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One of the first grown-up books I ever read as a kid was “Mr. October,” by Maury Allen. I was ten-years-old when it was published in 1981. I already had “The Reggie Jackson Scrapbook” but this was a biography, all words and no pictures (although each chapter featured a picture of Reggie at the plate ). I wasn’t a big reader but I liked having my own books and often received baseball books for my birthday. I knew about the two Rogers–Angell and Kahn–from my dad’s book collection. But when I picked up “The Boys of Summer” and tried to read it I got bored quickly, same for “The Summer Game” and “Five Innings” which had impossibly long paragraphs that seemed to go on forever.

Maury Allen I could read. He told a story. The words didn’t scare me away. So I read “Mr. October” over and again. And I got more of Allen’s books, notably “Baseball’s 100,” and always made the distinction between Maury Allen and Murray Chass–who covered the Yankees for the New York Times. Maury Allen was my first favorite sports writer. And although I knew that he wasn’t in the best of health, I was deeply sadened to hear that he died yesterday morning.

Here is the obit from the New York Times.

Allen had been around New York covering sports since the Toots Shor days. He wrote for the Post from 1961-88. In the Sixties, Allen was at the Post with Leonard Shecter, Milton Gross, Leonard Koppett, Larry Merchant and Vic Ziegel, to name just a few. He covered the Yanks and looked as if he’d be right at home sitting at Oscar Madison’s poker table.

Allen moved to the Gannett chain after leaving the Post and most recently contributed to The Columnists (check out his archive). He also wrote close to 40 books. I was thrilled that he was a part of the Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories book.

Maury Allen will be missed but not forgotten.

The Yanks got pasted this afternoon in Boston, 8-4, as the Rays win the AL East. The Yanks are the wildcard and will play the Twins. New York has owned the Minnie in the playoffs, which is why I have a bad feeling about this. That said, it’s October, and the Yanks are the defending champs. We’ll have plenty to keep us busy as we wait for first pitch on Wednesday night.

95 wins for your 2010 Yanks and a return trip to the post-season.

We’ll take it.

Or anything more, for that matter?

The Yanks and Rays have battled for first place all season long so it is entirely fitting that the Division Crown comes down to the final day of the regular season. If both teams win (or lose), the Rays take it.

Time to put a halt to the forgettable baseball that has been played around these parts for the past month. Starting this week, either at home against the Rangers or on the road against the Twins, the Yanks will defend their title. Either way, we’ll be root-root-rooting our hearts out.

Starting…now:

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

[Picture by Bags]

First of two is on Fox.

Go git ’em boys.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

Baseball later today. Meanwhile, the sky is clear and blue. Enjoy the day. Back later.

Meanwhile, music:

Game got rained out tonight and the Rays lost.

They’ll play two tomorrow. Second game could go deep into the night.

Yanks-Sox and the last weekend on the regular season. There is something at stake here, of course, the best record in the American League. Looks like the Sox have something to play for after all.

Mr. de Kooning

Joe Pos on Vin Scully:

What Vincent Edward Scully first came to Los Angeles to broadcast Dodgers baseball games in 1958, he worried because he could not find the essence of the city. The center. The heart. He was 30 years old, and he had some clear ideas about what it took to call a baseball game. He thought it was important that the hometown baseball announcer know the hometown. So, he kept looking for this PLACE. That’s was how his mind worked then. There had to be a place. Back in New York, there was always a place.

Vin Scully heard life in New York City rhythms then — well, he had grown up in New York. He went to school in New York. He had worked with Red Barber in New York. And in New York there’s always a place, doesn’t matter if it’s Brooklyn or the Bronx, Harlem or Greenwich Village, Manhattan or Queens. There’s a place you go, where people gather, where decisions are made, where the energy pulses, where everything starts.

“In New York, for me, it was Toots Shor’s,” he says. That was the restaurant, of course, there on 51st street between 5th and 6th Avenues but closer to 6th. That was where things were always going on, where Vin could feel the city’s vibrations, its power. He might see Joe DiMaggio sitting with Marilyn Monroe. He might catch Frank Sinatra talking a little boxing. He might catch a glimpse or Ernest Hemingway or see Jackie Gleason hold court or see Judy Garland sitting in a corner. More than anything, though, he might hear what was happening in his town, what mattered, and Vin Scullly needed to know these things. He felt sure they made him a better baseball announcer.

Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories hits the shelves next week. Dig this interview with me over at New York Magazine.

