All right, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but after watching the Yankees lose their ninth straight game in Tampa — and listening to Lou Piniella for nine innings — the title seemed appropriate if a bit reactionary.

There’s something about the Rays that really bothers me. When the Red Sox were at the peak of their powers, each series definitely raised my blood pressure, but I respected those teams. Terry Francona respected the game, and the players not named Papelbon, Pedroia, and Youkilis were actually a bit likable. They played the game the right way, and it was hard to hate them for it.

It’s not that the Rays don’t play the game the right way, because they do. They run out every ground ball, go from first to third, steal bases, all that stuff. But Joe Maddon is infuriating. He creates a new lineup each night, moving hitters four or five spots in the batting order from one night to the next, and haphazardly deploys his fielders, heeding voices only he hears.

The truth of it all, though, is that none of it would be remotely infuriating except for one thing — it works. All of it.

The matchup seemed to be in favor of the Yanks on Tuesday night, with the streaking Ivan Nova on the mound for the Bombers and the disappointing James Shield starting for the Rays. (How befuddling is Shields? Try this stat on for size: Complete games — 0 in ’09, 0 in ’10, 11 in ’11, o in ’12.)

The Yankees jumped on Shields early. Derek Jeter absolutely smoked the first pitch of the game, sending it to the wall in left center for a double, then scored on a laser that Curtis Granderson hit past Carlos Peña at first for another double. After the obligatory strikeout from Alex Rodríguez, Robinson Canó rifled a single through the Maddon Shift for a 2-0 Yankee lead.

DeWayne Wise homered in the third to bump the lead up to 3-0, but Nova was struggling enough to make it clear that more than three runs would be needed. He faced twenty batters over the first four innings, and he started twelve of them out with ball one. As a result, it seemed like he was working hard all night, even when no one was on base.

In the bottom of the third, however, the Rays got some folks on base. There were two outs and runners on first and second when B.J. Upton came up to the plate and immediately grounded a single through the left side of the infield. Wise charged the ball well and came up throwing, looking to get Elliot Johnson at the plate. Wise’s throw beat Johnson, but the ball came loose in the collision and the run scored. I’ve never seen a play this scored as an error, but Russell Martin got the E-2. Jeff Keppinger came up next and singled in two more runs to tie the score. All three runs were unearned, but all three can be attributed to Nova’s shakiness.

The Yankees took the lead right back in the top of the fourth when Raúl Ibañez doubled and came home on an Eric Chavez single, but that lead was immediately erased in the bottom half of the inning by two-run home run by Sean Rodríguez.

Trailing for the first time in the game, the Yankees looked to even the score in the top of the sixth. Reigning American League Player of the Week Canó opened the frame with a single, and two batters later Ibañez blistered a ball over the first base bag and into the right field corner. Third base coach Robby Thompson bravely waved Canó home, but Robinson it immediately looked like the wrong decision. After the relay throw arrived at the plate, catcher José Molina poured a cup of tea and let it steep for a bit before applying the tag on a sliding Canó. It kind of summed up the entire night.

From there, the Yankee hitters went down like lambs as the bullpen coughed up a couple more runs, including one on a double steal, making the final score Rays 7, Yankees 4.

Strange as it might seem, I can’t wait to get to Fenway Park.

[Photo Credit: Mike Carlson/AP Photo]

As Jon mentioned in his recap of last night’s game, the Rays find a way to bust Yankee chops.

Let’s hope that ain’t the case tonight. Ivan Nova’s on the hill.

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Raul Ibanez DH
Eric Chavez 1B
Russell Martin C
Dewayne Wise LF

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

[Photo Credit: John Black]

Here’s another bowling story. This one, by the late Jeff Felshman, is a keeper, a funny and understated gem:

Only the dead don’t bowl. Everybody’s tried it, anybody can do it, nobody wants to see it. Would you pay to watch bowling? Of course not. Not if the match featured the greatest bowlers of all time. Who are the greatest bowlers of all time? Who knows? As a spectator sport, bowling isn’t much. Most bowlers don’t pay much attention to their own game much less anyone else’s, especially after a couple of beers. That’s the downside of bowling’s great accessibility: even when you’re good at it, nobody cares.

