Yesterday afternoon, another chapter in the Alex Rodriguez vs. MLB soap opera dropped. Item goes: Alex Rodriguez or one of his associates ratted on his fellow players including teammate Francisco Cervelli. Before the game, Rodriguez told reporters that he’d spoken to Cervelli in the morning:

“He understands completely that it’s not true,” Rodriguez said. “I’ve been a member of this union for 20 years. It’s important for all the guys to understand that my loyalty is to this union. That would never happen, it would never occur. And it didn’t happen. Let’s make one thing clear: For the next seven weeks, it’s going to be a very, very bumpy road. Every day, expect a story like this if not bigger. After arbitration, I’ll have an opportunity with a full platform and I can tell my full story.”

Later, according to Chad Jennings, Vernon Wells said:

“I’ve always taken the stance that he has nothing to explain to me,” Wells said. “This isn’t my story. This isn’t even a Yankees story. This is an Alex Rodriguez story. If he feels he has to address the team, then great. We’re going to continue to move on and go play baseball.”

And play baseball the Yankees did last night, winning baseball, because Andy Pettitte was solid and the offense, including Rodriguez who went 2-4 with a walk (and both of his outs were well-struck), remained hot.

Final Score: Yanks 10, Sox 3.

Never believe this but Alfonso Soriano hit a 3-run home run giving him 18 RBI (a good month) in his last 4 games. And Mark Reynolds homered in his first Yankee at bat. Again, from Jennings, here’s Reynolds:

“We battled these guys with the Orioles last year, but this is different. When you’re on deck, I mean, you can’t repeat what the fans say to you, but it’s just a different vibe, a different atmosphere for sure. But all that stuff does is motivate us as players to go out there and perform better. It’s all in good fun, and it’s a great spot to be in, in this rivalry.”

The hysteria will continue for sure today and tomorrow what with the games on National TV. Last night, Rodriguez wasn’t upset by the jeering. Let’s hope the Yanks keep pushing along, sideshow and all.

[Photo Credit: USA Today]

Yanks and Sox in Boston.

Bring the ruckus. Or rumpus. Or whatever you want to call it.

Never mind the hostilities:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: BullDays]

Light day of blogging at the Banter. Let’s call it a summer Friday.

Be back for the ballgame tonight.

[Photo Via: union square greenmarket]

The Yankees pounded out 19 hits on Tuesday, 12 hits on Wednesday and I was worried the hittin’ shoes would be all worn out for Thursday’s afternooner, which I’d be attending with the extended family. The Yankees kept on hitting – 15 more hits today – but they stopped at third most of the time and wound up in a familiar spot, the losing end of a Phil Hughes start.

Next time, leave the cycle at home boys, and back up the score truck.

My father has fed a steady stream of criticism to Hughes through the TV this season, so I’m sure he was overjoyed when his Father’s Day gift turned out to feature the much maligned starter. We took bets on his outing: six innings / two runs; seven innings / three runs; four innings / four runs. Overall, we were an optimistic group and came close to nailing the actual line, six innings and three runs.

Hughes got touched for a run on a couple of singles in first, but he struck out Mike Trout on a slider with teeth so you almost had to forgive him. The Yankees were all over C.J. Wilson with hits in every inning and multiple base runners in most of them. But they turned a triple and three singles into only the tying run in the third as Vernon Wells rapped into rally-killing 5-4-3 double play with the sacks packed.

The Angels reclaimed the lead with a quickness in the fourth. It was the bottom of the order, and I don’t know if Hughes let up or if it was just one of those things, but they punched him up for a big double (Erick Aybar), a long sac fly and a 2-out homer (Chris Nelson) that really let the air out of the crowd.

But this is not the limp-bat lineup we’d have written off a few weeks ago. This team had plenty of offense left and, to their credit, the crowd perked up each inning rising to a crescendo in the bottom of the seventh. Robinson Cano and Alex Rodriguez both took big hacks at tying the game. All the kids in my row were really hollering, making up chants and cheers for the hitters. But neither big hack resulted in the much wished for big fly. And this time the air was out for good.

