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[Picture by my man Nynex]

Can you be a slut for a restaurant? Course you can. And that’s just what I am for L’Artusi, the Italian restaurant in the village. It’s run by chef Gabe Thompson and his wife, Katherine, who does the desserts. They are s0me kind of talented pair, boy.

All of the food is tasty. I’ve mentioned the crispy potatoes and the spaghetti with green chilies before.

The olive oil cake alone is reason to make the trip. And so is this salad with tomatoes and watermelon over a slab of pancetta. The saltiness of the pork is balanced by the sweetness of the watermelon, the acid from the tomatoes, and there is an extra kick from little cubes of pickled watermelon rinds. It’s the kind of dish that makes you wish summer would last indefinitely.

 Oh, and the service is warm, the wait staff knowledgeable and friendly. Again, can’t recommend this jernt enough. And if you like it, dig Dell’Anima, also in the west village, owned by the same good folks.

Represent.

In light of the news that Derek Jeter and Minka Kelly have split up, please see Jon’s New York Minute post from yesterday. Leave a comment while you are there if you are so inclined.

Turn the volume up. The song is best played loudly.

[Picture by Bags]

It’s dark and raining in New York. This might be a tough one to get in.

If they play, we’ll be rootin’:

Let’s Go Yank-ees.

Update: The start of the game is delayed. Check this out for fun while we wait.

[Photo Credit: Joel Zimmer]

My old pal Ras Beats has a new single out featuring two legendary rappers:

Side A:

Side B:

Check out this fine portrait of the 2011 Dodgers by Lee Jenkins in the current issue of Sports Illustrated.

Stow was in a coma. Half his skull had been removed to allow his brain to swell. He required seven forms of medication to limit his seizures. “He came as close to not making it as you can come,” says Dr. Gabriel Zada, Stow’s neurosurgeon at USC. His parents, Dave and Ann, and his sisters, Bonnie and Erin, spent seven hours a day at the hospital. At night they retreated to the downtown Marriott and toasted “the Great Hodge,” a nickname Stow gave himself as a boy. On April 6, a candlelight vigil was held outside the hospital. Hundreds attended, including Dodgers officials and a local talk-show host on KFI 640 AM named Bill Carroll. Ann invited Carroll to Stow’s room. Standing next to the bed, where Stow was covered in tubes and bandages, Carroll decided to make this story his own. He led his show with it most afternoons. He had Zada on as a regular guest. He sometimes took calls for three hours about the case, and when he went off the air, phone lines were still jammed. Everyone seemed to have survived a traumatic ordeal at Dodger Stadium, and they knew just who was responsible. “It was a convergence of two stories,” Carroll says. “People said, ‘I knew this would happen because McCourt let the team go downhill and security do the same.'”

Even after the Dodgers announced, on April 4, a $25,000 reward for information on Stow’s attackers, talk-radio host Tom Leykis pledged $50,000 of his own money in an attempt to embarrass McCourt. Leykis was also harassed at Dodger Stadium, by two fans during a game in 2009, and has not been back since. “I grew up in New York so I’m used to going to Yankee Stadium and seeing drunken louts threaten each other,” Leykis says. “Then I moved to L.A., and it was much different. Dodger Stadium was more like Disneyland. You have fun and feel safe and drift off into this dreamlike world. But now we’ve got this carpetbagger from Boston who never took the time to understand the deep connection of Dodger Stadium to Southern California. I’m not a dramatic person, but it hurts my heart. It kills me.”

Dodgers fans were not the only ones desperate to rid themselves of the carpetbagger. Commissioner Bud Selig told confidants that the Stow beating was “the final straw” for McCourt. By the time the Dodgers returned home from their first road trip, on April 14, Selig had dispatched a six-man task force to Los Angeles, led by MLB executive vice president John McHale Jr., to evaluate stadium security. McCourt’s hold on the franchise he had diminished was slipping.

Jenkins is an excellent reporter with a smooth prose style who has become one of SI’s top talents (he’s got two features this week). This is a long piece but worth reading.

Mike Flanagan, a former pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles–and a damned good one–is dead.