Most of the bowlers at Timber Lanes the first Saturday in June don’t watch; most of them can’t see. It’s the last day before the summer break for the blind bowling league from the Chicago Braille Center. They won’t be getting together again until the middle of August. By then they should know if they’ve repeated as national champions of the American Blind Bowling Association. The results from this year’s tournement (which was held over Memorial Day weekend in Atlanta, and drew about 700 bowlers from 170 blind bowling leagues) won’t be tabulated until August. The league secretary, Virginia Okada, doesn’t think Chicago Braille Center won this year; but until they hear otherwise they’re still the national champs.

A sign on the door says Timber Lanes welcomes seeing eye dogs, but no one brought the dog today. The group is large enough as it is, about 40 being a crowd in the small bowling alley on Irving Park Road. There’s someone here from practically every American group–that’s–black, white, Spanish, American Indian, Asian, old, young, middle-aged. Usually in America when people try to put together such a broad-based racial and ethnic coalition they fail, but the blind bowlers not only can’t see much difference they have a common cause: they’re all trying to stay out of the gutter.

Somehow, it didn’t make The Best American Sports Writing. Glenn Stout has more.

[Photo Credit: Xaxor]

Couple of stories on Joba Chamberlain:

Harvey Araton in the Times.

Daniel Barbaris in the Wall Street Journal.

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Post]

There’s a major George Bellows retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. through early October.

Might be worth a road trip.

The morning after David Robertson served it up to the White Sox, I told my son that the Yankees lost a “heart-breaker.” Now he looks at the scoreboard every morning and every one-run game is a “heart-breaker.” We played Scrabble, he beat me 110 to 108, promptly informed me that I just lost a “heart-breaker.” Someday he’ll learn that not all heart-breakers are created equal. Some heart-breakers are really head-scratchers with fangs.

How do these Rays keep doing this to the Yankees? Even without Longoria, with one of their lesser pitchers on the mound, in the midst of a horrendous stretch of baseball, they can sting the Yankees like no one else. Look around the diamond do you want any of those guys on the Yankees? Zobrist is a nice player, but this is a terrible baseball team right now and the Yankees should have been looking to step on their throats. Instead the Rays won a game they had no business winning, 4-3 and put the Yankees on the ropes to start one of the biggest weeks of the season.

Though both recent catastrophes have multiple culprits, they have a lot in common. The Yankees turned routine outs into shocking errors, and David Robertson got tagged. The errors were so freakish that you almost want to write them off. This time Mark Teixiera whiffed on an easy, inning-ending bounder down the first base line allowing the go-ahead run to score. The ball may have hit the bag, but Teixiera a) should have had his body in front of the ball and b) should have caught it anyway. None of this would have mattered of course if David Robertson was pitching well.

Robertson came in to the game with the Yankees leading 3-2 in the seventh, two out and a runner on second. I thought Girardi made a good call to bring him in in such an important spot. But Robertson fell behind, couldn’t locate and some doofus named Brooks Conrad blasted him off the wall in right. Then he got ahead of Elliot Johnson and couldn’t put him away because he had no feel for the breaking ball. Johnson grounded to Teixeira and the game was lost. (Alex Rodriguez did give it a whirl in the eighth, but those fly balls to right-center just don’t clear the fence when you don’t inject your Wheaties.)

Freddy Garcia, who had to throw it twice to reach 80 MPH on the radar gun in April, started and pitched well. I thought he was done as a Major Leaguer after the first few turns through the rotation, but I’ve got a terrible track record this year assessing Yankee pitchers, so I guess that doesn’t carry much weight. When you are ancient and getting by with smoke and mirrors, one morning you wake up and find that the smoke machine has crashed into the mirror and you go back to sleep.

