The Yankees led 6-2 going into the eighth inning this afternoon, Bartolo Colon having out-performed Gio Gonzalez. Robertson-Rivera and Say Goodnight Gracie, right? Except it didn’t go down like that. At least it wasn’t smoothness as usual.
David Robertson gave up back-to-back doubles to start the inning and then he walked Josh Willingham. Now, it was 6-3. He rallied to strike out David Dejesus and got Connor Jackson to pop out in foul ground and was ahead of Kurt Suzuki but couldn’t put him away as Suzuki doubled to right. One run scored but Willingham was held at third. And that was the end of Robertson’s afternoon. He walked back to the Yankee dugout and kicked bench in frustration.
Enter Sandman, on the early side. Rivera threw two pitches and got a broken bat ground ball to second. Zip, zip.
The Yanks scored a run in the bottom of the inning and led 7-4. Rivera got a got a ground out to start the ninth but then Jemel Weeks singled up the middle. Coco Crisp followed with a ground ball to Robinson Cano’s left. The Yankee second basemen reached down for it but couldn’t grab it–and even if he had, it would have been a close play at first.
Godzilla Matsui was next and he singled to right and the bases were loaded.
Rivera got ahead of Willingham 1-2 but couldn’t put him away and finally left a cutter out over the plate. Willingham hit a line drive to left that dropped in front of Brett Gardner who was playing deep. A run scored and now it was 7-5. Nail-biting time in the Bronx with Dejesus up. On the 1-1 pitch, he hit a line drive down the first base line. It was right at Mark Teixeira, who made the catch, stepped on first, and then Frank Sinatra started to sing. Mo looked up at the sky.
Frustrating loss for the Yanks yesterday. 4-3. They got out of bases loaded jams in the sixth and in the ninth and had the tying run on base a few times, but came up short. Nick Swisher hit a long home right that bounced off the facade of the upper deck in right but the game can be summed up in the final at bat. Robinson Cano was up with Jeter at third. The count was 1-1 when Cano raised his arm to the home plate ump for time. He was too late and time was not granted. The pitch came and Cano, unsettled, swung. It happened too fast; he didn’t mean to swing. But he did and hit an easy ground ball to short for the final out.
The five-year saga is a story of a giant mistake of a contract and an overmatched pitcher, a huge organization digging in and a quiet, somewhat mysterious Japanese pitcher with a sense of honor and a durable love of the game. The Yankees made it pretty clear Igawa would never pitch again in the Bronx, but they were determined that he pitch somewhere for his $4-million-a-year salary. They tried to return him to Japan, too. Igawa refused to go, standing fast to his childhood dream of pitching in the American big leagues.
And so, the stalemate — remarkable, if almost entirely un-remarked upon — continues.
The Yankees let him gobble up innings before small crowds in distant outposts as a cavalcade of younger prospects push past him on their way to Yankee Stadium. Igawa never complains, and in a tribute to either willpower or lower level longevity, he has set farm system pitching records. And with just a few months left on his contract, he still dreams of the major leagues, if no longer as a Yankee.
About two weeks ago, on a rare day off, Igawa celebrated his 32nd birthday alone at his Manhattan apartment. He did not consider attending a Yankees game in the Bronx, nor did he tune them in on his television.
“I don’t watch their games anymore,” Igawa said. “I never follow them.”
On the hottest day at Yankee Stadium since 1999 the Yankees and A’s play for close to four hours. The game was almost as brutal as the weather but there is little for Yankee fans to complain about because their team put a beatin’ on the A’s to the tune of 17-7. Mark Cahill is a good pitcher, honest, but he doesn’t fair well against the Yankees and they crushed him last night. Dig the box score for the gory details.
If there was one concern for the Yanks it was that Phil Hughes didn’t pitch long enough to get the win. But Nick Swisher homered and had five RBI, and Mark Teixeira hit a grand slam. Also, Derek Jeter batted second again last night, this time with Curtis Granderson in the lineup (Grandy hit third).
Tonight gives a rematch of C.C. Sabathia and James Sheilds. Great as the big man is, my hunch says that C.C. will finally have a bad outing. Yeah, I know it’s his birthday. I know the Rays aren’t a good hitting team. What the hell am I talking about? Mabye the heat is getting to me. So here’s hoping I don’t know dick and that my hunch is all kinds of wrong.
For all the hubbub of constant sound it is amazing how clearly the crack of a bat, the whoosh of a pitch (at least from the powerhouse Sabathia), and the leathery thud of the ball smothered in the catcher’s mitt cut through the textures. And if the hum of chattering provides the unbroken timeline and undulant ripple of this baseball symphony, the voices that break through from all around are like striking, if fleeting, solo instruments.
The most assertive soloists are the vendors. My favorite was a wiry man with nasal snarl of a voice who practically sang the words “Cracker Jack” as a three-note riff: two eighth notes on “Cracker,” followed by a quarter note on “Jack,” always on a falling minor third. (Using solfège syllables, think “sol, sol, mi.”) After a while I heard his voice drifting over from another section, and he had transposed his riff down exactly one step.
Mark Teixeira comes across as polite and vanilla in interviews but he’s go the redass on the field. He plays hard, is a good fielder, and is easy to root for. I wonder if that’s the reason why he doesn’t face more criticism for his declining offensive game. He doesn’t get ripped in the papers. There are no vicious campaigns against him on-line. But the truth is, Teixeira is getting paid to be a superstar and .242/.345/.499 just doesn’t cut it.
I think David Price will pitch a great game tonight, don’t you? I’m thinking he’s got some payback on his mind.
