A week from today the season could be over or the Yanks could be getting ready to play in another Whirled Serious.
We’re lucky to even have another week to look forward to, and starting tomorrow night, Cliff Lee vs. Andy Pettitte…it should be lively.
In the meantime, enjoy a lovely, cool fall day in New York. Those of us with Cablevision are shut-out of the first game, but the Jets are on at 4.
Let’s Go Sun-Day.
Yanks look to return home, up 2-0. Simple as this: Rangers win, it’s a series, Cliff Lee going in Game Three.
Yanks win, the Rangers are in the soup.
Gravy time for the Scoretruck, don’t you think? That’s why it’s all about Mr. Hughes. Go git ’em, kid and…
Let’s Go Yan-Kees!
First things first…
The day begins on a sweet note. Yanks lose tonight and we won’t stay chipper but for now, we’ve still got a few moments to soak-in last night’s win.
It was a good ‘un.
Raining in New York. Big night in Texas.
Let’s Go Yan-Kees!
[Picture by Bags]
Dig this most classic National Lampoon bit from the ’70s featuring Bill Murray and Christopher Guest.
01 I went out of my nut. I fell on my bum.
ss
Here are some fearless ALCS predictions from the crew at Bronx Banter.
First of all, I predict that I’ll have worked myself up into a state of near fury/exhaustion before the first pitch is thrown tonight. I’ve got nothing against Texas. I’ve never been there, other than a stop at the Dallas airport, but mostly, I admire Texas. But I predict that I’ll be cursing it up-and-down for the duration of the series. The sight of former president Bush will be fodder enough to get me going I figure.
I also predict that my wife will have had it up to hear with me by Saturday night.
As much as it bothers me to say, I think the Yanks will win the series. At least they should. The thought of them losing…no, there’s no way to make that palatable. Ron Washington is cool, sure, and I’ve got nothing against Michael Young. I’ve always loved Vlady. But collectively, the Rangers come across as a college team, youthful spirit, antler-horns, hollering, rah-rah. And why shouldn’t they next to the business-like Bombers? Still, that doesn’t mean I have to find it “refreshing.”
I figure Mo is going to blow one game and the Yanks will beat Lee. Oh, and if A.J. Burnett gets a start, he’ll do okay.
The Rangers will steal at will against Posada.
I don’t have a feeling about Alex Rodriguez but he’s due to catch fire and be a monster. He was terrific down the stretch. I’d be as geeked as the next guy if he goes on a tear.
Also, I fear Nelson Cruz.
Matt Blankman:
Yankees in 5. Superstition makes me nervous calling for a Yankee victory in fewer than 6 games, but really, if my thoughts and actions have such little impact on my own life, they can’t possibly affect a major league baseball game. The Yankees will drop one in Texas, find a way to win Cliff Lee’s start, and win the pennant in the Bronx. While I’m reading tea leaves, I see another effective start for Hughes, at least one Yankee bullpen implosion and some big hits from Mr. Cano. Also, look for some creative Bronx cheers for Cliff Lee – it’s not often you have to boo a guy you’re simultaneously wooing for next season.
Jon DeRosa:
I predict that the most annoying Ranger batter will be Michael Young, most annoying pitcher will be a tie between the twoDdarrens, and all three of them will be eclipsed by Nolan Ryan, who will be on camera so often that he’ll be the number-two most-annoying sports figure this fall (Nobody’s touching Favre. execpt Favre, obviously).
Dig this most awesome new book by photographer Lyle Owerko.
While we’re at it, how about a word from Uncle L:
The New Yorker’s recent compilation, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from the New Yorker, is a fine and handsome collection but it is does not contain a single piece by John Lardner, which begs the question: Is Lardner the most neglected great sports writer of all-time?
Sure, Jimmy Cannon is overlooked these days and he was a legend during his time; Joe H. Palmer was on his way to a PHD in English Literature when he became a full-time chronicler of horse racing–which he did as well as anyone ever has–but he died young and his name is lost; and Lenny Shecter was a funny, irascible talent, the patron saint of cynicism and snarki, and he’s sadly known as just the “co-writer” of “Ball Four.” Shecter also died young.
Over at SI.com, I’ve got an appreciation of a new collection of Lardner’s best sportswriting:
John Lardner was painting a prose portrait of a legendary con man when he wrote: “On a small scale, Titanic Thompson is an American legend. I say on a small scale, because an overpowering majority of the public has never heard of him. That is the way Titanic likes it. He is a professional gambler. He has sometimes been called the gambler’s gambler.”
