Alan Taylor’s In Focus is a great site–bookmark it, folks.

Here’s a gallery of the Rotten Apple back in the Seventies.

Late night of travel+Yu Darvish+a Gluten-free offense=3 hits. That’s what the Yanks mustered tonight, spoiling a perfectly nice outing from Ivan Nova–who has really looked good, hasn’t he?

Final Score: Rangers 3, Yanks 0.

So, with the Braun news out of the way, figure for the news cycle to reset and then the inevitable Alex Rodriguez suspension to follow in the coming days, right?

Cause it won’t be pretty. According to T.J. Quinn: “Sources tell @OTLonESPN evidence on A-Rod far beyond evidence v Braun. Charges expected to include accusation he interfered w investigation.”

[Photo Credit: James B. Knight]

Ryan Braun’s suspended for the rest of the season.

(Alex Rodriguez your life is calling.)

Meanwhile, the Yanks are in Texas for four games.

Brett Gardner CF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Robinson Cano 2B
Lyle Overbay 1B
Vernon Wells LF
Travis Hafner DH
Eduardo Nunez SS
Chris Stewart C
Luis Cruz 3B

Yu vs. Nova.

Never mind the funny stuff:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Image by Jackson Patterson via This Isn’t Happiness]

Rest in Peace, Dennis Farina.

I love this scene from Out of Sight, starting at 0:45 in this clip…

Here’s a 2009 interview with Farina at the A.V. Club:

AVC: What do you think makes Elmore Leonard’s work special and so adaptable for movies?

DF: First of all, they’re usually short. I read somewhere that if a book is over 250 pages, it’s iffy for movies. That sounds very pedestrian, I guess. But I think people like that. That’s one of the reasons they’re good sellers, because they’re not 700 pages long. And he writes very clearly and very distinctly and very succinctly. I think everyone can identify with his characters.

AVC: When you’re reading the script for an Out Of Sight or Get Shorty and you see the character you’re going to play, can you tell right away what you’re going to do with that character? Does it jump off the page?

DF: With Get Shorty, I read the book as a matter of course because I’m a big Elmore Leonard fan. I remember saying to myself, “Boy, I would sure like to play Ray Bones.” As luck would have it, I don’t know how long afterwards, I got a call to go to a table reading in L.A. I got a call from Danny DeVito’s office. They wanted me to read Ray Bones. About six months later I was doing the movie. I thought he was the most honest guy in the whole story. He wanted his money, and that was it. There was no pretense. He wasn’t trying to make a movie. He wasn’t trying to be anything else. He was a gangster who wanted his money. I thought he was funny, but I don’t think he thought he was funny. He thinks he’s very serious and that he should be taken seriously, but no one else took him seriously.

For Alex Rodriguez, it ain’t easy.Ever.

[Photo Credit: Bradley C Bower, AP]

Lefty’s career has been notable for a series of blown chances, especially at the US Open. But yesterday, he played a round of golf for which he’ll always be remembered.

The Guardian has the story.

Chris Jones delivers a good one for ESPN the Magazine:

Tomohiro Anraku’s last moments of invisibility. Outside Japan, at least, he has been that ultra-rarity — the unseen sensation, a real-life Sidd Finch, his story so impossible that he’s been spoken about only in whispers or exclamations.

He is out there somewhere on this all-dirt field; he is one of these few dozen possible boys. But on this overcast Saturday morning in June, before the start of the first of two exhibition games in Akashi City, the greatest teenage pitcher in Japan — the best since Yu Darvish — and one of the top 16-year-old prospects in the world — as can’t miss as Stephen Strasburg — continues hiding in plain sight. Saibi High School isn’t wearing numbers on its white uniforms today. These boys never wear names. And from a distance, as they practice their drills with alarming precision, looking less like ballplayers and more like a marching band, like toy soldiers, any single one of them disappears into the lockstep crowd. An arm like Anraku’s, this inhuman appendage, must look different. It must have scales, or talons, or somehow drag across the earth, leaving fissures in its wake. But for now his arm is just another arm, and Anraku is just another player, his otherworldliness lost in this army of Japanese ordinary.

Masanori Joko, Saibi’s 66-year-old manager, stands like a general on a hill overlooking the field. “Is Anraku the one with the shaved head?” someone asks him, and he smiles. “They all have shaved heads,” he says through an interpreter, before he offers his only description: “He is the tallest one.”

