Blog Archives

I didn’t feel good about AJ Burnett going into tonight’s game. For no other reason than I figured it was time for him to have a bad outing, get the snot knocked out of him. I’m pleased to report that didn’t happen. Burnett was strong once again as he allowed just one run over seven innings. He didn’t John Blaze the Rays to death–just five strikeouts–but he was effective (only two walks) and a-mighty fun to watch.

The Yanks put three early runs on the board against James Shields. Robbie Cano and Nick Swisher hit back-to-back dingers in the sixth and Alex Rodriguez added a two-run double two innings later. Derek Jeter had three hits and a walk and is now battting .325. I wax poetic about Mariano Rivera on the reg, I love rooting for Alex Rodriguez, but man, has it ever been wonderful to watch Jeter play all these years. He’s truly one of the great Yankees.

Johnny Alphabetsoup allowed two runs in the bottom of the eighth, and left two runners on base when he was replaced by David Robertson. What looked like a laugher got tense for a minute–but Robertson struck out Carlos Pena on a breaking ball in the dirt to escape further trouble.

Then Swisher added a solo shot–this one righthanded–in the ninth, Johnny Damon wacked a three-run dinger (his 200th career homer) as the Yanks beat the Rays 11-4. The Bombers remain two-and-a-half ahead of the Sox who beat the A’s in Boston.

Nice way to start the week, wouldn’t ya say?

One of my favorite movie scenes of all time:

The A’s stopped the Yanks 6-4 on Saturday ending New York’s eight-game winning streak. The Red Sox beat the O’s and now trail the Yanks by just a game-and-a-half.

Alfredo Aceves couldn’t wriggle out of a 7th inning jam–a couple of soft base hits and a drive into the right center gap–did him in. The Yanks started the inning up 1-0, with Andy Pettitte throwing a gem, and it ended with them down 6-1. Still, a couple of homers (Derek Jeter and Mark Teixeira) in the eighth made it exciting and when they put two men on to start the ninth it wasn’t hard to imagine them coming back and winning. But it wasn’t meant to be as Jorge Posada bounced into a 4-6-3 double play to squarsh the rally. Gio Gonzalez threw a nifty game for Oakland, allowing just a couple of hits. He had a good breaking pitch and fine control.

Paul O’Neill was in good form in the broadcast booth with his comedy partner Michael Kay and color man Al Leiter. At one point, they discussed their Saturday night plans. Leiter said that he was going out on a date with his wife. “Who is going to babysit the kids?” said Kay.

“You are,” said O’Neill. “That’s going to be our text pole in the seventh inning: ‘Who is going to watch Al’s kids tonight?’ And the answer is Michael, Michael and Mr. Kay.”

Ahh, wocka, wocka, wocka.

It’s a hot n hazy summer day in the Bronx as Andy Pettitte and the Yanks look to keep rollin’.

Yanks shootin’ for their eighth straight tonight against the A’s.

Get down with the Git down.

I’m getting more sensitive. Oh, I’m not as touchy as I used to be. I don’t take offense so easily, I don’t take things as personally as I once did. On the other hand, I can’t stomach violence. I don’t play Grand Theft Auto, or watch boxing, forget about UFC. I recoil when I see parents berate their kids in public.

Last month I was between 8th and 9th avenue when I looked up and saw a father walking down the block, his son, maybe 7 or 8, walking closley next to him. As I looked at them I heard the father say, “You are so f***-ing stupid, how can you be so goddman dumb?” It felt like a punch in the gut.

Last night, I read an article in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books about the Congo by the historian Adam Hochschild. I should have known that it would be a tough read but there was a story on the first page (fourth paragraph) of such unspeakable horror that I couldn’t finish the article. I skimmed the rest of it, not wanting to read anything so terrible again.

I was on the subway coming home. And I was rattled. I put the article down and tried to distract myself. I couldn’t. So I put on my headphones and scanned the i-pod for something soothing. Couldn’t find a thing. Then I happened on Some Girls, one of my favorite albums by the Rolling Stones. Listening to “Beast of Burden,” I was able to forget the savage imagery of the article for a few minutes.

I grew up on Some Girls–still one of my favorite Stones records–Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You. They may not be the Stones’ best work–Let it Bleed, Beggar’s Banquet, and Sticky Fingers are the Stones at their peak, though there have always been hardcore Stones fans who swear by Exile on Main Street (with Black and Blue as the sleeper pick of cherce)–but in some ways they are the ones that I hold most dear. The Stones were my first favorite band. As a kid, I thought Mick Jagger was a bad ass and a clown.

I remember a British friend of my mother’s laughing in those years when she heard “Emotional Rescue.”

“The Stones are making disco records now.”

Maybe the Stones were already a parody of themselves by the late Seventies, but they lived in New York City, and their records sounded good. Even if they were corny at times. “She’s so Cold,” that was my joint. I never especially loved “Beast of Burden,” but listening to it last night–and thinking about “Waiting on a Friend” at the same time–I felt reassured and calm.