Mike Flanagan, left, with his manager, Earl Weaver

He was tough on the Yanks. I remember watching him pitch when I was a kid. Sad news, indeed.

[Photo Credit: Yahoo!]

‘Tis the season.

At the famrer’s market this morning.

Alex Rodriguez is still out, but C.C. is on the hill.

While we wait for the game to start, check out this interview with Marc Carig over at The Yankee Analysts. Nice job by Carig and Moshe Mandel.

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

Never mind the preamble: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Drawing by Larry Roibal]

“Standing Nude” by Richard Diebenkorn (1966)

Man, he had chops. I just love seeing all the work he did on this picture. I could look at this all day.

Yeah, I know it’s the off-season, but still, great is great:

Dig this: 10 commonly misused words. Helpful. I often confuse “bemused” with “nonplussed” and am never exactly sure when to use either, though I think they are great words. “Disinterested” is a precise and wonderful word too.

[Photo Credit: Abelardo Morrell]

Devils on Horseback at The Spotted Pig. That’s a prune wrapped in bacon. May sound off-putting but believe me, it’s delicious.

The Breaking Point

By John Schulian

As much as I detested how Murdoch had cheapened the Sun-Times, I kept pushing myself to write the best column I could. For a while, I might even have succeeded. But things were too different and too weird for someone as irascible as I am to keep his mouth shut for long. The paper’s new editor wanted to cut a wide swath in Chicago society, and his wife was just as pathetic and desperate for the spotlight as he was. The new sports editor was a young dolt who seemed to spend most of his time sniffing around a pretty copy clerk. I’d worked for a string of first-rate sports editors before he showed up, guys who wouldn’t have hired him to fetch coffee, and here he was acting like he knew something.

One day he made the mistake of asking what I thought of the changes Murdoch’s infidels had made to the paper. When I told him, he looked like I’d hit him between the eyes with a sack of wet brownies. I’m sure he scampered off to let his bosses know that I hadn’t drunk the Kool-Aid. That’s the way they operated. I’m surprised we weren’t required to take a loyalty oath.

It’s safe to say I wasn’t the only one at the Sun-Times who loathed Murdoch and his henchmen. But people needed a paycheck. They had families, mortgages, bills. They needed the work. And if the people they worked for were a bunch of bums, so be it. They would soldier on and hope for a better tomorrow.

I was one of them until I came home from covering the 1984 U.S. Olympic trials in Los Angeles. I’d been fighting a virus for weeks and I felt like dog meat. But I’d never called in sick in Chicago and I wasn’t about to start now. It was a Friday and I went to Wrigley Field and interviewed Ryne Sandberg, who was having his breakout season with the Cubs. Then I came back to the office to turn the interview into my Sunday column. It was noisy in sports, so I took refuge in the features department, which was empty except for two deskmen laying out the Sunday sports section. All was right with the world until this guy I’d never seen before walked up and started insulting me, saying my column wasn’t any good and I was overpaid. It turned out that he was a features editor who’d been imported from Murdoch’s paper in San Antonio. Maybe the editors there could get away with acting like drill instructors and prison guards, but this was a first for me.

I should have just hauled off and hit the son of a bitch. But I’d been ambushed. I was stunned. On top of that, I was so weary and sick that I just wanted to go home and crawl into bed. It was all I could do to call him a weasel and a motherfucker and invite him to go to the editor who had decided to pay me all that money and get me fired.

The deskmen, both gentle souls, were gob-smacked, which, in retrospect, was the only amusing thing about this episode. I don’t think they realized their jaws were on their chests until Murdoch’s provocateur left and I finished my column and drove home to Evanston, about a half hour from the office. The longer I drove, however, the angrier I got. This was before cell phones so I had to wait until I walked I the door to call the office and ask if that mouthy prick was still around. He was. “Don’t let him go anywhere,” I said.

There are people who will tell you I went back to the office that night and punched him out. I didn’t. I realize this will come as a disappointment to both those who regard me as some kind of a hero and some kind of a lunatic, but it’s true. I’ve often wished that I had beaten the son of a bitch so badly that his unborn children felt it, but I’m not nearly that tough. Almost everything I’ve punched in my life has been inanimate. I do, however, have a temper, and I refuse to be bullied, and that’s why I returned with malice aforethought. But when I saw the guy for the second time, a voice in my head started saying, “You don’t want to go to jail, you don’t want to get sued.” Hardly the thoughts you associate with someone on the verge of violence, but there you have them.

