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I just don’t have that much jam.

Bronx Banter Guest Post

By Nick Fleder

I started going to Yankees games with my dad when I was four. I was shepherded to the outside gate to have French fries and Diet Coke before we found our way to our seats on the first base side of the diamond, close enough to the action that an errant throw on a double play could hit us in the head.

We walked past the same toothless usher who always guarded the section 71 seats at the old Yankee Stadium, and I would harass the same first baseman, Tino Martinez, for game balls until he retired and yielded his annoyance to Jason Giambi. Attending so many Yankee games, roughly twenty a year, was why I fell so hard for the sport. But even watching every game, part of the time starry-eyed under the stadium lights and the rest of the time in front of my kitchen TV set, didn’t completely satisfy me. I wanted to play.

* * *

Dad caught on to my baseball passion and coached me through Little League. But I was afraid of the ball and no good as a hitter. I stood at the rear of the batter’s box and rarely took the bat off of my shoulder. I had trouble keeping my eye on the ball and vividly remember one at-bat on a Friday night under the lights at Loshe Park in Sleepy Hollow, NY. It was my third time up and I was facing a flamethrower, my friend Nick. I chopped the ball to shortstop and was out by a good ten feet. No runs scored on the play, but my friends and teammates cheered for me making simple contact, which sums up what kind of ballplayer I was. I still wanted to play.

Dad bought me a metal pole advertised on ESPN, the one that had a ball fixed in a black padding. I worked on hand-eye coordination by batting the ball at torso level over and over again, while it coiled around the pole like a tetherball and returned to its original position. I was decent at hitting a ball when it was stationary, but that didn’t help me when it was moving, in a game, so when I finally gave up playing, Dad wasn’t disappointed, probably because I wasn’t either. But he saw what baseball meant to me.

Later that year, he tested something on me he had never tried on my older brother, Jackson, who was indifferent to the game but appreciated the spectacle of the ballpark—the heckling fans, the salesmanship of the hot dog vendors and the cheering after a home run. He took me to his fantasy draft.

* * *

My father was involved in the first fantasy league ever, and plays in what’s left of that league still today. He brought me into the world of fantasy sports through an expensive ($260 in, up to $1500 out) league of adult men (with a wealth of baseball knowledge) when I was almost ten, roughly six years ago. The league (originally called the Rotisserie league but now aptly named “AARP”) was the focus of one of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentaries, “Silly Little Game,” and the creator, Dan Okrent, still plays. It almost instantly became an obsession for me.

Draft day was even better than the trips to Yankee Stadium. We developed a ritual of grabbing a Quizno’s sandwich before heading off to scrape together an underwhelming roster using the SI Baseball Preview sheets. Dad guided me with tips for the auction, telling me to speak up and pronounce my bids with confidence, encouraging me to stare my opponents down, look them directly the eye when I bid to try to get them to drop out. He used a ten-year old boy to try to intimidate his opponents.

We didn’t have a useful strategy, despite his twenty plus years of experience. Maybe it was to make it fun for me, but our overall approach was not exactly a recipe for success: he told me to identify a couple of superstars and pay “whatever it takes” for them, and allowed me to keep the expensive superstars left over from our roster the year before.

Our incompetence wasn’t limited to the drafting of the players. We traveled to the ESPN offices on 34th Street in Manhattan for our first draft together, only to hear from the deadpan security guard on the second floor that he “had no idea of any draft at ESPN.” A phone call later, we realized we had returned to the site of the previous draft but that we were across town from this year’s draft location – the commissioner’s apartment. Amid the chaos of drafting by cell phone from a bus for the first thirty to forty minutes, Dad made good on his promise to buy any superstar whose name I would recognize; Todd Helton for $40? Maybe. David Wright for close to the same amount? Surely. Carlos Delgado for $45? Why not? We didn’t have a list of sleepers, or even a list of players we wanted, but it really didn’t matter at the time.

One league led to another. To my friends, my growing obsession, fueled by my interest in sabermetrics and the acquisition of MLB Season Pass and NBA League Pass subscriptions on our TV at home, looked an awful lot like a gambling addiction. My pal Max teased me. “You know it’s a growing problem, how much money you bet on sports?”

But it was just a deeper way of connecting to the game, incentive to watch as much baseball as I could, and a little reward for all the hours I devoted to it. I had watched the sport through the prism of the Yankees, which meant the AL East. Soon after I began playing fantasy baseball, though, I found myself flush with knowledge about the NL West. The money was a factor in my love of fantasy leagues—free leagues were much less interesting, after all, with owners regularly dropping out—but what appealed to me most is the chance to match wits and baseball knowledge with grown-ups.

