Blog Archives

First up gives the Tigers hosting the A’s then out to San Francisco for the Reds and Giants.

Have at it.

Let’s Go Base-ball.

[Photo Credit: Nina Zivkovic via Je Suis Perdu]

Over at ESPN, here’s Jeff MacGregor on Derek Jeter:

Jeter is our sphinx, as fixed and inscrutable as those marble lions in front of the New York Public Library.

Eighteen seasons, 3,304 hits. Who knows how many starlets. Captain Intangibles in the City of the Damned. To reasonable people from anywhere else, New York is crazy, a bughouse — an asylum, a hive, a slice of 99-cent pizza falling on a pair of $1,600 shoes. It’s bike messengers and violinists, grime and Champagne. It’s a Babel, a bad dream, a siren, a grinding of the teeth. It’s that smell. It’s horse carts and nightclubs and town cars and bridges. It’s Trump and Jay-Z, The Times and the Post, three-card monte and the stock exchange. It’s a Korean bodega in a Greek neighborhood run by 4 guys from Yemen. It’s what America used to be before focus groups got hold of it.

But New York makes sense to New Yorkers. Our cops and firefighters all look and sound like cops and firefighters, and the daily parade up and down the avenue of our actors and junkies and account executives is straight out of central casting. The ballplayers all look like ballplayers and first among them is Derek Jeter. As much a part of the mind’s skyline as the Flatiron or the Waldorf; as much a part of the tri-state subconscious as every car commercial they’ve ever bounced off your skull. Even if you hate baseball, he’s as permanent an impermanence as most New Yorkers can imagine.

The only question is for how long?

[Photo Credit: Bags]

How you expect to get your corn meal made?

[Photo Credit: Jeremy Egry via Zero]

Let Dem Playoffs Begin.

Braves-Cards are the early game. Rangers-O’s are the late one.

We’ll be watching.

Let’s Go Base-ball!

[Photo Credit: TS Flynn via It’s a Long Season]

Another one bites the dust. Had some good memories in that place.

Smitten Kitchen gives us spaghetti with broccoli cream pesto. Sure, why the hell not?

I got to have it.

[Photo Via: Eye of the Beholder]

Street scene from This Isn’t Happiness.

The so-called “experts” at Sports on Earth deliver their playoff predictions.  And here’s the ESPN think tank.

Over at SI.com, Jay Jaffe tackles the question: Does momentum matter going into the playoffs?

This speaks to me. From Isaac Chotiner’s 2008 Atlantic interview with Jhumpa Lahiri:

One critic who reviewed your first book said that your prose is extremely un-self-conscious and not showy. Without making a judgment on that, do you think he was correct?

I like it to be plain. It appeals to me more. There’s form and there’s function and I have never been a fan of just form. My husband and I always have this argument because we go shopping for furniture and he always looks at chairs that are spectacular and beautiful and unusual, and I never want to get a chair if it isn’t comfortable. I don’t want to sit around and have my language just be beautiful. If you read Nabokov, who I love, the language is beautiful but it also makes the story and is an integral part of the story. Even now in my own work, I just want to get it less—get it plainer. When I rework things I try to get it as simple as I can.

Do you have any desire to write a huge, panoramic novel?

I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m an effusive writer. My writing tends not to expand but to contract. If I do write more novels, I think they’ll be more streamlined and concentrated.

That fits into what you were saying about your prose style, right?

Maybe. Yes. I don’t like excess. When a great sweeping work is great, what makes it great is that there’s no excess.

[Photo Credit: Camille Van Horne]

Over at Grantland here’s Jonah Keri on why Mike Trout is the AL MVP and not Miguel Cabrera. That said, Bobby Valentine has a better chance of keeping his job than Trout does of winning the MVP.

[Photo Credit: Jeff Gross/Getty Images]

Drawing by Adrian Tomine via This Isn’t Happiness.

It’s always fun when you see a dance crew on the train–so long as a flying foot doesn’t clip you by accident.

[Photo Credit: Humans of New York]

Next time you’re in Iceland…

Food 52 reminds us how to keep all our fingers intact for root vegetable season.

[Photo Credit: Tasteinspired’s blog]

Yanks make the playoffs, win the division and secure the best record in the American League? Fug it, Dude, let’s dance.

[Photo Credit: Annett Turki via Kitty en classe]

From Chad Jennings comes this from Hiroki Kuroda today:

“To be honest with you, I never enjoyed playing baseball,” Hiroki Kuroda said. “I never enjoyed pitching, to be honest with you. Whether it’s a spring training game or a regular-season game, I like to put a certain amount of pressure on myself to be as normal as I can, even in that kind of atmosphere.”

