Monthly Archives: January 2011

R.I.P Milton Rogovin:

Click here for the NPR appreciation.

(more…)

It was surprising when the Yankees signed Rafael Soriano… mostly because Brian Cashman had been saying, pretty clearly, that he did not intend to. He explained that he didn’t want to give up a first-round draft pick for anybody besides Cliff Lee (and especially not a pick that would then go to the Rays), and that made good sense, especially since decent relievers can generally be uncovered from within the organization. Today, at the press conference officially announcing Soriano’s signing, Cashman admitted – or perhaps “confirmed” is the better word – that as many suspected (and several, including Buster Olney, previously reported) it was not ultimately his call. Per Joe LeMaire, on Twitter:

Yankees GM Brian Cashman acknowledges he did not recommend signing of Soriano. Says final call was Hal Steinbrenner’s.

Cashman: “I just didn’t think it was an efficient way to allocate our remaining resources.”

Huh.

That’s not surprising, as the Soriano contract is very much not Cashman’s style – not, as he says, an efficient allocation of resources. But I was under the impression that Cashman had successfully wrested control of the Yankees’ baseball decision, except perhaps in the case of a blockbuster like Alex Rodriguez’s most recent signing. And while of course Hal Steinbrenner owns the team and has a right to have input on how his money is spent, I find it puzzling that he would choose to interfere here, in the case of a middle reliever. Signing Soriano is not likely to have a huge impact on the team either way – they’re overpaying for him, but not by a crippling amount, and it’s unlikely to prevent the Yankees from making whatever other moves they feel they need to. Still, it seems like a weird thing for Hal to overrule his GM on. It’s a George kind of move.

Meanwhile, in further disturbing news: we also learned that Cashman not only considered Carl Pavano as a plug for the Yanks’ starting pitcher gap, but (per LoHud) had several discussions with The American Idle’s agent. Yipes! I choose to see this as just a sad, transparent attempt to make Andy Pettitte come rushing back into the Yankees’ arms…

UPDATE: Oh gosh – per WFAN (via Hardball Talk) the Yanks actually made an offer! One year, $10 million, supposedly.  “Carl, how would you like to hear 50,000 people screaming contemptuous insults at you every fifth day…”

Mark Bittman takes on whole-grain flapjacks. Why not?

[Photo Credit: Finger Food Recipes]

…If we all pull together as a team…

Remember not too long ago when cigars were chic? Fly girls in their twenties were smokin’ ’em. Now, cigars are not cool again, so real cigar smokers are forced to gather in spots like the cigar shop near 57th street on 6th Avenue. Some crusty-lookin, but happy old-school dudes in there, man:

Over at The Baseball Analysts, Rich chronicles his recent visit with Bert Blyleven:

Bert went out of his way to accommodate me as he had hip replacement surgery in October. Believe me, he can still zing it. Not shy, I told Bert that I wanted to compare curveballs. I threw him a spinner and he mocked me. “That’s your curveball?” Hey, it was the first one I had thrown in years and only then at a family picnic. He raised his arm and hand to a 12 o’clock position and said, “You’ve got to get it up here.” As someone who had a good curve through high school, I knew I was supposed to throw the ball over the barrel and shake hands with the center fielder (a visual that worked wonders for me). Nevertheless, at age 55, my shoulder wasn’t as cooperative as it once was. Bert, who is four years older than me, broke off a couple of tight ones. Impressive indeed.

My manager, Lee Stange, asked me what position I played. I told him pitcher but said I could also play first base. He kidded, “Everyone out here is a first baseman/DH.” Lee sent me to the bullpen to warm up. He liked what he saw enough to give me the start. The first two batters hit line-drive singles. Standing just outside our dugout on the third base side, Blyleven shouted, “Hey Rich! Try to get an out, why don’t you!” I smiled at him, took a deep breath, and got back to the task at hand. The next batter hit a slow roller to my right. I was thinking two but, then again, I thought I was 30-something rather than 50-something. My brain made the play with no problem, but my body failed me. The ball passed me and the shortstop had no play. A couple of runs later and Bert was now needling me again. “You’ve got an 18.00 ERA!” It was actually higher at that moment in time because I had not yet completed the inning. Thankfully, I did with no further damage.

[Photo Credit: Brian Hirten/Ft. Myers News-Press]

If you are a fan of the sports infographic representations of Flip Flop Fly Ball, then you might also enjoy a site called “MLB Trade Trees“.

From the site’s home page: “Find out how MLB trades evolved from a historian/baseball nerd in Iowa.”

The site isn’t splashy, but its quietly interesting, and the owner promises improvements.

The King of what? King of Style…

In case you missed it, Triumph recently reprinted Clyde Frazier’s classic fun time book, “Rockin’ Steady” (written with Ira Berkow).