* * *

Dad and I talked fantasy baseball while watching the Yankee games during dinners and my Mom suffered through the discussions. I continued to bounce ideas off him – “How does Ryan Howard for a cheap Aroldis Chapman sound?” – and we kept the Fleder Mice in conversations through our successes and our failures. He taught me the importance of keeping cheap speed (hello, $3 Angel Pagan), and how clean innings from a relief pitcher can pile up to provide more value than a starting pitcher who works every fifth day (meet a $2 Rafael Betancourt, and compare him to a $30 Josh Johnson) and as a result of the anecdotes of Roto wisdom he provided, I grew fascinated with the ins-and-outs of both the fantasy game and baseball itself.

Fantasy baseball appealed to me like nothing else I’d ever done, and playing the silly little game made me realize what my dream job in life would be. But with 30 General Managers in MLB and close to 7 billion people in the world, the odds are stacked against me. Even if I shorten the odds by accounting for only the roughly 300 million people in the U.S., my chances of actually running a big league team when I’m older are slim.

I continue to play the fantasy game for the same reason Dan Okrent invented it and my dad participated in the first place. When you can’t play baseball any more, because of arthritis or fear of the fastball, and when you get bored of watching your Cubs lose every year or your Yankees cruise to the postseason almost without fail, and when you itch for your favorite team to make a blockbuster trade, you can turn to your imagination. Dad may not be heaven-bound for creating a Rotisserie monster, but I love him for showing me how to play. And without jumping to conclusions, it looks like we’re going to finish in first place in our AARP league this year.

Nick Fleder is a high school junior who roots tirelessly for the New York Yankees. Fantasy sports are currently his only form of income.

Another study for Louise de Broglie. By Ingres (1845)

Take a minute, or seven, to enjoy one of the great New Yorkers of them all.

We miss ya, George.

Bombers go for the sweep as C.C. guns for win number 20.

Sic ’em, champ and:

Let’s Go Yanks!

[Photo Credit: Joel Zimmer]

Yanks are back in the playoffs as they rally to beat the Rays, 4-2. Cano+Mo=Good to Go. Sox fans everywhere breath a sigh of relief.

The Bombers’ magic number to clinch the AL East is three, to make the playoffs, it’s two.

It’ll be Hector Noesi and not Phil Hughes.

Gardner CF
Jeter SS
Cano DH
Rodriguez 3B
Swisher RF
Posada 1B
Jones LF
Nunez 2B
Romine C

Never mind the jokes about the “Headline,” Beavis:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Muggleborn]

Why not? I’d try it. Thank you, Smitten Kitchen.

“Study for Louise de Broglie,” By Ingres (1845)

Since we’re talking “Miami Vice” and the 1980s…

The Big Leap

By John Schulian

The fact that I lived through my experience at “L.A. Law” and had an on-screen writing credit to show for it gave me a seal of approval: “You worked for Steven Bochco? You’re just the guy we’ve been looking for.” It didn’t seem to matter that I’d just hit town and barely knew my hip pocket from a teakettle when it came to screenwriting. That’s how much clout the man had.

Steven made the call that got me in the door with his mentor, Bill Sackheim, at Universal. Sackheim was an embraceable curmudgeon who’d been through the wars in both TV and movies, writing westerns for Audie Murphy and Joel McCrea, producing and co-writing “Rambo,” and dealing with the nightmare that was Sally Field in her “Gidget” days. It didn’t take long for me to realize that time spent with him would be an education, and believe me, I needed educating, especially in the art of constructing a story for the screen.

But while I was trying to develop an idea for a Sackheim project about newspaper reporters, I got a call from a young “Miami Vice” writer named Mike Duggan. I’d met him at Jacob Epstein’s 30th birthday part, and here he was not three weeks later, telling me his boss was looking for someone to help write a two-parter about boxing. Once again the stars were aligned.

In less than two hours, I was in “Vice’s” offices–Building 69 on the Universal lot–meeting Dick Wolf, who was running the writing staff. The very same Dick Wolf who would go on to create “Law & Order” and all its spinoffs. He’d come over from “Hill Street Blues,” where he had clashed famously with the brilliant but erratic David Milch. In his spare time, he was producing two movies he’d written. I don’t know when he slept, but he always walked around grinning like the kid who got the most toys at Christmas.

