Monthly Archives: July 2011

There is an appealing interview with Chili Davis over at Fangraphs:

I don’t mind if I rub shoulders with a woman on the subway. Sitting down, a woman next to me, the feel of their skin pushed against my shoulder, it’s okay, you know? But this week, New Yorkers are cranky from the heat. The less touching the better.

I felt bad for this dude. He got on the train this morning drenched with sweat. What a way to start the day.

Yes, indeed, it’s fun time:

Some games bother me more than others. This one bothered me a lot. It all started well, with Bartolo Colón dispelling fears of his demise with the type of outing we had become accustomed to during the first few months of the season. Once again featuring fastballs, fastballs, and more fastballs, Colón demonstrated how a 92-MPH pitch on the corner can be much more effective than a 96-MPH heater down the middle. He struck out at least one batter in each frame and pitched into the seventh inning with his only trouble coming in the fifth when he yielded a booming triple to Sam Fuld (from… Stanford University!) and an RBI single to Reid Brignac. He would finish with an impressive line: 6.1 IP, 5 H, 2 ER, 2 BB, 9 K.

Colón’s opponent on this day was young Jeremy Hellickson. According to everything I’ve heard about Hellickson, he’s one of the best young pitchers in baseball, and he did nothing on Tuesday to make me think otherwise. Like Colón, Hellickson was dominant all night long, and like Colón, he had only one troublesome inning. His was the third, when Mark Teixeira laced a two-out double down the line in right, and Robinson Canó followed with an extra large home run just to the left of center field.

Through the middle innings, as Colón was rocking back and firing darts to one corner of the plate or the other, the game seemed to be unfolding perfectly. In the sixth my youngest daughter looked up from her Polly Pockets, noticed the score (“We’re winning, Daddy!”) and innocently asked me which team I thought would win. Was there any doubt? Colón would finish the seventh, David Robertson would take the eighth, and He Who Need Not Be Named would close the windows and lock the doors in the ninth.

But then things got crazy. If you didn’t watch the game, you might have scanned the play-by-play and figured that Joe Girardi waited too long to pull the trigger and pull Colón, and then foolishly chose Boone Logan to replace him. That’s not the way it happened.

Let me tell you the story of the most ridiculous inning of baseball I’ve ever seen. First, B.J. Upton struck out. That’s not ridiculous, that’s just what B.J. Upton does. Next Robinson Chirinos pulled a grounder deep into the hole at short and beat Derek Jeter’s jump throw by an eyelash. When Sean Rodríguez rifled a single to right, Girardi went to Logan.

The next line on the play-by-play says “J Ruggiano singled to center, R Chirinos to third, S Rodríguez to second.” In your head that probably paints an image of a line drive hit directly to Curtis Granderson with such pace that Chirinos had no choice but to stay at third. Not so. Justin Ruggiano (pinch hitting for Fuld) lofted a lazy fly to straightaway center field, and as Granderson moved a few steps towards the ball it looked like Logan was an out away from squelching the rally. But then Granderson’s arms suddenly flew out from his sides in the universal gesture for “I can’t believe we’re playing baseball in this ridiculous stadium.” A second later the ball fell at his feet and the bases were loaded.

Rays skipper Joe Maddon smelled blood in the water, so he immediately played his ace in the hole, the fearsome Elliot Johnson. Johnson pounded a simple one-hopper back to Logan, a picture-perfect double play ball that would end the inning, preserve the lead, and usher in Robertson and the Great One. But the ball skipped off the top of Logan’s glove for an error, Chirinos scored, and the game was tied at two.

According to the play-by-play, Johnny Damon came up next and hit a sacrifice fly to center. You might picture a blast to the warning track, but that’s not quite what happened. Logan jammed Damon on an 0-1 pitch, breaking his bat. The ball floated out towards no-man’s land behind second base, but Granderson was able to race in to make a sliding catch not more than ten or twenty yards behind the bag. Since he had to leave his feet, though, Rodríguez was able to tag up and score from third and the Rays were up to stay. Final score: Rays 3, Yankees 2.

