Mark Kram Jr. is one of the finest practitioners we have of long form newspaper journalism, better known as the bonus or takeout piece. He has been with the Philly Daily News since 1987 and his work has appeared in The Best American Sports Writing six times (here’s a selection:  “The World is Her Cloister” 1994; “Joe’s Gift” 2002; “I Want to Kill Him” 2003; “A Lethal Catch” 2005).

Kram has a clean, almost invisible style that doesn’t call attention to itself. It is in the fine tradition of Gay Talese’s fly-on-the-wall approach. With Kram you don’t notice his technique because you are immersed in the story. Now 56, Kram has written his first book, “Like Any Normal Day.” It is published today.

I wrote a short piece on Kram in the Scorecard section of Sports Illustrated last week and was fortunate enough to chat with him recently about his book and his father, who himself was a celebrated magazine writer.

Enjoy.

Bronx Banter: I’m a huge fan of “Forgive Some Sinner,” the uncompromising article you wrote about your father. It must not have been easy to write that story. How did it come about?

Mark Kram: Frank Deford planted the idea with me. He and Dad had been colleagues at Sports Illustrated during the 1960s and early 1970s but had drifted apart in the ensuing years, as friends occasionally do. They were both from Baltimore, yet not the same Baltimore. Frank grew up in an affluent area of the city, and Dad had come out of East Baltimore, a working class section. He had lettered in baseball, basketball and football in high school—in fact, he had played high school baseball against Al Kaline—but had been a poor student and had no interest in books until his pro baseball career in the Pirates organization came to an end.

Mark Kram, left, Tito Francona far right

I had known Frank as a boy and became reacquainted with him some 30 years later at a book event he had at The Free Library of Philadelphia in 2005, three years after Dad had died. We went out for a few drinks and I filled him in on the man he once knew. By the end of the evening, he said, “You know, you should write about him.” The thought had occurred to me, but I could not think of the circumstance that would arise where it would be possible. Were I to do it, it would have to have been for publication, and I could not think of any editor who would be remotely interested. Incredibly, Frank conspired with Rob Fleder, then a top editor at SI, to offer me an assignment.

BB: That had to come as a surprise, given how your father and SI parted ways in 1977.

MK: You can say that again. I showed my wife Anne the email Rob had sent me and her jaw dropped. SI had not even published an obit on him, and here they were asking for 6,000 words on him. I played along, but I was under no illusions that whatever I came up with would ever appear in their pages.

BB: Really?

MK: Yes. As stellar has his work had been, Dad had breached some very serious ethical standards – which I explore in some depth in “Forgive Some Sinner”–so he represented a complicated piece of SI history. It seemed unlikely to me that they would have any appetite to revisit it. And yet I was excited to have the assignment, if only because it gave me a license to pick up the phone, call people and ask questions.

BB: What happened when you submitted the story?

MK: SI paid for the piece in full and then sat on it. Rob had done a wonderful job helping me get it in shape—he is a splendid editor—but as I said, I doubted that it would ever get in. A year and half passed and Rob called. He said, “I have good news and bad news.” I said, “Give me the bad news.” As I expected, he said SI would not be running the piece. But the “good news” was that I could have the story back and sell it elsewhere, if I could find someone who would take it.

BB: At least they paid you for it and let you have it back.

MK: That was kind of them – and I appreciated it. So I shopped it around but no one wanted it. And then one day, a neighbor, Jason Wilson—who is the series editor of Best American Travel Writing—crossed into our yard and said he had just been appointed the editor of “The Smart Set,” an online cultural magazine he convinced Drexel University to underwrite. “Forgive Some Sinner” appeared as part of their launch and still gets visitors to it. So I would have to say it could not have worked out better.

BB: And there is a benefit to having it on-line because a simple Google search continues to lead readers to it.

MK: Absolutely. It’s been wonderful in that way.

BB: And it was included in The Best American Sports Writing that year. That had to be gratifying.

