Blog Archives

From DJ Matt B:

Oh, hell yeah.

Molten chocolate cake recipe from Saveur.

[Photo Credit: foodphotoblog]

Valentine’s Day flicks via Photo Booth.

[Photo Credit: Marilyn Minter]

Bounce…

The wife says to me yesterday, “I don’t want you to bring me flowers tomorrow. I’m serious. I don’t want you spending a fortune.”

She thinks Valentine’s Day is a trumped-up, commercial holiday, and she’s right. I bring her flowers all the time, just cause, and I don’t need a holiday to tell her that she’s the love of my life, though I’ll probably say it again today…jut cause. The emmis is the emmis, am I right?

In the meantime, I hope you guys all have a good day, whether you are married, single, in a relationship, or newly divorced. You can swing by the Banter for the love and a cyber hug. We’ll be here.

[Photo Still from “An American in Paris”]

On my way to the grocery store yesterday I stopped and tilted my nose in the air like I was a dog. It was warm in the sun and I thought I smelled it–the distinct odor of spring, which can only mean one thing: “Baseball.” It is the smell of soil, carried through the breeze. Eh, I think I might have been straining.

This morning, however, there it was again. Sure, this is a false spring we’ve got on our hands this week in New York (it is supposed to reach 50 degrees today), but I’ll take it.

Couple of Yankee notes fuh ya:

Brain Cashman has some tough love for Joba Chamberlain and Keith Olbermann is even tougher on Derek Jeter.

Update: Oh, and some cool news in the Yankee blogosphere–the Yankeeist and Yankee U have merged to form The Yankee Analysts. Be sure to drop by and check ’em out. I’m sure they’ll be doing some fine work this season.

[Picture by Richard Diebenkorn]

Pitchers and catchers report.

We cool out:

Ben Shpigel profiles the Yankees’ new pitching coach Larry Rothschild today in the Times:

At every stop Rothschild, 56, has burnished his reputation as one of baseball’s premier pitching instructors, renowned for his meticulous preparation, troubleshooting abilities and communication skills. Along the way, those assets have allowed him to connect with volatile personalities like Carlos Zambrano and Kevin Brown; free spirits like Jose Rijo and Al Leiter; and, yes, even “idiots” like Charlton, who called Rothschild “as good as it gets.”

“He learns how to get into guys’ heads but have them trust him,” [Norm] Charlton said in a telephone interview. “The reason he’s able to do that is because he’s right 99 percent of the time. What he says works.”

[Photo Credit: Tim Souers]

Hubba Hubba.

Grey skies, snow flurries in New York.

Stay warm, eat well, be happy.

[Picture by Bags]

Here’s Bruce Weber’s obit in the Times.

Let’s get groovy:

Over at Fangraphs, Dave Cameron has a good post about Alex Rodriguez’s time with the Rangers:

The problem is that Rodriguez more than held up his end of the bargain, and if the Rangers front office had behaved with even moderate competency, they could have put some good teams together. The blame for the failure of the 2001 to 2003 Rangers does not lie with Alex Rodiguez’s large paychecks, but instead with the total wastes of cash that they surrounded him with. You want to know why those teams failed? Look no further than Park, Gonzalez, Everett, Oliver, and Rogers. In their attempt to surround Rodriguez with talent, they brought in a never ending series of terrible players who had name value but lacked ability. It didn’t have to be that way. They had enough resources to put good players around Rodriguez – they just failed to identify which players they should actually be giving money to.

Alex Rodriguez’s first contract was far from the worst deal in baseball history. In fact, given his performance in the years after he signed the deal, Rodriguez was actually worth the money he was paid. Unfortunately, the narrative of the deal lives on, despite all the illogical hula hoops you have to jump through in order to reach the conclusion that MacPhail suggested yesterday. Don’t believe the hype; A-Rod was not the cause of the Rangers failures, and the contract they signed him to was actually a wise investment. The problem is that was the only good investment that franchise made in those three years.