Oh, one other note for those clamoring for the return of Ivan Nova: we probably won’t see him for a while. He left his start in Scranton on Tuesday night with an ankle issue.

But don’t worry. Everything will be okay. I promise.

[Photo Credit: Mike Carlson/Associated Press]

Colon is back on the hill tonight. Curious to see how he holds up.

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Jorge Posada DH
Russell Martin C
Brett Gardner LF
Eduardo Nunez 3B

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Painting by Diego Rivera]

(Note: this story was edited on 7/20)

Derek Jeter got his 3000th hit recently, had you heard? Not only did he notch his safety, he owned the game in which he reached the cherished milestone. I thought that was as remarkable as the career achievement – with so much promised, he still managed to over-deliver on the contract.

The fans didn’t have to wait around for it. He needed two hits and and got them his first two trips to the plate. It was homer to boot. And then he stuck around, got three more hits and won a dramatic game versus a division rival with a tie-breaking hit in the bottom of the eighth. He turned his 3000th hit into an unforgettable event. That’s Jeter’s gift; that’s his style.

I had to wonder if any other member of the 3000 hit club ever rose to the occasion in such a fashion. I remember Pete Rose pursuing 4000 and Ty Cobb’s record. And at that time Rod Carew was piling up hits and sealing his place in rap lyrics. But honestly, how they got there was lost to me.

I wonder if that is an unconscious reason behind the rampant Jeter bashing surrounding the hit and All-Star pass? His performance and Yankee fans’ constant retelling of his performance will make his 3000th hit indelible. But other Hall of Famers are not so lucky. Is it because they didn’t do it with as much style as Derek? Or is it another example of the New York Yankees and their fans blocking out the sun?

Turns out, I think, to be both. I checked out each milestone hit from Pete Rose’s 4000th all the way through Derek Jeter’s 3000th to see what I missed, what I should have seen, along the way. Look, there’s no way around it, Jeter’s milestone game was the best. The homer and the five hits would have given him a solid argument, the game winning RBI in the eighth ends the discussion.

But I had no idea how many other great Hall of Famers just dominated their games like Jeter did. As recently as 2007, Craig Biggio also had five hits on his big day. I confess, until a few mentions in the media after Jeter’s five hits, I had no idea that happened.

Tony Gwynn and Geroge Brett had four hits a piece. Wade Boggs had three hits and was the first to celebrate 3000 with a home run trot (that I remembered). Paul Molitor, who also had three hits, is the only guy to do it with a triple.

I was paying attention as 15 players passed huge hit totals, and ten of them did it with multi-hit games. Seven had three or more. Their cumulative average in these 15 games is .594. It’s too small a sample from which to draw a conclusion, but it does make you wonder if elite players, pumped up for this kind of moment, might benifit from the extra adrenaline or something.

As bad as it was to take shots at Jeter as he approached 3000 (of these 15 players, eight had OPS+ below 100 during their chase and only two or three of them could be considered to have had “good” seasons), it is equally terrible to celebrate his triumph as if it has never been done before.

It’s like the Red Sox fans celebrating the 2004 World Series as if it was the first title ever won by anybody in the history of anything. When you lose context, you piss off everyone but your core constituents. And as much as Derek Jeter deserves to celebrate, the celebration is about putting his name directly underneath and alongside Carl Yastrzemski, Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron and all the other all-time greats in this club.

He didn’t jump to the top of the list just because he went five for five.

That was his gift to Yankee fans.

***

When I revisited this story in my head last night I realized a mistake. It’s not Boston’s fans or Jeter’s fans who are to blame for over-reacting to the 2004 World Series or to the 3000th hit. They’re not the ones who are required to interject perspective during their uninhibited expressions of joy. It’s the national media who are responsible. But instead of playing that role and providing context for the rest of the sporting world, now they pander to the local fan base to make a buck.

And of course, being a good winner about such things and not rubbing it in goes a very long way to dispelling the blowback. So that’s where the fans come in, and as we all knows fans of all stripes, every faction has their guilty parties.

Dig this gallery of famous people by Bob Willoughby.

Hot and Cool.

