Good times over at Pitchers and Poets where they are hosting a 1990s First Basemen Week:
I wrote a brief memory of Kevin Maas.
Here’s more…
Carlos Quintana by Josh Wilker.
Tony Clark by Drew Fairservice.
Straight Shooters by Glenn Stout.
Rafael Palmeiro by Rob Iracane.
Perfect Rangers by Larry Herold.
Wally Joyner by Reeves Wideman.
Searching for the Typical ’90s First Baseman Season by Kenneth Morgan.
Pedro Guerrero by Will Leitch.
Bags and the Big Hurt by Jonah Keri.
Missed it by that much…
Serious Eats offers 10 lovable salads.
I’m not sold on figs. They can be too sweet for me. But I’ve had some that are appealing, especially when combined with something tart like a balsamic reduction.
Movie Star hubba hubba:
Audrey Hepburn and Paul Newman
Speaking of the Seventies…how about the Cobra?
Here’s Roy Blount, writing in Sports Illustrated about Parker back in the spring of 1979:
“He’s like the 10th man in Softball out there,” says First Baseman Stargell. “On a ground ball he’s backing up first before I’m there to take the throw. We were both after a foul ball one time with our arms outstretched, and we came together face to face like two big pairs of scissors. It was the only time I ever kissed him. We hit and flew apart by yards and yards.” Parker covers second on infield pop-ups, he gets involved in rundowns between second and third, he is everywhere. Pete Rose may be Charlie Hustle, but Parker hustles just as hard and considerably faster.
On the bases, too, he takes all he can get. Says Parker, “The highlight of the game to me is scoring from first on a double in such a way that people look at me in amazement, as if they’re saying, ‘My, how fast that big man can move.’ ”
Big he is—6’5″, 230 pounds. His legs terminate, after a lengthy run, in an upper body that looks like two Doberman pinschers bound tightly together. In addition to his speed afoot, he has general quickness—hence his nickname, Cobra—and a rifle arm. “He’s one of those rare individuals who come along every 15 or 20 years,” says Stargell. “Rare, and unique, and strong.”
Gene Monahan will retire after this season…Rafael Soriano doesn’t appear to be seriously hurt…A.J. Burnett is on the mound tonight…
Score Truck anyone?
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Picture by Stella Simon]
Nice piece on David Robertson by Bob Klapisch today:
How he destroys hitters is a secret that baseball technology is only beginning to understand, but Robertson was at his blow-away best against Kansas City. After getting Aviles to fly to center, Alcides Escobar and Chris Getz whiffed.
How? Because neither Royals hitter had a chance against Robertson’s 82-mph curveball.
Why? Because both hitters had been battered by the ferocity of Robertson’s fastball, which, although clocked at 93 to 94 mph, has the signature of a 97-mph heater.
That’s made possible by Robertson’s enormous push-off from the mound – a full 7 feet from the rubber, the most behind Tim Lincecum. Last month, Sports Illustrated profiled a Dutch company, Trackman, which extrapolates virtual speed from actual velocity and distance from the plate. Robertson can add as much as 4 mph to his fastball because he’s closer to the hitter than other pitchers. The average major league stride is 5 feet, 10 inches.
…That’s the beauty of his gift: Robertson doesn’t have to repeat any internal monologue to get his legs into gear. Instead, in times of stress, he thinks about the machinery of strikes-throwing, watching as hitters struggle to catch up to his heat, deciding when it’s time to unleash the killer curveball.
