Monthly Archives: June 2011

Man, I miss our pal Todd Drew. I think about him often and feel as if he’s still with us.

Here is a picture taken last week from his box seats at Yankee Stadium.

The Book of Dreams

By John Schulian

The stars were beginning to align for me even before I headed to Nashville in early 1974. The previous fall, I’d sold my first story to Sports Illustrated, and it ran a month after I scribbled my last notes at the Grand Ole Opry. The story was about a promoter in Baltimore who put on fights at Steelworkers Hall and ran a gym that was above a strip joint on the Block. I don’t think the guy could have existed anywhere else.  The smell of the sausages at Polock Johnny’s across the street drifted into the gym when the windows were open. You could feel the music downstairs coming through the floor. The promoter’s best fighter kept getting the clap from the dancers. And I thought I captured it all perfectly. A fat lot I knew.

I wasn’t given to asking other people their opinion of my work, but this time a voice in my head said I’d better stash my pride. If I screwed up the story, I might never get another shot at SI. So I took my deathless prose to an editor in the Evening Sun’s business department and asked him to read it. He wasn’t a close friend and his conversation usually had an edge to it, but I trusted him to be unsparing. And he was. When he walked up with his verdict, there was a wary little half-smile on his face. “If I was you,” he said, “I’d hit me with a sack of snot for what I’m going to say.” In short, the piece was good enough for the Evening Sun and most any other newspaper, but it wasn’t good enough for Sports Illustrated.

I spent the next couple of nights tearing it apart, reworking the structure and figuring out new transitions. I knew I had a winner as soon as I wrote my first sentence: “Baltimore is a gritty old strumpet of a city where unwritten sociological imperatives require a boxing arena to have Polish bakeries on one side, steel mills on another, and redneck bars all around.”

SI called the story “On the Block — Way of All Flesh,” and it wound up in the old “Best Sports Stories” anthology and put my name in bright lights. Tony Kornheiser told me years later that when he read the piece, he knew there was a new gun in town. He wanted to work at SI as badly as I did, and there were hundreds of other writers out there who had the same dream. SI was the holy grail.

Getting in “Best Sports Stories 1975” was the first time I felt like I’d really accomplished something professionally. I’d been fascinated with the anthology since I discovered it at Northwestern, mainly because it showcased the kind of writing I wanted to do. There were always big names like Red Smith and Jimmmy Cannon in the book, but the ones who captured my attention were writers from places other than New York who were doing great things: Myron Cope in Pittsburgh, Sandy Grady in Philadelphia, Wells Twombly in Houston and Detroit and San Francisco, even a young Philly basketball writer named Joe McGinniss, who went on to write “The Selling of the President” after he infiltrated Nixon’s 1972 campaign.

When the Evening Sun made me a one-man bureau in Harford County, I checked the public library there and found an even better collection of the “Best Sports Stories” anthologies than Northwestern’s. Every now and then, I’d slip down to the library and grab one. And I wasn’t just reading the stories. I was reading the bios of the authors who wrote them. I wanted to see where they came from and if the path I was on bore any resemblance to the one they had traveled. As soon as my story about the fight promoter ran in SI, I knew I was going to submit it to “Best Sports Stories.” I found out I’d made the book when a copy landed on the front porch of my $155-a-month furnished apartment. I was thrilled, naturally, but there was more to what I was feeling than that. I felt like I’d finally done something that would last longer than a day, something with permanence. Hell, my story was in a book.

It wasn’t that much longer before there was a year when “Best Sports Stories” didn’t come out. The editors had gotten old and one of them had died, and nobody had stepped forward to replace them. I wrote an essay for Inside Sports in which I said goodbye and, lo and behold, someone at the Sporting News read it and jumped in to bring the anthology back to life. It’s long gone now, of course, replaced by Glenn Stout’s more sophisticated and vastly superior “Best American Sports Writing” series, but I’m glad I got to do “Best Sports Stories” a good turn. I owed it.