It’s Sidney Lumet Week at the Walter Reader Theater, guys. If you are around, check it out. If you’ve never seen “Q&A,” it’s worth it. Nolte at his best:

Drawings by Ricardo Fumanal.

Keeping it light on a hot day, dig this gallery of refreshing sorbets and granitas over at Saveur.

[Photo Credit: Brooke Slezak]

Steven Goldman looks at A.J. Burnett vs. Ivan Nova:

Everything about Nova—good fastball but weak secondary offerings and a tendency to stop fooling hitters in the middle innings seems to scream relief work. He might someday develop that solid extra pitch, but it’s a gamble, whereas a Jimenez (or another established pitcher) has already cleared that particular hurdle. I remain a strong believer in internal development and a youth movement for the Yankees, but I don’t believe in youth solely for youth’s sake—if that was a goal worth pursuing, you could bring up any kid from any level of the minors. No, the youngster has to be demonstrably better than what you currently have. Nova is better than Burnett right now, but in the long term he’s likely to be surpassed. He’s just not special, and when someone offers to trade you their best stuff for your everyday, average players, you jump. That’s how legendarily lopsided trades are born. Every deal is a gamble, but Nova is not one of those chips not likely to come back and bite them.

In short, when it comes to Nova, the Yankees need to use him (for Burnett) or lose him (for someone better than Burnett and himself).

Summer Jam: The Great Dot X.

[Painting by Ana Teresa Fernandez]

I couldn’t get started this morning and it is already hot and muggy so the walk to the subway didn’t speed me up any.

When I got to work I said to one of the security guards, “Jesus, hot enough for you?”

“Never mind that, I’m already dealing with bullshit.”

I asked her what was wrong.

“This skinny bitch tries to come through here and I tell her she’s got to get put her bag through x-ray before I can let her in. Dude she’s with says, ‘She’s from the L.A. office, it’s okay.’ No, I don’t care where you from, over here you go through x-ray.”

I laughed and said, “Well, it’s over with so don’t dwell on it.”

“Oh, I’m done. Got to leave room for the more bullshit. My day’s just started.”

[Photo Credit: Penny Anderson]

AJ Burnett was one of four Yankee pitchers who exceeded expectations in the first half. I covered many of his starts and found most of them to be well pitched, even though they were almost all losses. He sped out of the second half gate and straight into the gutter with Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia tonight prompting every Yankee fan to look up Ubaldo Jimenez’s velocity charts on Fangraphs. Even though they already scoffed at the asking price yesterday. For the record, while it would be a lot to trade Montero, Nova, Banuelos and Betances for Ubaldo, I admire the heck out the Rockies for having the restraint to not ask for Lou Gehrig’s bones in the deal.

Whether or not the Yankees pull off a trade this summer, and whether or not they get a nice surprise from one of the young arms in the minors, I think we’ve just seen the beginning of winter. If you’re a fan of A Game of Thrones, you’ll know the Stark family is fond of reminding everybody that “winter is coming.” In terms of the Yankees, I’m not at all saying their season is over or that they can’t rally past Boston for some kind of title this year, just that winter is coming as sure as the calendar says so and when it gets here, CC Sabathia is going to rule the Seven Kingdoms and beyond.

I have followed the Yankees for so long and in all that time, they’ve never had a guy as good, as healthy and as consistent as CC Sabathia. Has any Yankee had three years in a row this good since Guidry from 1977-1979? Moose had three good years to start his tenure in New York, but I don’t think his best was as good as CC’s best. In two and half years he has made himself utterly indispensable. I can’t imagine the Yankees going forward without him. Luckily, I can’t imagine the Yankees letting him go either. But with every stinker from AJ and the rest, CC’s payday grows.

Tonight AJ revealed the stink with a quickness. After being staked to an early run, he allowed the first four men to reach. It looked like he would escape with only two runs when he caught a two-out chopper behind the mound, but instead of taking a half-step to set himself for an easy toss, he hurried a “throw” past Teixeira while wheeling and whirling. A third run scored. A T-Rex could have made a better throw, and I’m talking about the fossils on Central Park West.