Two women on the IRT…

Russell Martin, who may be doing quite a bit of catching for the Yanks this year, is skirting the subject, in fairly vague terms, of his disappointing last few seasons. From Canada’s National Post:

Russell Martin says he knows why he has skidded from stardom to mediocrity in the prime of his career.

But beyond vague allusions to “frustrations” and “distractions,” he politely declines to explain.

“There’s some things that you keep for yourself,” Martin said. “Those distractions, they’re personal — personal issues in my life that not everybody needs to know about.” …

…His performance faded during the past two seasons. By his standards, he says, he got lazy.

“I had some distractions that maybe led me not to have that same drive that I’ve had in the past,” he said. “Really, that’s all it is, honestly. I didn’t train quite as–I trained hard, but before, nobody trained as hard as I did.”

Martin made similar comments in the beginning of the 2009 season – though that’s not quite what he told the LA Times last month; it’s more or less common knowledge that Martin liked the LA nightlife quite a bit, possibly to the detriment of his on-field performance. On the one hand, it’s refreshing to see him (sort of) acknowledge it, and if Martin has actually figured out how to focus now, than that’s encouraging – better to think he has some issues he may be able to correct than that he’s simply not a very good ballplayer anymore. On the other hand, he said similar things in 2009 and doesn’t seem to have made much progress since then — and New York is not known for its lack of distractions. Like many of you I hesitate to evaluate a player based on things like this that can’t really be measured, but the Yankees would’ve been naive not to at least take this into consideration. Presumably they’re not too concerned.

Martin’s had an interesting life, or at least an unusual one by baseball player standards; he grew up in Quebec, where his mother was an actress and singer, and his father played the saxophone in subway stations to earn money for Martin’s baseball gear and training. He was poised for superstardom when he first came up, which is why so many more people have heard of him than his stat line would suggest, and few people in that time span have disappointed Dodgers fans more.

New York has a long tradition of great players who can stay out boozing and courting all night and still kick ass the next day – Babe Ruth, of course; Mickey Mantle, for many years; most recently, David Wells threw a perfect game while still tipsy from the previous evening. I love players like that, who do everything wrong and then perform anyway. But of course that kind of thing will catch up with most people sooner or later — and apparently caught up with Martin on the “sooner” side.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez certainly seem like they’ve enjoyed the entertainment options New York offers, so to speak, but I’ve never gotten the sense that either of them is a big drinker and certainly they both take care of themselves and come ready to play. Martin will be surrounded by stars and veterans in the New York clubhouse and perhaps a few of them can take him under their wing; I imagine that at the very least, if  Jorge Posada feels Martin is not playing his best, he will club him unconscious with his own bat.

The hits keep coming. My man Eric Nusbaum hipped me to these cherce selections from the Harry E. Winkler Collection of boxing photographs.

Bags hipped me to a most cool site called Scouting New York.

Dig these two then-and-now posts on “Taxi Driver” and “Ghostbusters”:

Kevin Long is a busy man. Over at SI.com,  Tom Verducci has a piece on the work Derek Jeter will do with the Yankees’ hitting coach in the coming weeks:

“I feel like Derek always has been the type of player who cares about winning instead of the numbers,” Long said. “I think the contract probably caused him to think more about numbers than he otherwise would want to. It probably did affect his performance.

“Listen, he’s human, just like anybody else. A lot of guys try real hard, and when they don’t get results they try even harder. And sometimes the harder you try the more you fail.”

[Photo Credit: Life Magazine]

For an old-fashioned, no-frills treat, stop by the Donut Pub next time you are on 14th street. Their Boston Creme rules:

[Photo Credit: Juozas Cernius and robobby]

Every once in a while something comes along that is so unbearably tremendous that I can’t help but feel rejuvenated, filled with enthusiasm and faith in the world.

Like this story…

…About the guy who found a treasure and is now sharing it with the world.

Dig this piece by Nora O’Donnell for Chicago Magazine:

On an unremarkable day in late 2007, John Maloof, a young real-estate agent, spent some time at a local auction house, RPN Sales in Portage Park, combing through assortments of stuff—some of it junk—that had been abandoned or repossessed. A third-generation reseller, Maloof hoped to find some historical photographs for a small book about Portage Park that he was cowriting on the side. He came across a box that had been repossessed from a storage locker, and a hasty search revealed a wealth of black-and-white shots of the Loop from the 1950s and ’60s. There’s got to be something pertinent in there, he thought. So he plunked down about $400 for the box and headed home. A closer examination unearthed no scenes of Portage Park, though the box turned out to contain more than 30,000 negatives. Maloof shoved it all into his closet.