Also, for all you NYC heads, I’ll be at the Gelf Varsity Letters series in Brooklyn next Thursday, October 7th. If you are around and available, represent, represent!

“The Social Network” is getting rave reviews. Check out this gusher from David Denby in The New Yorker:

“The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, rushes through a coruscating series of exhilarations and desolations, triumphs and betrayals, and ends with what feels like darkness closing in on an isolated soul. This brilliantly entertaining and emotionally wrenching movie is built around a melancholy paradox: in 2003, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), a nineteen-year-old Harvard sophomore, invents Facebook and eventually creates a five-hundred-million-strong network of “friends,” but Zuckerberg is so egotistical, work-obsessed, and withdrawn that he can’t stay close to anyone; he blows off his only real pal, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), a fellow Jewish student at Harvard, who helps him launch the site. The movie is not a conventionally priggish tale of youthful innocence corrupted by riches; nor is it merely a sarcastic arrow shot into the heart of a poor little rich boy. Both themes are there, but the dramatic development of the material pushes beyond simplicities, and the portrait of Zuckerberg is many-sided and ambiguous; no two viewers will see him in quite the same way. The debate about the movie’s accuracy has already begun, but Fincher and Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created a work of art. Accuracy is now a secondary issue. In this extraordinary collaboration, the portrait of Zuckerberg, I would guess, was produced by a happy tension, even an opposition, between the two men—a tug-of-war between Fincher’s gleeful appreciation of an outsider who overturns the social order and Sorkin’s old-fashioned, humanist distaste for electronic friend-making and a world of virtual emotions. The result is a movie that is absolutely emblematic of its time and place. “The Social Network” is shrewdly perceptive about such things as class, manners, ethics, and the emptying out of self that accompanies a genius’s absorption in his work. It has the hard-charging excitement of a very recent revolution, the surge and sweep of big money moving fast and chewing people up in its wake.

Don’t you worry…

GQ interview with Tony Curtis…

We’re working on a new look for Banter and a beyond beta version accidentally appeared last night. We’re still trying to work out the kinks and get things back to normal. It’s completely my fault and I apologize for the disruption.

Rays, Royals tonight out in the heartland…

[Picture by J. Parthum, Fort Greene, BK]

Puff n Schtuff

Over at SI.com, our man Cliff takes a look at how the Award season will play out. AL MVP?

1. Miguel Cabrera, 1B, Tigers (1)

Season Stats: .328/.419/.624, 38 HRs, 126 RBIs

September has been Cabrera’s worst month this season by far, but his extraordinary consistency is starting to win out as he has heated back up over the last week and enters Monday night’s action with an active six-game hitting streak during which he has gone 9-for-23 with four home runs. Cabrera doesn’t do much outside of the batter’s box and plays for a team barely keeping its head above .500, but no other American Leaguer has produced at such an elite level so consistently throughout the 2010 season. Cabrera has also started all but six of the Tigers’ games this season.

2. Robinson Cano, 2B, Yankees (3)

Season Stats: .318/.379/.532, 28 HRs, 105 RBIs

Hamilton has far and away the superior rate stats, but due to their disparate playing time, Cano leads the injured Rangers’ outfielder in RBIs, hits, runs, and walks (!), and is just one double and three home runs shy of Hamilton’s season totals. Give Cano additional credit for playing a far more challenging position, striking out fewer times in more than an hundred extra plate appearances, and for simple reliability (he has started all but three of the Yankees’ games this year), and he slips past the former frontrunner in this race.

I’ve never been to a four-star restaurant. Might be fun to try one day if I ever win the lottery.

In the Times, Sam Sifton gives Del Posto, the coveted four-star rating:

GREAT restaurants may start out that way. But an extraordinary restaurant generally develops only over time, the product of prolonged artistic risk and managerial attention. An extraordinary restaurant uses the threat of failure first as a spur to improvement, then as a vision of unimaginable calamity. An extraordinary restaurant can transcend the identity of its owners or chef or concept.

And of course an extraordinary restaurant serves food that leads to gasps and laughter, to serious discussion and demands for more of that, please, now. The point of fine dining is intense pleasure. For the customer, at any rate, an extraordinary restaurant should never be work.

Over at the Pinstriped Bible, Cliff, Steven and Stephani say Bring on the Rangers. Jay’s like, nah, bring on the Twins.

Another Hollywood Legend Passes: Tony Curtis, R.I.P.