While you are there, check out Cameron’s take on the news that the Twins are open to trading Francisco Liriano:

Dealing Liriano to the Yankees is likely the big question that the Twins will have to answer. If they make Liriano available, you can be sure that Brian Cashman will pick up the phone. If the Twins see 2011 as something of a consolidation year, with World Series contention more of a hope than a legitimate reality, then you can justify sending your best pitcher to a league rival if you think you’re getting the better end of the deal long term. But if the Twins think that Justin Morneau is going to be 100 percent this year and they want to make another run at a championship while they have Jim Thome and the M&M boys in their primes, then they shouldn’t be in the business of strengthening teams they will need to beat in October.

I can see the reasoning behind considering dealing Liriano now, but it would likely require the Twins to admit that 2011 is probably not their year, and that’s a tough case to make to the rest of the team right as spring training opens up. If this was a path they wanted to pursue, it probably would have made more sense to be aggressive in dealing Liriano earlier in the winter, when they might have been able to ship him to Milwaukee or Chicago, getting quality prospects in return and getting him out of the American League. Now, faced with the choice of sending him to New York or taking an offer that is likely less impressive in return than what the Yankees would put on the table, the Twins are left with two less than palatable options. At this juncture, I think the Twins are probably best served hanging onto Liriano until the summer. By then, they may have more clarity about their own chances of making a splash in the playoffs, and there might also be an NL contender willing to get in on the bidding.

The simple pleasure of roasted garlic–from Joy the Baker.

Louie Malle’s “Pretty Baby” is playing at BAM tonigh at 6:50.

Picking up on her Varsity Letters presentation, here’s Emma’s debut article for Baseball Prospectus:

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the maxim that if you can imagine it, there’s porn about it on the Internet. That’s no joke. It was only a few years ago that I first learned of fan fiction, when a friend explained that one of his coworkers not only contributed to, but ran, an extensive website entirely dedicated to fan-written stories about the characters from the animated series Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers. The stories that turned sexual—yes, stories about cartoon chipmunks that turn sexual—were called slash fiction, named for the typographic symbol in the “Kirk/Spock” liaisons that launched the genre in the 1970s.

Naturally, this prompted my friends and I to go online and see if there was any kind of subject, anything at all, and that did not have something pornographic written about it and posted on the Internet. The answer: not really, no. We couldn’t find anything pairing Jay Leno with bandleader Kevin Eubanks, but that was about it.

What we did discover was a trove of imagined romance and sex between baseball players, on multiple websites. I thought that over the years I’d seen most of the dark corners of sports fandom, but as it turns out, I still was not fully prepared for baseball fan fiction. If you’ve thought about it at all, you might expect to find quite a few tales of Jeter and A-Rod, and those are certainly there. But I was less braced for just how prominently players like, for example, Doug Mirabelli feature. You just do not ever expect to encounter the phrase, to quote one story, “Doug Mirabelli’s huge, unlubed…”

Well—Doug Mirabelli’s huge, unlubed anything, really. Let’s leave it at that.

Hey, Now…

Bowie Friday.

I first noticed it a few days ago coming out of the subway station on 103rd street. The light. Then a few more times this week, including various times this morning. The light. It’s changing. Spring is coming. We know that, of course. Every day, the papers have stories from Florida. Pitchers and catchers report to Yankee camp in three days.

It is still cold in New York and we’ll still have to endure plenty of lousy weather. Bring it on. You can’t stop the light.

I’ll tell you this–when it does warm up, this town is going to blossom like nobody’s business. Man, it’s gunna be a good spring.

Next Monday, the Doughnut Plant will open a second location. This one will be in the Chelsea Hotel.

Be warned, these aren’t your average treats. They’re so stupid they’ll make you use a word that don’t mean nuthin…like looptid.

[Photo Credit: The Gourmetro]

Not only was Danny Kaye a brilliant performer but he was a wonderful cook too.