.  Even so, the Yankees could easily have swept this series given a little luck.  The fact that the Rays could also have swept tells us not that the Rays are going in the opposite direction but that these are the two best teams in the game.

This glass is half full.  Relax and have a drink.

Step up (to get your rep up).

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

Bags Groove: The night is on my mind.

Some flix from around town…

from our man in the street…

I want to be a part of it…

Over on Baseball Prospectus.com, Kevin Goldstein runs down the seasons of top Yankee pitching prospects.  Some excerpted highlights:

Andrew Brackman: . . . key to his breakout was more consistent mechanics . . the 92-96 mph heat suddenly showed up every time out . . . breaking ball now a big power breaker that gives him a second plus pitch.

Dellin Bentances: 6-foot-8 and 250 pounds . . . stuff is even better (than 6′ 10″ Brackman), with 1-2 mph more on his fastball, an equally solid curveball and even better command.

Manny Banuelos: 19 . . .  at Double-A this year, had a 2.51 ERA, struck out 85 in 64 2/3 innings . . . his velocity went from the low 90s to consistently sitting at 92-95 mph, while his curveball became a more consistent offering with sharp break and his changeup remained the plus pitch it always has been.

Nu féminin (1918), By Amedeo Modigliani

One worth seeing…and I bet Matt B will agree with me on this one.

From Pauline Kael:

Melvin and Howard (1980) – This lyrical comedy, directed by Jonathan Demme, from a script by Bo Goldman, is an almost flawless act of sympathetic imagination. Demme and Goldman have entered into the soul of American blue-collar suckerdom; they have taken for their hero a chucklehead who is hooked on TV game shows, and they have made us understand how it was that when something big – something legendary – touched his life, nobody could believe it. Paul Le Mat plays big, beefy Melvin Dummar, a sometime milkman, sometime worker at a magnesium plant, sometime gas-station operator, and hopeful songwriter – the representative debt-ridden American for whom game shows were created. Jason Robards plays Howard Hughes, who is lying in the freezing desert at night when Melvin spots him – a pile of rags and bones, with a dirty beard and scraggly long gray hair. Melvin, thinking him a desert rat, helps him into his pickup truck but is bothered by his mean expression; in order to cheer him up (and give himself some company), he insists that the old geezer sing with him or get out and walk. When Robards’ Howard Hughes responds to Melvin’s amiable prodding and begins to enjoy himself on a simple level and sings “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” it’s a great moment. Hughes’ eyes are an old man’s eyes – faded into the past, shiny and glazed by recollections – yet intense. You feel that his grungy paranoia has melted away, that he has been healed. With Mary Steenburgen, who has a pearly aura as Melvin’s go-go-dancer wife, Lynda; Pamela Reed as Melvin’s down-to-earth second wife; Elizabeth Cheshire as the child Darcy; Jack Kehoe as the dairy foreman; and the real Melvin Dummar as the lunch counterman at the Reno bus depot. This picture has the same beautiful dippy warmth of its characters; it’s what might have happened if Jean Renoir had directed a comedy script by Preston Sturges. Cinematography by Tak Fujimoto. Universal, color.

Look Back in Hunger

By Guest Author: Greg W. Prince

How is it we crave what we haven’t tasted in 40 years? How is it I’ll be doing anything and suddenly be overcome by a desire for a grilled cheese sandwich from the Beach Burger in Long Beach?

A quick Googling shows Beach Burger is still up and running on the South Shore of Nassau County, or at least it’s there again. It changed names at least once during my youth. I would assume it changed hands a few times. Since I don’t live that far away, I could conceivably drag myself over there and seek that grilled cheese sandwich, but I can’t imagine it would be the same.

Besides, I can only imagine eating it across the street. And I can’t imagine doing that.

My experience with the Beach Burger grilled cheese sandwich that intermittently returns to my subconscious did not take place at the Beach Burger proper. It happened on the other side of the city’s main thoroughfare, known alternately as Park Street (commonly) or Park Avenue (officially and a little fancily). It happened at Franco Fanelli. That wasn’t a pizza parlor, to use the term no one uses anymore. It was, if you will, a clip joint.