MK: It was. Given the circuitous journey the piece had before it found a home, it was more than that. I am deeply thankful to Glenn Stout, the series editor of the book, and Bill Nack, the guest editor who selected it. And I am thankful to Frank, Rob and Jason for teeing it up.

BB: I was drawn to the part of “Forgive Some Sinner” where your old man discouraged you from pursuing a career in writing. Can you shed some light on what his thinking was?

MK: Writing was an extraordinary struggle for him. I can still see him sitting at the typewriter, drenched with sweat and wreathed in smoke from the pipe that he always had going. Every word to him was a careful brush stroke. Frank captured it well in his new memoir, “Over Time”:

“To Mark, writing was a laboratory science more than a craft; he could not write the second word until the first word was perfect. He also believed that he was like a female holding a finite number of eggs—that he only had so many words within him.”

I could not have said it better. Frank and I part company on certain other observations he had, but I am a very fond of him and he is surely entitled to his opinion. But to answer your original question: I think Dad discouraged me from writing because it was such an ordeal for him. I remember he used to say, “I should have stayed in baseball and become a first base coach.” Maybe he would have been happier.

Father and Son at Graceland, 2002

BB: To what extent was writing that story a relief for you?

MK: More than you can know. For years I had looked upon with the eyes of a boy—and only those eyes. I loved him dearly, and was always trying to plead his case in one way or another, even when the evidence to the contrary had been inescapable. I idealized him. I remember I used to look at his work and wonder how he ever did it—and if I ever could even approach what he did in some small way. Writing “Forgive Some Sinner” demanded that I looked at him with another set of eyes—challenging, discerning and yet not judgmental. No one is spared suffering in life, but you can either be embittered by it or ennobled by it. Dad became embittered by it, I am sad to say, and yet that was not the sum of who he was. “Forgive Some Sinner” was a painful excavation, yet one that acquainted me with the gray areas that hold regency over us. I think in some sense “Forgive Some Sinner” primed the pump for “Like Any Normal Day.”

BB: That’s an excellent point particularly since this is your first book. Why this story and why now?

MK: For years, I had hoped to do a book. Certainly, it seemed to be a logical outgrowth of the narrative writing I had been doing so long for newspapers. But I did not want to do just any book. I had no interest in doing an as-told-to celebrity job. I wanted to slice off a piece of life and examine it. What I found in the Miley family was precisely what I had been searching for: Ordinary people steeped in extraordinary circumstances. But I did not choose this story as much as it chose me.

BB: Ordinary people…

MK: Yes. When I attended the University of Maryland, I had a conversation with the novelist James M. Cain at his house one evening. Remember, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity?”

Cain was well into his 80s by then, but he told me a story that has stayed with me ever since. Carey Wilson, the producer, had once told him, “Jim, the reason I like your stories is that they are about real people. I know them.” Cain told me this story to illustrate his antipathy for Raymond Chandler, whose characters in the “The Big Sleep” included “a rich, old bald-headed guy who raises orchids and has two nymphomaniac daughters.” Cain said Wilson had told him, “Whoever heard of someone like that? You can take that son of a bitch and jump in the lake with him.” In any event, I knew Buddy Miley. We were we the same age. I had played ball with boys like him, star athletes who would only go so far before gravity pulled them to earth. I think I understood who he was.

BB: You played sports in high school, right?

MK: Some baseball and basketball. Good enough to be on the team, but more or less a bench player.

BB: How did Buddy’s story choose you?

MK: I suppose you could say Buddy whispered in my ear. He became a thread I tugged on while I worked on other stuff. I think with any creative project, you have to give yourself space to play with the loose threads you come across and see where they lead. Some of the threads you pull at snap off. Others just go on and on. Buddy became a thread that I could not let go of. Over the course of some years, I found that some intriguing themes emerged: What is our duty to one another? To what extent are we able to sacrifice of ourselves? I fooled with some of screenplay versions of the story, suffered through the usual annoyances that are attached to that, and then finally decided: This has to be a book. At that point the question became, can I sell it?

