Roger Clemens: Not Guilty. On all six counts.

I took this picture at Yankee Stadium last month. Bet this guy is happy today.

Stanley Speaks!

Via Open Culture.

We usually refrain from mixing sports with politics round these parts but this here column about Bryce Harper by Charlie Pierce over at Esquire.com is worth a look.

Johnette Howard has a piece on A.J. Burnett over at ESPN:

When a New York Daily News reporter passed through Pittsburgh in late May and checked in with him, Burnett volunteered a telltale story. He spoke about how in the first inning of his home debut as a Pirate, he coughed up a walk, a single and another walk to the very first three batters he faced. Oh no.

“I could imagine what that place [Yankee Stadium] would sound like,” Burnett said. “But there was about two words that came out of the crowd here. So it’s just different.

“You’re a little less on edge. Some guys thrive in that.”

I’m pleased for Burnett. He seemed like a guy that wasn’t cut out for pitching in New York. If that was the case, it’s nice to see him flourish in Pittsburgh.

[Photo Credit: David Richard-US PRESSWIRE]

Via Kottke, check out this Q&A over at Fast Company with the wealthy and successful inventor, James Dyson:

You once described the inventor’s life as “one of failure.” How so?

A: I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative.

Not all failures lead to solutions, though. How do you fail constructively?

A: We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a bit like a drug. You’re on it, and you can’t get off. I spent seven years on our washing machine [which has two drums, instead of one].

What’s the main lesson from those 15 years’ developing the vacuum?

A: It can take a very long time to develop interesting products and get them right. But our society has an instant- gratification thing. We admire instant brilliance, effortless brilliance. I think quite the reverse. You should admire the person who perseveres and slogs through and gets there in the end.

Love this.

The Yankees lost their second straight to the White Sox, coming up on the short end of a 3-2 score. DiMaggio managed only a single in three at bats, a blooper over the head of shortstop Luke Appling, but it was enough to keep the streak alive. Charlie Keller’s two-run homerun in the second accounted for all of the Yankee runs and made it fourteen straight games that New York batters had homered.

There were some who believed that DiMaggio’s single hits in games thirty and thirty-one were questionable at best. The ball that hopped off of Appling’s shoulder on the 17th was seen as especially controversial, and various reporters at the time reported that fans at the Stadium stood in silence as they awaited the official scorer’s decision. That official scorer was Dan Daniel, and in October of 2007 David Robeson wrote an article in the Walrus in which he asserted that Daniel’s biased scoring had erroneously given DiMaggio two hits that he didn’t deserve. (The hit in the 31st game glanced off of Appling’s glove, and Robeson argues it should’ve been scored an error as well.) Here’s the crux of Robeson’s argument:

In keeping with the ethics of the era, Dan Daniel, a popular writer who had been covering baseball since 1909, enjoyed all the perks of covering the Yankees. He travelled with and befriended the players, and had his expenses paid for by the club itself. Daniel was, by modern standards, part of the team, as much a PR man as a reporter. He wrote of DiMaggio extensively, championing “The Big Dago” before DiMaggio had even appeared in the bigs, and it was he who authored the quote, “Here is the replacement for Babe Ruth.” The Clipper made for wonderful copy: he was a good-looking bachelor who patrolled the most revered position in all of sports, centre field for the New York Yankees. Daniel also happened to be the most important witness to the streak. The reason? This friend of DiMaggio and quasi-employee of the New York Yankees just happened, unbelievably, to be the Yankees’ official home-game scorer as well — the very arbiter of hits and errors. For games at Yankee Stadium, Daniel, and Daniel alone, decided if DiMaggio was to be credited with a hit.

There is, of course, no video of either play, so we are left only with a box score and a handful of written accounts. One thing is certain, though. There are countless variables in the game of baseball, ranging from an umpire’s view of a pitch in the neighborhood of the outside corner to the distance of one park’s fence as compared to another. An official scorer’s decision is simply one more thing which is beyond a player’s control. DiMaggio had a hit on the 17th, another on the 18th, and lots more after that.

Know what’s a good sign? That C.C. Sabathia has been the Yankees’ worst starter during their recent streak. ‘Cause I never worry about C.C. and if he’s their biggest problem, man, that sure does bode well. Ivan Nova had another outstanding performance today as the Yankees beat the Nationals 4-1. Curtis Granderson and Robinson Cano hit solo home runs and the Yanks delivered a satisfying Father’s Day gift for all those Yankee-rootin’ Dads out there.

