Blog Archives

“Yuki Onna” Digital Painting by Charlie Terrell

Over at the Pinstriped Bible, Steven Goldman compares Bernie Williams with Kirby Puckett:

Both were excellent hitters with very different skills who nonetheless arrived at similar results. Puckett was short and stout, Williams long and lithe. Puckett reaped a huge benefit from his Metrodome home park, hitting .344/.388/.521 at home, .291/.331/.430 on the road. Williams was about the same hitter everywhere. Both were Gold Glove center fielders who won several of the defensive awards with their bats. Both won a single batting title. Puckett led the AL in hits four times; Williams walked too much to compete in that department.

Career-wise, Williams looks a little worse overall, but that’s because his peak isn’t quite so high and his career is a little longer. Due to glaucoma, Puckett’s career came to an abrupt end, depriving him of a decline phase, whereas Williams got to play until he was no longer useful. If you consider both through their age-35 seasons, it’s a virtual tie: Williams had hit .301/.388/.488 in 1804 games, while Puckett hit .318/.360/.477 in 1783 games. When you adjust for time and place, there isn’t a lot of difference–at which point, I would argue, you have to look at Puckett’s home-road splits.

This will make your day. It sure made mine.

[Photo Credit: Susan NYC]

In celebration of my cousin’s birthday how about getting the Led out with Three for Thursday:

Oh, what the hell, here’s a bonus beat:

Two photographs by Man Ray.

Head on over to the always entertaining site, Scouting New York, and check out this fascinating post about an abandoned missile base in the Adirondacks.

David Lebovitz makes fresh pasta.

Townes.

I’ll fake it to ya.

Check this out:

Edible Art.

Rothko Cookies

Mondrian Cake

[Photo Credits: Mimi O Chun and Through My Blue Eyes]

Tom Verducci and Rob Neyer write about how underrated Jorge Posada was during his career.

You want great Sichuan in Manhattan? Peep Legend on 7th Ave between 15th and 16th Street.

I’ve been four times in the past two weeks and can recommend almost everything that I tried. I especially liked:

Sichuan Cucumber

The Green Beans with Ground Pork

Sichuan Spicy Ma Pa Tofu

Dry Spicy, Tasty Diced Chicken with Ginger and Peanut.

Photo Credit: Serious Eats, from their fine slideshow of the place.

Graham Greene was one of the first novelists that I liked. I think I read three or four of his books before I was twenty. I haven’t revisited him in a long time but he came to mind when I read about a new book by Pico Iyer. Check out this excerpt from The Los Angeles Review of Books:

It’s not of great cosmic interest that Graham Greene seems to be writing my life, even as I’m so proud of making it up myself. Or that he reads me better than many of the friends and family members who see me every day do. But what’s more intriguing is that all of us have these presences inside our heads, who seem somehow to shadow us, and in ways we can’t quite explain. “I can’t listen to Joni Mitchell’s Blue,” a friend once told me. “And I can’t stop listening to it. It’s as if she stole my diary and is broadcasting its secrets to the world.” “I’m almost afraid to see what Henry James will write in the next sentence,” another friend says. “Because it’s so close to my life that he might be telling me what I’ll do and think tomorrow.”

These days, in our virtual lives, this sense of spectral affinity may be more intense and unnerving than ever. Every other celebrity seems to have a stalker who feels he’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s other half, if only she would wake up to the fact; and many of us probably know more about Princess Diana or Tiger Woods, at least when it comes to their intimate lives, than about our siblings or parents. It’s almost as if we have one official life, in which we look and sound like our mother or father; but underneath is a more mysterious life in which we’re really closest to Zadie Smith, or that painter who’s produced our portrait without ever meeting us.

One of the writers who was most interested in this secret universe — we dream, again and again, of a place we’ve never seen in life, but almost never of the building in which we live; we meet a stranger at a party, and feel she knows us better than the old friends we came with do — was, as it happens, Graham Greene. At the age of 16, after failing to run away from the school where his father was headmaster, he was allowed (unusually for his time and class) to go and live for six months with a dream analyst in London, and the man’s glamorous wife. For much of his life thereafter he kept a careful diary of his dreams, meticulously indexed, and two of his novels, he said, came straight from dreams. The last book he prepared for publication before his death was a record of his dreams.

And here is a review of Iyer’s book in the New York Times Book Review.

A couple of mid-’90s Hip Hop Gems.

I saw a couple on the train this morning who were not shy about showing their affection. It was as if they were all alone, or perhaps they just get their kicks smooching in a crowd. Who knows?

Barry Larkin was elected to the Hall of Fame today.

Larkin 86%, Morris 67%, Bagwell 56%, Smith 51%, Raines 49%, Trammell & Edgar 37%, McGriff 24%, Walker 23%, McGwire 20%…Bernie 10%.

[Photo Credit: Ronald C. Modra/SI]

Jim Steranko

[Image via Whiz Bang Pow]

Check out this long appreciation of Townes Van Zant by Aretha Sills in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

TVZ: There’s so many good young people and old people, I can’t listen to it all. I end up listening to Muddy Waters and Mozart, Muddy Waters and Mozart. Hank Williams every so often, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. I mean, I listen quite a bit, but mostly I’m playing. Traveling and playing. And when I’m in a car, somebody gives you a tape, you listen to it. That’s one of the best places, but eventually it comes down to the hum of the wheels.

TVZ: But this land is covered with brilliant young and old musicians. What it takes is perseverance, and you have to be lazy. You have to be too lazy to work. When you start, at least, it helps not to have a family, because I started before I had a family. Young men come up to me and say, ‘I’d really like to do what you, how shall I go about it?’ I say, well you get a guitar or a piano (I prefer a guitar because it’s a lot easier to carry than a piano), then you’ve got to blow off security, money, your family, your loved ones, your home, blow it all off and stay with your guitar somewhere under a bridge and learn how to play it. That’s how it goes. That’s what I did. And that discourages a lot of them, ‘cause some of them are like, ‘I have two kids and I work in a gas station. I’m going to save my money and go to Nashville for a week.’ But that ain’t it. And girls, young ladies, occasionally ask me. I say, well first off, you’ve got to cut all your fingernails on your left hand off. And that stops most of them. But it ain’t easy. I mean, it’s not hard; it ain’t easy. It’s killing me, I know that. Something’s killing everybody. Just sometimes I get so tired that I can’t even sleep.

[Photo Credit: Al Clayton]

Happy Monday.

[Photo Credit:  Fotourbana]