BB: Did you have a feel for how that would go?

MK: Practically speaking, it seemed to me to be a long shot that any publisher would be interested in Buddy, or his story. But I had what I think of as an epiphany. It dawned on me that the book was not about Buddy alone but the people he touched.

BB: Someone who is injured like that impacts everyone around him.

MK: Exactly. That one split second of horror that occurred one day on the football field in 1973 changed the destiny of an array of people beyond just Buddy. His parents, his siblings, especially Jimmy, his youngest brother. Friends. I even found his high school girlfriend in Alabama—Karen Kollmeyer (then Karen Shields)–whose life intersected with Buddy in an intriguing way up until the very day he died. It seemed to be the perfect book for me—not a sports book per se, or a Kevorkian book—but one that played out across a large canvas of human experience.

BB: You explain in the book that you first wrote a piece about Buddy after reading a letter his mother wrote in Sports Illustrated. What was it about her letter that drew your curiosity?

MK: I always have an eye out for pieces that play in the margins of sports. In this case, an editor at the Philadelphia Daily News passed it along to me. Since I had come to Philadelphia in 1987 from Detroit, I had no idea of who Buddy or the Mileys were. In her letter, Rosemarie said, in part:

“I am sure the majority of SI readers ‘love’ football. I ask them to spend one day with my son. They will see the terrible pain he endures. They will feel his frustrations at being totally dependant upon others.”

It went on. But the point is, I followed up on her invitation, even if it had been intended as a rhetorical one. I called her and asked if I could drop by and take her up on her invitation. Of course, I had no idea of where it would lead except for perhaps an interesting feature article.

BB: Did you stay in touch with Buddy after that first article was published?

MK: I spoke with Buddy just once after the piece appeared in the paper. Apparently, some of his old friends had read it and organized a benefit for him. Ostensibly, it was to raise funds so he could visit Buoniconti clinic in Miami in search of relief from the pain he was in on a daily basis. He did take that trip, but it was to no avail, though he did get an eyeful on a side trip to South Beach.

BB: Hey, that had to be a good feeling, that something you had written had led people to organize a fund-raiser?

MK: The hope I always have is to spark a connection. Occasionally, that has expressed itself in a level of generosity that I found inspiring. I remember I once did a story on Joe Delaney, a promising young Kansas City Chiefs running back who died trying to save some boys from drowning—a $1000.00 check showed up in the mail to forward along to his widow. In the case of Buddy, I think we see the bigheartedness of others throughout his life—and this book.

BB: He was not alone.

MK: Good people stepped forward from every walk of life to help him, from legends such as the former Colts running back Alan Ameche, his widow Yvonne, and obscure characters such as Dave Heilbrun, who volunteered his expertise to build an addition on the Miley home that allowed Buddy some space of his own. So I suppose I would say, what I have always hoped to do is move readers in a way that enables them to connect to a world outside themselves.

BB: I interrupted you there. So did you stay in touch with Buddy?

MK: We spoke just once again and he more or less faded from my radar until I received a phone call from the office one evening in March, 1997. Buddy had been found dead in a Michigan motel room. From what could be immediately ascertained, it looked like it had been a Kevorkian job. I contributed some reporting to the story that appeared the following day, but did not become more deeply involved in the story until a year later. I proposed a piece on the one-year anniversary of his death, if only because the initial reporting seemed to leave certain questions unanswered. I am also of the belief that in pursuing feature subjects—especially when there is a tragedy involved—it is usually a good idea to give people some space to grieve.

BB: That makes sense.