Felt damn good for the rest of us, too.

David Waldstein has the game story over at the Times.

[Photo Credit: Greg Flume/Getty Images; Painting by Wayne Thiebaud]

The Yanks look to make it nine straight this afternoon in Washington D.C. Edwin Jackson hopes to help his team get at least one win in this series.

Never mind the power drill n duct tape: Happy Father’s Day Fellas and Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: Ffffound]

Speaking of Coltrane…

[Photo Credit: DeeZet]

David Waldstein has a long profile on Russell Martin and catching in the New York Times:

The physical penalties paid by the catcher, of course, are not often characterized by the spectacular violence of a wide receiver clotheslined by a safety. Neither are they frequently accompanied by the angry acoustics of a crunching hockey check into the boards.

The price paid, as much as anything, is one of plain, penetrating exhaustion, both mental and physical. It is about enduring a grinding, dirty routine, where, in St. Louis or Arlington, Tex., in August, a catcher can shed 10 pounds in a game. In 2007, when he was with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Martin started 143 games behind the plate.

Three times this season, Martin has caught at least six games in six days. From May 11 to 17, he caught seven consecutive games, and once, from June 5 to 13, he caught nine in a row.

“When you’re going through it, you don’t notice it,” Martin said of the grind. “It’s when you stop for a day or two and then the aches from the foul tips and the fatigue kind of bubble to the surface and you’re like ‘Whoa, did I get hit by a train?’

“Sometimes I’d rather just plow through and keep playing, just soldier on, because it almost feels harder when you’ve been off for a day and you come back.”

Worth your time.

[Photo Credit: Jyekn; Thomas Ferrara/Newsday]

The Chicago White Sox snapped New York’s winning streak at eight with an 8-7 victory, but the two other Yankee streaks continued. Charlie Keller crushed an upper-deck shot in the eighth inning, temporarily tying the score and making it thirteen straight games with Yankee homeruns, but the Sox won it in the ninth. DiMaggio set the all-time Yankee hitting streak record at thirty games, but he needed some luck. He came to the plate in the seventh inning, still without a hit, and smashed a hard ground ball directly to Chicago shortstop Luke Appling. But just before Appling could gather in the grounder and put an end to the streak, the ball took a horrible bad hop, bounding up and hitting Appling in the shoulder. He had no play, and DiMaggio kept streaking. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Much more on this tomorrow…

What’s the worst that could happen if I let it be?

I didn’t even bring my phone with me to the store. Yet when I got home our boys held a 5-3 lead going into the bottom of the 14th. Mark Teixeira got the big hit, a two-run double against Brad Lidge. Jayson Nix hit an infield single to deep short to start the frame and then Derek Jeter failed to lay down a bunt on the first two pitches he saw. But he fouled pitches off and took some more; soon the count was full then Jeter hit a ground ball single himself. It was a stubborn, resilient at bat, and Jeter’s first hit in seven trips to the plate.

Lidge recovered to strike out Curtis Granderson and he got ahead of Teixeira but then hung one and the Yankee first baseman lined a ball to the right field corner.

Rafael Soriano wasn’t smooth and two men were on base when he got Bryce Harper to ground out to end the game. I thought Harper, 0-6 with five strikeouts at that point, would fulfill an ESPN highlight clip that I had running in my mind, but he did not. After the game, Washington’s manager Davey Johnson said that for the first time this year, Harper chased pitches out of the strike zone, anxious to make something happen.

By the time the game was over and Freddy Garcia, sixth of seven Yankee pitchers, was the improbable winner, the startrtd, Jordan Zimmerman and Andy Pettitte were a vague memory. Both pitched well. Zimmerman reminds me of Matt Cain. He’s got great stuff but the Yankees made him work and he was out of the game after six innings.

One thing about Zimmerman, he made two excellent plays in the field. The first, after catching a line drive, had him making a pinpoint throw to the shortstop as they tried to double Eric Chavez off second. The next play was another throw, this one home, that nailed Nick Swisher (Swisher’s leg collided with the catcher’s knee and the cheerful outfielder’s day was done).