Click here for the complete “From Ali to Xena” archives.

[Illustrations by David Noyes]

The Yanks and Reds will play two today. First game is at 12:30 and the second game is at 7:00.

Over at PB, Cliff takes a look at Brian Gordon and other 5th starter options.

[Picture by Jeremie Egry]

Check out these  breath-taking pictures of New York by Irene Suchocki.

Brett Gardner LF
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Russell Martin C
Ramiro Pena SS
Brian Gordon RHP

Cueto is going for the Reds, weather-permitting.

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

UPDATE: As you know by now, the game was cancelled. They’ll play two tomorrow.

[Picture by Bogdan Panait]

Check out this wonderfulness from Dominic Philibert.

I have not seen “Justified,” the TV series based on characters created by the Elmore Leonard but from all accounts it is excellent. Over at the Star-Ledger, Alan Sepinwall talks to the Master:

We talk about director Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1995 version of “Get Shorty,” the first truly successful (in both creative and commercial terms) Leonard adaptation after a long fallow period. The conversation quickly turns to how the creative team on the sequel, “Be Cool,” got wrong so much of what Sonnenfeld and writer Scott Frank got right.

“I told Barry Sonnenfeld, ‘When somebody delivers a funny line, don’t cut to someone else laughing or nudging or grinning, because they’re all serious,’” he recalls. “And he knew that. But then when they shot the sequel, they forgot all about that, and everybody’s laughing all the way through. There’s a guy named Cedric the Entertainer (in the cast). Well, I can’t have a guy named Cedric the Entertainer in one of my stories!”

I just happen to be reading “Swag” these days, and am thoroughly enjoying it.

Don’t front…original heads.

I’m late in linking to this, but check out this memoir piece by Ted Berg:

Late in the summer of 2002, Chris moved from his home in Boston to my parents’ house, to a hospital bed set up in our living room. What started as melanoma on his shoulder had spread through his body and into his brain. We knew – though we never said it out loud – he was dying, and it became clear it was easiest for everyone to let him do it there. Weird time.

The best I can figure it was Saturday, Aug. 31, when I watched my last game with my brother. Baseball-reference tells me the Mets lost a 1-0 tilt to the Phillies, an unlikely pitchers’ duel between Randy Wolf and Steve Trachsel.

I can’t recall any of it. All I remember is that I was charged with carrying my brother from a wheelchair to the easy chair in the den where he would watch the game. And I remember how light he was, how frail he felt – this guy who weighed 230 pounds just a year earlier, the football stud with the broad shoulders, my big brother. And I could feel the cancer just under his skin, invasive little bumps. It was everywhere, and terrifying.

The next day I packed up my car, told my brother I loved him, and headed off for my senior year of college. He died two days later.

I skipped the Mets’ home opener in 2003, the first I missed in 16 years of being a Mets fan. Soon after I graduated and moved back home, the Mets called up their top prospect – the 19-year-old shortstop, you know the guy.

It is only now, eight years later, that I realize Chris never saw Reyes play.

Fresh direct from Vermont, my Ma is making strawberry rhubarb jam.

Over at New York Magazine, Mark Jacobson recalls the famous Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich wife-swapping trade.

[Joe D Lamp via Pitchers n Poets]

It was a treat to ride in a cab as a kid. The best was when we hailed one of those plump checker cabs, the kinds with the fold-out seats in the back. My brother, sister, and I would fight to claim those two seats.

Checker cabs were the bomb.

[Picture by Joel Zimmer]

Last week, Tom Verducci profiled Derek Jeter in SI:

“In all my years playing with him,” says Paul O’Neill, Jeter’s teammate from 1995 through 2001, “I don’t think I ever heard him have one technical discussion about the mechanics of hitting. He keeps it simple. He just plays. It’s like he’s still playing high school baseball.”

…”I worked on staying inside the ball in the minor leagues and pretty much every offseason in Tampa with [coach] Gary Denbo,” Jeter says. “But he didn’t teach it to me. That’s just how it was: Keep my hands inside the ball. It’s still the same thing. A lot of people stay inside the ball, but I don’t know about to that extreme.”

