Word to Ron Darling.

After the usual sentimental events of Old Timers’ Day, which featured an extended and loving tribute to Gene Monahan, there was not much to cheer about for Yankee fans in the early going of their game against the Rockies this afternoon. Juan Nicasio retired the first thirteen Yankees and the Rockies had a 3-0 lead. Robinson Cano singled to break up the perfect game with one out in the fifth and Nick Swisher followed with a two-run homer into the right field bleachers. Jorge Posada was next and he hit a high home run and the game was tied. Just like that.

Ivan Nova wasn’t great but didn’t fall apart either. Ty Wigginton wore him out, that’s for sure. His second homer put the Rockies up 4-3 in the sixth, but the Yanks answered with single runs in the sixth, seventh and eighth. Alex Rodriguez tied it with an RBI single and Eduardo Nunez put them ahead for good with an RBI base hit of his own.

Perhaps the most encouraging performance came from Boone Logan who got three outs in the seventh. David Robertson pitched a scoreless eighth and won a long battle with Troy Tulowitzki to start the eighth. Onions.

Oh, know this: Tulo made a critical error in the bottom of the seventh but also made a sensational play look easy in the eighth when he fielded a ball, moving to his right and threw Nick Swisher out easily, from deep in the hole. Man, it was impressive.

And what better way to end a long afternoon love-in than with the Great One, Mariano Rivera?

Three up, three down. Three strikeouts. It never gets old as we savor the greatness that will never be replicated.

Final Score: Yanks 6, Rockies 4.

[Photo Credit: from the most cool site, I really Like the Rain]

Old Timers’ Day should prove to be especially sentimental this year with the Godfather Joe Torre in the House. Sweet Lou Piniella and Sweet Pea Bernie Williams will also be there.

Here are some pictures I took at last year’s Class Reunion:

Hot and sunny in New York. Nostalgia followed by Yanks and Rocks.

Enjoy everyone!

C.C. was everything we expect from him today. His stuff was dynamite and he pitched eight strong, allowing just one run and a walk while he struck out nine. The Yankees pounded the Rockies, 8-3. Six players had at least two hits, including an increasingly banged-up Alex Rodriguez, who is now hitting an even .300.

Yanks look to bounce back from last night’s disappointing loss with a win.

Never mind the pessimisim, C.C. is pitching:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Take me…

The bad A.J. Burnett showed up on Friday night–Bad A.J, Bad, Bad!–while the good Ubaldo Jimenez appeared for the Rockies–Bad A.J, Bad, Bad! The result was a 4-2 win for the Rockies. Yeah, five walks for Burnett just doesn’t cut it. About the only good thing to be said for the entire evening was that the Red Sox lost too, 3-1, in Pittsburgh. Oh, and if you are a Jason Giambi fan, and why the hell not, count me as one, you got to see the erstwhile Yankee have a good game. Giambi went 3-4 with a walk. He hit a monstrous home run into the right center field bleachers.

“I wasn’t touching the ground,” said Giambi, according to Brian Heyman. “I was excited. There’s an incredible energy playing in this stadium with the fans that they have here. It was like old times to have that opportunity to play in front of them again. I went up there, and I think he could’ve thrown the resin bag 2-and-0 and I would’ve swung at it. …

“I couldn’t have dreamed for a better game to have.”

Here’s hoping his sweet dreams lasted just one night.

[Picture by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images]

The Yanks vs. the Rockies. The Rocks? Okay…very well, then.

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

We’ll be rootin’:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Minh Dam]

Rest in Peace.

Okay, not only does Nicole Franzen run the dopealicious La Buena Vida food blog, but she also features beautiful photographs are her own site. Today is all about appreciating what Franzen brings to the world. It’s good n plenty on a rainy Friday in New York.

Anyone been to the New Amsterdam Market? I haven’t but just read about it at a cool food blog, La Buena Vida. Looks like it’s worth the trip.

Over at ESPN, Andrew Marchand has a piece on Jesus Montero:

Right now, there is one thing Montero is certainly not: He is not ready to start, let alone star, in the big leagues.

“It is all in becoming a first-rate professional and he is still in the middle of that process,” said Mark Newman, the Yankees’ senior vice president of baseball operations, who heads up the team’s minor leagues.

…Monte — as everyone in Scranton calls him — is developing at beautiful, tree-lined PNC Field in front of crowds that average around 4,000 fans per game. When you walk into the stadium a sign greets you, saying the Bronx is 128 miles away. Sometimes, it seems, that is where Montero’s head is located, too.

