Blog Archives

Man, it’s cool and beautiful in New York. Breezy. Wonderful. Happy Friday.

[Picture by Ondun]

Here’s an appreciation of John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman by Ralph Gardner Jr. in the Wall Street Journal:

I’m a Mets fan, yet my favorite announcers are the Yankees’ John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman.

I can already hear the groans from baseball aficionados, so let’s clear the air before we get started. Yes, Mr. Sterling’s silken delivery owes more to the golden age of radio, or perhaps Ted Baxter of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” than it does gladiatorial ESPN. He’s been known to call home runs—”It is high, it is far, it is gone!”—only to have to take it back when the balls turn out to be playable. And Ms. Waldman might have momentarily lost perspective when she swooned in 2007 upon spotting Roger Clemens in George Steinbrenner’s box at Yankee Stadium, signifying his lordship’s return to the Yankee roster for one year at $28 million, and said: “Oh my goodness gracious. Of all the dramatic things I’ve ever seen…”

My reaction to the armchair critics is: Lighten up. Get a life. Then again, I may not be the best judge. I started a co-ed softball team in college, with myself the only male player because I wanted nurturing and encouragement rather than vilification when I dropped a pop fly, as I occasionally did.

But for sheer radio listening pleasure for the casual fan, I don’t think anybody beats the Sterling-Waldman duo. Their style is conversational rather than testosterone-crazed; it’s almost overheard, as if you were eavesdropping on their tête-à-tête from the next table at Sardi’s. And they know their stuff—Mr. Sterling because he’s been the Yankees announcer for every single game since 1989, Ms. Waldman because she works her tail off—as I discovered when I visited them at the stadium for last Tuesday night’s game against the Toronto Blue Jays.

[Photo Credit: The Yankee Analysts]

Our pals, the Three Amigos, are doing some fine work over at PB.

Here’s Cliff on Derek Jeter

Goldie on Eduardo Nunez and Jesus Montero and

Jay on Fab Five Freddy and the  incredible Curtis Granderson.

Class is in session.

There’s a good Varsity Letters tonight featuring Robert Lipsyte. Also on the venue is Robert Weintraub author of “The House that Ruth Built.” Dig the interview with Weintraub, here.

And if you are around tonight, check, check it out.

Smitten Kitchen crushes purple potatoes and I feel hungry.

I love Gene Hackman as much as I’ve ever loved any actor.

Dig this short Q&A with Hackman from the latest issue of GQ:

GQ: You worked with Coppola on The Conversation. He’s a director who has a “reputation.” Tell me about that movie.

Hackman: He wanted Brando for that part. But it’s not too bad to be second to Brando. [laughs] We rehearsed—normally you don’t get a lot of rehearsal in films. We took advantage of Francis having some juice, because he’d just finished The Godfather. It was a good experience, because he’s such a confident filmmaker. It was great because it was about something. It was about paranoia, the whole idea of eavesdropping. He’s a very hands-on director, but after rehearsal he left me alone. But you knew what was required of you. Most directors, if sensitive at all and think an actor knows what he’s doing in a film, have the good sense to leave him alone, and he did that.

GQ: If someone were to portray you, what would be the key to “getting” you?

Hackman: That’s a tough one. Almost anything one would say would sound egotistical. [pauses] I’d like to think that if an actor was playing me, that he would do me in an honest fashion. I always try to approach the work in that way, regardless of how good or bad the script. When I say “honest,” I say to portray what is on the page, instead of what maybe people might think of me or what I would like them to think of me in terms of personality or charisma. But just be what is asked of me on the page.

[Drawing by Jerry Vaughan]

After 19 seasons, Shaq is calling it a career. Next stop: Hall of Fame.

The Yanks scored early again today. In the first, Alex Rodriguez doubled home Derek Jeter, and in the fourth, Nick Swisher hit a three-run home run into the left field bleachers. That after he attempted to bunt on the first two pitches.

After the game, Swisher told reporters, “I thought I was told to lay one down. So finally after it got to 2-0 and the pitching coach came out I went over to (Pena) and said, ‘Hey man, what do you want me to do right here?’ He said, ‘I want you to let it loose.’ So I did.”

It proved to be enough as the Bombers leave Oakland with a three-game-sweep of the A’s. A.J. Burnett allowed a first inning home run, a two-run shot to Josh Willingham, but didn’t have any trouble with the A’s after that. Joba Chamberlain put two men on in the eighth, but then speared a line drive off the bat of Conor Jackson and turned a double play to end the inning.