Pettitte was outstanding, again, and held a 3-2 lead after seven. He’d thrown 95 pitches but with three right handed hitters coming up in the eighth inning was pulled in favor of Corey Wade who retired the first two batters on two pitches. He got ahead of Ian Desmond 0-2 and then threw a bad pitch, a meatball that missed its target by plenty. Desmond smacked a 400 foot home run and the game was tied. After a walk to Tyler Moore, Boone Logan relieved Wade. Dwayne Wise, who’d replaced Raul Ibanez in left to start the inning, shifted to right and Nix went to left. Adam LaRoche was the pinch hitter and he singled to right. Wise fielded the ball and made a strong throw home. Russell Martin tagged Moore for the third out.

It was a stirring play for the Yankees as well as a lucky one as the replays showed that Moore was safe. But this is how it goes when you are on a wining streak–luck is on your side. Right now, the Yanks have more than a little bit of luck. Everything is going their way. We’ll take it.

Oh, yeah, this was their first win all season without hitting a home run. Tomorrow they go for their ninth straight.

Unt we am Heppy Kets.

Final Score: Yanks 5, Nats 3.

[Photo Credit: Patrick McDermott/Getty Images]

It’s Andy today against another impressive young pitcher. I’m out of the house early so I don’t have the line-up here. Head on over to Chad Jennings for the latest.

Meanwhile, never mind getting complacent: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via Municipal Archives of NYC]

UPDATE: Rodriguez has the day off.

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Raul Ibanez LF
Russell Martin C
Eric Chavez 3B

In the final game of their showdown at the Stadium with the Cleveland Indians, the Yankees grabbed a 6-4 victory and moved to within a game of first place. DiMaggio hit a double to left in the fifth inning, setting a Yankee record by hitting in his twenty-ninth straight game. Second baseman Joe Gordon had homered earlier in the fourth inning, meaning the Yanks had gone deep in twelve straight. The Yankees had now won eight games in a row, and seemed to have finally gotten their season headed in the right direction. It’s interesting that the current Yankees seem to have found their way as well.

[Painting by Phillip Barlow]

Gio Gonzalez is no joke. Throws a fastball in the mid-90s and has a vicious curve ball. He’s walked too many batters when he’s faced the Yanks in the past but he only walked a pair tonight while striking out eight. The Bombers pushed across two runs against him in the third inning–soft ground ball to right by Alex Rodriguez and a single to left by Nick Swisher–but Gonzalez got tougher as the game went along. His pitch count was up over 100 after six and he didn’t come back for the seventh, despite how well he was pitching.

Phil Hughes, on the other hand, might not have the same kind of dynamic stuff but he continued his recent surge going six, walked two, and struck out nine. He’s challenging hitters these days, changing eye levels with the fastball–hung a couple of curve balls, including one that drove in the Nationals’ first run–but he was impressive. And for the first time this season, he didn’t give up a home run.

Andruw Jones reached base with a seeing-eye-single to start the seventh, ending Gonzalez’s night, and then Dwayne Wise replaced Jones and took off on the first pitch reliever Brad Lidge threw to Russell Martin. He made it without a throw. Lidge hung a slider to Martin on the 1-1 pitch and then Martin fouled off several good pitches before he drew a walk. Jason Nix sacrificed the runners over–Ryan Zimmerman threw him out a first, and he fielded and threw the ball with such quickness and fluidity that made me think what a pleasure it’d be to watch him play defense on a regular basis–and Robinson Cano came to the plate as a pinch hitter.

Cano was intentionally walked and then Derek Jeter fell behind Lidge, missing a couple of good pitches. With the count full, Jeter hit a soft ground ball to short, good enough to score a run. The throw to first hit the dirt and skipped past Adam LaRoche. Another run came home and it would be more than enough for the Yanks who added a couple more on an opposite field double by Curtis Granderson. In the ninth, Grandy hit a solo home run, his 20th of the year.

Cody Eppley pitched a perfect seventh, Clay Rapada a clean eighth and our old pal David Robertson pitched the ninth. He gave up a couple of hits and a run but it was good to see him again. Even better to see the Yanks win another game. They’ve won 17 of their last 21.

Indeed.

Final Score: Yanks 7, Nats 2.

[Photo Credit: Joel Zimmer; Greg Flume/Getty Images]

The once lowly Washington Nats ain’t chumps no more. They’s in first place, don’t cha know.

Yanks get their first look at Byrce Haper this weekend. Should be fun.

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Nick Swisher RF
Andruw Jones LF
Russell Martin C
Jayson Nix 2B

No Robbie. Don’t know why just yet.

Never mind the Go Go: Let’s Go Yankees!