Nice to know we’ve got distractions–a way to escape–from the incredible terrors, large and small, that exist in the world.

Because on any given day something great can happen.

Like this.

What does it all mean?

Fiorello LaGuardia reads Dick Tracy:

Many years later, Double D and Steinski sample LaGuardia on their Lesson records:

Then, Prince Paul nabbed the bit on the first De La Soul record (dig the weird video mix):

Mark Lamster, a longtime friend of Bronx Banter, has a long piece on the two new NYC ballparks over at Metropolis magazine:

For a certain kind of baseball enthusiast, the ultimate measure of these two parks rests on how they actually play. The new Yankee Stadium is a simulacra of the old, with dimensions that are roughly the same but different enough that it performs quite differently. (For the spectator, this lends it either an eerie cast or a pleasant familiarity.) In practice, shorter and closer outfield fences, a reduction of foul territory, and concourses open to the wind make Yankee Stadium one of the most hitter-friendly parks in baseball. Though the old yard always favored powerful lefties like Ruth, it now seems to favor anyone who shows up with a bat: its home-run rate is by far the highest in baseball. This has made it something of a laughingstock among seamheads, but what real detriment the hitter-friendly contours might pose, beyond making games longer, is a matter for debate. Some experts believe that hitters’ parks place undue stress on team pitching staffs, thereby reducing their chances at postseason success. Attendance, however, traditionally supports the validity of the league’s nineties-era marketing slogan: “Chicks dig the long ball.”

Regardless of gender, fans who want to see home runs would do well to avoid Citi Field, which seems as hostile to dingers as Yankee Stadium is friendly to them. Despite the Mets’ potent bats, their new home, with its prairie-scaled expanses, suppresses offense like no other in baseball. “The distances in the outfield and the power alleys, that’s where you can have some fun in establishing dimensions,” Barnert says. “You can create some unique areas where the ball can rattle around a bit.” It is that creativity, however, that many purists find aggravating. “It’s just so contrived,” says Jay Jaffe, a writer for Baseball Prospectus. “It drives me crazy.” The dimensions of the classic ballparks on which the Populous stadiums are modeled (such as Ebbets Field) were the product of their constrained urban lots. But Citi Field was built in the middle of a parking lot. And therein lies the strange paradox of the Populous stadiums: though they are painstakingly manufactured to appear idiosyncratic, the willfulness of their design is inescapable; and now that there are nearly 20 of them around the league, their heterogeneity has come to seem altogether homogenous.

When I first started attending games on my own, some 20 years ago, a ticket to the Yankee bleachers cost $1.50, pocket change even for a kid on a tight allowance. That same ticket now costs $14: not an unreasonable sum, but more than a movie and enough to keep a student on a limited budget from making it too much of a habit. The new stadium, for that matter, doesn’t beg that kind of relationship. It’s a special-occasion place, somewhere to visit a couple of times a season. Why empty your wallet for an entertainment event that might not be entertaining? (Even the best teams lose roughly 40 percent of their games.) When you’re stuck in the nosebleed seats, and a beer, a dog, and a bag of peanuts cost upward of 20 bucks, thoughts of exploitation inevitably percolate through the mind. It is in those moments that the fan-team compact seems hopelessly broken, and one begins to wonder about the difference between being a fan and being a chump. Sometimes it seems like there’s no difference at all.

Lamster’s second book, Master of Shadows, The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens is due out this fall. Dude, talk about well-rounded. Lamster is one of the best and brightest and I’m proud to call him a pal.

AJ Burnett likes to mash pies in his teammates’ grill. Let’s hope he gives them reason to return the favor this afternoon.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

I missed Sergio Mitre’s Yankee debut last night. By the time I got home, Alfredo Aceves was pitching. But Mitre kept his team in the game and left with the Yanks ahead 6-4. Aceves, Phil Coke, and Mariano Rivera did not allow a run and that was how the score stood as the Yanks moved into sole possession of first place (the Rangers beat the Red Sox 4-2 in Texas).

“We don’t get caught up in who’s in first place, who’s in second place,” Derek Jeter said. “Yeah, it’s great that nobody’s in front of us. But it doesn’t mean anything at this point.”
(Kepner, N.Y.Times)

The Bombers didn’t hit much but they took advantage of eight walks issued by Baltimore’s pitching staff. Alex Rodriguez had a productive night. In the second, he led off with a walk, stole second, advanced to third on a fly ball and then scored on a sac fly. The following inning, with two out, Rodriguez drove in two runs with a single, putting the Yanks ahead for good.

That’s five straight for the Bombers who play an afternoon game today. Looking at the standings, it sure seems as if we’re going to have some excitement on our hands this summer. The Rays, Sox, Yanks, Angels and Rangers are all having fine seasons–only three will make the playoffs. Ya gotta love it.

