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Let’s start fresh, shall we?

Last night was a game to forget. Here’s hoping tonight will be different. Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

Nicholas Dawidoff has a long profile on Rex Ryan in this week’s New York Times Magazine. For those of you who, you know, dig the pigskin:

Late spring in Florham Park, N.J., under a cloudless sky on a bright green lawn lined for football. It’s too hot, there’s only one lonely shade tree, and Rex Ryan’s latest diet isn’t working out. The New York Jets’ head coach is up over 345 again. Across the way from Ryan is his most valued employee, the magnificent cornerback Darrelle Revis, who is so “frustrated” about his salary that he sometimes seems undone. Living in Ryan’s attic back at the house is Ryan’s best friend since his Oklahoma youth, Jeff Weeks, the Jets’ outside linebackers coach, who is going through a divorce. Down on the farm in Kentucky, Ryan’s father, the pioneering defensive coach Buddy Ryan, has been ill with diverticulitis, while out in Cleveland, Ryan’s twin brother, Rob, is coordinating the defense for Browns Coach Eric Mangini, who had Ryan’s job until he was fired for what holdover Jets delicately call “negativity.” That, at least, will never be Ryan’s problem. “How great is this!” he cries, looking around. “My life is perfect.”

Jets practices are all planned to the minute long before they take place, with the formal responsibilities delegated to the various positional coaches, as well as to the team’s offensive coordinator, Brian Schottenheimer, and its defensive coordinator, Mike Pettine. As these worthies exhort their charges, it’s easy to imagine them all astride wheeling horses on some military parade ground, hardening their regiments for the long campaigns of autumn. Ryan is left to do exactly what he pleases, which almost always amounts to meandering from group to group, being enthusiastic. Wherever he wanders, Ryan is hard to miss. An immense man whose thick foothills of neck and haunch swell into a spectacular butte at the midsection, he possesses a personal geography that, from first-and-10 distance, assumes a form that follows his function — Ryan looks like nothing more than an extra-large football.

Saturday Morning Melodies…

Clifford does like Clifford do.

Yanks-Rangers in a possible playoff preview (minus, you know, a couple of aces for the Yanks).

Should be funski.

Let’s go Yan-Kees.

Bronco Buster, By Frederic Remington

Two all-pros:

Is Godzilla Matsui’s time with the Angels about to expire?

He’s no Mo, as our man William pointed out, but Tim Marchman thinks that Trevor Hoffman still deserves our admiration:

If we’re honest, we’ll admit that Hoffman has never, with the exception of his glorious 1998, really been a great pitcher. This has less to do with closers being inherently overrated than with how good he’s been. The average, competent closer will have an ERA of somewhere between 2.50 and 3.00; Hoffman’s career ERA is 2.87. He’s had better years and a few lesser ones, but he’s mainly spent two decades being pretty good.

Being pretty good for that long is difficult, maybe more to some ways than being great. A truly great player will adapt as he ages because he does several things well and can get better at some even as he gets worse at others. A player who does one thing well — and that describes the vast majority of even good major leaguers, who can maybe field a bit or hit a home run now and then or throw a nice fastball — has almost no margin for error.

Hoffman has always been such a player. He had some significant virtues such as composure and the ability to pitch an inning every third day without hurting himself, but basically he owed his success to one thing: a change-up. In his prime it was just hideous, and then as he lost a bit to age he figured out how to keep it working well enough to do his job, solidly and well, for long enough that he’ll almost certainly make the Hall of Fame.

Is Joaquin Phoniex a put-on artist? Manohla Dargis reviews “I’m Still Here”:

For a twitchy, perversely funny stretch, he mumbled and fidgeted, softly, often monosyllabically, responding as Mr. Letterman’s formulaic jive grew testy. “What can you tell us about your days with the Unabomber?” Mr. Letterman asked at one point. Mr. Phoenix looked down while the audience roared at a joke few seemed to grasp.