[Photo Credit: Post 34 Baseball]
John Schulian is one of our most gifted storytellers and a wordsmith who has been compared to Red Smith and A.J. Liebling. He came of age as a newspaper reporter and sports columnist in the 1970s, part of a generation of young turks that featured the likes of David Israel, Leigh Montville, Mike Lupica, Jane Leavy, Tony Kornheiser and Tom Boswell. Then he left sports behind and went to Hollywood where he wrote for “L.A. Law,” “Miami Vice,” “Wiseguy,” “JAG,” and numerous other series–including “Slap Maxwell,” the short-lived Dabney Coleman show about a sportswriting hack. He was also the co-creator of “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Before, during and after his foray into show business, Schulian wrote long-form articles for Sports Illustrated and GQ. His work has been collected in “Writers’ Fighters and Other Sweet Scientists,” “Twilight of the Long-ball Gods,” and the forthcoming “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand.” Schulian has been featured in “The Best American Sports Writing,” and, on ten occasions, the old “Best Sports Stories” series. He also edited “The John Lardner Reader” and co-edited (with George Kimball) “At the Fights: American Writers of Boxing.”
Last fall I sat down with John to talk about his career and what came out was more than just an interview but an oral history of the newspaper business, of the sporting scene and of Hollywood. So I am proud to present John’s story, in his own words, “From Ali to Xena,” which will be posted in column-like segments twice a week.
You are in for a treat.
–Alex Belth
From Ali to Xena
By John Schulian
PREAMBLE
Good things have happened to me all my life, whether I deserved them or not, and “At The Fights”is the latest of them. When George Kimball and I started working together, we had nothing more in mind than a modest book of stories by writers who had won awards from the Boxing Writers Association of America. The way we looked at it, no sport has inspired more wonderful prose than the Sweet Science. But for every great piece we found, there was another one that even a generous critic would have had a difficult time calling mediocre. I won’t say we were ready to give up, but the bloom definitely was off the rose.
Then, out of nowhere, George’s literary agent, Farley Chase, called and said the Library of America was interested in having us edit an anthology of great boxing writing. “The same Library of America that does Twain and Poe and Raymond Chandler?” we said. “That’s the one,” Farley said. So we wrote a proposal and talked to LOA’s big cheeses and lobbied like a couple of Tammany Hall politicians. And we got the gig.
It turned out to be an incredible amount of work that was definitely pleasurable. You don’t have to ask me twice to read Heywood Broun, W.C. Heinz, and Carlo Rotella, and I know George feels the same. But there was also more than a little pain in the process because we didn’t have room to include all the pieces we love and all the writers we admire. The book we wound up with, though, is one we believe in wholeheartedly. “At the Fights” reflects both our personal tastes and the importance of boxing in American nonfiction. Just think of the big names whose work we’ve showcased: Mailer, London, Baldwin, Schulberg, Plimpton. Maybe George expected to be to sit in judgment of them at some point in his career, but it’s a complete surprise to me.
Honestly, I never expected any of what has happened to me over the last four decades. Not the big-city sports column or the magazine work or the books, not Hollywood and the modest success I had in TV, not the fascinating projects that still fall in my lap as I enter my golden years. Sure, I dreamed about it when I was a kid, but dreaming is far different than expecting. There were guys I met on newspapers who fairly radiated their expectation of success and became wet-behind-the-ears sensations. I, on the other hand, moved at a far slower pace, forever unsure of what lay in store for me.
I don’t mean to be disingenuous. That’s just a natural fact. I knew I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and columnist, but I thought I might just as easily wind up as a copy editor. (I can hear the copy editors I worked with saying, “You never could have cut it.”) If I saw myself doing anything, it was bouncing around to a lot of different newspapers — but not papers in glamorous cities and not papers with glowing national reputations. I was thinking more along the lines of Toledo for a couple of years, then maybe see what was available in Portland or Albuquerque. The only thing I was sure of was that I had a shot at an interesting life.
Will the Heat finish off the Celtics tonight? I’d like to see it but I think the Celtics will win.
Can the Thunder beat the Grizzles tonight in Oklahoma City to go up, 3-2. Sure, they can, but I’m picking the Grizzles. Hope I’m wrong but I’ll believe the Grizzles (and Celtics) are done when I see it.
[Picture by Patrick Joust]
Hubba hubba Part II.
Click here for a photo gallery of the one and only Gordon Parks.