There he is. That must be him. He is the tallest one by several inches, more than six feet tall, with a cap perched high on his head and a red glove on his left hand. His back is so broad, his shirt — the only one its size on this entire team — rides up his long arms. He has thick legs and a surprisingly American ass, and when his feet dig into the dirt, he ripples like a sprinter. He runs with another, much smaller boy into rightfield, the pair lost in the same cloud of dust, where they wait for a coach to hit a ball their way. When a pop fly settles into Anraku’s glove, his arm is put on display for the first time: He throws a one-hopper to the plate. A murmur rolls through the crowd. This is a good sign.

[Photo Credit: Uroty]

Mugged, mugging. I remember hearing those words all the time growing up. Always aware that it could happen, that it would happen. When it did, getting mugged didn’t mean you’d be killed, just that someone would take your shit.

That is mind, here’s David Freeman’s 1970 New York magazine story, “Mugging as a Way of Life”:

Twelve years ago, when the moon was made of paper and a pleasant old man was the President, Hector Diaz moved with his mother, his grandmother and a platoon of assorted relatives from the slums of North San Juan to El Barrio in the slums of North Manhattan. None of the Diazes spoke English and there were 10 people in three rooms, but the rooms were big, the plumbing was inside and the older Diazes took strength in little Hector, who was 9 and had eyes the color of ripe olives and who seemed to learn English faster than he grew. On Hector’s 11th birthday the family moved to Simpson Street in the South Bronx and Hector moved to the streets, where along with more English he learned the ways of the IRT and of airplane glue.

Two years ago Hector moved from Simpson Street to Avenue C on the Lower East Side, where he changed his ecstasy from glue to red wine in brown paper bags and then to heroin in glassine envelopes. Hector is still the only Diaz who can speak English and his eyes still look like olives, but green ones now, stuffed with red pimento. The Diazes, or what’s left of them, still live on Simpson Street and Hector visits them occasionally. But Hector spends his days on the streets of the Lower East Side, where he and a friend named Louise share their nights in burnt-out buildings and support themselves by mugging their neighbors.

For a time, in the fifties, the streets that run east of Avenue A to the river and below Houston Street to the Brooklyn Bridge on New York’s Lower East Side were almost a shrine, praised as the breeding ground of armies of doctors and lawyers all of whom looked like Harry Golden. Praising the tenements of their youth (“Sure it was tough, but we had love and desire . . .”), Lower East Side alumni sounded like Nixon talking about his astronauts. Today the incipient Jewish judges are gone, and the hippies of a few years ago are mostly gone, departed for communes or the suburbs. The streets and the buildings, exhausted from generations of bright, aggressive youngsters followed by stoned hippies, look tired, as if they need a rest after 65 years of social ferment. Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall are gone; the streets are lined with garbage now—human and automotive—and the people are mostly Puerto Rican. The billboards are in Spanish and in every store window a red sign screams “How do you know you don’t have V.D.?/ ¿Cómo sabe Ud. que no tiene enfermedad venérea?” The old-law tenements are crumbling, collapsing, burnt-out hulks. Their windows are covered with tin and plywood and their roofs are ripped away so that the sunlight floods into the upper stories like shrapnel.

[Photo Credit: Steven Siegel]

So C.C. did in fact pick up where he left off. Staked to a tidy 3-0 lead, he promptly screwed the pooch and gave it away.

“I suck,” he said after the game. “I wish I had an excuse or something. … It’s embarrassing. I’ll just try to get through it. Figure something out and try to stop hurting this team and (start) helping.”

Soon, it was 7-3 and that figured to be that. But the Yanks crawled back in it and tied the score, 7-7. Then, the game stretched on, the Yanks left a ton of runners on base, and when it went into extra innings any thoughts of a good night’s sleep went with it. The Yanks got some impressive bullpen pitching, David Robertson got out of a bases loaded jam, and were jobbed by a bad call in the 11th. The longer it went, the more you knew it wasn’t going to end well.

And it didn’t when Mike Napoli hit his second homer of the game, this one a solo shot, to end it in the 11th.

Final Score: Red Sox 8, Yankees 7.

Kind of felt like this:

Alex Rodriguez was due to join the Yankees in Texas tomorrow but he’s back in New York having an MRI on the current old-man ailment for the Yanks–quad troubles.

Meantime, it’s C.C. who will try to pick it in the second half…dammit. C’mon, C.C., you’re our MAN.

Brett Gardner CF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Robinson Cano 2B
Lyle Overbay 1B
Vernon Wells LF
Travis Hafner DH
Eduardo Nunez SS
Chris Stewart C
Luis Cruz 3B

Never mind the Game of the Week:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Quint Buchholz via This Isn’t Happiness]

“Victoria” The Kinks

Last week I was talking to a Red Sox fan about how much I hate Red Sox fans. But then we got around to Angels fans and Blue Jays fans and fans of other teams and I had to amend my thought. I love to hate Red Sox fans but I respect them, too. Remember when Joe Torre came back from cancer in 1999 and the crowd at Fenway gave him a nice hand?