MK: When I revisited the Mileys in March 1998, everyone was there except for Jimmy. I was told it would just be too hard for him to be there. Although I suspected then that Jimmy had been the one who had taken Buddy to Michigan, I figured that I would be done with the Mileys when I finished that story. But I had grown fond of Rosemarie and gave her a call every now and then just to talk. Always, it seemed, we ended up laughing over one thing or another. Occasionally, I would bring up Jimmy, ask how he was and told her I would love to talk with him if he was ever up to it.

BB: And you later did a story on him as well, right?

MK: The piece I did on Jimmy appeared in the Daily News in June 2006. A year before, Rosemarie called me and told me Jimmy would like to talk with me. So I drove out to Warminster to see him, no strings attached, just a chat. If for whatever reason he did not want a story written, I promised him that that would be the end of it. We met at a diner and talked for four hours. I knew then that he had a compelling story to share, but I could also see that he was bound up in fear. He seemed to think if he went public, he would end up in jail as an accessory. Or, perhaps even worse, that he would be shunned in the community for participating in an act that the Catholic Church looked upon as a sin.

BB: He was tortured.

Jimmy Miley

MK: Yes. He was so overwhelmed by his fears that he called two weeks or so later and declined to proceed. Another year passed before he decided to move forward. Contrary to the apprehensions that had held him back, the community embraced him with compassion. I received dozens of letters from readers who opened up their hearts to him. To the extent that the book had a genesis, it could be found in those letters—this sense that what Jimmy experienced had universal overtones. In fact, I had an aunt who lived in a vegetative state for 10 years, so I had some fairly strong personal views regarding self-determination.

BB: Did you share any of the letters you received from that second article with Jimmy?

MK: I did. I dropped a pile of them off at his house one day. I think it was a revelation to him, that there were people who supported what he had done, even if they did not approve of Dr. Kevorkian or what he stood for. They understood that what he had done had been an act of compassion on behalf of his brother.

BB: When Jimmy got cold feet, how did you react to that?

MK: Disappointed, of course, yet not entirely surprised. As we spoke, I sensed that he was backing away. And yet he continued to talk, as if by doing so he was expelling a large burden he had been carrying around. Sometimes I have had story subjects who could not bring themselves to follow through. I understand it. This is deeply personal stuff, and it is not easy to expose your inner world to someone, particularly a stranger who proposes to share your story in a public forum. In this case, there was also an added obstacle that came into play. Nationally, the big story in the news in early 2005 was Terri Schiavo, the young woman who had been in a vegetative state and became the focus of a heated debate on euthanasia in America. I had a sense that that spooked Jimmy.

BB: Can you talk about the difficulties that you face as a writer when you get to know a subject and like them? And was there a difference between the connection you had with the family during the two articles you wrote and then the book?

MK: Initially, my relationship to the Mileys was cordial but not one that I had any sense would endure. They were lovely people, yet the necessities of turning around fresh ideas seemed to preclude any deeper connection. Once a story is published, there is always this sense of closure, that both the subject and I had attained what we had set out to accomplish and would part ways. A book is different matter altogether. To go to the depths one has to plumb in order to piece together a narrative non fiction of any length, it is essential to establish a level of abiding trust and transparency. What I found is that you have to give of yourself in order to have any expectation of any return. The Mileys were helpful in this regard. They assured me, “This is your book.” And I assured them that I would observe the same sensitivity in writing about them as I would my own family.

BB: In what way do you give of yourself? At one point in the book, you bring yourself in the picture by sharing some of your personal history. And you do share that you and Buddy were the same age. Is this what you are referring to?

MK: By “giving of yourself” to a subject, this quite simply means that you have to be something more than an interrogator. You have to connect with them at a human level and create an environment of safety. I remember when I interviewed Karen in Alabama, I asked her to look up “Forgive Some Sinner,” if only to give her a sense that I understood what was involved with letting go of old demons. I think by reading it she came away with a better sense of who I was and became more relaxed with me. As far as Buddy was concerned, I included some personal history only to underscore the passage of years. In the 23 ½ years Buddy had been paralyzed, longer by the way, than he had been ambulatory, time had not stopped for me as it had for him.

