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On second thought, Phil Hughes will start tonight, after all. Like to see it.  And it’s not Buchholz but Dice K for the Sox.

Hughes game. Gimme some Score Truck.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

While we wait for the Yanks to play tonight, we’ve got football and football means:

Happy Sundaze.

[Picture by J. Parthum]

It just is.

[Photo Credit: J. Parthum]

That’s the only word that will do. The Yanks are playing like horsesh**. Jon Lester is a stud and he was in peak form on Saturday, true. Give him credit. But listen, the Yankees have lost four games in a row at home and are doing their best to make us squirm. Final score this afternoon: Red Sox 7, Yanks 3.

They’ve got Dustin Moseley pitching against Clay Buchholz tomorrow night. Anyone inspired with a sudden burst of confidence? Okay, so let’s say they get swept. There will be six games left, Magic Number stuck on stupid at three. You’ve still got to love their chances to make it to October, which looks like it’ll start in Minnie against that sombitch Pavano (the Rays already have a 4-0 first inning lead tonight).

But c’mon now, enough is enough already. The sky isn’t falling yet, of course, but that doesn’t mean we’ve got to be happy about this horsesh**, either.

The Yanks are stumbling toward a playoff berth. Last night, the offense showed some fight, which has me feeling good. However, the formidable J. Lester goes for the Sox later this afternoon on Fox (doom, doom!) and Dustin Moseley will start for the Yanks tomorrow night so a Red Sox sweep is not hard to imagine.

Still, I’ll be keeping the faith like De La, and root-root-rooting for the home team.

Fug whatchu hoid: Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

[Picture by Frank Miller]

Hey, Yanks just need to win two games to reach the playoffs this weekend?

Things aren’t all that bad, after all.

Okay, so 1960 is a most horrid thought for most Yankee fans but this is too good not to share.

The Times does homemade potato chips.

For you skeptics out there, last night’s loss is proof that this is not a magical year, that this Yankee team will get bounced from the playoffs in early October. We’re always looking for signs and the Yanks have not played well over the past month. This morning, the papers took notice.

In the Post, George King begins his recap:

Joe Girardi and CC Sabathia better be correct. Because if they are wrong, the Yankees’ October experience is going to be a short one.

The manager and ace both said the max-effort pitching duel between David Price and Sabathia less than two weeks ago in St. Petersburg, Fla., didn’t bankrupt the Yankees ace’s tank.

In the News, Mark Feinsand writes, “The standings still show the Yankees in sole possession of first place in the American League East, so why does it feel like they lost the division Thursday night?”

Nobody was happy in the comments section here at Banter last night, either. So? What does it all mean? Can this team turn it on and go back to the Whirled Serious? Or is this 2006 and a first round bump?

I don’t think the Yanks will repeat but also would be surprised if they don’t at least make it to the ALCS.

The Dummy leads, the dummy leads…

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

As William mentioned in the comments section earlier, there is always something to see when you are the ballpark that you can’t get on TV, even if the ballpark experience features an awful  lot of TV. For instance, last night, I noticed just how slowly the players took the field between innings. They were in no rush. It was hot and humid, and they’ve been playing all summer long. How many trips has this been from the dugout to their respective positions? They were pacing themselves, conserving energy.

Then, I think it was in the top of the third inning, one of the Rays hit a line drive that almost took off the head of their first base coach. The dude hit the deck, then, gingerly, stood up. The crowd gave him a cheer for surviving. A few minutes later, a ground ball up the middle took a late hop and Derek Jeter had to adjust his glove quickly to snare it. After he gloved the ball and flipped to Cano at second for the force, Jeter shook his head as if to say, “Dag, close call.”

And it struck me that even when baseball seems slow, boring and tedious, the action on the field happens lightening fast. The sense of  danger is always there.

P.S. I heard that Jeter is called a “bi-racial angel” in the new Will Ferrell movie. That’s a good line.

[Photo Credit: Andrew Burton/Getty Images]

It’s not about a salary it’s all about reality.

Hey, speaking of gangsters, remember this fargin corksucker?