Mike Trout hit a 2003-ALCS-Game-7 double to lead off the top of the 8th and my seats for today’s game (third base side, upper deck) gave me the same vantage point as when Posada hit his double all those years ago. I could see right away that the ball was falling in and instead of watching Cano track into short center, I focused on Trout sniffing the double from about halfway up the first base line. He turned on the jets and, well, damn. That’s the best player in baseball for you.

Trout appeared to be stuck there at second, but with two outs, Girardi got cute, walked a .236 hitter intentionally and set-up the end game. Logan battled the no-stick catcher Hank Conger and lost him to an unintentional walk. Then Chris Nelson wacked him for a grand slam. Nelson had two RBI in ten games for the Yanks earlier this season. He had five RBI and quite possibly won the game this afternoon.

You know, it’s not everyday that you get to see Phil Hughes and Joba Chmaberlain get beat around by the same team – it’s every fifth day. Wocka, Wocka. Hughes wasn’t terrible though, especially for the new-look lineup. The Yanks had one more rally in them in the ninth, but they were too far behind and the final score of 8-4 is both unfair to the Yankees and the Angels in a weird way.

It’s not the 1995 Cleveland Indians or anything, but as currently constituted, this a fairly dangerous lineup and a well-rounded team. It almost looks like a contender if they were starting today.

But they’re not, and that’s why we had a blast at this game. For pennant fever, we watched the scoreboard for Pittsburgh-St. Louis updates (we’ll be in Pittsburgh on Saturday for the D-backs) and for sheer baseball excellence, we watched Mike Trout. And oh-by-the-way, the Yankees have some great players too, as Cano (Henry’s favorite), Arod, Granderson, Soriano and Gardner reminded us with 11 hits and three walks.

Much like Henry and this ice cream cone, the battle was lost but it was a hell of a ride.

Good gorsh, day game. I forgot.

It’s chuck-and-duck Phil Hughes.

1. Brett Gardner CF

2. Alfonso Soriano LF

3. Robinson Cano 2B

4. Alex Rodriguez 3B

5. Vernon Wells RF

6. Curtis Granderson DH

7. Eduardo Nunez SS

8. Lyle Overbay 1B

9. Austin Romine C

Never mind my tardiness: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: New York Explorer]

Over at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, check out this post on Jonathan Hertzberg’s NYC movie collage:

Life in and around the Big Apple according my pictures over on Instagram. 

I would never try to tell you that I was disappointed when the Yankees traded away Alfonso Soriano for Alex Rodríguez before the 2004 season. Rodríguez was the best player in baseball back then, so it would be hard to argue with that deal even knowing what we know now, but I was definitely sorry to see Soriano go. He should’ve been the hero of the 2001 World Series, he was coming off two spectacular seasons in ’02 and ’03, and even though there were holes in his swing and questions about his work ethic, it was hard to argue with the numbers on the back of his baseball card.

So when my summer tour of the Midwest was interrupted by the news that the Yankees had reacquired Soriano, I was thrilled even if Brian Cashman wasn’t. Even if you accepted that the odds of hanging a twenty-eighth banner this October were slim, it still felt like a good deal to me. Any extra bat added to the anemic attack we’d suffered through over the first four months would have to be a good thing, right?

Of course, no one could’ve imagined what happened over the past two days against the Angels. Soriano had hit two home runs and driven in six runs on Monday night, with all of that damage coming in the final four innings, and he picked up right where he left off on Tuesday.

Jered Weaver was on the mound for the Angels, and I don’t particularly like Jered Weaver. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because he always looks like he’s absolutely miserable. Remember when your dad used to tell you stop crying or he’d give you something to cry about? Well, the Yankees gave Weaver something to be miserable about, but quick. After Brett Gardner and Ichiro made the first two outs of the first inning, Robinson Canó laced a single right back over Weaver’s head, then A-Rod promptly doubled him over to third. The right-handed Weaver played the percentages and gave the left-handed Curtis Granderson four straight balls to load the bases for our boy Soriano.