Garcia didn’t quit however and accepted a demotion to the least important spot on the 25-man roster. In over 17 innings as the last man in the bullpen, Garcia turned in a 1.56 ERA and pitched well enough to earn this start replacing Andy Pettitte.

Garcia was on a short leash – only expected to throw 65-70 pitches. He used those pitches efficiently as they got him through five innings. The only blemish was a solo jack by B.J. Upton in the fourth. He was pitching so well, and the Rays looked so helpless against his particular brand of precision-slop, that Joe Girardi got greedy and sent him out for the sixth with a 2-1 lead. The first batter grounded to short, but the second batter, Carlos Pena, tattooed the 74th pitch, an 84 MPH flatball, to right to tie the game.

The Yankees scored two in the first when they strung a few hits together and Hideki Matsui badly misplaced a fly ball to right, but that was it until the top of the seventh. Curtis Granderson gave them the lead 3-2 when he battled his way to a hard-won sac fly to left. Maybe they should have had more runs. Rays rookie Matt Moore was good enough to get by, but not good enough to impress. The Yankees had the better starter, the better hitters. They had the game in their pocket.

But the story of these two teams head-to-head is that Rays dismantle the Yankee bullpen and the Yankees can’t sniff Fernando Rodney, who has two wins and three saves against them already this year. Typing that sentence just caused a panic sweat to break out on my back and my right arm is tingling. I wonder if it is my heart?

AP Photo by Brian Blanco

The Yanks look to end the first half on an up-note this week. They’ve got three in Tampa and then four this weekend in Boston. Won’t be easy.

Fab Five Freddy goes tonight against a struggling Rays team. Be interesting to see what he’s got to offer as a starting pitcher after a poor start to his season and a long time buried in the bullpen.

In the meantime, Corey Wade was optioned today to make room on the roster for Philadelphia whipping boy, Chad Qualls.

How about an appearance from the Yankee Score Truck?

Derek Jeter DH
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Andruw Jones LF
Jayson Nix SS
Chris Stewart C

Never mind letting up now: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

The Yankees beat the Red Sox 8-4 for their sixth straight win, increasing their American Leauge lead to three games over Cleveland. With DiMaggio having already tied Keeler’s mark, the crowd was much smaller, but those 8,662 in the Stadium that day watched as he took the record and stood alone at forty-five games in a row. DiMaggio’s lone hit was a screaming liner that rocketed over Ted Williams’s head and found the left field seats for his eighteenth home run of the season. After the game, a young Williams admitted admiration for DiMaggio. “I really wish I could hit like that guy Joe DiMaggio. I’m being honest.” Williams could hit pretty well himself. He was hitting .401 at the time.

[Drawing by Margie Lawrence]

From D Magazine comes a bowling story by Michael J. Mooney.

Since we’re talking literature, check out this recent piece on James Joyce by Louis Menand in the New Yorker.

Even better, dig these rare illustrations Henri Matisse did for a 1935 edition of “Ulysses.”

Adapted from his foreword to a new Modern Library Edition, here’s John Jeremiah Sullivan on William Faulkner’s masterpiece, “Absalom, Absalom!”:

A poll of well over a hundred writers and critics, taken a few years back by Oxford American magazine, named William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” the “greatest Southern novel ever written,” by a decisive margin — and the poll was conducted while looking back on a century in which a disproportionate number of the best American books were Southern — so to say that this novel requires no introduction is just to speak plainly.

Of course, it’s the kind of book a person would put first in a poll like that. You can feel reasonably confident, in voting for it, that nobody quite fathoms it enough to question its achievement. Self-consciously ambitious and structurally complex (unintelligible, a subset of not unsophisticated readers has always maintained), “Absalom, Absalom!” partakes of what the critic Irving Howe called “a fearful impressiveness,” the sort that “comes when a writer has driven his vision to an extreme.” It may represent the closest American literature came to producing an analog for “Ulysses,” which influenced it deeply — each in its way is a provincial Modernist novel about a young man trying to awaken from history — and like “Ulysses,” it lives as a book more praised than read, or more esteemed than enjoyed.

