"A New York Treasure" --Village Voice

Monthly Archives: January 2011

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'Lo, Jonah, What's the Rumpus?

 

Jonah Keri had me on his podcast last night. Check it out and hear to me blab on about my stint in the movie business and life as a blogging dinosaur. I had a good time. Jonah is good peoples.

Yanks get a Marginal Reward

If you’ve been a follower of the Banter for a while, you know we’ve assigned little “nicknames” to some of our favorite Yankees (and opponents). Some of these names are based upon physical stature (ex. diminutive Dustin Pedroia has earned the moniker “My Little Pony”). Some are based upon anagrams of their names (ex. Sergio Mitre anagrams to “Orgies Timer”).

Well, back on August 7, 2008, during a Rangers/Yankees game, in the comments section of a post discussing (speak of the recent devil) Joba Chamberlain’s health, a new anagram was born. I had brought up for discussion the ‘do of a Texas Rangers pitcher with the delicious name of Warner Madrigal. A few moments later, after running his name through my anagramming software (it shouldn’t surprise anyone to read that I possess such an item), I chimed in that the chunky reliever’s name anagrammed to “MARGINAL REWARD”.  A legend was born.

Now Madrigal’s legend was actually conceived earlier that season, when the 6’1″, 265-pounder made his made his major league debut in a game at Yankee Stadium.  With the Rangers leading 7-6 in the bottom of the 7th, Madrigal took to the mound, and was greeted thusly:
B. Abreu, Ground-rule Double (Fly Ball to LF Line)
A. Rodriguez, Walk
J. Giambi, Double to LF (Line Drive to Deep LF); Abreu Scores; Rodriguez Scores
J. Posada, Double to RF (Ground Ball); Giambi Scores
R. Cano, Single to RF (Ground Ball); Posada to 3B
W. Betemit, Groundout: 2B-P; Posada Scores; Cano to 2B
B. Gardner, Wild Pitch; Cano to 3B
B. Gardner, Single to RF (Line Drive to Short CF-RF); Cano Scores
Jamey Wright relieves Madrigal

Madrigal ended his debut with an ERA of 162.00, which exceeded his Body Mass Index only slightly.

He recovered enough to finish the year with an ERA under 5.00, but 2009 saw him battle wildness and a pesky forearm problem. After spending 2010 in the minors, pitching well for Oklahoma City, the Rangers released him at the end of the year.

Now, according to a tweet from Kevin Goldstein from Baseball Prospectus, the Yanks have signed “The Marginal One”, presumably to a minor-league deal.

Let’s hope he can make the big club, if only to see him possibly wrap up a blowout win for equally “full-bodied” CC Sabathia.

(photo credit: TR Sullivan/MLB.COM)

Extra, Extra

Brian Cashman made headlines this morning because he is candid–some call it cunning, others call it self-destructive. He’s in the news because Andy Pettitte hasn’t made up his mind about pitching in 2011 yet, the Yanks are short a starting pitcher and because there isn’t much else going on. Oh, and because Cashman isn’t shy about talking.

I’m still amazed that the Yankees have had a GM for as long as they’ve had Cashman. It’s only natural that at this point in Yankee his career, Cashman has as many, if not more, detractors as he has supporters. I’ve always found him appealing enough as a public figure as far as suits go, and wouldn’t pretend to offer any kind of sound evaluation of him as a GM. His time in New York won’t last forever and Cashman’s place in team history is already secure (fantastic survivor, ineffective underachiever). One thing is sure–he’s good copy, and in New York, that’s half the battle.

Million Dollar Movie

Sugar came out in 2009 to excellent reviews and relatively small audiences. Somehow, despite the fact that baseball movies are something of an obsession with me, I only just got around to seeing it – and, wow. It’s an understated movie, but never uninteresting, beautifully made, and more honest about the game than all but a handful of films have ever been. I liked it significantly more than Field of Dreams and about five million times more than The Natural, and though I can’t imagine that Sugar will ever get the kind of mass audience that those movies did, I still hope it manages to stick in the cultural consciousness.

In its outlines, the story is a familiar one to serious baseball fans: kid from the Dominican Republic signs with a major league team, struggles to deal with culture shock and professional competition in a small minor-league city. We’ve all read articles and interviews with international players that fit that profile, and beyond that, nothing hugely dramatic happens in Sugar — except that this story in and of itself is, really, a pretty dramatic one, even if dozens or hundreds of players a year go through it. And while I don’t want to give away the ending, I will just say that it feels honest, and very refreshingly so for a sports movie. There is no Big Game that will make or break everything, no villains, no inspiring speech, just a series of events and decisions that together make a story.

The movie opens at the just-barely-fictional Kansas City Knights baseball academy in Boca Chica, Dominican Republic. It establishes the rhythms of the place, which is part school and mostly training facility – the camaraderie and competition between the players, the strict coaches, and life on the weekends at home in the town, where Sugar (Algenis Perez Soto, doing a good job in his only American film role to date) lives with his family. The scenes in the DR were some of my favorites, for their laid-back slice-of-life feel: peeling, brightly painted buildings, beaches, friends playing dominos, stray dogs, music, dancing, beer.