Final Score: Yanks 4, A’s 2.

No complaints here as the Red Sox lost again to the White Sox in Boston.

Smiles all round, especially from Swisher, who had this to say to Kim Jones:

“I feel great. I feel like myself again. My personality is back. You know, I’m out of that dark place. So, either way my teammates have been amazing for me, my family and everybody. It’s been a wonderful trip so far. You learn a lot about yourself when you’re in those times. So for myself, I just wanna keep going out there, keep battling, and keep picking up those wins because everyone loves winning.”

Amen to that.

[Photo Credit: Ben Margot/AP and roly]

It is raining in Oakland. Let’s hope the Yanks and A’s get the game in.

We’ll be root, root, rootin’ for the road grays:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photograph by Eugenia Kyriakopoulou]

Last night on the bus up in the Bronx, dude decked out in Bonds gear.

Go figure.

UNDER THE SPELL OF THE BIG SCREEN

By John Schulian

We didn’t have a TV in our house until 1954, when I was nine. Maybe it was for economic reasons, maybe my parents just didn’t think it was important. They seemed perfectly content with listening to the radio, my mother in particular. I listened along with her. The first thing I remember hearing was the news that Babe Ruth had died. Honest. I was three years old and I had not the slightest idea who the Babe was, but there was something about the way the man on the radio talked about him that made it possible for even a child like me to grasp the importance of his death. Just remembering that moment makes me feel older than dirt. It’s the same when I remember listening to Tom Mix’s radio show-–his doctor was my mother’s doctor, by the way-–and Fibber McGee and Molly, Lum and Abner, Arthur Godfrey, and Art Likletter’s House Party. Linkletter’s band leader had one of the great names ever: Muzzy Marcellino. Muzzy, for crying out loud.

Something else we listened to was Lux Radio Theater, where Hollywood stars of a certain wattage acted in half-hour recreations of movies that were then in the theaters. In my house, we ate up movies, all three of us in the beginning, then just my father and me as time went on. There wasn’t any reason for this movie love. My parents weren’t star-struck, nor were they given to long, thoughtful discussions of performances, directing choices, or cinematography, good or bad. It was just something that was in the air in L.A. along with the aroma of the orange groves and the stench of the burning tires that warmed them on winter nights. If you listened to the radio, you could even hear broadcasts of the premieres of big movies and breathless interviews with stars like Cary Grant and Lana Turner.

The movie house we went to most often was the Academy, an art deco palace near the intersection of Manchester and Crenshaw boulevards. (It’s now a church.) If I went to see Burt Lancaster in “The Crimson Pirate” with my parents on Saturday night, I’d be back at 1 p.m. Wednesday for the kiddie matinee, two movies for a quarter. Might be two Abbott and Costello comedies, or two war movies (“Halls of Montezuma” with Richard Widmark and “Operation Pacific” with John Wayne), or an Audie Murphy Western paired with one starring Jeff Chandler, or-–hang onto your hat–“King Kong” and “Mighty Joe Young.”

Come summer we’d head for the Centinela Drive-In, where we saw “Shane,” “Strategic Air Command” and the truly awful circus movie “The Greatest Show on Earth.” (There’s a scene in “Heat” that was shot at an abandoned drive-in. I’d swear it was the Centinela, which sits in what is now regarded as hard-core gang territory.)

When 3-D movies were all the rage-–”Hondo,” “Charge at Feather River,” “House of Wax”–we went to see them at the big movie houses on Hollywood Boulevard, which was still glamorous and exciting then. (The first movie I remember seeing was “Pinocchio,” at the Pantages.) Afterward, we’d eat at Café de Paris, a little French restaurant around the corner from Charlie Chaplin’s studio. My father’s French buddies hung out there. My parents ate escargot and I drank Shirley Temples.

And then it was just my father and me going to the movies. It had to be by design. My parents were ancient by the standards of the day: when they married, my father was 41 and my mother 39. My guess is she was going through menopause and desperately needed some time away from her rambunctious son.