Specifically, they clipped hair there — my mother’s hair. Franco Fanelli was a beauty salon…more often referred to as a beauty parlor (whatever happened to parlors, anyway?). Going to the beauty parlor was a big deal to my mother, big enough so that when she had an appointment and had to schlep her seven-year-old son, the sense of occasion was extended by ordering in lunch. It wasn’t just my mother doing that. They did it for all the ladies.

All my life going to barber shops it never occurred to me eat around falling follicles. But that’s what they did at Franco Fanelli. I suppose it was as much a social outing as a hair care event.

Me, I’m sitting off to the side somewhere. It’s a terrible place for a seven-year-old. There’s gabbing and industrial-strength hair dryers blasting away and enough hair spray in the air to make Love Canal seem pristine by comparison. When you entered Long Beach, you were greeted by a billboard that welcomed you to America’s Healthiest City.

(more…)

Dave Itzkoff interviews the Wood Man in the Times:

Q. How do you feel about the aging process?

A. Well, I’m against it. [laughs] I think it has nothing to recommend it. You don’t gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you’d trade all of that for being 35 again. I’ve experienced that thing where you wake up in the middle of the night and you start to think about your own mortality and envision it, and it gives you a little shiver. That’s what happens to Anthony Hopkins at the beginning of the movie, and from then on in, he did not want to hear from his more realistic wife, “Oh, you can’t keep doing that — you’re not young anymore.” Yes, she’s right, but nobody wants to hear that.

Q. Has getting older changed your work in any way? Do you see a certain wistfulness emerging in your later films?

A. No, it’s too hit or miss. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything that I do. It’s whatever seems right at the time. I’ve never once in my life seen any film of mine after I put it out. Ever. I haven’t seen “Take the Money and Run” since 1968. I haven’t seen “Annie Hall” or “Manhattan” or any film I’ve made afterward. If I’m on the treadmill and I’m scooting through the channels, and I come across one of them, I go right past it instantly, because I feel it could only depress me. I would only feel, “Oh God, this is so awful, if I could only do that again.”

[Photo Credit: Suzanne DeChillo, NY TImes]

Dig this coolness from Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York:

This here was one of the most provocative album covers I remember as a kid. My parents didn’t own this record but I saw it almost everywhere else. Didn’t know–or care–who Herb Albert was, just loved that green, the whipped cream and that girl. It made sex look tasty but fun.

Cause there ain’t no such thing as too much Sammy.

That’s Mark Teixeira, who has been playing–and will continue to play–with a broken toe. Mark Feinsand has the details.

So much happened in the 25-minute span from 10:30 p.m. ET to 10:55 p.m. ET, in Tuesday night’s Yankees-Rays game. Five plays, specifically, spread over seven outs. All with the specter of a fifth straight Yankees loss and 1 1/2-game deficit in the American League East. Thanks to Curtis Granderson, Jorge Posada, Carl Crawford and Greg Golson, the Yankees earned a split in the first two games of this three-game set in St. Petersburg and vaulted back into first place.

First, Granderson’s incredible diving catch robbed Ben Zobrist of an extra-base hit — possibly a three-bagger or even an inside-the-park homer — to end the ninth inning, bail out David Robertson and send the game into extras. Three pitches later, Jorge Posada repositioned a Dan Wheeler fastball into the restaurant above center field to give the Yankees the 8-7 lead. Posada’s bomb sent the Yankees’ Twitter universe into upheaval as beat writers, columnists and bloggers — myself included — attempted to describe the sudden turn of events in 146 characters.

Mark Feinsand of the Daily News called the shot “ridiculous.” Our friends at RiverAveBlues guessed that Posada’s blast “probably would have hit the restaurant glass in the Bronx.” I wonder if it would have been out at Yankee Stadium I?