Sugar and an academy teammate finally get their long awaited call to Los Estados, attending spring training with the Kansas City Knights (who I assume were named after the New York Knights, Roy Hobbs’ team in The Natural). He and his Dominican teammates are taken under the wing of Jorge, a slightly older player who’s been slipping down the prospect lists after a knee injury – and who explains to them that you never drink the beer in the minibar, gives Sugar his old I.D. so he can get into bars, and takes the newcomers to a diner where, following his lead, they all order French toast. It takes weeks before Sugar, incredibly sick of French toast, figures out how to order eggs.

More than anything else, the movie does an excellent job of dramatizing the cultural disconnect and language barrier. There are no villains – some people are nicer than others, some are less helpful, but no one is evil. When Sugar gets assigned to the Knights’ single-A team in rural Iowa, he stays with a local couple, older farmers who live in the middle of cornfields. They are religious, reserved, extremely different from anything Sugar’s experienced before, and he feels deeply isolated living there – but they mean well. The movie is as much about finding a community in a new place as it is succeeding at baseball, and suggests that the latter may not be possible without the former, anyway.

If I had one issue, it’s that Sugar himself is a little bit of a cipher, as a character. I think partly this is by design – the character did not finish high school, has thought about almost nothing besides baseball for years, and once he reaches the U.S. is restricted by language and cultural differences – he’s quiet because he so often doesn’t know what to say or how to say it. Sugar’s favorite player is Robinson Cano; he’s never heard of Roberto Clemente. He loosens up a bit with the other Spanish speakers on the team, but even so the details of his personality come across only vaguely. Perhaps that makes it easier for the character to stand in for so many real-life immigrants.

The whole movie is excellent, but it’s the end that sets it apart for me – realistic and wistful without being depressing. He doesn’t make it to the Majors and throw a perfect game his first start out, and he doesn’t end up a drug addict with a life in ruins. The movie’s restraint doesn’t make it the least bit boring – on the contrary, because it rings true, it’s that much more engrossing.

Afternoon Art

Bags Grooves to Matisse at the Modern.

Beat of the Day

Flipped.

New York Minute

A middle-aged woman came on the subway this morning with a small girl, maybe four or five years old. The girl sat a few seats away from me and the woman stood above her. I didn’t pay much attention to them but I caught the woman scolding the girl a few times. I read the paper and listened to my iPod. Then I heard the woman over the music.

“You are going to make me hurt you one of these days,” she told the child. She was smiling, playfully, without malice.

“Don’t believe me?” she said. “You don’t think grandma will hit you?”

Her words echoed in my head. The little girl sneezed.

“Bless you,” said her grandmother. “You need a tissue, sweetie?”

Do Baseball Nerds Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do you dream about baseball during the middle of winter? When it is grey and cold, chunks of ice on sidewalk, banks of snow against the buildings, do you picture long summer days, green grass, men spitting and laughing, the smell of beer and urine, the humidity, and the tension of even the most routine ball game? I can’t imagine what it must be like to live in a different part of the country, where it is warm and you can have a catch at any time of the year.

Here in the northeast, baseball is sleeping unless you go to an indoor hitting cage. The game seems distant now but thoughts of summer are never far away. I covet my fantasies and protect them as if wrapped in a blanket to protect them from the elements. I daydream about Mariano entering a game to his theme song and picture the grace and precision of Alex Rodriguez’s swing. I take comfort in knowing that Derek Jeter will bust ass down the first base line every chance he gets. Yet I am most excited about the unknown–which young player will make an impression, what will we see–even a minor detail–that we’ve never seen before?

I usually keep these thoughts to myself  but figured I’d share them with you since you might be dreaming too.

There are twenty days left before pitchers and catchers report to spring training for the Yankees.

[Photo Credit: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images]

Old Friends Are Best

Six years ago if you’d told me Manny Ramirez and Johnny Damon would, in 2011, both sign relatively inexpensive one-year contracts with the Tampa Rays, it would have been jarring. Really, it’s still a bit jarring. Time and change come to us all, yet it’s odd to think how quickly yesterday’s superstars become today’s late-offseason bargains: Manny Ramirez made $20,000,000 last year, and last week he signed for $2,000,000. He didn’t get old overnight, but he started getting paid like an old player overnight. He is still only 38.

The real winners of this move are the few, the proud, the Tampa beat writers and columnists, whose clubhouse just got about 12 times more interesting: Damon is outgoing and easy to talk to and always sticks around to offer goofy quotes, and for a player who rarely talks to the media, Manny manages to provide plenty of material. Not that either new acquisition is destined to be useless, by any means. Damon had quite a lousy 2010, by his standards, but still produced more than the average left fielder, and is a clever enough hitter that he’ll be finding his hits here and there even after his bat speed and power deteriorate further; Manny fell off too, but I wouldn’t want to see him up against my team in the late innings with the game on the line, and I doubt too many pitchers would either. With that said, Damon was, even four or five years ago, not the best fielder- I remember bleacher fans at the Stadium joking about his “perfect 20-hoppers to first” – and hasn’t gotten better with wear and tear, which means right-handed visiting hitters may find their BABIP getting a nice boost in Tampa next year. Manny, of course, will probably not be seen in the outfield unless he jogs out there to urinate between innings.