“I just get the feeling that Monte is so blessed physically — and I hate to say it — he is almost bored here in Triple-A,” said Scranton hitting coach Butch Wynegar, a former Yankees catcher. “Maybe if he went to the big leagues tomorrow, this kid might just go off and he just might lock in.”

Good morning beat fresh direct from Jack Curry:

In the first bit here, you’ll see the old H&H Bagels in the background as Henry Winkler and Shelley Long cross 80th street and Broadway:

Morning, Sunshine:

Here’s Margaret Atwood on what she reads:

I like to read at night before bed, too, though it can give you some pretty horrific nightmares–and a stiff neck, because of the position of your head.

Really, though, I will read anything at any time. If there’s nothing else available I will read airplane shopping magazines. You find out some pretty interesting things in there, actually. You think: “Somebody invented this. They actually sat in a room and invented it. And then they went out and raised the money and they manufactured it and now it’s in the airplane shopping magazine.” Boggles the mind.

I used to read the backs of cereal boxes but I’ve kind of exhausted their possibilities. Advertisement used to provide a lot more reading material than it does now‹ads have become too pictorial. They used to have a lot more print. They used to be more narrative. Story ads were still going strong in the forties, and to a certain extent in the fifties. I think it probably started to change in the sixties. They used to have little poems. They used to have quizzes.

I’m a reading junkie, I guess. It’s the fault of my upbringing. I was brought up in the north where there weren’t any other forms of media–other than print. I certainly learned my first French off the backs of cereal boxes. This is Canada: “Eh! Les enfants! Special offer. Collect the box tops.”

I think it’s curiosity that drives me to read. I don’t think “entertainment” quite covers it. It’s not that I’m indiscriminate in my appreciation–I like to feel that I can tell an apple from a pear, and I don’t expect from the pear what I might expect from the apple. In other words, if I’m reading Conan the Conqueror I’m not demanding that it be Middlemarch. They have different things to offer. But in some cases you get led to fine experiences through very devious pathways.

Pass the peas pasta (like they used to say).

Smitten Kitchen wins, and so do we.

Amedeo Modigliani painted the best babes.

“Just a Guy at Oxford” (Bill Bradley)

“The Great Wall of Boston” (The Green Monster)

“Sam, You Make the Ball too Small” (Sam McDowell)

“The King of the Jungle” (Walter O’Malley)

George Vecsey, right, with his arm around the wonderful Ray Robinson

I recently exchanged e-mails with George Vecsey, the veteran columnist for the New York Times, who started his career at Newsday under Mann.

Here’s our chat. Enjoy:

Bronx Banter: When Jack Mann took over the Newsday sports department was he influenced by any sports editors that came before him? I’m thinking of someone like Stanley Woodward.

George Vecsey: I don’t know. He came up through the news department at Newsday, had some college, was well read, surely knew about sports editors, but was so much an outsider that I doubt he would consider himself an acolyte of anybody.

BB: How would you describe to young readers what the climate of the press box was like in 1960? And how did Mann and “his Chipmunks” differ from the older writers?

GV: Well, the dichotomy was not as clear as I guess we would like to have thought. It may have been a function of age. But Isaacs and Len Shecter of the Post and Larry Merchant of the Philly Daily News were not children, and were capable of thinking for themselves, with Jack only part of it. The Chipmunks were young and energetic and brash. The split was probably on the same generational lines of the Kennedy-Nixon election – new vs. old (politics excluded). Even in 1960, some of us (me at least) were anticipating the forces of the mid-60’s in style and music and attitude. But we all were pretty traditional, except in comparison to the older writers, who were often hooked into the free drinks of the press room and the party line of the clubs they covered, or so we thought. Sounds pretty simplistic, looking back.

BB: Who else writing for the New York papers in the early 60s were like-minded? I’m thinking specifically of Shecter at the Post. Who else was part of the new breed?