It was a blessing in disguise for my father and me. We didn’t get to spend much time together, mainly because he worked such long hours and spent a lot of time sleeping in his easy chair when he was home. I don’t want you to think he was distant or cold, though. He was, rather, the nicest man I have ever known. He was charming and funny and gracious, and he had a Danish accent that gave him, I don’t know, a continental air, I guess you’d call it. No wonder he oversaw all the big weddings in Salt Lake when he became catering manager of the Hotel Utah, the No. 1 hotel in the city. He took care of not just Mormons but Greeks and Jews and Italians and anybody else who wanted to be treated right. He loved them all, but he loved the good tippers best. To me, however, he was the dad who took me to see the Hollywood Stars in the old Coast League. And who played catch with me in the backyard, and, when we lived in Inglewood, took me to sprawling Centinela Park to pitch me batting practice and hit me fly balls. And remember, he’d never played an inning of baseball. He was a Danish immigrant who didn’t see a game until he worked in Chicago at a hotel where the big league teams stayed. He told me about players who took out their tobacco chaws only to eat, and of how forlorn the Pirates-–well, I think it was the Pirates–were when the Cubs’ Gabby Hartnett beat them with his Homer in the Gloamin’.

Truth be told, though, he was probably more comfortable going to the movies with me. His choice of theaters was an odd one, not any of the first-run houses, the Academy or the 5th Avenue or the United Artists, but a second-run house called the Inglewood Theater. And it was there that my education in movies, such as it is, began. We saw the John Ford-John Wayne cavalry trilogy, and “The Big Sleep” and Red Skelton comedies and Robert Mitchum in “Blood on the Moon.” Sometimes the old movies bored me witless-–”Saratoga Trunk” with Gary Cooper, in particular-–but more often they fed my imagination and my dreams.

The fact is, I loved movies before I loved baseball. For all I know, I read the movie ads in the newspaper before anything else. And I read Louella Parsons’ column, too, checking it for movie-star names in boldface. Then I would cut out the movie ads and paste them in a scrapbook, which wasn’t as pointless an exercise as it might seem, because I would then use the title of a movie that had captured my imagination and create my version of it. The movie I remember was “Kansas Pacific,” a Republic Pictures Western starring Sterling Hayden that I didn’t get around to watching until a couple of years ago. It was dreadful.) I drew the story in cartoon blocks on pieces of paper about the size of a postcard and I taped or glued the pieces together. Then I took a piece of cardboard, drew a screen with curtains around it, and cut slits on both sides of the screen. Then I would pull the strip of paper on which my movie was laid out through the slits while I provided the dialogue and narration. nd my parents would watch. But only after they had paid a nickel or a dime for the privilege. Even then, at the age of 9 or 10, I realized that movies were for making money.

There was something at work besides the profit motive, though. It was the ability to imagine, to let a couple of words in a newspaper inspire me to create the most primitive kind of art. I suppose the same forces were at work when I listened to the Mutual Game of the Day on the radio and envisioned what the Green Monster in Fenway Park looked like and how the ivy on the walls at Wrigley Field was coming in. I could even read about a minor league slugger in the back pages of the Sporting News-–Frosty Kennedy or John Moskus or Chuck Weatherspoon-–and spend my paper route imagining how they looked as they smacked another home run. It was as though I imagined life with a score by Dimitri Tiomkin or Max Steiner and a big, booming orchestra to back them up. If I listen closely, I can still hear the music.

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

I like to go to the Matisse room at the Modern and just sit in front of this picture for a good while.

Here’s John Richardson on the picture:

Few, however, have spotted that it is a baton in an artistic relay race that goes from Cézanne to the great period of Matisse’s that this show celebrates, to Cubism. In a letter Matisse wrote to a friend in 1914 was a sketch of a goldfish bowl on a table set off against the railings of his studio balcony. The sketch included the artist himself, holding a rectangular palette just as his hero, Cézanne, does in a famous 1885 self-portrait. In the course of working on the painting, however, Matisse did a vanishing act, whittling his image down to a vestigial scaffolding. All that remains is the palette with a thumb in it. I see this iconic white rectangle as the baton in the relay race of modern art. Trust Picasso to pick up on it, when, a year later, he came to paint his tragic, self-reverential Harlequin (which also belongs to MoMA). Seeing this late Cubist masterpiece, Ma­tisse hailed it as his arch-rival’s greatest work to date, because it owed everything to him. For years, nobody could figure out what he meant. The link? What else but Cézanne’s palette. Cézanne had passed it on to Matisse, who had used it to signify himself. Ma­tisse had then passed it on to Picasso, who had turned it into a barely perceptible self-portrait on a rectilinear canvas his Harlequin alter ego is clutching. Subsequent abstractionists would pass the baton from one to another until there was nothing left but a blank rectangle.

I love seeing all the under painting, you can see the work, and imagine Matisse busting his tail to resolve the picture to his liking.

Say word.