Bottom 10, enter Mo to close it against Carl Crawford, Evan Longoria and Matt Joyce. Crawford reaches on a single. Longoria also unloads to center. “Holy cow, that looked gone. Instead, Granderson catches Longoria’s drive at the track in dead center,” read the tweet from the Ledger’s Marc Carig. Crawford, however, made the first of his two base running gaffes here. Instead of tagging and ending up on second base, Crawford went too far, and was forced to retreat to first. He proceeded to steal second. This set up the second Crawford gaffe: Joyce hit a high fly ball to shallow right field, and if you watched closely, you could see the play developing as Golson sped to circle the ball in order to catch it in optimal position for the throw to third base. Crawford sped toward third and Golson fired what Michael Kay called a “laser” to third. Alex Rodriguez picked the throw on a short hop and tagged Crawford on the shin.

Game over. Arms raised. Fist pumps abound.

Carig later reported via Twitter that Golson didn’t think Crawford was going. Granderson was yelling from center field to alert him. Watching the whole series of events, I can only think of my father’s assessment of Rickey Henderson, and how he used to scoff at broadcasters who lauded his base running skills. Dad was, and is, of the opinion that Rickey was a great hitter, great athlete, great base stealer, but a terrible base runner. He didn’t tag when he was supposed to, he didn’t run hard out of the batter’s box, etc. Crawford’s hiccups are more of the lack of instinct. The Yankees made Crawford pay for his hubris.

It was one of the wildest finishes to what may have been the best regular season game the Yankees played since A-Rod’s walk-off home run beat the Red Sox in 15 innings last year.

* * *

Lost amid the hubbub of the last two innings was how events progressed to that point. Storylines heading into the game were as follows: 1) Four straight losses, two of them coming in disappointing extra-inning fashion, to relinquish control of first place for the first time since August 3. 2) Bullpen question marks. The Meat Tray and Chad Gaudin prominently involved. (To this end, Michael Kay recited a quote during the My9 telecast from pitching coach Dave Eiland: “Sometimes you have to lose a battle to win the war,” a not-so-subtle metaphor for the Yankees’ long-term thinking and plans to get the main horses for the bullpen healthy in time for the playoffs. Those horses will likely not include the Meat Tray or Gaudin. Back to the recap.) 3) Swisher and Gardner out of the lineup. 4) Tex with a broken pinky toe on his right foot. 5) Perhaps most flagrant, manager Joe Girardi says he’s gunning for the division but acting like he’s gunning to open the playoffs in Minnesota to face Carl Pavano’s mustache.

To add even more reasons to drive fans into a questioning frenzy, Girardi trotted out a lineup that was essentially 5 1/2 deep to support Ivan Nova, who was opposing Matt Garza, ye of the no-hitter.

The way both offenses started the game, though, combining to strand seven runners in the first two innings (four in scoring position), it was only a matter of time before the dam broke and the numbers got crooked in a hurry.

For the Yankees, that time was the third inning, when they exploded for four runs, the rally capped by a frozen rope of a home run by Robinson Canóo. In the fifth, an A-Rod home run and another tack-on run had many Yankee fans feeling comfortable with a 6-0 lead.

That was, until Nova lost the strike zone and coughed up the lead in the fifth. Willy Aybar’s pinch-hit home run — off a good 1-2 pitch by Boone Logan that was just golfed into the seats — cemented the 7-run comeback. The Yankees got the tying run right away, and then both bullpens took over. Before the Posada home run, three Rays relievers combined to retire 11 consecutive Yankees.

The Yankees’ relief arms were equally good. Logan, to his credit, retired four in a row after the Aybar home run and Joba Chamberlain, Kerry Wood and Robertson combined to allow just one base runner. Until he arrived for the ninth, Robertson had warmed up on three separate occasions.

The Yankees needed this win badly. Any shot of confidence will help, the way they’ve literally limped through the last week and a half. And if these two teams meet in the ALCS, we can only hope, as Ian O’Connor tweeted, that it goes seven games and each one resembles the first two games of this series.

The Yanks have lost four straight, seven of their last eight. They’ve been back-and-forth with the Rays for first place all season, a steady give-and-take, a dance. Now, the Rays are up by a half-game. But unless something horrible happens (the Red Sox trail the Yanks by seven games for the wildcard), they are both making the playoffs.

Tonight gives Matt Garza against the kid Nova, in his biggest test yet. Should be fun. I see the Bombers scoring some runs–don’t know if they’ll haul in the Score Truck, but more than enough to win.

Time to get back to the business of being in business.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!