I shook hands with Dick, and then he introduced me to an amiable, prematurely gray guy who was just about to leave: Kerry McCluggage. Kerry was “Vice’s” supervising producer that afternoon; two days later he was named president of Universal Television. Just like that, I was on a first-name basis with one of the most powerful people in the business. When I’d bump into him on the lot, he’d always say hello and ask about the show, as if I really knew anything about what was going on.

On that first Saturday, however, all that mattered was making a good impression and getting the assignment. I spun a couple yarns about Muhammad Ali and then a few about Don King, and I knew I had scored when Dick showed me the story for the first of the two boxing episodes and asked what I thought of it. I pointed out a few things he had wrong and he didn’t try to debate me, didn’t even flinch; he just fixed them. Then he said, “Okay, we need the script by Tuesday.”

Dick looked at me, still grinning, but there was a question in his eyes that I have to believe involved whether or not I would run out of his office screaming when I heard the deadline. He was asking me to do a rush job, but I’d spent 16 years in newspapers doing rush jobs. This would simply be one for higher stakes.

“Fine,” I said.

“Then you do acts two and three. I’ll do one and four.”

The race was on. I hustled back to Le Parc, where I was staying again, and started hammering away on my Olivetti. I didn’t stop until Tuesday morning when Dick swung by the hotel and I ran out the front door to hand him what I had written. A couple of hours later, he called to say I had passed my trial by fire.

I should point out that the script Dick and I lashed together in three days wouldn’t be the one we shot. It would simply be something the production team in Miami could work off for casting, location scouting, and that sort of thing. While all that was being taken care of, Dick and I went to work on a rewrite that was a far better piece of work.

“Miami Vice” was in its third season when I showed up, and no longer had the heat it did when its stars, Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas, made the cover of Time and established Crockett and Tubbs in the national lexicon. But I was still in tall clover. I didn’t even mind that I was working in a spare office full of the empty cardboard boxes that signified the previous occupant’s failure. Every time I finished rewriting a scene, I’d trot it down to Dick’s office. Halfway through the process, he looked at me (grinning, of course) and said, “I don’t know where you learned to do it, but you know how to get into a scene and out of a scene.” All those years of reading W.C. Heinz, Jimmy Breslin and Gay Talese, the masters of the scene in journalistic form, were paying off. They had always relied on the tools of drama–character, dialogue, the kinetic energy of the moment–and just as I had followed their lead in my newspaper and magazine work, now I was doing it in a medium where the scene was everything.

There were other links to my not-so-distant past as well. Our cast featured rowdy heavyweight Tex Cobb, Olympic champion Mark Breland, and the one and only Don King. I put words I’d heard King say in his character’s mouth, and he made a hash of them. Stuff like “afoxanado” and “low and scurrilous cad.” I even had him say someone was “matriculating on the veranda.” Everything was set up to make King look great. And he whiffed, the big goof.

Cobb was an infinitely better thespian, which should come as no surprise to anyone who remembers him in the Coen brothers’ “Raising Arizona.” My fondest memory of him, of course, is that he was the first man I killed on TV. But far more thrilling than that was hearing Crockett and Tubbs saying my words, and seeing the stylized shot of three killers swaggering through a gymnasium door with bad intentions, lit perfectly, with clouds of man-made fog wafting in for atmosphere. It was pure “Miami Vice.”

I got all those mental keepsakes, and a full-time job, too. Dick hired me as a staff writer, and then he and I set to work on the second of the boxing episodes. Or maybe we wrote part two first. Things were moving so fast that they blur in my memory. The one thing I’m absolutely certain of is how lucky I was as I sat in my office, now clear of boxes, and banged out my half of the next script. Without realizing it, I had hopscotched past thousands of writers who would have sold body parts and family members to be where I was.

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

We already knew that Ivan Nova has pitched well enough to be the Yankees number two starter. David Cone said on the broadcast tonight that young pitchers often start at home in the playoffs but that Nova has pitched even better on the road. So there’s that. And we know the kid makes us feel better than Bartolo, Hughes, Fab Five Freddy or A.J. Burnett. Against the Rays, he showed us why as he had a slider working, threw a sharp breaking curve ball and the heater was moving, clocked around 94 mph. He didn’t putz around and threw strikes. Mmm, mmm, good.