The score was 4-1 when the Yankees rallied off Tampa starter Alex Cobb in the fifth. Teixeira singled to cash in Gardner’s lead off walk and Robbie Cano looked dangerous representing the go-ahead run. Then the power went out at that crappy stadium and ruined the at-bat. When he finally got back in the box fifteen minutes later, the rookie regrouped from his only real jam of the night and retired Cano to end the threat.

Just at that time, Baltimore took a lead on Boston for thirty seconds, hell froze half-over and dogs and cats considered mutual respect before the natural order sped to reassert itself. Boston tied the game before Baltimore could record an out.

Burnett continued to be hot garbage into the sixth. He ended up allowing eight hits and six walks and looked every bit as bad as that line suggests. But thanks to a bail-out from Hector Noesi, the score was somehow stuck at 4-2 when he hit the shower. Shower as long as you want AJ, some odors are stubborn. (Apparently he got into it with a fan behind the dugout. I think the fan was mad that AJ didn’t invite him out to run the bases; everybody else in the stadium had had a chance.)

The Yankees brought the go-ahead run to the plate again in the seventh, but Mark Teixeira struck out looking on a close pitch. The replay showed the pitch clearly outside, but with the game on the line, if you leave it up to the umpire on a close pitch, you have to live with some bad calls.

Around this time, dogs and cats rekindled their age-old feud in earnest and the Red Sox blew the game open in Baltimore. Pedroia has raised his slugging percentage 100 points in about 15 games and somewhere along the way lapped Cano in bWAR (4.9 to 2.7).

The Yankees rallied again in the eighth, this time they meant it. Brett Gardner singled off Kyle Farnsworth to make it 4-3, but there was no chance to score Russell Martin from second. The bases were still loaded for Eduardo Nunez and he went up hacking under the pressure. It looked like a bad idea as he grounded a potential double play ball to short. But there was Brett Gardner, all over the second baseman with wonderfully tough slide to destroy the pivot. The game was tied. Derek Jeter swung at balls four and five and whiffed to end the inning, but it was sweet to get to Farnsworth for the first time this year.

While the Yankees assaulted the lead, the bullpen held the line admirably. David Robertson backed up Hector Noesi and both were excellent. Robertson especially so, as he set down the top of the Tampa order in the blink of an eye. The Rays sent out Alexander Torres to make his Major League debut. He was called up because they used nine pitchers the night before in the 16-inning loss to the Red Sox.

The rookie allowed a lead off single to Granderson, but recorded the next two outs. With Granderson on third, Joe Maddon had Torres walk Swisher. I noticed the intentional balls were fluttering to home plate – he was not comfortable. The last one bounced. David Cone and Ken Singleton were all over it as well and they wondered if the nerves might be getting to Torres. Whatever the reason, he ended up walking the next two men as well, and forced in the go-ahead run. Give credit to Jones and Martin for beautiful at-bats, but I can’t support a manager asking a guy making his Major League debut to intentionally put a base runner on in the ninth inning of a tie game. Brett Gardner did his best to draw another walk, but Torres finally found the zone and escaped the jam without further damage.

Mariano Rivera came in to face the heart of the Rays order in the ninth. And, well, you know how that story goes. It was over before I had a chance to get nervous. I was amused and offended by BJ Upton’s angry reaction to getting punched out. The pitch was placed so perfectly, broke so late and so hard, that he just should have been proud to be part of that moment. Like being photgraphed by Richard Avedon or something.

The teams combined for 16 walks and 17 hits, so it was quite a slog, and maybe it wasn’t a good game, but it was a great win for the Yanks, 5-4. And hey, if you consider the Rays’ bullpen was shot from the night before, the Yanks owe this victory to the Red Sox.

Yanks in Tampa. It was a late night for the Rays who lost 1-0 to the Sox in 16 innings. Ouch.

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Jorge Posada DH
Russell Martin C
Brett Gardner LF
Eduardo Nunez 3B

Cliff’s got the Preview. You know how we do:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Mark Borthwick]

Jam it on the One.

Fighting the Good Fight

By John Schulian

Chicago was a great city for anyone who worked on a newspaper. There were three dailies when I got there–the Daily News, Sun-Times and Tribune–and people read them voraciously, passionately. They were part of the fabric of life in the city. There wasn’t a great paper in the bunch, but they were still lively and full of first-rate reporting and writing. What they did not have when I hit town, however, was memorable  sportswriting. It was, if I may be blunt, painfully mediocre.