Something nagged, however—perhaps a reflex picked up from working the flea market circuit as a poor kid growing up on the West Side of Chicago. Though he knew almost nothing about photography, he eventually returned to the box and started looking through the negatives, scanning some into his computer. There was a playfulness to the moments the anonymous artist had captured: a dapper preschool boy peeking from the corner of a grimy store window; an ample rump squeezing through the wooden planks of a park bench; a man in a three-piece suit napping, supine, in the front seat of his car, his right arm masking his face from the daylight. Whoa, Maloof mused. These are really cool. Who took them?

Vivian Maier, a French ex-pat, that’s who:

After a call to the Tribune left him with a faulty address and a disconnected phone number, Maloof didn’t know where to turn. In the meantime, though, he started displaying Maier’s work on a blog, vivianmaier.com. Then, in October 2009, he linked to the blog on Flickr, the photo-sharing website, and posted a question about Maier’s pictures on a discussion board devoted to street photography: “What do I do with this stuff (other than giving it to you)?”

The discussion went viral. Suggestions poured in, and websites from around the world sent traffic to his blog. (If you Google “Vivian Maier” today, you’ll get more than 18,000 results.) Maloof recognized that this was bigger than he’d thought.

He was right about that. Since his tentative online publication of a smattering of Vivian Maier’s photographs, her work has generated a fanatical following. In the past year, her photos have appeared in newspapers in Italy, Argentina, and England. There have been exhibitions in Denmark and Norway, and a showing is scheduled to open in January at the Chicago Cultural Center. Few of the pictures had ever been seen before by anyone other than Maier herself, and Maloof has only scratched the surface of what she left behind. He estimates that he’s acquired 100,000 of her negatives, and another interested collector, Jeff Goldstein, has 12,000 more (some of them displayed at vivianmaierphotography.com). Most of Maier’s photos are black and white, and many feature unposed or casual shots of people caught in action—passing moments that nonetheless possess an underlying gravity and emotion. And Maier apparently ranged far and wide with her camera—there are negatives from Los Angeles, Egypt, Bangkok, Italy, the American Southwest. The astonishing breadth and depth of Maier’s work led Maloof to pursue two questions, as alluring in their way as her captivating photographs: Who was Vivian Maier, and what explains her extraordinary vision?

Here’s David Dunlap in the New York Times:

What is known about Ms. Maier is that she was born in New York in 1926, lived in France (her mother was French) and returned to New York in 1951. Five years later, she moved to Chicago, where she worked for about 40 years as a nanny, principally for families in the North Shore suburbs. On her days off, she wandered the streets of New York and Chicago, most often with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera. Apparently, she did not share her pictures with others. Many of them, she never saw herself. She left behind hundreds of undeveloped rolls.

Even if you don’t think Ms. Maier has the makings of a minor master from the mid-20th century whose work can now be appreciated, you’ll probably be affected by at least a few of her photos.

And if you’re nearing 60 and grew up Chicago, you’re almost bound to feel — as I do — that a precious past has been rescued that we didn’t even know existed; thousands of blinks of the civic eye, tens of thousands of beats of the public heart.

Thank you, John Maloof. You are doing a great public service.

Here’s the website:

Enjoy.

For Matt B and all you funky Rock N Rollers out there:

Nice piece on Robbie Cano by Jack Curry over at YES:

While interviewing Cano on his home turf, I was intrigued by how candid he was about wanting to be a megastar. Cano wasn’t cocky, just confident. Cano wants the Yankees to win a title. That’s the most important goal. But the better Cano is, the easier it is for the Yankees to win. Cano’s hopeful words should be refreshing to the Yankees.

“I want to see how it feels to do everything,” Cano said. “I want to see how it feels to win an MVP [award]. I already had a World Series ring. I want more.” He added, “I want to have a Gold Glove, which I have right now, an MVP, a batting title. I always want to know how that feels, to be there. So that’s why I work hard every single day to try and get better.”

The thought of Robbie having another strong season sure is appealing, ain’t it?

[Photo Credit: Billy Weeks]

A few years back I was shocked to learn that the Yankees had once had a ill-conceived and misbegotten mascot, Dandy, which appears to some kind of upsetting bird-type creature although it is honestly quite hard to be sure. Since everyone involved is eager to deny involvement and sweep poor Dandy under the rug, conflicting information abounds. I first read about Dandy in a book about Yankee history, when I researching a chapter in my own book, and in that post I quote a New York Times article, but it turns out accounts vary as to just when and for how long Dandy stuck around, and what he did or didn’t achieve in his short and blighted existence.

Now the great Flip Flop Fly Ball has discovered this fantastic/terrible photographic evidence of Dandy in his unnatural habitat, “on some guy’s Picasa photo album”:

Ladies and gentlemen, the 1980s.

‘Nuff said.

Jet win.

Congrats to the Jets. The punks leave New England stunned.

Hot, damn.