It is always the same, the sudden, stomach-dropping, jolt. Walking along a city block, looking up at a familiar store front or restaurant, a Closed sign hanging in the door way, or a vacant window. Something has happened. Change has come, like it or not.
I gasped last night as I walked past Sal and Carmine’s pizza shop on Broadway between 101st and 102nd (They make a salty but delicious slice.) The grate was up and a red rose was taped against the metal. Above it was a small xeroxed obiturary from a New Jersey paper.
Sal died late last week. I’ve been eating their pizza since I was a kid. Sal and Carmine. Two short, taciturn men in their seventies, though they look older. I never knew who was Sal and who was Carmine, just that one was slightly less cranky than the other. These are the kind of men that don’t retire but are retired.
The funeral was yesterday; the shop re-opens today.
As I read the obituary, people stopped and registered the news. They congregated for a few moments, some took pictures with their cell phones, and then slowly walked away, the neighbhorhood taking in the loss.
The Yanks won 2 of 3 in Texas and have won 2 of 3 so far in Cleveland (they split their first series against the Indians, 2-2). A loss tonight would be a drag. So after a lousy start last week against the Rangers, I expect Joba Chamberlain to come out and pitch well this evening.
As you may have already heard, Steven Soderbergh will attempt to make the great baseball movie out of Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ seminal baseball book. Brad Pitt is set to play Billy Beane.Adapted for the screen by Steve Zaillian (Schindler’s List), Soderbergh is perhaps the ideal director to bring Lewis’ book to the screen.When he’s not directing A-List star vehicles like Erin Brockovich or Ocean’s 11, Soderbergh makes smaller, more avant-garde movies like Schizopolis and The Limey where he experiments with linear narrative.
Moneyball is a book that, on the surface anyway, seems to be ill-suited for the big screen. But I’ve always felt that it had dramatic potential–a charismatic lead, evocative scene-chewing set pieces like the draft room business. The fact that it is not a traditional story works in Soderbergh’s favor.
The question is: Can the best baseball book of a generation become the best baseball film of them all?
“Bull Durham is the model for most baseball fans in terms of behavior and storytelling,” Soderbergh said recently.“It seems the most lifelike. But I want to do something that’s even more immersive. I’m standing on the shoulders of [director] Ron Shelton. That was his contribution to the genre. Now it’s my turn….”My clearly stated goal is to set a new standard for realism in that [sports] world.”
Soderbergh has the cooperation of MLB (he can use game footage).Art Howe, Rick Peterson, David Justice and Jeremy Giambi will play themselves as the director attempts to create a realism never seen in a baseball movie.
This all sounds promising. But here’s the catch. Moneyball was hip and timely when it was released in hardcover; now, the material is dated. I wonder how Soderbergh can work around this and create something that is aesthetically exciting, dramatically compelling, and relevant.
Monty Poole doesn’t think it can work. I have my reservations too, but believe it will be an interesting movie regardless. And since the bar for baseball movies is so low, Moneyball could be worth watching–it could even be the best baseball movie ever filmed–even if it is a fine mess.
I never did like Carl Pavano much when he was in pinstripes but I didn’t necessarily enjoy ragging on him. It became inevitable at a certain point–he didn’t leave us any cherce but to bust on him–but it wasn’t something I relished.
Now, I really don’t like the dude. With his fat arse and crooked nostrils and current success on the mound. Whadda Bum.
On Sunday afternoon, Pavano pitched well against the Yankees for the second time this year. He was even better today than he was at Yankee Stadium in April, throwing slop effectively, mixing speeds, getting ahead, and keeping his pitch count low. A steady wind blocked fly balls from sailing into the seats and Pavano got by on a steady diet of fly ball outs.
Carl Pavano goes for the Indians today against Phil Hughes. As you may know, Pavano has pitched well of late. This is not an amusing development for Yankee fans–it’s revolting, actually. I hope the bats keep it up this afternoon and put a whuppin’ on Mr. Pavano. It would also be nice to see Mr. Hughes throw another good game, wouldn’t it?
There have been some strange imagery in Cleveland the past two nights as bugs and boids have swarmed the field. The little bugs floated through the air for the entire game on Saturday. From the center field camera it looked as if both teams were playing inside a bottle of club soda. Seagulls swooped and soared in the outfield and into the stands.