Jeter’s hands-in approach relies on making contact with the ball so late—farther in its flight path—that he can hit even inside pitches to the opposite field with authority. Entering this season, on pitches he hit to rightfield, Jeter had a .479 average and a .718 slugging percentage.

“All these years he’s stayed true to what he does best,” O’Neill says. “He had a year or two where he started to gain some strength and turned on some balls, but for the most part he is an example of taking something you do that is good and making it great. In a time when there was pressure in baseball to hit more home runs, he never caved in to that.”

It’s a defensive-looking swing. Jeter hasn’t changed his approach all these years and shortly after he returns from the disabled list he’ll reach 3,000 hits. We’ll be there cheering him on.

[Photo Credit: Sports Illustrated]

“What I don’t understand, is how it gets into your shoes…” And to illustrate his confusion, Yankee ace Ivan Nova gently pulled his left cleat off his foot and poured from it half a glass of champagne before offering it to an amused reporter.

Only an hour earlier the Yankees had put the finishing touches on their 29th world championship, sweeping the defending champion Chicago Cubs, but it was already tempting to install them as favorites in 2016, 2017, and years to come. A quick survey of the locker room revealed one of the most balanced teams ever assembled.

In one corner of the room sat third baseman Alex Rodríguez and his 761 career home runs. For much of September they had hung around his neck like the links in Marley’s chain, weighing him down and making him look old and slow as he suffered through the first homerless month of his career, but he had hit two home runs in this fall classic and was talking openly now about playing “at least two or three more years.”

Next to A-Rod stood the game’s most feared batsman, designated hitter Jesus Montero. Just entering his prime, Montero had hit .327/.411/.601 with 41 home runs in a season expected to earn him his first league MVP award.

But unlike Yankee teams in the past, this group won — and will continue to win — because of its absolutely dominant starting pitching. “We’ve got a guy in CC Sabathia who has upwards of 230 career wins, and he’s basically our fifth starter,” explained manager Jorge Posada. (Sabathia didn’t pitch in this series, but did deliver a key pinch hit to extend an eleventh-inning rally in Game 2.) “We’ve got Nova at the top, followed by Phil Hughes, Manuel Bañuelos, and Dellin Betances. It’s no wonder we won 109 games this season.”

“It’s funny when you look back at it now,” said a typically quiet Brian Cashman. “All you read about four or five years ago was that the Yankees couldn’t develop young arms, but take a look at our rotation. Take a look at the bullpen. Sure, Mo’s still there on the back end, but what about Joba? His ERA was under one for the second year in a row, and we think this might be the year that Rivera actually retires, so Joba will be closing next year.”

Nova, though, was the biggest story. He had been named the Series MVP after shutout wins in Game 1 and Game 4, and it was hard to remember that he had once been a rather lightly-regarded prospect. “It all changed for me that night in Cincinnati…” His eyes seemed to focus somewhere in the distance, and he told the story of his formative game with such vivid detail it was as if it had happened just yesterday.

As the game started out it looked as if it would be another Yankee rout, as Cincinnati starter Travis Wood kept floating pitches into the middle of the strike zone and Yankee hitters kept roping them into the outfield. Nick Swisher led off with a single, and after Curtis Granderson struck out swinging, Mark Teixeira singled, A-Rod followed with a single to score Swisher, Robinson Canó doubled to score Teixeira, Russell Martin drove in A-Rod with a ground out, and Andruw Jones singled in Canó. And just like that, the Yankees had a 4-0 lead.

Nova squeezed a bit of bubbly out of his sock and said, “That first inning, it just might’ve been the most important inning I’ve ever pitched. I only threw ten pitches, but I’ll never forget them.”