Is there anything more civilized than taking a walk in Manhattan after a meal? That’s just what I did with the wife last Saturday night. We strolled through through the west village when we heard a trumpet playing “Blue Bossa.” I love that tune no end and I looked ahead to see where the street musician was. I couldn’t see anyone when I looked up and high in the sky saw a figure sitting in a window playing his horn.

I know I’ve played this tune before but it makes me so damned happy here it is again:

Yanks-A’s, Oakland again with a tough pitcher and for us another late game, but here at the Banter, it’s more of the same:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

What to do with the struggling Ivan Nova? Over at PB, Jay Jaffe examines the options:

While Phil Hughes remains at least a month away from returning — he’s scheduled to throw live batting practice soon, though some would argue that’s exactly what he did during his three ugly starts — the Yankees do have other options should they turn away from Nova. Hector Noesi has been impressive in three relief outings, throwing 9.1 innings while allowing just one run. His 5/4 K/BB ratio isn’t anything impressive (particularly given an 11/9 K/BB ratio in the minors), but he’s shown a proclivity for pounding the strike zone for the bulk of his minor league career; his K/BB ratio on the farm is a stellar 5.1. One of his major league walks was intentional, and particularly during his four-inning major league debut during that epic in Baltimore, the kid — who’s all of two weeks younger than Nova, by the way — has shown some moxie with runners on base. According to Texas Leaguers, he’s thrown six different pitches: four-seam fastball (48.1 percent), slider (24.0 percent), curve (10.1 percent), changeup (7.0 percent), two-seam fastball (7.0 percent), and cutter (3.9 percent). While there may be some classification crossover amid these admittedly small samples, he’s clearly not afraid to use multiple offspeed offerings. Furthermore, he’s getting swinging strikes about three times as often (12.8 percent) as Nova.

Also looming in the organization is Carlos Silva, who has compiled a 22/6 K/BB ratio and a 2.13 ERA in 25.1 innings over five minor league starts, most recently at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. He has an opt-out clause in mid-June if he’s not promoted, and it doesn’t take a crystal ball to imagine that with another solid start from him, and another rough outing from Nova, the Yankees might take a peek before they risk losing him. The chances of the team catching lightning in a bottle with another corpulent castoff aren’t all that high, but Silva hasn’t drawn reports of looking completely washed up as Kevin Millwood did during his slog through the hinterlands.

Perfect day for an Arnold Palmer…

Joe Pos on the trouble with Joakim Soria:

Here was the thing: Joakim Soria seemed magical. That was the word. Magical. He came to the Royals in late 2006 as a Rule 5 draft pick, an almost complete unknown at 22, and by the end of April ’07 he was already being asked to close some games. He had a nearly two-month stretch — from the end of May to the end of July — when he did not give up a single run. By the end of the 2007 season, he was the Royals’ full-time closer. Over the next three seasons, he averaged 38 saves and had a 1.84 ERA for bad Royals teams, and while his nickname around Kansas City was the Mexicutioner, he was known around baseball as “One of the Royals’ few bright spots.”

The thing that made him magical, though, was that he succeeded subtly. Mysteriously, even. There was no OBVIOUS or BLATANT reason why he dominated hitters. He did not throw his fastball in the mid-to-high 90s like other dominant closers. Often, he did not even throw his fastball in the low 90s. He did not have a Mariano Rivera cutter or a Trevor Hoffman changeup or a Bruce Sutter split-fingered fastball. He did not have a wild-man act, did not stomp around the mound or glare batters down or intimidate in the slightest. He mainly looked like he had just woken up from a particularly refreshing nap.

Here’s Jeff MacGregor on W.C. Heinz:

Too often on American sports pages, we use the long-bomb language of war to talk about games. And too often on the editorial page, we use the slam dunk language of sports to obscure the realities of war. By doing so, we corrupt our honest understanding of both. The symbols and mythologies, the lessons and the metaphors might seem interchangeable — devotion, honor, fortitude — but one is a harmless funhouse reflection of the other. Sports are a kind of necessary human nonsense. War is the abject failure of everything that makes us human.

…Before he became a sports writer, Bill Heinz was a war correspondent. He spent months in the North Atlantic; landed at Normandy; chased Patton across France. He drank with Liebling and with Hemingway and watched American boys felled like trees in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. That’s what I think made him great. Not just the writing or the craft or the work ethic. But in knowing exactly how much — and how very little — is at stake in sports.

Because every word Bill Heinz ever wrote about sports was informed by what he carried out of that war. By the things he could never forget.

Salute.