Blog Archives

The Rays needed a win and they played well on Thursday night while the hapless Yanks played like they had a plane to catch.  Okay, that’s not fair.  Maybe it just seemed that way.  Scott Kazmir was solid, allowing just one hit over six innings, though he did walk five batters.  But Darrell Rasner didn’t make it out of the second inning and gave up five runs.  Alfredo Aceves threw five innings in relief, giving up just one run and was a bright spot, and the Yanks did make it interesting late. 

Tampa led 7-0 going into the ninth but the Yanks scored five runs before calling it a night:  with two out, Derek Jeter smacked a three-run homer to right and then Alex Rodriguez hit an absolute blast into the catwalk in left.  Rodriguez’s shot was dumb nice, career dinger #550.  But it was too little too late, the story of the Yankees’ season, as Xavier Nady popped out to end the game. 

Rays 7, Yanks 5.

So our boys take the long cross-country flight to Seattle where Melky Cabrera will re-join the team.  Speaking of cross country, check out this soporific soul classic by Archie Whitewater, the perfect lullaby for a long trip:

It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? 

Hey, how about dem Yanks?  Be nice to see them continue to give the Rays troubles, wouldn’t it?

C’mon boys, time to spoil all the fun down south.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

I know I threw a ton of stuff at you today, so here’s a quick linkorama to a feast of New York Giant goodies:

Giants for a Day: Dreaming of the old Penn Station and the Polo Grounds:

Lookit Here: A video piece with accompanying article on the New York Giants Nostalgia Society for SNY.TV.

So Long, Farewell: Arnold Hano and Roger Angell bid farewell to the Polo Grounds.

Bronx Banter Video Bites:

Number One: An Introduction.

Number Two: The Truth Hurts.  Tales from the dugout in the ’54 World Serious.

Giants Fan in my Soul: A guest article by Greg Prince.

Bronx Banter Bite Number Three: The Candy Man Can (aka, The Del Crandel Story).

Number Four: Spahnie, How I Luv Ya.

Number Five: The Lady is…An Ump. 

Number Six: Showtime.

And finally, here’s one last morsel, a New York Giants reading list from Greg Prince:

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Perry Barber has umped fantasy camps and spring training games for years.  This past winter, she worked home plate for a Mets-Cards exhibition, part of the first all-female umpiring crew to work a big league game. 

Dig: 

Here’s a bit from one of the Koolest Kets I’ve ever had the chance to meet, the one and only Perry Lee Barber: a Jepoardy champion at age 19, a nightclub singer who opened for Springsteen, Billy Joel and Hall and Oates in her twenties, and a huge baseball fan who has been a professional umpire for the better part of the last thirty years:

I Kid, I’m a Kidder…

What’s a matta, kid?  Can’t take a joke?

Richie talks about how hard it was not to root for the Giants when he was working the visiting team dugout at the Polo Grounds: 

By Greg W. Prince

Fifteen years after the New York Giants played their last game.

In an All in the Family episode called "Edith Finds an Old Man," Edith does exactly as the title describes. She brings home an elderly loner she found wandering through the supermarket, Archie blusters, we learn some valuable lessons about how society should treat senior citizens and Gloria declares toward the end that since she didn’t know her own grandparents, we can adopt Mr. Quigley (and his girlfriend, no less) as honorary Bunkers.

I recall that sitcom moment here because I suppose I did the same thing as Gloria Stivic. I adopted the displaced New York Giants as my own grandpa: my own baseball grandpa.

Never mind that I never saw the New York Giants play. Never mind that the New York Giants ceased to exist five years before I began to commence. Never mind that there is no trace of Giants fandom in my biological lineage. Never mind that I don’t care a whit for the San Francisco Giants. To me as a real-time New York Mets fan, the San Francisco Giants are just some windy stopover on the way to getting swept in San Diego.