BB: Buddy fell in love with Karen while he was in the hospital. At what point in the process did you track her down?

Buddy Miley and Karen Sheilds on Graduation Day, 1974

MK: Karen emerged very early in my reporting. At some point while I was preparing the piece on Jimmy for the Daily News, he told me that women had always loved Buddy. Some had passed in and out of his life, but there was one in particular that Buddy had a special affection for. He told me she was living somewhere in the South, Florida or Alabama. He said he had her telephone number somewhere. Once the Daily News story appeared and I began to draft a book proposal, I asked Jimmy to give her a call. He did, and Karen and I later spoke on the phone. That was in 2006 or so. When I finally got a deal, I flew down to Alabama and spent a few days with her.

BB: That’s a huge get on your part.

MK: By the end of those interviews, it became clear to me that she would be an essential character to the book. I remember I told her, “I need you to help me tap into the heart of this story.” And so she did, beyond what I could have imagined.

BB: Was there anything new or surprising that you learned about the Mileys writing the book?

MK: Nothing “new” or “surprising,” but I did develop a deep appreciation for what lovely people they were. None of them shied away from any of the questions I had, although their memories in some cases had dimmed. I remember asking Rosemarie Miley if she would share with me the letters she exchanged with her husband Bert during World War II. I asked her a few times offhandedly, but she always said no, that they were private. It was not until my final interview with her that, out of nowhere, she asked me if I would like to see one of them. “Of course,” I told her. She excused herself from the table and came back with a hand-written love letter that Bert had sent her from the Pacific near the end of the war. Quietly, she read part of it aloud to me. It was as if I had come across a missing piece in an elaborate puzzle: beneath the stony exterior that Bert exuded beat the heart of a man with the same dreams his paralyzed son had had.

BB: The story is so sad in many ways and dramatic. How did treat that story without becoming melodramatic?

MK: From the beginning, I knew I had to find some way to lighten the emotional load. So humor had to be a critical element of the story. Jimmy provided more than enough in this area. As the youngest of the seven Miley children, he had been a fine athlete, perhaps better than Buddy, yet he had been immature and always falling over himself in one way or another. It was not until he tapped into his courage and helped Buddy that he ascended into manhood. Karen, as a character, also allowed me to step away into a love story, even if that love story would ultimately have tragic overtones.

BB: And it was an unusual, complicated love story, too.

MK: Karen weaves in and out of the book. They were supposed to go on their first date after the game in which Buddy was injured. Karen began visiting him in the hospital and they became close – indeed, they fell in love. In the book there is a wonderful picture of the two of them on the stage at graduation. In any event, Karen moved away at that point with her parents, but not before Buddy assured her that when he was able to walk again, he would find her and sweep her off her feet. It was pure fantasy – Buddy would never be able to walk again – yet Karen became a projection to Buddy of the normal life he longed for. As the years passed, Karen went on to have a life of her own, with a husband and children, yet a part of her remained connected to the boy whose heart had touched her so long ago. Buddy contacted her two years before his death with the help of a private investigator. During this period, the deep feeling between them reemerged, and continued until Buddy called her from Michigan to say goodbye.

BB: You had this story with you for a long period, yet had addressed it only in short form. What entered into your thinking as you expanded to 70,000 words instead of 5,000?

MK: Good jockeys have a clock in their head, which is to say they have a sense of pace that enables them to know precisely where they are at any given point in a race. I had that ability here. Originally, the contract called for 80,000 words. Before I signed it, I sat down with a legal pad and worked up a very loose outline, just to get a sense of how far this material could be spread out. What I came up with during that exercise was what appeared to be a 70,000-word book, so we had the contract amended. And the book I turned in came to 70,400 words. We ended up trimming perhaps 1000 words from that during the editing process.

BB: Damn, that’s nothing.