…“I’m not saying this because I’m with the Yankees,” Kuroda said. “This has been all throughout my professional career. There’s a lot of responsibility as a starting pitcher, so rather than enjoy myself out there, I feel that I must fulfill my responsibility and that’s my priority.”

Kuroda pitched in the playoffs for the Dodgers so it’s probably an exaggeration to call this the biggest game of his career but it is his most crucial start in pinstripes.

Derek Jeter SS
Ichiro Suzuki LF
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Curtis Granderson CF
Raul Ibanez DH
Russell Martin C

Never mind the raindrops or the bollocks: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: The Absolute Best Photography]

Over at SB Nation’s Longform, here’s Pat Jordan on his days pitching in the minor leagues:

The closest I ever came to pitching a “Big Game” in the minors was in my last minor league season, and it was a “Big Game” only because it was my last game. The year was 1961, and I was pitching for the Palatka in the Class D Florida State League, against the Tampa Tarpons, a farm club for the Cincinnati Reds. I was wild as usual, walking batter after batter, sweating in the merciless August heat, kicking the dirt, cursing myself, my teammates, the umpires, the fans, the opposing batters just standing at the plate, relaxed, grinning even, their bat resting on their shoulder, not even expecting to swing, just waiting out their four balls before they trotted to first base. Their fans cheered my ineptitude at first, but even they got bored with so many walks and runs for their team, the game, for all intents and purposes, already over in the first inning. They began moaning and jeering, pleading with my manager to free everyone from this painful public disgrace, “Take him out, he’s done on both sides.”

The next batter stepped into the batter’s box. I already knew he would be the last batter I would ever face in my aborted career. I glared at him, my final chance to salvage some pride, to go out on my shield on a boat filled with burning straw into that vast sea of an ordinary life that awaited me in Bridgeport, where I expected to work one shit job after another to support my wife and squalling kids; Mason laborer. Soda jerk at a drugstore. Ditch digger on a construction crew. And then, after work, dirty, depressed, and disgusted, I would drink too many beers before I went home to my poor beleaguered wife.

So I decided to plant my fastball in this final batter’s ear; Pete Rose.

Ken was at the game two nights ago. This afternoon, a win gives the A’s the AL West title.

[Photo Credit: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images]

Over at Grantland, check out this great piece on the Red Sox by Charlie Pierce:

The franchise needed a year like this. It needed a year like this not just because it was forced to clear out the lumpy deadwood in the clubhouse, though it certainly needed that. It needed a year like this not just because it was a humbling experience that let the air out of the inflated hubris that had been keeping the franchise’s collective ego aloft since the wonderful autumn of 2004, though the franchise certainly needed one of those, too. The franchise needed a year like this because people like me are getting older and we missed the days when being a Red Sox fan wasn’t so much work. The franchise needed a year like this because we kept telling young folks that it wasn’t always like this, that, in fact, things can be much worse than simply piddling away a playoff spot to the Rays in September, that baseball — Red Sox baseball — can be so thoroughly, unremittingly awful that you can stop worrying every game to death long before it’s time to get back to school.

And, yes, it is sometimes possible that good seats indeed will still be available, phony shutout streak or no.

From a strictly baseball sense, this looks like a middling- to long-range rebuilding process. The manager has to go. The farm system is nearly desiccated, and there isn’t enough talent on the roster to contend anytime soon. Neither Jon Lester nor Clay Buchholz looks remotely like a consistent no. 1 starter anymore. Also, it doesn’t look as though life in the American League East is going to get any easier. (Sooner or later, even the Blue Jays will forget to underachieve.) And I don’t want to hear anything about rebuilding that most noxious of all marketing department curses — “The Brand.” Sooner or later, you realize that no matter how many things you can find to commemorate, The Brand is simply whether you win or not. Stop losing, and your Brand is all bright and shiny again.

So, I rather enjoyed the second half of this Red Sox season. I was reminded of all the afternoons I spent with my grandfather, watching lousy baseball while, bit by bit, he drank and smoked himself into the Beyond. Those were good days, and isn’t that what the baseball people tell us the game is all about? Generations, sitting together, watching players bumble and stumble while the old folks teach the young’uns new and exciting curse words? Let Ken Burns set that to banjo music. I’ll be in the Parakeet Bar, waiting for the show to begin.

[Photo Credit: ]