It’s better to be lucky than good. It’s an old saying. The first time I heard it was from Tommy Lasorda in 1988 when the Dodgers beat the heavily favored Mets and then the A’s to become World Champs.

I’ll go one further–it’s better to be lucky and good. The Yankees have won three straight games by the score of 2-1. Andy Pettitte, not wanting to be the odd man out, picked up where Joba Chamberlain and CC Sabathia left off, and threw a fine game last night.

Sure, there has been some luck–how did Jose Molina manage to keep that snow-coned ball in his mitt last night?–and if they’d been losing games 3-2 we’d be moaning about the lack of hitting. But they’ve been winning and so we are heppy kets for the moment.

Win it all, or else. That’s the philosophy in the Bronx. Championship or mud. Sometimes it is difficult to appreciate what you’ve got when you live by this motto. Sure, the World Serious is the thing. It has to be. But the Yankees give us more pleasure than disappointment, no matter how much more pleasure we demand from them. (At these prices, they had better win.)  

They are tied for first place now. There is still a long way to go.  We haven’t hit the dog days yet. The latest set-back for Chien-Ming Wang presents a problem. But they are playing well and right now, the breaks are going there way. Time to stop, take it in, and appreciate what we’ve got. There is no guarantee that it’s gunna last.

But after seeing Godzilla hit a game-winning homer last night I bet there are a lot of fans around the country cursing, Damn Yankees.

Somehow, I missed this when it was originally posted. Maybe D linked to it already. If not, check out these personal letters, written by Lou Gehrig, that are up at ESPN.com.

I took a round of live bp at the Uptown Sports Complext hitting cages in the Bronx on Saturday afternoon. It was a humbling experience–my mind remembered how to hit but the body wasn’t so willing (I lunged all over the place). I came away with blisters on my left hand, having worked up a good sweat swinging the bat for half-an-hour. It was a reminder of just how hard baseball is to play, something I thought of again watching Old Timers’ Day this afternoon.

Baseball is not meant to be played by old men. (The same cannot be said about Golf, as Tom Watson nearly became the oldest man to ever win the British Open; a great story, Watson fell short, proving that no age is too old to experience the agony of defeat). Sure, some former players can still swing–Jesse Barfield had a couple of good hacks, Lee Maz knocked a Ron Guidry pitch deep but foul before Gator came back and stuck him out on a slider–and a couple can even move–Jeff Nelson shagging a fly in left, Mickey Rivers turning it on and legging out a double, but mostly, old players just look old trying to play.

Mariano Rivera, yeah, he’s old, but he’s still got the Midas Touch. Rivera saved a game for the third consecutive day as the Yankees completed the sweep of the Tigers, winning 2-1. Joba Chamberlain threw a nice game–hitting the upper 90s on the radar gun–going 6 2/3 strong innings. He worked out of a trouble in the fifth; five or his last six outs came on strikeouts (he had eight in all). Phil Coke threw one pitch to get out of the seventh and Phil Hughes mowed ’em down in the eighth setting the stage for Rivera, who worked around a two out walk (only his fourth base on balls of the year), to earn his 26th save of the year. Rivera lowered his ERA to 2.25.

Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira hit solo home runs and that was the difference. Roy Halladay and the Jays beat the Red Sox and the Yanks are now just one game behind Boston.

In all, a swell start to the second half, wouldn’t you say?

It’s starting to get hot. You know what that means. Tempers get short.

I’m out and about today, so posting will be slow.

In the meanwhile, chew on this and have a smile:

Paul Hemphill, a terrific American writer, passed away last weekend. He was 73.

In the New York Times obituary, William Grimes writes:

Mr. Hemphill turned a flair for sportswriting into a columnist’s job at the old Atlanta Journal in the 1960s, when the New Journalism began to take hold. Like Jimmy Breslin, a writer he was often compared to, he turned his roving eye to ordinary Southerners overlooked by most writers and mined the inexhaustible vein of human experience that he summed up, in his collection “Too Old to Cry” (1981), as “lost dreams and excess baggage and divorce, whiskey, suicide, killing and general unhappiness.” He also wrote blunt columns about race at a time when the topic was incendiary in the South.

“He was the kind of general newspaper columnist that hardly exists anymore,” Roy Blount Jr., who worked with Mr. Hemphill at The Journal, said by e-mail in June. “He’d go out and do things and talk to people and write 2,000 words, daily. He wasn’t a talking head; he was walking ears, or listening legs.”

Hemphill wrote a seminal book about country music called The Nashville Sound and later, a well-received biography of Hank Williams. I love his memoir about the South in the Sixties, Leaving Birmingham.

I had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Hemphill over the phone once a few years ago. He was charming and gracious though he was already ill with throat cancer. We spoke about his debut novel, Long Gone, and the 1987 movie adaptaion for HBO (which sadly, is not available on DVD). He didn’t have much to do with the film but was pleased with how it turned out.

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