Lardner might well have been writing about himself, although calling him a writer’s writer is too limiting, not to mention entirely inadequate. In a career that spanned three decades, the ’30s through the ’50s, he wrote for The New Yorker about everything from movies and TV, to the invasions of Normandy and Iwo Jima. But it was as a sports columnist for Newsweek that Lardner left his deepest footprint, and he underscored it with long, brilliant pieces for magazines like True and Sport. His trademark, as Stan Isaacs, the former Newsday sports columnist recently pointed out, was a “droll touch — precise, detached.”
“Time has a way of dimming the memory and achievements of writers who wrote, essentially, for the moment, as writers writing for journals must do,” Ira Berkow, the longtime columnist of the New York Times, told me recently. “But the best shouldn’t be lost in the haze of history and John Lardner was a brilliant writer — which means, in my view, that he was insightful, irreverent, wry and a master of English prose.”
Al Silverman, who ran Sport magazine in the Sixties, edited Lardner’s once-a-month sports column in True for a year-and-a-half in the early ’50s. “We never did meet but talked over the phone about his piece every month,” said Silverman. “I don’t remember ever saying, ‘You made a little grammatical error here, John.’ Always it was me saying, ‘Another great one, John.’ And they all were wonderful.”
In the epilogue to a posthumous collection “The World of John Lardner” (1961), his friend Roger Kahn wrote, “Although most perceptive sports writers accepted him as matchless, sports writing was not the craft of John Lardner. Nor was it profile writing, nor column writing. After the painstaking business of reportage, his craft was purely writing: writing the English sentence, fusing sound and meaning, matching the precision of the word with the rhythm of the phrase. It is a pursuit which is unfailing demanding, and Lardner met it with unfailing mastery.”
Do yourself a favor and pick up the new Lardner collection. You won’t be sorry.
[Drawings by Walt Kelly]
Well, this is just too much fun. Joe Pos lists 32-great calls.
I’ve got a nomination for one of the worst calls–Tom Seaver, Howard Cosell, and Keith Jackson botching Reggie’s third dinger.
The Daily News has two excerpts from Jane Leavy’s new Mantle bio: here and here.
Must-read for Yankee fans.
Game Two, that is. I think this is a good call. Whadda ya say?
[Picture by Bags]
Dig the origins of 10 Food Phrases over at cool site called Mental Floss:
Sowing Your Wild Oats: Avena fatua, a species of grass in the oat genus, has been referred to as “wild oats” by the English for centuries. Though it’s thought to be the precursor of cultivated oats, farmers have long hated it because it is useless as a cereal crop and hard to separate from cultivated oats and remove from fields. Literally sowing wild oats, then, is a useless endeavor, and the phrase is figuratively applied to people engaging idle pastimes. There’s also a sexual connotation in that a young man sowing his wild oats is spreading seed without purpose.The saying is first recorded in English in 1542, by Protestant clergyman Thomas Becon.
A Piece of Cake: The earliest appearance I can find is in Ogden Nash’s Primrose Path in 1936, and the phrase seems to have descended from the earlier “cakewalk.” This second term originates with a 19th-century African American tradition where slaves or freedmen at social gatherings or parties would walk in a procession in pairs around a cake and the most graceful pair would win the cake as a prize (this may also be the origin of “takes the cake”). Although the cakewalk contest demanded some skill and grace, the phrase was eventually adopted as boxing slang and flipped to connote an easily-won fight.
My old man used to drink at The Ginger Man, a restaurant near Lincoln Center. The place was named after the play based on J.P. Donleavy’s novel. Patrick O’Neal, one of the owners, had stared in the short-lived play. The novel, was reissued not long ago, and over at The Daily Beast, Allen Barra calls it “the funniest novel in the English language since Evelyn Waugh.”
I loved the Star Wars movies as a kid, not as much as an adult. That said, this looks bitchin‘.
“We were alert out there tonight,” said Texas Manager Ron Washington. “We were ready to play ball. I’m not saying Tampa wasn’t, but we were ready to play ball tonight – and it showed.”
So it’s the Rangers–who out-Rayed the Rays last night–to take on the Yanks for a chance to go to the Whirled Serious (Steven Goldman says, have no fear, the Rays will be back next year). This is a more balanced Texas team than we’ve seen in the past. They are spirited and fully capable of beating the Yanks (and for all the Rangers news that’s fit to link, check out the Newberg Report). Still, I like the Bombers’ chances. I’m curious to see if there is any rust for the ol’ Yanks come Friday night. The one thing that can’t happen is coming back to New York down 0-2 to face Cliff Lee. That said, I’ve got confidence in our boys.
Whadda ya hear, whadda say?
So far I like the idea of Kenny Powers more than I like the real Kenny Powers. But the jury is still out, and there’s always room for improvement. The fact that Kenny Powers doesn’t literally know how to throw a ball is weak.
Oh yeah, huge game tonight–Price vs. Lee. Should be a good one.