Fausto Carmona didn’t have much and the Yanks made quick work of him. Solo homers by Jorge Posada and Nick Swisher put New York on the board in the second, and they added five more in the fourth, thanks in part to a couple of errors by the Indians. Derek Jeter, who had the big hit in that inning, Mark Teixeira and Robinson Cano each collected two hits; Hideki Matsui had three.
CC Sabathia was strong early on, not as much after getting the lead, but he muscled his way through seven, allowing three runs. CC is pitching well, now (5-3, 3.46 ERA). And that’s a beautiful thing.
David Robertson looked good and threw a scoreless eighth, while Jose Veras, Felix Heredia’s heir apparent as the run fairy, gave up a couple in the ninth.
While most of Cleveland will be paying attention to Game 6 of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals tonight, CC Sabathia returns home to face the Tribe. I’d love to see Lebron James and the Cavs force a Game 7 but the smart money has the Magic winning this one going away. Still, one can always dream, right?
In the meantime, Sabathia has been pitching well of late. Let’s hope he throws another good game and gets plenty of support from the Bronx Lumber Company.
I was poking around the cookbook section at the bookstore a few days ago and thought it’d be fun to come up with a list of essential cookbooks (Joy of Cooking, Jacques Pepin’scomplete techniques book, Marcella Hazan, etc). On that note, it might also be cool to compose a list of essential food items that I’ve always got in my pantry: Maldon salt, a good bottle (or three) of olive oil, HP sauce (or Daddy’s if I can find it), fresh horseradish from the L.E.S., a container of cornichons…I have to think of it some more.
A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.
The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. I work on Japanese and European motorcycles, mostly older bikes with some “vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people.
My mother’s father was a mechanic (His wife did not approve; she thought it was beneath her to be married to a man who got his hands dirty for a living).
I have never had any interest in taking things apart and figuring out how how they work. If something breaks I pay someone to fix it. For the longest time I thought I was less of a man because I wasn’t inclined to fix, construct or build things. In many ways, I didn’t have much in common with my grandfather but I always admired him, the breadth of his knowledge, his casual confidence. He was a true artisan.
This article made me think of my grandfather. It made me stop and appreciate his calling.
The Yanks beat-up the Rangers last night to the tune of 9-2. Godzilla Matsui hit two home runs–and took what seemed like an eternity to round the bases; he looked like a tired farm animal who’d been pullling the plow for too many years–Derek Jeter added three hits, and Mark Teixeira and Robinson Cano also homered. AJ Burnett pitched okay and clearly got plenty of help from his hitters. He threw close to 120 pitches in six innings, didn’t allow a run and gave up just three hits but also walked four. He also finished the game with seven strike outs.
“There were no mistakes,” Burnett told the New York Times. “Everything was where I wanted it to go, for the most part. Fewer walks and you can go deeper in the game, but you’ve got to start somewhere.”
Perhaps the best news of the night was watching Chien-Ming Wang look sharp in two innings of relief. If he can return to his former self, then, man that gives the Yanks some decent pitching…Muh-hu-ha-ha.
The win, combined with a Boston loss, pulls the Yanks into a tie with the Sox for first place.
I have a stack of new baseball books waiting to be read. At the top of the list is Heart of the Game: Life, Death and Mercy in Minor League America by S.L. Price. It is about the death of Mike Coolbaugh who was killed by a foul ball during a game several years ago. Price is one of the more elegant journalists going today; he’s a true craftsman.
S.L. Price: I first wrote this story for Sports Illustrated, but even early in that process felt it growing beyond the bounds of a magazine story. In my 15 years at S.I., I’ve probably never felt as satisfied with a piece while at the same time knowing there was so much more to tell; I had 50,000 words of notes by the time I filed. The stories of Bill Valentine, Bo McLaughlin, Jon Asahina and Warren Stephens — people in the park the night Mike was killed who had had personal experience with the damage a ball could do — made up a paragraph or two in S.I., and they alone summed up huge chunks of baseball history, major and minor. Then, as I got a sense of Tino Sanchez’s grief, and the parallels between his career and Mike’s, I knew I could explore modern ball by retracing their paths.