MK: With the help of my wife, Anne, who attended the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and has a sharp eye for errant prose, I did some rewriting on certain chapters as I went along. Some of our editorial sessions were tense.

BB: Oh, I can only imagine.

MK: But when I looked at what she suggested with a cooler head I was always deeply grateful, not just for her direction but the patience and love with which she offered it.

BB: Did you show your editor any early drafts?

MK: No, I just showed George Witte, the editor in chief at St. Martin’s Press, the completed manuscript when I was finished with it. I had a good sense of where I was going. And there is no point eliciting a partial score. George got back to me within a week with a lovely acceptance note. At that point, there were only some very minor revisions.

BB: That sounds so tidy. And you would have never been in this position had you not written about your father. “Forgive Some Sinner” really gave you a leg up on writing “Like Any Normal Day,” is that fair to say?

MK: In so far as the deep diving you have to do with certain subjects, I would say yes. I came away from “Forgive Some Sinner” with a better understanding not just of Dad and myself, but of life—even under ideal circumstances, it is a muddy affair. In a certain way, I cleared the land of the underbrush with that piece, which enabled me to enter the world of Buddy and Jimmy Miley in an unobstructed way. And I had discovered that “Forgive Some Sinner” helped me develop some previously unengaged creative skills, perhaps which in the final analysis can only come with experience. I remember whenever I had self-doubts as a boy, Dad used to remind me again and again: “The race is to the steady, not to the swift.” I can still hear him say that: Hang in there.

BB: I like how Scott Raab put it when he said, “Endurance is a talent.”

MK: Well said. Along with whatever talent you can scrape together, you have to have an iron ass. Buddy sure as hell had it. For 23 ½ years, he hung in here until he could not do it one more day. The pain that would shoot through him was so severe that it would leave him gritting his teeth. And yet I think he was ennobled by his suffering, not embittered by it. That’s a remarkable thing, really. Buddy had a big heart, and he shared it with whoever walked into his room and sat down with him. It was because of that heart that he stepped away from his struggle, if only to enable his mother Rosemarie a few years of peace in her advancing years. So he and Jimmy stole away to Michigan. Buddy was the personification of endurance, which is why I will always treasure the piece of memorabilia that Jimmy gave me that had belonged to his brother: a signed Cal Ripken jersey. Somehow that seemed so perfectly fitting.

You can order “Like Any Normal Day” here and here. And check out Kram’s website, here.

[Photos provided by Mark Kram Jr. Additional images via Elevated Encouragement. Author pictures taken by Mary Olivia Kram. ]

You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t believe in the Texas Rangers. I know they’re good, and not just because they represented the American League in the World Series in each of the past two seasons. So far this year they’ve been the clear class of the league, winning thirteen of their first sixteen games, and they’ve been led by several players off to phenomenal starts. Ian Kinsler was leading the league in runs scored, Michael Young was hitting .403, Mike Napoli had an OPS of 1.041, and then there was Josh Hamilton. The Hammer finished his first sixteen games with league-bests in each of these categories: seven home runs, .776 slugging percentage, and an otherworldly OPS of 1.214.

So yes, the Rangers are good, but there’s still a huge part of my consciousness that refuses to believe it, that only remembers them as the appetizers that were served up year after year as the Yankees were winning championships in the late 90s. And as if to solidify that image in my mind, the Rangers trotted out the retiring Iván Rodríguez to throw out the first pitch (and the first throw down to second base). It seemed like 1998 all over again.

That theme continued as soon as the game got underway and Derek Jeter singled on an infield grounder that Kinsler couldn’t quite corral. After Robinson Canó singled and Alex Rodríguez walked to load the bases, Curtis Granderson blooped a single into short center field to score two runs and give the Yankees and C.C. Sabathia a 2-0 lead.