I’m a New York Mets fan in my heart and a New York Giants fan in my soul. Those are my teams. Earlier this season, I prematurely wrote off the 2008 Mets as dead. But the Giants, they’re actually deceased since 1957.

Your team being dead at the present time, however, is no excuse for not remaining loyal to it.

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Richie McCabe was the bat boy in the Indians dugout at the Polo Grounds during the ’54 Serious.  Here’s a little story about an encounter with Bobby Avila:

I’ve souped-up a series of exclusive Bronx Banter takes on the summer gathering of the New York Giants Nostalgia Society.  They are intended to be little nuggets of Noo Yawk Lovliness.

Here’s the first of six short clips that will be posted over the course of the day.

Dig ‘Em:

In the coming weeks, we’ll see more than our fair share of tributes to Yankee Stadium. Here are a couple of excellent farewells to the old Polo Grounds…  

Arnold Hano, who wrote the terrific account of Game One of the 1954 World Serious, A Day in the Bleachers, was on hand for the Giants last game at the Polo Grounds. He wrote about the experience for Sports Illustrated:

It was a few minutes before one o’clock in the afternoon, and Willie Mays and Valmy Thomas were socializing in center field of the Polo Grounds with Pittsburgh Pirate Outfielder Jim Pendleton, against all the rules of the game. It was obviously going to be that sort of day.

Wafted across the field, through the gravel-throated public-address system, sweet music entertained the early crowd. A fan sang softly, "Sweetheart, if you should stray/A million miles away/I’ll always be in love with you." It was that sort of day.

The sky was gray, and there was a ring around a hazy yellow sun. It was also that sort of day. A fan walked through the bleachers. "Wanna buy a crying towel?" he said. "Buy a set of crying towels." There were no other vendors. You couldn’t buy a scorecard in the bleachers. You couldn’t buy a hot dog or coffee. The vendors hadn’t showed up. The concession stand was open, though. You could get a beer. There are two big signs in the Polo Grounds that read: "Have a Knick." The concession man was selling Ballantine’s.

At 1:32 the public-address announcer said, "Will the guests of the Giants assemble at home plate?" A fan near the third-base boxes snarled, "We’re the guests, you jerks.

Six-and-a-half years later, Roger Angell said goodbye to the Polo Grounds in a short essay for The New Yorker:

What does depress me about the decease of the bony, misshapen old playground is the attendant irrevocable deprivation of habit–the amputation of so many private, and easily renewable small familiarities.  The things I liked best about the Polo Grounds were wights and emotions so inconsequential that they will surely slide out of my recollection.  A flight of pigeons flashing out of the barn-shadow of the upper stands, wheeling past the right-field foul pole, and disappearing above the inert, heat-heavy flags on the roof.  The steepness of the ramp descending from the Speedway toward the upper-stand gates, which pushed your toes into your shoe tips as you approached the park, tasting sweet anticipation and getting out your change to buy a program.  The unmistakable, final "Plock!" of a line drive hitting the green wooden barrier above the stands in deep left field.  The gentle, rockerlike swing of the tloop of rusty chain you rested your arm upon in a box seat, and the heat of the sun-warmed iron coming through your shirtsleeve under your elbow.  At a night game, the moon rising out of the scoreboard like a spongy, day-old orange balllon and when the whitening over the waves of noise and the slow, shifting clouds of floodlit cigarette smoke.  All these I mourn, for their loss constitutes the death of still another neighbhorhood–a small landscape of distinctive and reassuring familiarity.  Demolition and alteration are a painful city commonplace, but as our surroundings become more undistinguished and indistinguishable, we sense, at last, that we may not possess the scorecards and record books to help us remember who we are and what we have seen and loved.

Man, how I wish I could have seen that joint up close.

Earlier this summer I went to a meeting of the New York Giants Nostalgia Society up in the Bronx. Here is a piece I did for SNY on the meeting:

“For some reason the Giants didn’t get a love lock on the people of New York the way the Dodgers did on the people of Brooklyn,” says Roger Kahn, whose seminal book, “The Boys of Summer”, helped perpetuate the myth of the Brooklyn Dodgers. “The Giants were New York’s original team. The old New Yorkers rooted for the Giants. The Yankees were tourists.”