Statistically, it was the right move, but it didn’t work. Weaver left a fastball right over the heart of the plate, and Soriano did his job. He absolutely crushed it to straightaway center field for a grand slam and a 4-0 Yankee lead.

The heart of the lineup — and this lineup actually has a heart now — did more two-out damage in the second inning. With runners on first and second, Canó ripped a single to right to push the score to 5-0, and after a walk to A-Rod, Granderson singled in another run, making it 6-0. This brought up Soriano, who crushed another ball, this one just a double to score two. 8-0.

An eight-run cushion would be enough even for a fifth starter, but when it’s your ace on the mound as it was on Tuesday, you might as well send everyone home. Ivan Nova didn’t have his best stuff, but he labored through 7.1 innings and only gave up three runs.

As I said, the eight runs would’ve been enough for Nova, but they weren’t enough for the Yankee hitters. When Soriano led off the fifth inning with another home run, his fourth in two games, he elevated himself into some fairly exclusive company. With six RBIs on Monday and seven more on Tuesday, Soriano became just the seventh player in history to total at least thirteen RBIs in consecutive games and only the third player to have six or more RBIs in each of two consecutive games.

The Angels finally wised up and walked Soriano in his fourth and final at bat of the night, but he scored along with Granderson on a Chris Stewart single for the game’s final runs. Yankees 11, Angels 3.

The only downside that I can see to all this is that the Yankees have me believing again. Maybe this lineup is good enough to score on a consistent basis. Maybe Ivan Nova will continue to string together quality starts. Maybe Hiroki Kuroda (the team’s other ace) will do the same. Maybe Derek Jeter will finally get healthy and add even more depth to the lineup.

Maybe this team will make the playoffs. And after that? Who knows.

[Photo Credit: Rich Shultz/Getty Images]

Ivan Nova squares off against the talented Mr. Weaver.

Brett Gardner CF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Robinson Cano 2B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Curtis Granderson DH
Alfonso Soriano LF
Lyle Overbay 1B
Eduardo Nunez SS
Chris Stewart C

Never mind getting ahead of ourselves:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Kevin Hulsey]

Kevin Cyr via the so so def Jhalal Drut.

Golden Years by the most-talented Kendrick Brinson.

Jimmy Picker’s 1983 Oscar-winning short.

Well, Goddamn. The Score Truck and an old fashioned Bronx beat down. Remember them?

The game was close, the Yanks were behind early, but then they proceeded to beat the snot out of the Angels, and after a late rain delay, and an unfortunate performance by Dellin Betances, the Yanks won by a touchdown, 14-7. Couple of homers and 6 RBI for Lil’ Sori; 4 Ribbies for Nunez, a win for C.C.

Yeah, it was a good night.

It’s C.C. C’mon Big Fella, we got your back.

Eduardo Nunez SS
Alfonso Soriano LF
Robinson Cano 2B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Vernon Wells RF
Curtis Granderson CF
Jayson Nix 3B
Lyle Overbay 1B
Austin Romine C

Never mind the raindrops:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Martha Cooper]

Over at Narratively, Shannon Firth profiles our man, Michael Popek (aka “unmoderated”):

Michael Popek remembers visiting his grandfather’s four-story home in New Jersey, where anything that could be collected, was—stamps, toy train cars, cap guns, autographs, baseball cards. “There was a standing order not to touch any of the WWI grenades,” Popek says. As far as his grandfather knew, these were still live and active.

Those visits happened long before Popek, now 35, started gathering his own assortment of collectibles: things left between the pages of books, or as he calls them, Forgotten Bookmarks. It seems destined to happen, given that Popek comes from a family of collectors. He grew up in an old farmhouse in Oneonta, a small town in upstate New York. His father, Peter Popek, a former UPS deliveryman, started a book business in the mid-eighties, but only after coming upon a too-good-to-be-true deal at a local auction.

The offer was 5,000 books for $10. He paid an additional $10 for delivery. According to the elder Popek, no one wanted these books, including him. “We had no interest in books. We didn’t know anything about them. But we didn’t want to waste ‘em,” Peter Popek says. Within a few years, Michael’s father had filled a barn in the backyard with over 20,000 books. The Popeks also bought and sold antiques and owned a small shop in town, not far from their house. Slowly, though, the book collection muscled its way into the antique shop and took over much of the space.