“Stubbs was the leadoff hitter, and I started him with an easy fastball for strike one. After he took a curve for a ball, I went back to the fastball and he hit a line drive into center field for a base hit. Brandon Phillips was next, and I went all fastballs with him, but he was able to fight one off and line it to right, pushing Stubbs around to third. This was a moment when things would’ve exploded on me in the past. I’d have overthrown a curve ball or opened up on a fastball looking for the strikeout, and suddenly they’d put four or five runs on the board, but suddenly there was a voice in my head — it sounded an awful lot like David Cone — telling me to ignore the runner on third. So instead of muscling up, I took something off of a fastball to Joey Votto and got him to ground into a double play. The run scored, but I had avoided the big inning. Jay Bruce came up next, and I fooled him with a changeup. He bounced the ball back to me, and the inning was over. To be honest, the game was over.”

Over the next seven innings Nova only allowed two singles. His line on the night was dominant: 8 IP, 4 H, 1 ER, 0 BB, 7 K. Of his 24 recorded outs, all but three came via strikeout or ground out. “Sure, the manager kind of bungled things in the end, pulling me after eight innings even though I had only thrown 105 pitches, but Mariano finally came in and did what he always does, and we won, 5-3.”

Nova paused, then quickly shook his head as one does when waking from a dream. “Was that really four years ago?” He smiled. “Impossible.”

With that he jumped up and chased after bench coach Paul O’Neill, triggering a second wave of celebration throughout the room. But just as suddenly, everything went quiet. At the far end of the clubhouse, having walked in unannounced, stood Derek Jeter, dressed impeccably in a grey suit and looking for all the world as if he were about to announce a comeback. But he wouldn’t. He shook a few hands and nodded across the room at old friends Posada and Rivera as he walked straight to Nova.

“You looked good out there tonight, kid. But remember, you’ve still got a ways to go before you catch me.” He held up six fingers and smiled, then turned and left.

[Photo Credit: Joe Robbins/Getty Images]

So…the Yanks vs. the Reds, huh? Well, okay, then. Cliff has the preview.

This afternoon, Jack Curry tweeted: Brian Gordon on role w Yanks: “If they want me 2 b the official rosin bag guy, I’ll be that guy.”

That’s a good one.

Johnny Cueto won’t start tonight for the Reds but tomorrow instead.

Here’s the order:

Nick Swisher RF
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Russell Martin C
Andruw Jones LF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Ivan Nova RHP

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Yeah, I know it’s Monday. Snap out of it and look alive.

[Collage I did in 1993]

Drawing by Emma Kelly

This is a few weeks old, but check out this good, and funny, piece by Noreen Malone on the “em-dash” over at Slate:

The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that’s not yet complete? Strunk and White—who must always be mentioned in articles such as this one—counsel against overusing the dash as well: “Use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate.” Who are we, we modern writers, to pass judgment—and with such shocking frequency—on these more simple forms of punctuation—the workmanlike comma, the stalwart colon, the taken-for-granted period? (One colleague—arguing strenuously that certain occasions call for the dash instead of other punctuation, for purposes of tone—told me he thinks of the parenthesis as a whisper, and the dash as a way of calling attention to a phrase. As for what I think of his observation—well, consider how I have chosen to offset it.)

Living and Dying in ¾ Time

By John Schulian

Call me self-deluded, but my shortcomings as a writer didn’t stop me from campaigning to become the Evening Sun’s city columnist, the Breslin of Baltimore, if you will. The strategy I concocted was simple: in addition to writing the best feature stories I could, I would write about rock and roll. There were always great acts coming through town or playing in D.C. or out at Meriwether Post Pavilion in Columbia, the planned city. But the Evening Sun acted as if rock and roll didn’t exist, even with Rolling Stone getting bigger and bigger in the cultural zeitgeist. So I asked the city editor if I could write about a Grateful Dead concert, and he said sure, why not. And then I wrote about Alice Cooper, who borrowed my pen and used it to stir his drink. I wrote about Muddy Waters, too, even though he was too drunk to talk before his show and I spent most of my time hanging out with his piano player, Pinetop Perkins, who was a hell of a nice guy.