And when he ran into trouble, Nova didn’t panic. He gave up a lead off single in the top of the seventh, leading 5-0. Then a phantom hbp call put another runner on before Nova walked the number nine hitter to load ’em up. But he got Desmond Jennings out on a fly ball to Brett Gardner in left and then “escaped unscathed,” as they like to say, when B.J. Upton grounded into an inning-ending double play. Good thing too because although a five-run lead might sound like plenty, the Yanks left 637 men on base over the first six innings (for good measure they left the bases juiced again in the seventh and two men on in the eighth). Curtis Granderson did most of the damage with three hits, including two doubles, and four RBI. Eric Chavez also had an RBI base hit.

Nova lasted through two outs in the eighth, gave up a hit and Boone Logan got the final out. Luis Ayala came on to pitch in the ninth and the first pitch he threw was smacked right back at him. Ayala got a glove on it and the ball continued on past him. Robinson Cano moved to his right, slowed down to make sure his timing was right, fielded the ball, turned his body and side-armed the ball to first in time for the out. It’s a play that has become Cano’s signature move and man, does he ever look smooth making it. Always tops it off with a big smile too. After a walk, Jeter started a slick 5-4-3 double play to end it. Mark Teixeira with the beautiful scoop–and he had a couple of those tonight.

Final Score: Yanks 5, Rays 0.

And the magic number to clinch a playoff spot is down to two.

[Photo Credit: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm]

Yanks and Rays start a four-game serious at the Stadium tonight.

Cliff’s got the preview.

1. Jeter SS
2. Granderson CF
3. Teixeira 1B
4. Rodriguez DH
5. Cano 2B
6. Swisher RF
7. Chavez 3B
8. Martin C
9. Gardner LF

Never mind the scoreboard:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Over at Grantland, Michael Krause has a story about a real-life Crash Davis:

“Every year,” Chase Lambin said, “I think, ‘This is the year. This is the year it’s going to happen.'”

He’s played in Brooklyn, Port St. Lucie, Binghamton, Norfolk, Zebulon, N.C., Albuquerque, Japan, Syracuse, and now Rochester. He’s played in more than 1,000 games. He’s been up to bat more than 4,000 times. He’s been an All-Star in Class A, in Double-A, in Triple-A. He’s never made it to the major leagues. He turned 32 in July.

He walked out of the clubhouse and through the tunnel to the dugout and onto the field to stretch. He jogged to a spot in shallow center and knelt in the grass and said a short prayer. This was how he started the last day of his 10th season in professional baseball.

I think Krause is trying too hard here. The language is simple and blunt to the point of distraction. He is clearly a good writer and I understand why he’d want to keep the prose spare, but it came across to me as  self-conscious. But I don’t think the minimal style–which is the kind of writing I usually like–spoils the story and I felt like I was there in the locker room with Lambin. Man, what a life.

[Drawing by Ronnie Joyner]

G. D. Spradlin died this summer and over at the wonderful site,  Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, you’ll find a nice tribute to the actor.

In case you missed it, check out Taylor Branch’s story about the same of college sports over at The Atlantic:

“I’m not hiding,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.”

Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. These were eminent reformers—among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors. The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education.

“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”

Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

The piece is long but terrific.

“Drapery Study for a Seated Figure,” By Leonardo Da Vinci (1470)

For reals. Bow down.

Food 52 has got seven dishes for you to make like you’re in Southeast Asia.

Over at New York Magazine, Will Leitch weighs in on the Yanks:

This year has been monotonous, dull, and seemingly preordained, which is to say it has been the platonic ideal of a Yankees season. The last time the Yankees weren’t in first or second place in the AL East was April 8, when they were a game and a half behind the Blue Jays. The rest of the season, the team has been comfortably ensconced in playoff position, knowing, without much doubt, that they would be playing into October. There were a few bumps along the way, but minor ones, nothing to concern anyone. Some Yankees fans might grouse about the rotation, but all any fan can hope for his team is to secure a spot in the postseason, and the Yankees have had theirs secured for months. Most of the year has felt like one long twiddling of thumbs until the weather started getting cold and the games started mattering again.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because that’s what the Yankees 2010 season was like. And it’s what the Yankees 2009 season was like. For three consecutive years, the Yankees’ regular season has been an amiable slog. Since the 2008 season, the one year the Yankees missed the playoffs entirely (a disappointment the Yankees took in understated stride, spending $423.5 million on three free agents and opening the following April one of the most extravagant, expensive sports stadiums in the world), the Yankees haven’t had to worry about that happening. They haven’t had to worry about anything. It’s all you could want. Three boring, easy, calm, dominant years when drama is at a minimum. Boring, easy, calm, and dominant: This is becoming the signature trait of the Joe Girardi era. I feel comfortable now calling it an era.

[Photo Credit: N.Y Daily News]