[Photo Credit: Jessica Bal]

Cool post on the apartment building in the shadow of Yankee Stadium over at Scouting New York.

Held over until next Tuesday is the Film Forum’s run of Intolerance.

Here’s Glenn Kenny:

If you have not seen D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance since film school, or film appreciation class, or years ago on public television, etc., or worse yet (or maybe better yet, as it happens) have never seen it at all, get yourself down to Manhattan’s Film Forum starting tomorrow and catch it, in a stunning new restoration released by The Cohen Film Collection. It is nearly one hundred years old and I will put money down that it will be the most spectacularly vital film running theatrically in the five buroughs as of its first screening.

Why? Well, it’s not just the structure: in making this ostensible “answer picture” to the (completely justified) protests pertaining to his 1915 The Birth of a Nation, Griffith conceived four tales of this movie’s title theme, each set in a different age and place, and interwove them cinematically, with one of the key effects being, as Kevin Brownlow has so memorably described, a sweeping up of the viewer into four separate and equally engrossing climaxes in the film’s final third. This was/is admitedly a daring storytelling gambit, and not a whole lot of conventional narrative filmmakers have tried to meet this challenge since (although in a mildly ironic coincidence, noted Griffith disapprover Quentin Tarantino has performed structural tricks that Intolerance certainly set a kind of precedent for, in both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown). That’s the thing I absorbed pretty well on my first screening of Intolerance long ago, so it didn’t knock me out this time around. Nor, for that matter, did the content, although it is quite fascinationg. The discursive “modern day” story finds Griffith wrestling with his inner Victorian to concoct a condemnation of priggish reformers. The conception of the fall of Babylon has an interesting proto-feminist component in the person of a character named “Mountain Girl.” And so on. All good stuff. Pauline Kael has noted that the film contains the seeds of every kind of silent and then sound studio film that came immediately after it. And more than that: the movie has surprising scenes of nudity, quasi-nudity, and extreme violence and gore. There’s a beheading or two; the effects for these are not particularly convincing, but hey, they were in there pitching. In this respect, and given the movie’s still staggering scale of spectacle and set-construction (it’s almost impossible to believe that Griffith conceived, produced, shot, edited, and released such an elaborate movie in a mere year after his prior one), what Kael says still goes.

I liked Chris Nelson when he was in New York for a few minutes earlier this season. Maybe it was his sympathetic face but watching him I appreciated how hard it is for some guys to stay in the big leagues. I felt sad when the Yanks let him go and pleased when the Angels picked him up.

Well there he was last night in the 9th inning. The bases were loaded, 2 men were out, the Yanks ahead, 2-1. David Robertson was on the mound, having replaced Boone Logan. They were pitching because Mo had the night off. Nelson stood at the plate and worked the count full.

I’m sure Angels fans and Yankee fans were both thinking the same thing–my team is going to blow this. Robertson threw a fastball over the plate but it was high and well out of the strike zone. It was one of those rising pitches, however, that is tough for a right-handed hitter to lay off. Nelson bit and swung. Didn’t come close to hitting the ball and the game was over.

I was relieved and then looking at Nelson’s face as he walked off the field I felt sad for the guy. Not as sad as I would have felt for Hiroki Kuroda, who was fantastic once again, but I couldn’t shake the feeling because in baseball someone is always losing.

Final Score: Yanks 2, Angels 1. 

[Photo Credit: Corey Sipkin/Daily News]

Our man Hiroki vs The Wonder Boy and his gang of Angels.

Brett Gardner CF
Ichiro Suzuki DH
Robinson Cano 2B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Lyle Overbay 1B
Alfonso Soriano LF
Curtis Granderson RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Chris Stewart C

Oy, with these Angels. Even when they’re a lousy team, I still don’t like ’em.

Never mind the Halo’s: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: John Kingman]

Over at Egotrip, dig this:

[Photo Credit: Malik Sayeed]