Anyway, one thing led to another, and before I knew it I had a once-a-week pop music column. I spent a lot of weeknights and weekends going to shows and interviewing musicians in hotels and motels and bars. I still had to take my regular turn on re-write and do my features and anything else that came my way, but it was all worth it. The music was great even if Sly Stone never showed up and Al Green’s girl friend looked like she wanted to dump hot grits in my lap. I wrote about great, great talents like Bruce Springsteen (just before he hit it big), Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Wonder, Emmylou Harris, Sonny Stitt, Steve Goodman, Ernest Tubb, Bo Diddley, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup, the bluesman who wrote “That’s All Right, Mama,” which became one of Elvis Presley’s early hits. I wrote about Kinky Friedman, too. Twice, in fact, because he was so funny, Groucho Marx in a cowboy hat. He played the old Cellar Door in Georgetown and dedicated a song to my future ex-wife. Thank you for being an American, Kinky.

Wonder of wonders, when I said I’d like to go to Nashville to write a week’s worth of stories about country music, the Evening Sun sent me. Yeah, that’s right, the paper that threw nickels around like manhole covers. Nobody ever told me why and I never asked. I just went. And I had the absolute best experience of the nearly 16 years I spent in newspapers.

In a week of reporting, I played pinballs with Waylon Jennings, whose greasy mixture of country and rock stirred my soul; had an audience with Dolly Parton-–a genius songwriter, in case you didn’t know-–and she was as smart as she was funny and self-effacing; sat with Chet Atkins, the king of Nashville in those days, while he puffed on a cigar in his darkened office and mused about the shadow that Hank Williams still cast over the country music business 20 years after his death at the ripe old age of 29; had a beer and a bowl of chili at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, where all the great songwriters–Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, Kris Kristofferson–had taken refuge when they hit town; spent an afternoon with Tom T. Hall, a wonderful songwriter, while he laid down a demo of a song called “You Love Everybody But You”; and got on stage at the Grand Ole Opry when its home was still the Ryman Auditorium and it was strictly a radio show.

For the sake of perspective, I wanted to do a piece on Nashville as a whole–its aristocracy was locked in a culture war with the folks on Music Row–so a friend from the Army told me to call a guy he served with in Vietnam. A reporter from the Nashville Tennessean named Al Gore. He picked me up at my hotel and drove me all over town, giving me the rundown on its politics, social structure, race relations, and everything else I wanted to know about. Gore couldn’t have been smarter or more accommodating or nicer. Years later, when I saw his presidential campaign, he seemed like a completely different person, and not one I’d want to show me around Nashville. More like one whose brain waves had been intercepted by Martians.

And then there was Paul Hemphill, who was as open as Gore became sealed off. Along with Johnny Cash’s “Live at Folsom Prison,” which I listened to almost every day that I was in the Army, Hemphill’s book “The Nashville Sound” opened my mind to country music. There’s certainly never been a better piece of work on the subject. I’d read Hemphill in Life and Sport, and one of the guys at the Evening Sun had worked with him at an Atlanta paper and carried his favorite Hemphill column in his walle. He said Hemphill was good people, so I got his home address and wrote him about the trip I planned to take to Nashville. He wrote back right away with the names of people I should look up. From that moment forward, we were friends until he died last year. Mostly we stayed in touch by phone and letters and, later, e-mail. I was stunned by how candid he was about his life, especially his drinking and his frustrations as a writer, but that was Hemp, honest in the way every truth-seeker should be.

We only met once, in ’97 or ’98, when I was in Atlanta working on a story for Sports Illustrated. He took me to a bar called Manuel’s, which was a favorite haunt for politicians, cops, and newspaper reporters He loved the place-–he’d written about it a lot-–and you could tell the people there loved him. He was one of the great writers of his generation and one of those true Southern liberals who overcome the ignorance and bigotry they’re born into. I wish more people knew about him, just like I wish I’d been able to make more trips to Manuel’s with him.

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