The sports-page revolution that had swept through New York, L.A., Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington hadn’t caused so much as a ripple in Chicago. Nor did the city’s newspaper executives seem to realize that all over the country, young hotshots were seizing the moment — Dave Kindred in Louisville, Joe Soucheray in Minneapolis-–and seasoned wordsmiths like Wells Twombly in San Francisco were still going strong. The Tribune had two first-rate sportswriters, Don Pierson, a wizard at covering pro football, and Bob Verdi, a droll stylist who went back and forth between baseball and hockey. Otherwise, the Trib was dreary, uninspired and burdened with lazy, burned-out columnists. The Sun-Times was trying to shake things up by bringing in consummate pros like Ron Rapoport, Randy Harvey and Thom Greer. Tom Callahan, a ballsy columnist from Cincinnati, was supposed to be part of the revolution, but he took one look at the in-house chaos and went right back where he’d come from.

Nobody was going to get rid of me that easily. I wrote an introductory column laying out my ties to Chicago -– the days I’d spent in Wrigley Field’s bleachers, the night I’d seen Bobby Hull score the 499th and 500th goals of his career -– and I followed it up with pieces on Al McGuire, a columnist’s dream, and the Bulls’ tough guy guard, Norm Van Lier. Next thing I knew, some guy was walking up to me and saying, “So how does it feel to be the best sports columnist in town?”

Jesus, the hours I put in. The deadline for the first edition at the Daily News was something like 5 in the morning, and I can’t tell you how many times I came close to missing it. (It always made me feel better when I heard that Larry Merchant did the same thing at the New York Post.) Understandably, my work habits grated on my wife when I got married. They also raised the anxiety level for the two guys who put the sports section together, the positively Zen Frank Sugano and Mike Downey, who went on to become a star columnist at the Detroit Free Press, the L.A. Times, and the Chicago Tribune. I can still quote headlines that Downey put on my columns: “She’s Dorothy, Not the Wicked Witch” for one in defense of Dorothy Hamill, and “That Mother McRae” (well, for one edition, anyway) after things between the Yankees and the Royals got chippy during the 1977 playoffs.

As soon as I proved myself, I had the clout to lobby for bringing in Phil Hersh, an old friend from Baltimore, to cover baseball. Phil was a first-rate writer, an intrepid reporter, and a fount of story ideas. While I covered Leon Spinks’ upset victory over Muhammad Ali in Las Vegas, he jumped on a plane to St. Louis and wrote a killer feature about the God-awful Pruitt-Igoe housing project where Spinks’ family lived on government-issue peanut butter in a blistering hot apartment with no way to control the heat.

Once we did a few things like that and wrote the hell out of whatever was on the agenda for the day, the bright kids on the Daily News staff caught the fever. Kevin Lamb, our Bears writer, already had it, because he’d broken in at Newsday, which had been at the heart of the revolution. All Downey needed was someone to free him from the copy desk and point him in the right direction. It was the same with Brian Hewitt, who was straight out of Stanford.

We didn’t have much space at the Daily News, but we made the most of it by out-hustling and out-writing the competition. Even when the sports department got moved downstairs to a dreary space next to the backshop, we didn’t miss a beat, just kept on kicking ass.

Seeing that happen was one of the real thrills of my first year as a columnist. I was in the middle of something that was more than just exciting, it was important. We were doing our part to keep the Daily News alive.

After I’d been in Chicago for a couple of months, I started hearing from papers that wanted to lure me away. The Tribune was the first of them. Fat chance. Then it was the San Francisco Examiner because Twombly had up and died when he was barely 40. The only call I paid attention to came from Larry Merchant. I would have sworn he didn’t know my name and here he was on the phone telling me he was in discussions to become the New York Times’ sports editor. If he took the job, he said, he wanted his first hires to be Peter Gammons and me.