Well, the Sox fans showed their character again today, giving Mariano Rivera a standing ovation when he took the mound in the 9th. Sure, the Red Sox have faired relatively well against Rivera over the years–relative being the key word. But the cheers today were not ironic or sarcastic, they were sincere. Mo was deserving and they gave him his due.

That’s what’s up.

A nice moment in the final act of what turned out to be a satisfying 5-2 win for the Yanks. Hiroki pitched well, as is his custom, five hits in the 7th got him the runs he needed and Robertson and Mo put heads to bed to end it.

[Photo Via: USATSI]

Yanks turn to the ever-reliable Hiroki Kuroda this afternoon. Fox: Buck-McCarver. Gluten-free offense. That hard-on, John Lackey. Could be a long day’s journey into night.

But never mind all that:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

The C Jam Blues–Duke Ellington

[Photo Credit:  Hui Yi]

The Yankees returned from the All-Star Break in fourth place in the standings and somewhere around eleventy-th place in our hearts. The first-place Red Sox, palpably better than the Yankees a la 2008 or 1916, took the first game of this three-game series playing it close at 4-2 but without breaking a sweat.

Andy Pettitte pitched into the seventh and put himself in great shape for a win in any other year of his Yankee career, but allowing four runs in front of the 2013 Yankees is a death sentence. And though the bullpen did cough up that last run for Andy, his performance, marred by two early homers, was nothing special.

The Yankee lineup, weak as a kitten under normal circumstances, lost outfielders Zoilo Almonte (hurt ankle) and Brett Gardner (hurt feelings) mid-game to drop them to Threat Level Koala. Let’s put it this way – in the crucial eighth inning, the Yankees had the tying runs in scoring position, two outs, and Luis Cruz, who was released earlier this year by the Dodgers for failing to be a better hitter than any of their pitchers, was allowed to bat for himself.

The season will likely slip away from the Yankees in the next few weeks as they face superior competition on the road. They have one asset that might bring back a meaningful player for their future and that’s Robinson Cano. But will whatever they get back for Cano be better than just signing the best second baseman in baseball to a long term deal? If the Yankees want to keep Cano long term, then they become buyers, but with a long, non-2013, view. And that allows them more flexibility and less urgency at the deadline.

I hate contemplating the end of the season at the break but the team is filled with bad players playing badly. Ichiro, who has been much maligned, is the third best offensive player on the team. Derek Jeter crawled back into his Bacta Tank and I saw Curtis Granderson’s face on a milk carton this morning.

Alex Rodriguez is reported to be coming back though, so the good news is that, finally, we’ll have somebody to blame for all of this.

Yanks vs. Sox at Fenway. Jeter to the DL. Old man Andy on the hill.

Brett Gardner CF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Robinson Cano 2B
Vernon Wells DH
Zoilo Almonte LF
Lyle Overbay 1B
Brent Lillibridge 3B
Eduardo Nunez SS
Chris Stewart C

Never mind the

[Picture Via: Grażyna Smalej]

Blogging will be light today but we’ll be back tonight for the game in Boston. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and check out the great images over at It’s a Long Season.

Check out Gary Dunaier’s 2006 trip to Yankee Stadium II.

Nah, I got nothing other than, man, this looks inviting right now.

Picture by J.D. Chen.

Following the Y ankess changed for the better when Pete Abraham started the Lo Hud Yankees blog. Fortunately for us, Chad Jennings has maintained Pete’s  high standard after Pete left to cover the Red Sox for the Boston Globe.

So head on over and check out Chad’s first half awards, what we can expect moving forward, as well as today’s news and notes.

Meanwhile at SI.com, Jay Jaffe’s got 10 bold predictions for the second half.

Here’s one that doesn’t come as a surprise:

The Yankees will miss the playoffs

They’re 51-44 at this writing, three games back in the wild-card race, but while they’ve hung surprisingly tough without Curtis Granderson, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira for most of the season, the bet here is that they’ve peaked before the cavalry of returns and deadline acquisitions has arrived. With their offense scoring less than four runs per game, it’s been their pitching that’s kept them afloat, but their run differential is in the red (-2). A closer look shows that at least among their starters, only Hiroki Kuroda and fill-in Ivan Nova have been preventing runs at a better-than-average rate, while CC Sabathia has been maddeningly inconsistent and Andy Pettitte has looked his 41 years. For the first time since 2008, the Yankees will be on the outside looking in come October.