Nah, you don’t need to know too much about this one (Chad Jennings has the notes, as always, if you’re interested).
Like the third game against the Diamondbacks this was one the Yanks had control of but then let it slip away.
Final Score: Blue Jays 8, Yanks 4.
Yanks face the formidable Josh Johnson in Toronto this afternoon:
Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Vernon Wells LF
Travis Hafner DH
Lyle Overbay 1B
Eduardo Nunez SS
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Jayson Nix 3B
Chris Stewart C
Never mind the bacon:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Credit: Albert Law]
The Yanks were on their merry way to another tidy victory this afternoon when things suddenly went bad. They were ahead 3-0 and Hiroki Kuroda had quieted the Jays all afternoon. Never mind that the Yanks blew a bases loaded chance with one man out in the middle of the game, they had a three-run lead with one out in the eighth inning. That’s when Lyle Overbay made an error and David Robertson replaced Kuroda. And before you knew it the Jays tied the game–sombitch Melky Cabrera had the big hit.
I figured that was it for our boys but the Jays made a critical error themselves which led to a couple of runs in the top of the 11th and Mariano Rivera worked around a lead-off double by Jose Bautista and a loud out by Edwin Encarnacion to earn the save. Struck the last two men out to end it.
Hot Damn.
What’s more–the Knicks put the clamps on the Celtics in the second half at the Garden and took the first game, 85-78.
And the Nuggets-Warriors game was a hell of a lot of funski, too.
[Photo Via: Lomography]
Before the Knicks and Celts this afternoon gives Hiroki vs. Buehrle.
Brett Gardner CF
Ben Francisco DH
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkilis 1B
Vernon Wells LF
Francisco Cervelli C
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Jayson Nix 3B
Never mind nuthin’:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Credit: Heather Champ]
The Yanks beat the stuffin’ out of the Jays tonight as Andy Pettitte had another solid outing.
Smile.
Final Score: Yankees 9, Blue Jays 4.
[Photo Credit: Joel Zimmer]
Don’t like these Blue Jays. Not one bit. Haven’t for a few years but now that they’ve got some talent and some hype, forget it. I dislike them so much I found myself rooting for the Red Sox when they played the Jays a few weeks ago.
The Red Sox.
Andy is back tonight as the Yanks are in Toronto for the weekend.
Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkilis 3B
Travis Hafner DH
Vernon Wells LF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Lyle Overbay 1B
Francisco Cervelli C
Never mind the Upstarts:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Credit: Darren Calabrese/National Post]
Tonight Matt “I got a friend Shirley bigger than you” Harvey faces the Nats and Stephen Strasburg.
I’ll have the clicker in hand.
[Photo Credit: AP]
Dwight Garner profiles John Le Carre in the Times:
Yet John le Carré’s greatest invention is easily John le Carré himself. Born in 1931 in Poole, a sprawling coastal town in Dorset, he is a product of a childhood both unusual and enviable — if you happen to be a writer. It made him suspicious of charm of any sort and gave him a limitless fascination with humans and their secrets.
Le Carré, as most of his fans know, is a son of a great, debonair English con man. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, born into mundane middle-class life, remade himself into a funny, gracious man who found that he could talk anyone out of anything, and did so. He was friendly with the Kray twins, the notorious and photogenic London gangsters. He was jailed for insurance fraud. He always, le Carré said, had a scam or two in the works.
“In his high days, he had a racehorse at Maisons-Lafitte outside Paris, and dancing girls, and he’d go whizzing off to Monte Carlo with the former lord mayor of London to stay in grand style at the Hotel de Paris,” le Carré said. “His social rise was extraordinary.” When things went badly, le Carré recalls, “not only were the police looking for him, but the boys were. We had to put the cars behind the house, keep the lights out and so on.”
Le Carré likes to cite a passage from the autobiography of Colin Clark, the son of the art collector Lord Clark, who wrote about what it was like to be taken in by le Carré’s father: “He was your favorite uncle, your family doctor, Bob Boothby and Father Christmas rolled into one.” He could, Clark wrote, “fix anything” and did. “Ronnie invited me to Royal Ascot and gave me a few good dinners. Then he showed me a piece of derelict property, which he did not own, promised to double my money in three months and took the lot.”
[Featured Image Via: Third Eye Photography]
Another night and again the Diamondbacks get an impressive performance from their starting pitcher. This time it was Patrick Corbin, a slinging lefty with a nice fastball and a nice slider. Phil Hughes was good too. He allowed two solo home runs and that put the Yanks in a 2-1 hole (they scored their run on a solo homer by Robbie Cano).
In the eighth, Eduardo Nunez was robbed of an extra base hit by Martin Prado to lead off and then Travis Hafner, pinch-hitting walked against reliever David Hernandez and Brett Gardner singled. It was only the third hit of the game for the Yanks.
Wells walked on four pitches, the crowd was alive, and for the first time this season, my pulse quickened. Cano took a fastball low for a ball and then fouled off a good fastball–oooooh, just missed it. Another fastball, this one upstairs, probably not a strike, but Cano swung at it anyhow and fouled it off. Next pitch was a wicked breaking ball, Cano, couldn’t check his swing even though the ball hit him in the left foot. The initial call was that Cano did not swing but the appeal–to the first base ump, not the third base ump who is responsible for the call–had Cano out. It was the correct call, too.