Once again my head was spinning. But Merchant didn’t get the job, so I went back to busting my hump in behalf of the Daily News. I wish I could tell you every column I wrote was a work of art, but that wasn’t the case. Sometimes they were good, maybe even very good; other times I floundered and grasped for ideas and phrases that were beyond me. Still, I’ve always been grateful that I could break in as a columnist on a p.m. paper. It gave me the time I needed to master the form.  If I’d been at an a.m. paper, I’m not sure I would have survived as well as I did.

And here’s something that could only have happened at a p.m.: When I walked out of the paper to look for a cab home in the wee small hours one snowy morning, my footprints were the first on North Michigan Avenue. I had my dream job, in my favorite city in the country, and in a few hours, the people in that city–some of them anyway–were going to read what I had stayed up all night to write for them. And in that moment, I felt the romance of the newspaper business as I never had before.

It didn’t seem anywhere near as romantic late on March 3, 1978 as the Daily News staff waited for the paper’s final edition to come off the press. My face was as long as anybody’s, but I wasn’t entitled to sadness, not the way the people who had given their lives to the paper were. I was standing next to M.W. Newman, who wrote elegantly about architecture and books and local history and pretty much anything else that popped up on his radar. He’d been at the Daily News for something like 30 years. He was the one who had the right to sing the blues. I was just somebody who came along too late to help save the paper. And yet you’d be surprised how often I think of it. And how proud I am to have been there.

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

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Times]

Matt B hipped me to this blog post by Lawrence Block about the difficulty of adapting books for the big screen:

Once in a while, of course, someone really gets it right. Once in a while there’s a movie that takes a book, slaps it on the big screen, and works like a charm even as it reflects the writer’s vision. The most vivid recent example would be the Coens’ remake of True Grit. I’d read the Charles Portis novel first, then saw and enjoyed the Henry Hathaway film with John Wayne and Kim Darby. It wasn’t the book, but I thought it was a pretty good movie.

But the Coen brothers went back to Portis’s book, and took the revolutionary step of putting that story on the screen, using his scenes and dialogue pretty much as written. And blew the earlier picture out of the water.

Oddly, something very similar happened seventy years ago. John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon succeeded so utterly that not many of us realize it was the third adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel. (The 1931 version starred Ricardo Cortez; the 1936 remake, called Satan Met a Lady, had Alison Skipworth playing the Sydney Greenstreet role.)

It’s also not widely known that Hammett deliberately wrote the book in the form of a prose screenplay, with nothing on the page that couldn’t be shown or spoken on the screen. It was his notion that movies were the future, that writers were best advised to write books that could be filmed, and that the ideal tactic would be to do the screenwriters’ work for them while writing the book. After this was conveniently overlooked by two sets of filmmakers, Huston did what should have been done in the first place, and put Hammett’s lines, essentially verbatim, in the mouths of the perfect cast. There’s a reason the film gets better every time you see it.

Amen, to that. It’s a near perfect movie.

Simple Pleasures are the best.

Spaghetti with spring garlic and chilies at L’Artusi.

From Kostya Kennedy:

It was 70 years ago, on a mild and misty night in Cleveland, before the largest crowd of the 1941 baseball season — 67,463 in Municipal Stadium — that Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak came to an end. The game became, in today’s parlance, an “instant classic.” It would have been destined for countless airings on many sports channels had only there been footage to air.

Instead the night of July 17, 1941 survived only in memory (and in some part myth), re-lived and re-told not just by DiMaggio himself but also by his teammates and by the opposing Indians players and by the coaches and the batboys and by the people who attended the game and by the many thousands more who were not at the game, but who would swear, year after year, that they were.

The facts are simple: DiMaggio went 0-for-3 with a fourth-inning walk. Yet each of DiMaggio’s at-bats that night was an event, the mass of fans cheering and hooting each time he strode to the plate. Many of the people felt unsure whether or not they wanted to see the Great DiMag, as he was called, succeed against their Indians. Cleveland’s ace pitcher, Bob Feller, felt that way as he watched from the Indians dugout. When I spoke to him, some nine months before his death at age 92 last December, Feller said he remembered the game clear as if the floodlights were still upon it.

Of course, a new hit streak started the next day.