[Photo Via ViewFinder]

As the Yankees played on consecutive days for the first time in a week, DiMaggio had only one hit against the Cleveland Indians on this afternoon in the Bronx, but it was enough to continue two streaks. DiMaggio hit his thirteenth homerun of the year, an upper deck blast which extended his personal hitting streak to twenty-eight and the Yankees team homerun streak to eleven. The Yankees beat the first place Indians, 3-2, for their seventh win in a row; they were now only two games out of the top spot in the league.

At twenty-eight games, DiMaggio was now only one game behind the Yankee record, held jointly by Earl Coombs (1931) and current Cleveland manager Roger Peckinpaugh (1919). Reporters were starting to wonder if DiMaggio might challenge the all-time record, then believed to be George Sisler’s forty-one game streak from 1922. (It would be a few weeks before someone turned up the actual record.) Contacted by the New York Daily News, Sisler said, “You can’t imagine the strain. The newspapers keep mentioning the streak. Your teammates continually bring it up. You try to forget, but it can’t be done. It’s in your head every time you step to the plate.” And he didn’t have to deal with live cut-ins from ESPN, plus he probably smoked cigarettes with tons of nicotine.

Fresh direct from Fortune magazine archives, check out this 1946 article about the Yankees:

In more ways than one, Larry MacPhail is like no other figure in baseball’s ruling class–the “magnates.” Because he is publicity minded and operates on terms of rowdy good-fellowship with the press, to whom he addresses a few thousand wellchosen words almost every day of his life, he is constantly in the news, and not always in a complimentary light. Where Ruppert was always “the Colonel” (an honorary title conferred on him at age twenty-two), MacPhail, who won his rank in service, is more likely to turn up even in the staid New York Times as “Loquacious Larry” or the “Rambunctious Redhead.” Once, in a fit of passion, he threw a middle-aged punch at the capable and well-liked Arthur Patterson, then covering the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. Patterson, whose hair is just as red as MacPhail’s, countered in kind. MacPhail was so pleased about the affair that he later appointed Patterson traveling secretary and publicity director of the Yankees. The MacPhailian legend, indeed, stops precariously short of clownishness. Irrevocably, he is what the boys call “a character.” It is a curious, possibly a useful, mask for one of the abler businessmen in the U.S. and, with the possible exception of scholarly Branch Rickey, the soundest operator in baseball. (Rickey is a great all-around baseball man, but is now undergoing, in Brooklyn, his first real test as the president of a major-league club.)

The idea of MacPhail as a brooding Byronic figure would give most of his acquaintances a laugh, but even so it may be that he is entertaining a mildly psychotic war in his bosom. As a red-haired, freckle-faced kid in Ludington, Michigan, at the turn of the century, Larry liked to play nine o’ cat until dusk, but he practiced his piano lessons, too, and at fourteen was good enough to play the organ in the Episcopal Church. At sixteen he qualified for Annapolis but went to Beloit instead, where he was a star in his three favorite sports–baseball, football, and debating. During vacations he played pro ball under an assumed name. “In the Southern Michigan Association one season,” he can be induced to recall, “I hit .282. Fred (Bonehead) Merkle was in the league that year and was sold to the Giants for $750. He hit .274.”

Over at the Boston Globe, Dan Shaughnessy has a long interview with Theo Epstein:

Epstein: I think taking a step back, if you take a look at what our baseball group was best at, we were best at drafting and developing young talent and finding some undervalued players. I think we were the best drafting team of the decade and all that. That’s a very patient, organic approach. Pure . . .

“We joked about it all the time in the front office. We’d say, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could just say, screw free agency altogether. We’re going with a purely home-grown lineup. We’re going with old-school, Branch Rickey-style, pre-free agency, pre-draft whatever?’

“Middlebrooks at third, Lowrie or Iglesias at short, Pedroia at second, Rizzo at first, Lavarnway catching, Ellsbury in center, Reddick in right, Kalish in left. Wouldn’t that have been fun?

“We kind of clung to that in the back of our minds, knowing it was impossible, recognizing that there was an inherent tension between that approach and bigger business. I kind of kick myself for letting my guard down and giving into it, because that might be a better team in some ways and resonate more with the fans than what we ended up with.

“When you make a mistake in the draft, you just keep drafting. You keep finding another player to develop. When you make a mistake in free agency, you’re stuck with it for the duration of the deal and it can be a real impediment.

[Photo Credit: Neil Leifer]