Here’s the lineup:
Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Russell Martin C
Andruw Jones DH
Eduardo Nunez 3B
Brett Gardner LF
I’m old-school. That is to say, I’m a hidebound, head-in-the-sand, troglodyte traditionalist. Especially when it comes to baseball.
I was vehemently opposed to the entire idea of including a wild card in the playoffs. I hated the idea of inter-league play with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. I even viewed the original idea of dividing the leagues into divisions, a-way back in 1969, with a gimlet eye.
(One exception: I have always liked the designated hitter, mostly because I can’t stand watching professional athletes do something they can’t do, i.e., pitchers trying to hit. We don’t make linebackers kick field goals or goalkeepers—hockey or soccer—take penalty shots. Do those games suffer for it?)
So I’m none too happy with the latest proposals to expand the baseball playoffs yet again—and not just because they’re likely to extend the season through Thanksgiving.
Wait ’til you get to the Salsa Division and the Keillor-Terkel Raconteur Division. It’s a hoot.
Where there are sports writers, there is booze. It’s been that way since the first scribe raced a deadline and decided he deserved a pop afterward. Or maybe he was drinking while he committed his deathless prose to paper, just a little something to kill the pain of knowing that the desk was going to make a hash of it. All these years later, I’ve seen it work both ways, heard the funny stories that the sauce inspired, and the sad ones, too.
I was supposed to give a certain shaggy wordsmith a ride to the airport the day after Sugar Ray Leonard’s first comeback, in Worcester, Mass. But my hirsute friend never showed up in the hotel lobby, and he didn’t answer his room phone, so I had to take off without him. The next week I called him at his paper to make sure he was all right, and he told me the tale of how he’d fallen in with, if I recall correctly, a toothless barfly and her one-armed boyfriend. (The mind boggles at the proposition they must have put before him.) Somewhere along the line, they slipped him a mickey, stole all his money, and left him unconscious in a fleabag hotel. It was like listening to Charles Bukowski when he told the story, laughing and coughing, savoring every dirt-bag detail. Some guys you just can’t derail.
And then there was Pete Axthelm, a genuinely good soul and a great talent who was undone by alcohol. How lucky we are that he wrote “The City Game” when he was young and the lost nights had yet to take their toll. Ax wasn’t even 50 when he died, but in the clips of his final TV appearances, he could have passed for 75. That’s not the way his friends want to remember him. Better to think of the big smile on his face as he cashed a winning ticket at Churchill Downs.
The curious thing is, sports writers of my generation will tell you it was the old-timers who drank like they had hollow legs. The king of them, as far as I could tell, was Red Smith. As Wilfred Sheed once said, “Weight for age, Red was the greatest drinker I’ve ever seen.” He favored Scotch, lots of it, but only after he had worked so hard on his column that he had sweated through his Brooks Brothers oxford-cloth shirt. He was lifting a glass to his parched lips after the Preakness one year when his hands trembled so badly that Bill Nack’s wife grew visibly alarmed. Red put down his glass, took her hand, and, patting it gently, said, “Don’t worry, dear, it’s an old Irish affliction.”
With drinking, as with writing, the wisest thing to do was to admire Red, not compete with him. In Montreal during the 1981 baseball playoffs, I wound up at dinner with him, Roger Angell, Tom Boswell, Jane Leavy, and Mike Downey – not a bad lineup, huh? – and Red got into the Scotch pretty good. Before the evening was over, he was telling us about the annual Christmas party the New York papers used to have and how people would rewrite carols and holiday songs to make them fit the occasion. And then he sang “Hark the Herald Tribune” in that wonderful old man’s voice of his. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I’d taped him.
Myself, I’ve never been much of a drinker. Don’t like the taste of the hard stuff, and I can go years between beers. I’ll drink wine with dinner, but that’s about it. The last time I got stupid with alcohol was at a party in Baltimore in the early 70s. I drank bourbon from the bottle until I was sufficiently inspired to do somersaults down the hallway of a friend’s apartment. A nice lady drove me home in the wee small hours of that cold winter’s night but refused to come inside with me, if you can imagine that. I went into a full pout and curled up on my front porch, saying I’d just fall asleep there and probably freeze to death. In her infinite wisdom, the nice lady said, “Have it your way,” and drove off. Eventually, I stumbled inside and didn’t come out for two days. I was so hung over, my eyelashes hurt.
It’s a good thing I knew I couldn’t run with the big dogs before I hit Chicago. Otherwise, I might have drowned in what the city’s newspaper booze hounds called the Bermuda Triangle of Drinking, three bars they tried to take down to the last drop every night: O’Rourke’s, Riccardo’s, and the Old Town Ale House. You could get decent Italian food at Riccardo’s, so I ate there once in a while, and I loved the jukebox at O’Rourke’s – it was one for the ages, with classical music, Miles Davis, and Hank Williams side by side. But get stupid drunk at any of those joints? No thanks. I just listened to the stories they generated, like the one about the night Nelson Algren and a Sun-Times columnist named Tom Fitzpatrick threw drinks at each other. Or were they spitting? Hell, I can’t remember. And if Algren and Fitz were still around, they might not remember, either.
All this happened just before newspapers were overrun by tight-assed careerists, so there were still reporters and editors who kept bottles in their desks in case they didn’t have time to duck out for a shot and a beer. And I’m not just passing along the legend. I saw it for myself one Friday night at the Sun-Times when I walked into the city room to get a drink of water. There was a long-in-tooth reporter with a quarter-full bottle of gin in one hand and a bottle with a few splashes of vermouth in the other. He was pouring one into the other, back and forth, back and forth, when he looked up at me with a glassy-eyed smile and said, “Welcome to my laboratory.”