The Giants were New York’s first baseball dynasty under the helm of John McGraw and led by superstar pitcher Christy Mathewson. But they were soon eclipsed by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the Yankees. “You never could refer to the Giants as Dem Bums or as Fat Cats,” says Arnold Hano, author of the “A Day in the Bleachers,” the classic first-person account of Game One of the 1954 World Series in which Willie Mays made his famous over-the-shoulder catch.

“The Yankees were Fat Cats, the Dodgers were Bums, and the Giants were in somewhere in between. They were like the middle child. They didn’t have any gloried stars: Mel Ott and Bill Terry and Carl Hubbell were great but it was hard to have fan clubs for them. They were bland. Priests in Brooklyn were praying for Gil Hodges to break out of slump. Why didn’t that happen to the Giants? Maybe because Brooklyn is the land of churches.”

In addition, I shot and produced a short video for SNY.  Here it is.  Hope you enjoy (and thanks go to Dave, Jonah, Fred and Jay for helping me put it all together):

My grand father was a circumspect, bookish man who believed that actively rooting for a sporting team was an essentially foolish activity, a waste of time.  At least the impression I always got.  He was the most passive fan you could imagine but he was a Giant fan because the Giants were New York’s team when he was growing up.  My father, hot-tempered and emotional, took after his mom’s side of the family and rooted for the Dodgers, even though he was raised in Washington Heights.  He was ten when Jackie Robinson joined the team, and liked to tell me that he was "second to none" as a Jackie Robinson fan.  I heard the names Pee Wee and Pete Reiser and Cookie Wookie Lavagetto as a kid but I never heard about any of the Giants, other than Willie Mays.

Of course, we all know about the Dodger’s enduring legacy in Brooklyn, but I’ve always found it curious that the Giants are all but forgotten.  After all if I could go back in time, I’d go to the Old Penn Station:

…and the Polo Grounds:

That said, I’m going to make today all about the old New York Giants who started playing ball in San Francisco fifty years ago. Much more to come shortly…

Going, going…

Gelf’s Varsity Letters reading series is back in action tomorrow night downtown at the Happy End Lounge (302 Broome street, between Forsyth and Eldridge).  Harvey Frommer, who wrote the text for a gorgeous new over-sized book about Yankee Stadium, Remembering Yankee Stadium: An Oral and Narrative History of "The House that Ruth Built", will be there as a featured speaker as will Buster Olney, who wrote The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, and David Zirin, author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play.  If you are around, pop on over and check, check it out. 

Thanks to the tireless word machine better known as Joe Pos, I caught up with Nick Dawidoff’s recent feature on Johnny Mac for the New York Times Magazine.   

Mac is still a pill, after all these years. 

I caught some of Midnight Run on TV recently and was struck by how many cigarettes were smoked in that movie.  It didn’t faze me at the time, of course, but now…Man, it’s hard to imagine that the Smoking-is-Foo! Universe is still so relatively new, isn’t it?  In childhood photographs of anyone my age and older, you’ll see all forms of grown ups smoking, ashtrays on the coffee tables.  Smoking was replete.

I gave up smoking more than ten years ago.  But every once in awhile I’ll see an old movie that still makes smoking look, if not glamourous, then at least desirable.  What are some of your favorite smoking flicks? 

Alex Rodriguez is now tied for 12th on the all-time home run list with some dude named Michael Jack Schmidt.  Rodriguez has 1,588 RBI in his career.  He’s scored 1,591 runs.  He may in fact be the most frustrating great player we’ve ever watched but there is no denying that he’s great. 

Mazel props, dude.