And lastly, throughout the reporting, I had this strange experience. It’s a dark moment, obviously, but while talking to everyone involved I kept thinking, “I know this is a tale of woe, so how come I feel so good?” Because everyone — at this extreme moment where there was no place to hide or fake it — kept doing the right thing. Tino in his anguish showed great respect to Mike and the life he lived, the Coolbaugh family repeatedly reached out to Tino to let him know they didn’t blame him, to support him, and, he says, that pulled him from a very dark place. The Colorado Rockies voted Mike’s family a playoff share — it ended up over $230,000 — in 2007, though they didn’t know him and he’d only been with the team three weeks and the history of stingy ballplayers goes back as far as the game’s origins, and then they refused to talk about it. The national media wanted to celebrate them, but the players and management wouldn’t say who came up with the idea, how the vote went, nothing. It was too important to talk about. Meanwhile, fans all over the Texas League and minor league baseball donated money night after night, $1 here, $5 there, to give to the Coolbaugh family. And no one did this because they thought the media might notice.
When a story whipsaws you like that — from brutal loss to heartfelt compassion — when you feel good and bad at the same time? Then I’m pretty sure it’s a story worth telling in a book.
Yup, that’s what happens when you get the early crew covering a late night game. An 8 o’clock start was pushed back a couple of hours by rain–no, by hail if you can believe it–and by the time the Magic dashed the high hopes of Lebron James and the Cavs to take a 3-1 series lead in the Eastern Conference NBA finals, I was just about shot.
I caught the highlights of the Cards-Brewers game yesterday. Fitting that it came a day before the 50th anniversary of the famous Harvey Haddix near pefecto.
He never set out to become a famous person. He just wanted to see if he could open a noodle bar. Now he finds that he’s a public figure, criticized and praised—but mostly praised—by people he’s never met. “Getting these awards freaks me out—the last thing I want is a Michelin star—because I know I’m not the best,” he says. When he thinks about the cooks he worked with at Craft and Café Boulud and how they were so much more skilled than he, and had put in more years than he had, and yet here he was getting all these prizes and all this attention, he feels himself starting to panic. Sometimes he tries to comfort himself thinking about all the bands he loves that made great music even though they were terrible musicians, but somehow it’s not the same. “I feel like I’m losing my ability to understand reality,” he says, “like when someone loses their hearing, they can still speak English, but their speech eventually becomes distorted because they can’t hear themselves. I don’t want to be this crazy. It’s tiring. I just want some mental clarity. But I don’t like that I’m becoming more self-aware of all my problems. It doesn’t make me feel better—I just feel unease almost all the time. I’m a total head case right now, I cannot keep this up. All I want to do is f***ing move to Idaho and ski and fish and read books. All I want to do is run away and stop.”
There are several mother figures in his life who worry about his health and try to persuade him to run away and stop: Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet; Dana Cowin, the editor of Food & Wine; Alice Waters, the founder of Chez Panisse. “I never thought that I’d be able to be, like, friends with Alice Waters,” he says. “And for her to actually care about me—that is so weird. I think Ruth told her that I had shingles, and that’s when Alice had an intervention at lunch. She was like, ‘You’re not doing anything more, no more, no more!’ ” Then, there are the older-brother chef figures who know he’s not going to stop but who tell him to calm down. Andrew Carmellini bought him yoga lessons. “It was just when Momofuku started to really roll,” Carmellini says, “and I was, like, ‘Dude, I’m telling you from personal experience, you need to chill out.’ ” Mario Batali, who has opened seven restaurants in New York, three in Las Vegas, and two in L.A., while hosting two programs on the Food Network and appearing regularly on “Iron Chef,” comes into Noodle Bar a fair amount and gives Chang counsel. “Mario’s big thing to me is ‘Dave, would you f***ing be happy?’ ” Chang says. “He loves it. He loves life. I want to love life as much as Mario loves life.” He sighs. “It’s not that I’m not happy; I’m just fearful for the future,” he says. “I’m fearful that everything’s gonna be taken away. Fear is a driving force for most of the things that I do. I don’t know if that’s healthy.”
I was downtown over the weekend and stopped into Momofuku Bakery and had the famous pork buns. $9 for two pork buns.
If you can restrain yourself you can eat one in four bites. I ate the first one in five and savored the second in six. At about a dollar a bite it’s so worth it. You can also order the pork buns with a deep fried, slow poached egg.
Believe it. These pork buns are the Truth, man.
Then I had a slice of Arnold Palmer cake. That’s a cake made like the drink–lemonade and iced tea. It was wild. The desserts are playful and crazy. They used to have Lucky Charms ice cream. I saw Sour Patch kids ice cream, and Atomic Hot Ball ice cream while I was there. Could be hectic but could be amazing. They also sell specialized milk and butter.
