It’s Phil Hughes vs. Joe Saunders. Someone is getting their tits lit tonight. Let’s hope it’s not Hughes. And if he falters early, Dave Phelps, and perhaps even Derek Lowe, could play big roles for the Yanks.
Derek Jeter DH
Ichiro Suzuki LF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Nick Swisher RF
Russell Martin C
Curtis Granderson CF
Jayson Nix SS
Never mind the emotion (the Win is the Thing): Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Credit: Staton Rabin/ National Geographic]
Joe Girardi’s father, Jerry, died today. He was 81. Giardi is expected to manage tonight.
Joel Sherman first reported the news on Twitter.
[Photo Credit: Bob Luckey / Greenwich Time]
Awesome Playoff Day Open Thread. Today, I’m rooting for the Reds, Nats, Yanks, and A’s.
Let’s Go Base-ball!
[Photo Via: It’s a Long Season]
Last gasp of summer. Dig in to this orecchiette recipe over at the Lemon Fire Brigade.
Early for a game thread but what the hell?
There’s no lineup change for Alex Rodriguez and the Yanks but Eric Chavez is playing third and batting ninth.
Derek Jeter SS
Ichiro Suzuki LF
Alex Rodriguez DH
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Curtis Granderson CF
Russell Martin C
Eric Chavez 3B
RHP Hiroki Kuroda
Never mind those pesky boids: LET’S GO YANK-EES!
[Photo Credit: ari j. greenberg]
This afternoon we’ve got two NL games: Cards at Nats and then Giants at Cincy.
Enjoy.
[Photo Credit: Saint Anslem]
Here’s an extra beat of the day for you. A friend posted this on his Facebook page and said it made him feel like he was a Huxtable.
Chad Jennings with some Yankee notes. At ESPN/New York, Mark Simon looks at Baltimore’s Miguel Gonzalez.
And over at Deadspin, here’s Tom Scocca on Ichiro’s play at the plate last night.
Tonight gives a pair of Game 3’s: Giants vs. the Reds and later tonight, Tigers vs. the A’s.
Have at it.
Let’s Go Base-ball!
[Photo Via: Omynameistaken]
Over at SBN’s Longform, check out this fine piece story by William Browning:
Before the boy passed 10 his parents left the Mississippi Delta for the pine woods farther south, where his mother found a teaching job in the county. They were a young family, renting near the school, when his father left.
The boy felt lost in that new place. To better hide the hurt he whittled away his footprints through the years, turning his back on basketball, the drum line, a job bagging groceries and a place on the school honor roll. When he handed in his football jersey during his junior year there was nothing else to quit. He did it in spring, a few months after the ’96 season. A slow-footed receiver four notches down the depth chart, he thought he would not be missed. He was surprised when the coach sent a note to his English teacher asking to see him. Everyone called him, “Coach.” He was humorless and had a dry voice. He growled through one-sided conversations on the football field but off it he could be inarticulate.
The boy remembers walking the hallway toward his office, telling himself not to give in. He sat face-to-face with Coach, Bear Bryant’s picture hanging nearby on the office wall. Are you sure you want to spend your senior year in the bleachers? Coach said. Full of teenage arrogance, the boy said he wouldn’t be attending any games. He said he had watched from the sideline for two seasons and had his fill.
Coach, always slow to speak, leaned back in his chair and warned him. He warned him that not that season, but in a decade or so, he would come to regret his decision and that once made, it could not be undone.
The boy laughed. A grown man, said the boy, has no business thinking of games he did or did not play in high school. Coach said all right and the boy left. He never called him “Coach” again. Not because he walked away from football, but because that summer the coach married his mother.
And the boy hated him for that.
[Photo Credit: Colorado Springs Gazette ]
Pete Townshend’s “deeply felt but often ungainly” memoir, Who I Am, is reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in the Times:
What Mr. Townshend does manage to do here with insight, verve and sometimes grandiosity is describe how the Who and its music evolved: how the group “set out to articulate the joy and rage” of the generation that came of age in the “teenage wasteland” that was post-World War II Britain, under the shadow of the atomic bomb and deeply alienated from the established class system. This is why the Who’s early sound — with all the screaming feedback and distortion, the wrecked guitars and Moon’s frenetic drumming — was so aggressive and explosive.
“I wasn’t trying to play beautiful music,” Mr. Townshend explains. “I was confronting my audience with the awful, visceral sound of what we all knew was the single absolute of our frail existence — one day an aeroplane would carry the bomb that would destroy us all in a flash. It could happen at any time. The Cuban Crisis less than two years before had proved that.”
This is Mr. Townshend in his rock theorist mode — familiar to fans, who have read his music essays and reviews, or listened to his ruminative interviews. He speaks candidly in these pages about the influence that artists like the Kinks and Bob Dylan had on him, recalling that when he first sat down to try to write songs for the Who, he isolated himself in the kitchen of his Ealing flat, and listened to a few records over and over again: “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”; Charles Mingus’s “Better Git It in Your Soul,” from “Mingus Ah Um”; John Lee Hooker’s “Devil’s Jump”; and “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the MGs.
He proves equally engaging as a sort of rock historian, describing the musical landscape in Britain in the early 1960s, when rock exploded on the scene. He describes how it upended the old order represented by the swing music that his father, a clarinetist and saxophonist, played in a band called the Squadronaires. And he charts how the Who came to push the boundaries of rock, creating one of the most acclaimed early concept albums (“The Who Sell Out,” 1967) and pioneering the form of the rock opera with “Tommy” in 1969.
As Mr. Townshend sees it, the Who’s ascendance would eventually be undermined by the rise of punk rock in the late ’70s. Though Who songs like “My Generation” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” became “anthems for a particular time,” Mr. Townshend writes, by 1981 “a gulf had opened up between the Who and the new younger generation.
“I had to accept that we had reached our peak of popularity at Woodstock, and however famous and successful we still were as a band, our ability to reinvent ourselves was declining as we continued a long slow descent from that moment when Roger sang ‘See me, feel me, touch me, heal me,’ the sun rose up behind us, and my guitar screamed to 500,000 sleep-tousled people.”