But good writers don’t look for impressedness in their readers — it’s at best another layer of distortion — and “greatness” can leave a book isolated in much the way it can a human being. (Surely a reason so many have turned away from “Ulysses” over the last near-hundred years is that they can’t read it without a suffocating sense of each word’s cultural importance and their duty to respond, a shame in that case, given how often Joyce was trying to be amusing.) A good writer wants from us — or has no right to ask more than — intelligence, good faith and time. A legitimate question to ask is, What happens with “Absalom, Absalom!” if we set aside its laurels and apply those things instead? What has Faulkner left us?

I have never read the book, though I’ve started it a few times and have read four other novels by Faulkner. This article has me curious to try again.

[Painting by Steven Sullivan]

Well, I missed the whole damn affair. Family gathering upstate. Had to be done and it turned out to be a nice time. I checked the score from time-to-time and was thrilled to learn that Phil Hughes, after giving up a couple of runs in the first, was stingy. He went eight innings and a two-run home run by Robinson Cano–yes, that man again–broke the tie as the Yankees beat the White Sox, 4-2.

Cano is surging, is in the prime of his career, and more than capable of carrying the team for weeks at a time. It’s also been great to see Hughes, Nova and Kuroda pitching well, am I right?

Zach Schonbrun has a nice write-up in the Times.

Coupled with a Baltimore loss the Yanks are now six games ahead in the American League East. That’s the way to beat the heat. Nice job by the Yanks after losing the first two games of the series–the White Sox got two runs in the last couple of games.

Say Word:

And on Old Timer’s Day (covered here by Harvey Araton), Derek Jeter, C.C. Sabathia, Curtis Granderson and Cano were selected to the All Star Game. Sabathia was replaced by C.J. Wilson. Also, the Yanks picked up a reliever today and over at River Ave Blues, Mike Axisa can’t figure it.

[Featured Image via: Kathy Willens/AP Photo; interior pictures by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images and Willens]

Old Timer’s Day at the Stadium or “The Return of Tanyon Sturtze!”

Laughs and old men running around in costumes playing a boy’s game.

More heat. Boy, is it hot.

Phil Hughes follows as the Yanks try to break even against the White Sox.

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

More than 50,000 fans packed Yankee Stadium to watch DiMaggio as he took aim at the all-time hitting streak record. Wee Willie Keeler had hit in forty-four straight games in 1897. The crowd was anticipating a record, and they were also no doubt excited to watch the Yanks battle Ted Williams and the Red Sox. In the opening game, DiMaggio came up empty in his first two at bats, fouling out to first in the first inning and grounding out to third in the third. In the fifth, he hit another grounder to third, but third baseman Jim Tabor bobbled it momentarily before firing wildly to first, allowing DiMaggio to reach second.

The official scorer gave him a hit, although many disputed the call. The crowd, incidentally, was left in the dark, as the scoreboard at that time did not flash the H or E that modern fans are accustomed to seeing. Most people in the park didn’t know whether or not the streak had been extended. With his next at bat, however, DiMaggio erased all doubt with a clean line drive into left field. The crowd erupted with an ovation that lasted a full five minutes. The Yankees won the game, 7-2, but for the first time in nearly a month they didn’t hit any balls over the wall. Their record of hitting home runs in twenty-five straight games still stands today. (I think it’s been tied recently, if I remember correctly; it’s a difficult record to track down.)

It should also be noted that there were two DiMaggios playing center field on this day; Joe’s younger brother Dom was in the other dugout with the Red Sox, and he hit his fourth home run of the season in the opener of the double header.

DiMaggio took care of business much earlier in the second game. He lined a single over shortstop for a single in the first inning to tie Keeler’s record. The Yankees won easily in an abbreviated five-inning game, 9-2, and stretched their lead in the American League to 2 1/2 games over the Cleveland Indians.