GV: Len Shecter, Isaacs, Merchant, of course. And Stan Hochman A lot of the younger guys were Chipmunks just because we chattered a lot, and hung out together. Looking back, it would be hard to put one label on me, Steve, Maury Allen, Vic Ziegel, Phil Pepe, Paul Zimmerman, Joe Donnelly, Joe Gergen. We (or at least I did) admired Dick Young, who was no Chipmunk, but I knew him through my dad when I was a little kid, and Dick was very gracious to me when I came along as a young writer. I was friendly with older guys like Harold Rosenthal (more acerbic than any of us) and Barney Kremenko (a kind man, a friend), and I learned a lot from Leonard Koppett, one of the great people of the business, and I adored Jimmy Cannon. I don’t know that Bob Lipsyte considered himself a Chipmunk, but he and I hung out a lot in those days, and his excellent early work as a sports columnist (in his first tour of duty, I emphasize) re-defined the genre. So it’s hard to define Chipmunk, at this late date. Every generation has its new look. When I came back to Sports in 1980, there was Jane Gross, Allen Abel, Michael Farber, Jane Leavy, Phil Hersh, all good pals of mine. New faces.

BB: And now, the climate is different from then.

GV: The one difference between then and now was that everybody talked in the press box. Talked about the game. Argued about politics. Bickered about where we were going to dinner. Nowadays, the kids are all hunched over their machines, with headsets on, tweeting and facebooking and blogging and goodness knows what else. Nobody talks in the press box. I miss arguments. I miss human contact. I think we had more fun than the Thumb Generation. But the output in the New York Times is really good, probably better than ever, which is what matters.

(more…)

Michael Sokolove has a measured and insightful piece in the New York Times Magazine about aging athletes. Derek Jeter is a feature player:

The careers of elite athletes, enviable as they may be, are foreshortened versions of a human lifespan. Physical decline — in specific ways that affect what they do and who they are — begins for them before it does for normal people. The athletes themselves rarely see the beginnings of this process, or if they do, either do not acknowledge it or try to fight it off like just another inside fastball. They alter their training routines. Eat more chicken and fish, less red meat. They try to get “smarter” at their sport.

A great many of us, their fans, live in our own version of denial — even in this age of super-slow-motion replay and ever more granular statistical data. We want to think our favorite players have good years left, great accomplishments ahead of them, just as we would hope the same for ourselves. The writer Susan Jacoby, who happens to be a devoted baseball fan, is the author of “Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age.” “Fans don’t like to watch aging in these relatively young guys,” she told me. “It makes us uncomfortable. We think, If it happens to them, what the hell is going to happen to us?” Jacoby, a self-described insomniac who listens to sports-talk radio in the middle of the night, said she has been appalled at the “venom” she sometimes hears directed at Jeter. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘The hero is not performing.’ Well, he’s gotten older.”

Older, for ballplayers, begins much sooner than we think. “A lot of fans, if they really studied it, would be surprised at how early players really peak, especially hitters,” Jed Hoyer said when he spoke to me by phone from San Diego, where he is general manager of the Padres. Previously he was an executive with the Red Sox, one of the more data-driven franchises in baseball. “The years of 26 to 30 are usually the prime years,” Hoyer continued, “but you’ll see plenty of guys start to trend down, even if it’s subtle, before they’re 30.”

It is almost impossible to age gracefully as an everyday player. You can transition to a role player like Jason Giambi has done in Colorado, but Jeter is in a tough spot and Sokolove is dead-on in describing Jeter’s career as “charmed.” Yet Jeter’s relative good fortune has changed over the past year. Everything about him these days is touchy:

The prospect of this article did not sit well with the Yankees, or at least elements of its hierarchy. Jason Zillo, the team’s media director, would not grant me access to the Yankees’ clubhouse before games to do interviews. I have been a baseball beat writer, have written two baseball books and have routinely been granted clubhouse credentials for a quarter-century, as just about anyone connected to a reputable publication or broadcast outlet usually is. “We’re not interested in helping you, so why should I let you in?” Zillo said, before further explaining that he views his role as a “gatekeeper” against stories the Yankees would rather not see in print.

I was surprised that he would deny access to The New York Times Magazine. But if I learned anything over the course of working on this article, it is that aging is a sensitive issue. It happens to everyone, but that doesn’t mean we’re comfortable with it. Jeter has become a lightning rod on the topic. We see him getting old, but we’re supposed to pretend he is just in a prolonged slump. “The reason the response to athletes’ getting older is so powerful is that the decline occurs in public,” Susan Jacoby told me. “We don’t see it when a man has trouble with an erection for the first time. Or a mathematics professor forgets something. It’s not Alzheimer’s, but it’s age, and it’s difficult. But it’s private.”

This is a long story but well-worth reading. Fine job by Sokolove.

[Photo Credit: David Goldman/AP]

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