I settled for calling the guy every kind of a gutless motherfucker I could think of, hoping he’d throw the first punch. But his mouth had written a check his ass couldn’t cash. He kept backing up, and just as he was about to turn and run, I grabbed him – one hand on his collar, one on his belt — and threw him over the nearest desk. He bounced once, as I recall. Then I walked around the desk, picked up him, and threw him back where I had found him. The only real satisfaction I got was the expression on his face. He looked like the noose had just been put around his neck and I was the hangman.

The next day, the sports editor called to say I’d been suspended me without pay. In doing so, the paper violated its contract with the Newspaper Guild, which said I was entitled to a hearing before any action could be taken. The Sun-Times responded by firing me. But the Guild fought the good fight in arbitration and I won a healthy settlement. It came on top of a different kind of reward from the people in the features department who had been bullied by the son of a bitch I bounced around. He had been making their lives a misery from the day he showed up. To them, I’d struck a blow for justice.

My wife was less convinced of my virtues. I didn’t blame her. I still don’t. I wasn’t easy to live with in those days. I was either on the road for work or at home raging about a computer that had crashed or a column I’d written poorly or a typo the copy desk hadn’t caught or . . . Jesus, I was a runaway train. The blow-up at the Sun-Times only added to my anger and my wife’s confusion and frustration. The strange thing was, we never argued. Maybe we should have. But my being fired was where our paths diverged for keeps. We divorced quietly, amicably, painfully.

For the rest of the summer, I rode my bike up and down the North Shore, from Evanston to Highland Park and back, always by myself. I had a million thoughts running through my head and no concrete plans. About the only person I saw on a regular basis was a big-hearted used-book dealer named Roger Carlson. He had a little shop in an alley in Evanston. It didn’t have any windows, so Roger had one painted next to his front door. The window looked in on a bookstore, and there on the shelves, alongside Shakespeare and Dickens and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, was a book with a name on it that really didn’t belong there or, for the moment at least, anywhere else. My name.

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

Over at Pinstriped Bible, Steve Goldman asks: Why did Joe Girardi play for one run in a two-run game?

In the bottom of the ninth inning of Tuesday night’s game against the A’s at Yankee Stadium, the Yankees trailed 6-3 entering the frame. Jorge Posada led off with a solo home run off of A’s closer Andrew Bailey, closing the deficit to 6-4. Russell Martin followed with a double, and Brett Gardner reached on third baseman Scott Sizemore’s error, putting runners on first and second with no outs and bringing Derek Jeter to the plate.

Jeter is tremendously hot right now. He came into the game hitting .339 since returning from the disabled list and he went 3-for-3 with a walk prior to the ninth-inning plate appearance. Again, the Yankees needed not one run, but two. In baseball this year, teams that have put runners on first and second with no outs have scored an average of 1.4 runs, which is to say the Yankees stood a very good chance of scoring one run there and a solid chance at scoring another. Teams that have runners on second and third with one out see their expected runs go down to 1.3, a fractionally smaller number, but it’s still less of a chance to score. I leave it to you whether eliminating the double play was worth trading that fraction of a run as well as the possibility of having three chances to score those two runs instead of two. Again, we’re talking about old school Derek Jeter here, not April-June Jeter. The formerly ground-ball obsessed GDP expert has hit into just three twin killings in 40 games, the last one coming about two weeks ago. What do you do?

Girardi chose to take the bat out of Jeter’s hands.

I saw the King this morning. He was slinking after a squirrel. Then he saw me, came over, meowed, and let me pet him. Then he walked off and took a bath.

It’s good to be the King.

Bartolo “Diego Rivera’ Colon is on the mound tonight as the Yanks start a three-game series against the A’s at the Stadium.

Alex Rodriguez was a late scratch with a sore thumb. All the same, our purpose remains:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Note:  “The Watermelons” (1957) was Rivera’s final painting]