Greasy…

From the New York Magazine archives, here’s a piece Pete Hamill once in 1969 about a Great White Hope:

Jerry Quarry was dressed in natty gray sharkskin trousers, a cobalt-blue shirt and white shoes, and he looked like all those young men in Southern California who don’t take drugs or wear their hair long or go off to Berkeley. The dark blond hair was combed straight back, with long sideburns, and you were sure that a few years ago he wore a ducktail. The face itself had that rugged blockiness you see a lot in California: straight short nose, good jaw, neat ears; only Quarry’s eyes had that peculiar maturity that comes with the acceptance of pain. He nodded and disappeared into the dressing room.

After awhile, Quarry returned and hopped into the ring. He was wearing green trunks and white boxing shoes, and he started to move briskly around the ring, flicking his bandaged hands at the air. The hard body was tanned and trim, and he twisted it and stretched it, the hands always moving, describing patterns of punches, the jab whipping straight out, the right hand jamming behind it, the short flat hook whipping horizontally across Quarry’s own chin-line. The audience seemed hypnotized.

Then Quarry went over to the side of the ring, where his trainer Teddy Bentham smeared Vaseline on his face and laced on a pair of 10-ounce red boxing gloves. Boursse came into the ring, his face masked by headgear. Quarry did not wear headgear, and you could see the blanched look on the face of John Condon, the Garden public relations man. Quarry’s fight with Frazier is the hottest prizefight of the year; the Garden might be sold out, and if it is, the live gate alone could be $750,000, with another million coming from closed-circuit television. If Quarry were cut in training it would cost someone a lot of money. But Quarry is a fighter, and the real fighters don’t really care much for headgear.

An intriguing new book on Charlie Chan by Yunte Hang has received good reviews–from the L.A. Times and the New York Times and The New Yorker:

Chan’s Hollywood career was launched in 1926, with a film adaptation of “The House Without a Key,” starring the Japanese actor George Kuwa, after which Chan went on to appear in forty-six more movies; he was most memorably played, in the nineteen-thirties, by a Swede named Warner Oland. He also appeared in countless comic strips and, in the nineteen-seventies, in sixteen episodes of Hanna-Barbera’s “The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan,” which aired on CBS television on Saturday mornings and featured a dog named Chu Chu, Jodie Foster’s voice as one of Chan’s ten children, and the cri de coeur “Wham bam, we’re in a jam!”
Charlie Chan is also one of the most hated characters in American popular culture. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, distinguished American writers, including Frank Chin and Gish Jen, argued for laying Chan to rest, a yellow Uncle Tom, best buried. In trenchant essays, Chin condemned the Warner Oland movies as “parables of racial order”; Jen called Chan “the original Asian whiz kid.” In 1993, the literary scholar Elaine Kim bid Chan good riddance—“Gone for good his yellowface asexual bulk, his fortune-cookie English”—in an anthology of contemporary Asian-American fiction titled “Charlie Chan Is Dead,” which is not to be confused with the beautiful and fantastically clever 1982 Wayne Wang film, “Chan Is Missing,” and in which traces of a man named Chan are all over the place, it’s just that no one can find him anymore.
“Role of dead man require very little acting,” as Charlie Chan liked to say. (Don’t ask me what that means. Aphorisms, like tiger in zoo, all roar, no claw.) In “Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History” (Norton; $26.95), Yunte Huang, who grew up in China, went to graduate school in the United States, taught at Harvard for a while, and now teaches American literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, confesses, abashedly, to being a Chan fan: “Sometimes late at night, I turn on the TV and a Chinaman falls out. He is hilarious.” Most interesting.
(Jill Lepore, The New Yorker)

[Picture by Greg Kucera]

Derek Jeter put in some extra work with hitting coach Kevin Long and has some good results to show for it. Jeter has an 11-game hitting streak and is starting to drive the ball again. According to Ben Shpigel in the Times:

“Lately, what you’ve seen is a guy whose head is staying still,” Long said before Wednesday’s game against the Rays. “He’s much more direct to the baseball.”

The primary change involved shortening Jeter’s stride. Long noticed that Jeter’s left foot was moving toward the plate instead of toward the mound as he prepared to swing, a flaw that left him vulnerable to inside pitches and prevented him from making solid contact. “You’re going to see the ball a lot better, and your body’s more in control,” Long said. “Ultimately, everything’s going to be working in order.”

Yanks lookin’ to get greedy. AJ Burnett lookin’ to show and prove:

Go git ’em, fellas.