“I don’t care how it looks,” Derek Jeter said. “I’ll take an ugly win over playing well and losing.”
(Kepner, New York Times)

The Yankees scored eleven runs in the first three innings yesterday, knocking Justin Verlander out the box with the quickness, but the Tigers came back and scored six in the fourth and by the end of five it was 11-9, New York. So much for a laugher. But such is life for the 2008 Yankees, who scored two more in the top of the sixth on a big RBI single by Derek Jeter as the Yanks survived to beat the Tigers, 13-9.

Sidney Ponson and Edwar Ramirez were not effective but Brian Bruney, Phil Coke (making his big league debut), Damaso Marte and Chris Britton were able to throw up zeros. Coke, a left-hander with a weak chin, and a delivery that reminded me a little bit of both David Wells and Al Leiter (except Coke slings the ball in a more exaggerated manner than either of them), had a nice inning and looked poised. Six of the Yankee starting nine had multiple hits; Alex Rodriguez had four RBI.

Yanks slide down to Tampa tonight for the start of three against the world-beating, Rays. Mike Mussina goes for win #17. According to the Daily News, Joba Chamberlain will be activated before the game and will be used in the bullpen for the rest of the season. In the long run, I like Chamberlain as a starter, and so do the Yankees. Seems like it would make sense to use him anyway they can right now. What’s your take on him being used out of the pen for the month of September?

Space is generally the most precious, sacred thing in the world for a New Yorker. You often don’t get much of it, but even a couple of feet can feel generous when you are on a crowded subway car. Stand on any busy avenue and wait for the light to change. The traffic shoots by and then suddenly, for a break of fifteen to twenty seconds, the avenue is clear, almost deserted and you’ve got space to breath, space to move.

All of which goes to explain why Labor Day is one of my favorite holidays in the city. The town is dead (and, as Emma mentioned yesterday, it makes you pine for a car just so you can park it). But it’s only dead for another day, for a handful of hours. It’s the calm before the storm because starting tomorrow morning the city will be buzzing again–families back from vacation, kids back to school. It will be congested again and summer will be over.

In the early nineties, I remember going to the Museum of Broadcasting with a friend to watch Dennis Potter’s final TV interview. He was dying and was drinking liquid morphine to numb the pain; there was no telling if he’d be able to remain lucid for the entire interview. But he did and he was brilliant:

We all, we’re the one animal that knows that we’re going to die, and yet we carry on paying our mortgages, doing our jobs, moving about, behaving as though there’s eternity in a sense. And we forget or tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense; it is is, and it is now only. I mean, as much as we would like to call back yesterday and indeed yearn to, and ache to sometimes, we can’t. It’s in us, but we can’t actually; it’s not there in front of us. However predictable tomorrow is, and unfortunately for most people, most of the time, it’s too predictable, they’re locked into whatever situation they’re locked into … Even so, no matter how predictable it is, there’s the element of the unpredictable, of the you don’t know. The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene. You know, I can celebrate life.

Below my window in Ross, when I’m working in Ross, for example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying “Oh that’s nice blossom” … last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There’s no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance … not that I’m interested in reassuring people – bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.

Sometimes it takes an existential crisis to stop us in our tracks and notice the world around us. The friend I saw the interview with died several years later of cancer.

Last week, Emily upgraded our phone service. We now both have blackberries. I’ve noticed people walking around the streets these days with their heads buried in their palms, looking into their phones or their i-pods. I’ve caught myself doing the same thing. (Mel Brooks once said, “We make fun, ‘look at the old guy bent over and spitting,’ pretty soon we’re bent over and spitting.'” Few weeks ago I called a friend on my cell phone and said, “You know those Herbs that talk on their phone as they are walking down the street? Well, now I’m that Herb too.”) Another thing to keep us plugged in and tuned out. It is the rare occasion when I am at home with nothing turned on–usually, I’ve got the TV and the computer going.

It’s more of a struggle than ever to keep our minds clear. But a day like today always drives home the little things for me. Soaking up the final lonely hours of summer before the bustle of autumn returns.