Say goodnight, Gracie…
Mariano Rivera didn’t look to have his best stuff last night. But with one out and a runner on first, he snagged a hard ground ball and quickly pivoted his body around to second base. In that instant I thought of the 2001 World Series, 9th inning, Game 7. That was when Rivera didn’t turn a double play. It wasn’t the worst performance of his career but it may have been the most painful as the Diamondbacks scored twice to win the Serious. I couldn’t sleep that night. I replayed the inning over and over. I wondered if a loss like that would break Rivera. It didn’t, of course. The Sandy Alomar home run in the 1997 ALDS didn’t, and neither did Game 4 and 5 of the 2004 ALCS against the Red Sox.
Now, it’s almost ten full years after the loss to the Diamonbacks and only a handful of players who appeared in the Serious are still active. None of them are performing on Rivera’s level. He’s embodiment of excellence, still graceful, a later day Fred Astaire as we like to think of him around these parts, and one of the most beautiful athletes in pro sports.
Rivera was quick enough to field the hard ground ball last night and he made a difficult throw to second base look easy. It was right on target. Cano caught it and threw to first in one smooth motion, in time for a game-ending double play. Close play. Yanks got the call.
The Yankee players smiled as they gathered to shake hands. Smiled at an old man who still has a few moments left. He was smiling too.
And so were we.
Bill Gallo, the longtime cartoonist for the New York Daily News died yesterday. He was 88.
Filip Bondy has a loving tribute today in the News. And here is Lupica, delivering the goods:
This newspaper, the Daily News newspaper, was born in 1919, and Gallo was born in 1922 and first walked through the doors as a copy boy and into the rest of his life in 1941. He was more the Daily News than anybody who ever lived. He would keep drawing his pictures. He would keep telling his stories through those pictures to the end. We hear all the time about how the newspaper business is supposed to be dying. Nobody ever told Bill Gallo, even as he was.
“The News is the only life I ever really knew once I got back from the war,” he told me one time, not so long after I first walked through the doors of the old offices on 42nd St., between 2nd and 3rd, that famous globe in the lobby. “And it’s the only life I ever wanted.”
…He was a friend to anybody who ever opened this newspaper and cared about it. And so today, one last time, you open the paper and there is Bill Gallo. There is Bertha and old Steingrabber, and Yuchie and Thurman Munson the day after he died. There is the work of those pens and pencils and brushes. The right hand reaches out one last time, across all the years, and the business is alive and so is he.
Here is a gallery of Gallo’s work.
The News, and New York Sports, will not be the same without him.
The Royales with Cheese are in town for a three game series and they are an improved team.
We kick back and cheer:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
Over at PB, Jay Jaffe looks at Brett Gardner’s turnaround:
Gardner has reached base in 10 out of his last 11 starts. As hitting coach Kevin Long said last week, “He’s turned it around. He’s had several good games as of late, and he seems like the Brett Gardner we saw last year. Getting on base, causing havoc, playing great defense.” More specifically, Long noted that Gardner had shifted in the batter’s box: “Basically he moved up closer to the plate. In a nutshell they were pitching him away, and he was coming out of his swing and not able to stay tight and compact on the outside pitch. So he’s moved up on the plate, and that’s helped him a great deal.”
Tellingly, Gardner’s strikeout-to-walk ratio in those two small samples has improved, from 14/4 in the first to 10/10 in the second, and so has his rate of pitches per plate appearance, from 4.13 during his cold spell to 4.46 in his hot one. Overall, he ranks eighth in the league in P/PA at 4.30, down from last year’s league-leading 4.61, though that figure had more than a little something to do with his midseason wrist injury. Interestingly enough, the remade Curtis Granderson currently ranks a surprising second in the AL at 4.48 P/PA.
[Picture by Joseph Holmes]
Sweet SI cover this week…
Couple of days of hubba hubba.
[Picture by Jean-Francois Jonvelle]