Kick the Bobo…

[Photo Credit: Particular Particules]

Hiroki Kuroda has quietly been the Yankees most reliable starting pitcher this season. He had a rough stretch early on and their was talk that the adjustment to the American League East was too much. But that hasn’t been the case overall and Kuroda had another strong start today, just when the team needed it, as he shut out the White Sox for seven innings. He struck out eleven batters–tying a career high–despite not having his best split finger fastball. The Sox only managed three singles against Kuroda.

Solo homers from the lefties Curtis Granderson, Robinson Cano and Dwayne Wise (who added an RBI double) was enough against Jake Peavey who pitched a pretty good game minus those mistakes.

On a unpleasantly warm day in the Bronx, Kuroda and the Yanks cooled off Chicago, and for that we are grateful.

Final Score: Yanks 4, White Sox 0.

[Photo Credit: Thomas Hoepker/MAGNUM PHOTOS]

Yeah, it’s hotter n July hot today in the Bronx as Hiroki Kuroda looks to stop the bleeding for the Yanks who have dropped the first two games of this series to the White Sox.

Yanks will need a Score Truck Debut today but they’re facing a tough pitcher in Jake Peavey.

1. Jeter SS
2. Granderson CF
3. Rodriguez 3B
4. Cano 2B
5. Teixeira 1B
6. Swisher DH
7. Ibanez RF
8. Martin C
9. Wise LF

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

[Photo Credit: Leonard Freed via Je Suis Perdu]

Photo and recipe for sweet and sour cherry jam over at Hungry Ghost Food+Travel.

Adam Warren dug in for the first start of his big league career tonight, dealt to Alejandro De Aza, and came up with a satisfying strike out. Let’s leave Adam Warren right there because it was mostly a mess after that and why rub it in?

The Yankees were on the board early and looked to be playing the part of a big brother protecting his younger sibling his first time out at the playground. The Yankees gave Warren a four-spot in the first, but he must have had a hole in his pocket because it was gone before he could spend it.

Girardi mercifully ended his night in the third and handed the ball to David Phelps. Phelps would be a better option than Warren to begin with – he’s been better in the Minors and looks to have better stuff based on their side-by-side comparison tonight – but he’s been in the bullpen all year and is not prepared to throw a lot of pitches. The Yankees tied it at six in the fourth, but Yankee runs seemed to bring out the worst in the pitchers. Phelps gave the White Sox the lead back one batter into the fifth.

Pitching for the White Sox was a Yankees cast-off named Jose Quintana. He had pitched well in the low minors, but he was not in the Yanks plans. They let him walk as Minor League free agent and the White Sox snatched him up.

He’s been great for Chicago so far, but the Yankees bashed him around for four innings and he seemed destined to be on the losing end whenever the runs stopped scoring. He had nothing and seeing him out there in the six was shocking.

But the Yanks went cold and stupid while the Sox tacked on more runs. The lowlight was either Robinson Cano’s brainless pick-off in the fifth or Cory Wade’s lifeless pitch to Alexei Ramirez, sporting a .563 OPS heading into the game, in the seventh. The homer helped Ramirez add .032 OPS points tonight and finished off the Yankees.

The White Sox kept scoring from there and piled up an ugly 14-7 victory. Joe Girardi’s binder must have said “14-7 = time for a position player to do some pitching.” Dewayne Wise got the last two outs so quickly the other pitchers didn’t even have time to take notes.

Photo via Elsa/Getty Images

Ah, the old place. Well, the second old place, anyhow.

It’s hot out there for Adam Warren’s big league debut. The ball should be a-jumpin’, even though the White Sox are throwing a good young pitcher tonight. I keep waiting for Adam Dunn to hit one into the upper deck in right field.

1. Jeter SS
2. Granderson CF
3. Teixeira 1B
4. A-Rod 3B
5. Cano 2B
6. Swisher RF
7. Jones DH
8. Nix LF
9. Stewart C

Stay hydrated and: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit:  Laura Powers]