So it was up to Kevin Youkilis, who took a fastball for a strike–too low, Blue, too low–and then fouled off a breaking ball, waved at another slider, barely fouling it off, and took a fastball high. He got another fastball, this one just inside enough and Youkilis fouled it off. The next pitch was a slider up and Youk leaned his elbow out but it missed him (and you wonder why opponent’s don’t like him). He swung and missed at the next pitch, a breaking ball and the inning was over.
And for the first time this season I was irked.
That quickly changed to fuggin annoyed when Gardner overran a fly ball for a two-base error to start the ninth–he ran a long way to make an error. A bloop single over Cano’s head (did he mis-time his jump?) put runners on the corners with nobody out, Joba on the mound. He struck out Eric Chavez and then got a little tapper hit right to him, chased down the runner at third, got him in a run down, and Youkilis tagged the runner out. Youk spun, threw the ball to Nunez, who was covering third and they had Cody Ross out, but Ross slid in under the tag and was safe. Catcher’s interference on Frankie Cervelli loaded the bases and left our catcher smarting. But wouldn’t you know it a fly ball ended it. Lots of weirdness, but no runs.
And a good performance by Joba.
J.J. Putz–pronounced “Puts,” as only a Putz would do–hung a 1-2 splitter to Cervelli with one man out and the little guy planted one into the first row of the left field stands: tie game. It was no bomb but it had a nice ring to it. Sure sounded sweet.
We might as well leave there because soon enough the irritation I mentioned earlier returned when David Phelps worked out of a jam in the 11th. And resignation set in after Nunez ended the bottom of the 11th with a well-struck ball that almost took off on Cody Ross in right field. Yeah, the winning run was on second and would have scored easily. Cervelli had another catcher’s interference in the 12th and Ross came up with the go-ahead RBI; our old friend Eric Chavez collected three RBI with a long double.
Final Score: Diamondbacks 6, Yanks 2.
Two-of-three was good but the Yanks should have swept ’em.
Rain in the Bronx on a glum night.
Meanwhile, there’s a game to be played. Phil Hughes looks to pitch well…
1. Gardner CF
2. Wells LF
3. Cano 2B
4. Youkilis 1B
5. Francisco DH
6. Cervelli C
7. Suzuki RF
8. Nunez SS
9. Nix 3B
Never mind the hankies:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Via: Zero]
I’ve started a blog over at Deadspin called The Stacks, devoted to archiving memorable newspaper and magazine writing. The Stacks will simulcast our Banter Gold Standard re-print series as well as include posts with links to classic material already available on-line.
Diggum.
If you’ve never read John O’Hara’s first novel, do yourself a favor. Penguin Classics has published a new edition of the book with an introduction by Charles McGrath, excerpted over at The New York Review of Books:
Originally published in 1934, John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra is still the only American novel I know that begins with a scene of a married couple—Luther and Irma Fliegler—having sex and on Christmas morning, no less. Later in the book, another married couple—Julian English, the novel’s protagonist, and his wife, Caroline—make love in the middle of Christmas afternoon. Julian has been dispatched on a disagreeable errand, and Caroline rewards him by waiting in their bedroom in a black lace negligee she calls her “whoring gown.” About their lovemaking, the novel says, “she was as passionate and as curious, as experimental and joyful as ever he was.”
Before O’Hara, sex in American novels—polite novels, anyway—was mostly adulterous, not something that proper married women engaged in, or if they did, they weren’t known to enjoy it. Appointment is a genuine love story, charged with eros but stripped of sentimentality, and the relationship between the Englishes is more convincing and more satisfying than that of, say, Gatsby and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, or Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. Though unfaithful to her, Julian can’t stop loving Caroline, and after O’Hara devotes a whole chapter to her intimate thoughts and sexual explorations before marriage, the reader can’t help falling a little in love with her, too. Caroline, for her part, reflects at the end of the book: “He was drunk, but he was Julian, drunk or not, and that was more than anyone else was.”
The speed with which the book was written may account for the urgency of its storytelling. O’Hara began it in December 1933, when he was just twenty-eight, and wrote it in something like white heat, finishing in a little under four months. Set in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a lightly disguised version of Pottsville, where O’Hara grew up, the entire action of Appointment in Samarra—Julian English’s whirlwind of self-destruction—takes place in just thirty-six hours, and its breakneck pace is startling and exciting. Even on a second reading, when you know what’s going to happen, you tear through it still not quite believing in what’s just ahead and what’s already been established by the novel’s epigraph, taken from W. Somerset Maugham’s play Sheppey (in which Death speaks of meeting a merchant in Samarra): an appointment in Samarra, we know from the beginning, is an appointment with death itself.
Yanks down 3-0? No fuggin’ problem.
C.C. Sabathia gave up a couple of runs in the first but then toughed it out for eight innings. Meanwhile, Young Wade Miley dominated the Yankees until the seventh inning. That’s when he got shook and loaded the bases. Had two outs too when he walked Eduardo Nunez to load ’em up and you could see his frustration building. He followed that by walking Jayson Nix and that was it. His night, done. Then Brett Gardner singled to tie the game.
Bottom of the eighth, Travis Hafner hit a 95 mph fastball for a pinch hit home run and Mariano Rivera retired the side in order in the ninth for the save. Fell behind Cody Ross 3-0, but got him to pop out to Ichiro! in right. Our old pal Eric Chavez grounded a 2-2 pitch to short and Gerrado Parra rolled one over to Robbie Cano–cue Sinatra.
Hey, not bad for these suck-ass 1965 Yankees, huh?
[Picture by Grégoire Guillemin]