More than a year later the joke continues, sputters, occasionally hits its target and finally wears out its welcome in “I’m Still Here,” a deadpan satire or a deeply sincere folly (my money is on the first option) about Mr. Phoenix’s recent roles as an acting dropout and would-be hip-hop artist. Directed by Casey Affleck (who’s married to Mr. Phoenix’s sister Summer), the movie, which is being unpersuasively sold as a documentary, is a gloss on the mutually parasitic worlds of celebritydom and the entertainment media. Those are worlds Mr. Phoenix knows well, having fed the beast since his breakout role as Nicole Kidman’s poignantly thickheaded lover in “To Die For,” Gus Van Sant’s 1995 comedy about the tragedy of fame.

“I’m Still Here” isn’t as merciless as “To Die For,” which was etched in acid by the screenwriter Buck Henry. Mr. Affleck and Mr. Phoenix have been involved in the movie business long enough to be disgusted (or maybe just irked) by it, but they don’t appear to have surrendered to cynicism. Whatever else their movie is, and whatever their actual intentions, “I’m Still Here” does take on, at times forcefully and effectively, the pathological fallout of the Entertainment Industrial Complex. Much of the movie involves Mr. Phoenix’s having, or more likely pantomiming, a meltdown, for which he puts on a really good show. (He snorts white powder, hires a hooker, abuses his assistants.) But the programmatic nature of his antics strongly suggests that he is self-consciously playing a role in a narrative, one that isn’t simply about him.

Andy Pettitte pitched for the Trenton Thunder last night and the reports are good.

Here’s the TV theme song of the night. Remember this short-lived Dabney Coleman vehicle? Played a sports writer? Wish they had it on DVD, man.

Mark Simon has a neat little post on Boone Logan over at ESPN:

Lefty reliever Boone Logan, now more valuable with news coming down that Damaso Marte may not pitch again this season, has now made 22 straight appearances without allowing a run. He whiffed the two batters he faced in Wednesday’s comeback win.

That scoreless streak, via calculations made on Baseball-Reference.com, is the third-longest streak of scoreless games by a Yankees pitcher in the Live-Ball Era (since 1920).

[Photo Credit: Murphy Elliott]

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (1892-3),  By John Singer Sargent

Detail:

Got an e-mail from Yankeeist author Larry Koestler today:

I was recently able to conduct an interview with Alex Langsam, who works in the front office of the Pittsburgh Pirates as a Baseball Operations Assistant. Alex was generous enough to spend a significant amount of time providing very well-thought-out answers to my questions. Alex touches on everything from whether we’ll ever see wOBA show up on stadium scoreboards to when we might see some of the Pirates’ young phenoms hit the Bigs to what year the Pirates will return to the playoffs.

One caveat — this interview was conducted prior to the recent news regarding the Pirates’ financial documents and the status of GM Neal Huntington, and so those topics are not covered. Regardless, I wouldn’t have pressed Mr. Langsam nor do I think he would’ve cared to comment on those matters as it is.

Most cool. Dig it:

Yankeeist: You grew up a Yankee fan. Can you tell us a little bit about whether you are able to reconcile your Yankee fandom while working for another Major League organization, or is it similar to what happens when a player who grows up rooting for Team X ends up being drafted by Team Y and naturally switches allegiances to the organization that employs them? Did you root for the Yankees in the playoffs last year given that the Pirates were not involved in postseason play?

AL: I kind of surprised myself in how easy it was to “turn off” being a Yankee fan and switch allegiances to the Pirates. Not that I wasn’t a big fan before, I just found that when you work as hard as you do towards one goal, you have to be in it 100%. There’s really no room to be “rooting” for another team, otherwise you’re not giving the effort that everyone around you in the office is. Odd as it was, the Yankees really just became another team very quickly. As far as rooting for other teams in the playoffs, I found myself rooting for the teams of friends and former co-workers in the industry rather than for the laundry.

Check out our old pal Joe Sheehan on the Triple Crown:

“Triple Crown” is one of those phrases that has an tinge of antiquity to it, like the word “mitt” or referring to “base ball” or the mythical creature called the “doubleheader”. Leading the league in the traditional “big three” categories of batting average, home runs and RBI just isn’t done any longer. No baseball fan under 50 has a memory of seeing a Triple Crown, the last being achieved by Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. For three players — Joey Votto, Albert Pujols and Carlos Gonzalez — to be making a run at the Crown is highly unusual.