It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that Damon is getting paid more than twice as much as his brother-in-hair, even though he’s nowhere near twice as good a player as Ramirez, and just one year younger; I can only assume that Manny’s positive steroid test played a role, and perhaps the lingering ill-feeling after his acrimonious breakup with Boston (where he was more or less accused, at various times, of faking or exaggerating an injury, missing spring training to make promotional appearances, and shoving an elderly traveling secretary to the ground). When I mentioned these signings to a friend, her first thought was that Tampa might be looking for veteran leadership on their young team, and she wondered if it was really a good idea to have Manny try and full that role. But I don’t think any team’s management would view Man-Ram as that kind of figure, although you could do a lot worse that having young players watch the way he hits. I think he’s there for his pop, as well as his talents as a box-office draw and attention grabber. I have a hard time imagining that he won’t give the Rays their $two million’s worth.

For more analysis check out Jay Jaffe over at Pinstriped Bible, talking about how the additions of Damon and Ramirez give the Rays flexibility. I know it’s way too early to surmise anything, but on this frigid winter day I’m not loving the Yankees’ odds against Tampa or Boston.

—-

And speaking of old friends… Bill Clinton had dinner in Miami last week with Alex Rodriguez and Cameron Diaz. While none of those people are on my “If you could have dinner with any three people, living or dead, who would they be?” list, I have to admit that, like the nymag.com headline, I’m curious about what they might have talked about. Other than “so, being incredibly rich: pretty cool, eh?”

Hoboken!

This is how Diane’s heart stays warm on a cold day:

Candy Girl

Dig this piece on Laurel Nakadate in the New York Times.

Here’s her website. Houba.

DD–Disappointed Dunski

There’s a piece on Bobby D the New Yorker in the L.A. Times Magazine. Check it outski.

Taster's Cherce

Parsley and Pancetta salad. I’m a sucker for parsley, guess it’s the French in me.

This looks worth trying…from Saveur.

Searching for Bobby Fischer

Over at the Times, Janet Maslin reviews a new biography of Bobby Fischer by Frank Brady:

“Endgame” is a rapt, intimate book, greatly helped by its author’s long acquaintance with Fischer, who died in 2008, and his deep grounding in the world of chess. Mr. Brady was the founding editor of Chess Life, the official magazine of the United States Chess Federation, but his book is entirely accessible to readers who have never heard of that publication. Nor does “Endgame” require any prior knowledge of chess luminaries, chess strategies (no charts here) or chess tournament etiquette. It requires no expertise to appreciate a one-liner like the one the 19-year-old Fischer delivered after a visit to a brothel in Curaçao. “Chess is better,” Fischer said.

Mr. Brady, a biographer dangerously drawn to megalomania (he has also written books about Aristotle Onassis and Orson Welles), takes a demystifying approach to Fischer’s eccentricities. He sees the person behind the bluster, and he presents that person in a reasonably realistic light. Mr. Brady also makes use of unusually good source material, from Fischer’s own unpublished manuscript to 50 years’ worth of his own conversations with Fischer’s associates, mentors and relatives. Note the omission of the word “friends.” Fischer never had them.

Fischer was a genius as well as a madman. Do yourself a favor and check out Bill Nack’s terrific SI piece on his search for the reclusive Fischer: “To find him, to see him, had become a kind of crazy and delirious obsession, the kind of insanity that has hounded other men in search of, say, the Loch Ness monster.”

[Photo Credit: Times On-Line]

Beat of the Day

 

Caught this on Saturday at the Times Square subway station. Dig Susan Keser’s website and listen to her play:

The Sun Will Come Out…Today!

“It’s supposed to hurt,” said Rex Ryan after the AFC championship game last night.

Bitterly cold in New York today, the coldest day of the winter so far.

Baseball is coming…not soon enough for most of us but it’ll be here before we know it. Excited?

Naturally.

I know the thinking goes the Yanks’ 2011 hopes ride on whether or not A.J. Burnett has a strong season, but Mark Teixeira is my guy. I expect him to have a strong year–and a good start to boot. If he’s a monster, the Yanks sure will be tough. Over at It’s About the Money, Stupid, Mark Smith looks for Teixeria and Alex Rodriguez to rebound in 2011. Who do you think are the key players to watch?

[Pictures by Bags and Alex B]

Deja Blues

Engine room, bring me my drink.

Same ol’ Jets, indeed.

[Picture by Bags]

Shall We Dance?

They’ve been here before…be nice to see the Jets finally make it to the Super Bowl. Whadda ya say, Green? Winner gets Green Bay.

It won’t be easy against the Steelers but we’ll be root-root-rootin’ them on!

And that’s word to Wesley Walker:

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"This ain't football. We do this every day."
--Earl Weaver