To some, the lack of Triple Crown winners in modern baseball is, like the lack of complete games or the decline in contact hitting, a sign that today’s players lack skills that their forefathers did. As with those issues and a host of others, the reasons have more to do with evolution and math than they do any change in the character of baseball players. It’s harder to lead the league in three categories now because it’s harder to lead the league in any one category now. The baseball Triple Crown went from an achievement that happened now and again to a rarity the minute baseball expanded past eight teams per league. The table at right shows the relationship of league size to Triple Crown winners.

There’s a fun post up at Serious Eats on Desert-Island Pantry Staples. I’ll go with a good bottle of olive oil and a good bottle of wine vinegar, Maldon salt and Sriracha, Tazo Awake tea and a jar of red current jelly for starters. What you got?

No, it’s not the theme song to Not Necessarily the News, it’s EC y’all:

Jay Jaffe has a good post on Jorge Posada and concussions over at PB:

Sadly, concussions have become a Very Big Deal in professional sports in recent years as their devastating and harrowing long-term effects have come to light. Among football players, they’ve been implicated in the onset of dementia. On the diamond, they’re thought to be the real cause of what’s previously been accepted as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a/k/a Lou Gehrig’s Disease, at least according to one recent scientific paper. Concussions have ended the careers of players such as Brewers’ third baseman Corey Koskie, who collided with a wall while attempting to catch a pop-up in 2006, and Giants’ catcher Mike Matheny, who was forced into retirement in early 2007 as a result of the cumulative effect of all the foul tips he took in the mask — a situation that rings a bell both literally and figuratively as far as Posada is concerned.

Other players such as Jim Edmonds, Ryan Church, Justin Morneau and Jason Bay have been forced to the sidelines for extended and maddeningly indefinite periods of time due to concussions and their aftermath, the poorly understood post-concussion syndrome, which can include headaches, nausea, dizziness, fatigue, loss of memory, insomnia… a potpourri of misery. Cardinals’ manager Tony La Russa basically impugned Edmonds’ manhood while the latter recuperated, and Mets manager Jerry Manuel similarly made a hash of Church’s situation to the extent that his club came under well-deserved fire for their general handling of such cases.

I covered the last game at the old Yankee Stadium for SI. Spent almost the entire time trailing Ray Negron, who at one point, gave a two-hour private tour of the place to a party of four headlined by Richard Gere. The filmmaker Barbara Kopple was part of the media swarm and she followed Ray and his group with her camera crew, hoping to get some footage of Gere. For his part, Gere was gracious and allowed her to film him some.

Well, Kopple’s ESPN documentary will air soon but it seems that Yankee president Randy Levine doesn’t much care for it. Which means, it might be pretty good, after all.

The Yanks were this close to being swept by Buck’s birds. Then Nick Swisher hit a game-ending, two-run home run to the opposite field to give the Yanks a 3-2 win. I missed the game on the count of, you know, I gotta job and all, but I was pleased to hear that Ivan Nova pitched well, and of course, I was pumped about how the game ended.

When Tino Martinez played for the Yankees, women loved him. Girls swooned for Jeter, women went for Tino. He was reliable, solid, plus he had a nice ass. Nowadays, a lot of women love Swisher. Not like they liked Tino, but they find Swisher’s goofy enthusiasm charming. Here’s a shot I took of him at Old Timer’s Day with some of the old Yankee wives:

You might think he’s cool or you might think he’s a clown. So long as he keeps hitting, I’ll take him.

On a more somber note, Brian Heyman reports:

The postgame talk had more to do with Jorge Posada’s concussion symptoms than Nick Swisher’s two-run walk-off homer, which came one year to the day of his last walk-off homer. Joe Girardi was asked about life potentially without Posada, and he didn’t like the thought.

“You’re talking about a guy that’s playoff-tested, World Series-tested, September-down-the-stretch-tested, a switch-hitter in the middle part of our lineup,” Girardi said. “It’s an impact.”

But everything turned out OK with the test results. Posada is day to day and cleared to play.

Forget about Posada not being in the lineup, here’s hoping the man is okay.
[Photo Credit: Bill Kostroun/AP]