In the home half of the inning, though, the Rangers looked poised to do more than just answer back. Kinsler opened with a single, then Elvis Andrus pushed him around to third with a single of his own, bringing Hamilton to bat with no one out. So far this year Sabathia hasn’t been as dominant as we’ve gotten used to seeing him, and one of his biggest problems has been an inability to make the pitch in a game’s crucial moment. Even though he held a two-run lead and his teammates had twenty-four more outs to score him some more runs, this felt like a moment.

Sabathia looped a lazy slider (or was it a curve?) clocking at just 78 MPH towards Hamilton, up above the belt but in enough that Hamilton couldn’t get any good wood on the pitch. He rolled the ball out to Canó at second who started an unorthodox 4-3-6 double play. Kinsler scored from third, but it was a win for Sabathia. He had made his pitch.

Building on that momentum, Sabathia cruised the next four innings, yielding just two hits while striking out seven, including all three hitters in the fifth.

Meanwhile, the Yankee hitters were padding their lead. Back-up catcher Chris Stewart started the fifth inning with a walk, moved to second on an error, to third on Jeter’s third hit of the game, and finally home on a Nick Swisher sacrifice fly. Two batters later with two men on, Rodríguez picked an opportune time to notch his first hit off a left-hander all season long as he launched a bomb over the fence in straight away center field for a three-run homer and a 6-1 Yankee lead. (Interestingly enough, it also more than doubled the previous RBI output for Yankee cleanup hitters.)

In the top of the sixth Mr. Jeter struck again, this time with a rocketed double off the wall in right center field to score Stewart with the team’s seventh run. A quick word about Jeter. The man who was essentially left for dead last June is currently leading all of baseball with 30 hits and slashing .411/.436/.644. Suddenly the talk is less about retirement and more about Pete Rose. While it still might be a stretch to imagine Jeter playing shortstop for the seven years it would take for him to get to forty-two-fifty-six, it’s clear he’s got a lot of hits left in him. He currently sits eighteenth all-time with 3,118 hits, but by the end of next season he will probably have edged past Carl Yastrzemski and vaulted all the way into sixth place.

Sabathia ran into a bit of trouble as the game progressed, yielding a majestic solo home run to Hamilton in the sixth and then a two-run double to Craig Gentry in the seventh, but he recovered to work a five-pitch eighth inning before handing the ball over to the Great One for the ninth. Just like that, the game was over.

Yankees 7, Rangers 4.

[Photo Credit: LM Otero/AP Photo]

Good match up tonight. C.C. vs. Holland down in Texas.

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

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

[Photography by Cy Twombly]

The Nets play their final game in New Jersey tonight. Dig this photo gallery of New Jersey Nets hoops over at SI.com.

It’s tempting to say that Phil Rizzuto, Bill White and Frank Messer were the only broadcasters for the Yankees during the 1970s. It seemed that way, if only because those three men were fixtures on television and radio. But there were a few others who announced for the team that decade, including Fran Healy,  a good guy who made the immediate transition from backup catcher to broadcaster, and Bob Gamere, who is now in a federal prison for possessing and transporting child pornography.

There was also a guy named Dom Valentino.

Valentino died last week at the age of 83. If you don’t remember him as a Yankee broadcaster, you’re easily forgiven. I have only vague recollections of Valentino, and I was a diehard Yankee fan for most of that decade. Valentino announced Yankee games for just one season, in 1975, which turned out to be an also-ran campaign for the Yankees, just one year before their celebrated return to the World Series.

But I do remember Valentino, at least a little bit. Further research reveals that he was all of five feet and four inches, but had a large, booming voice that belied his stature. A colorful personality who wore shirts with wide collars that could have fit aircraft carriers, Valentino had an excitability on the air that made him distinctive. He sometimes embellished details on the field, trying to make circumstances more dramatic than they were, but hey, baseball is entertainment and not precision brain surgery.

The 1975 season was hardly a hallmark campaign for the Yankees, but it was noteworthy for the debuts of both Jim “Catfish” Hunter and Bobby Bonds in Yankee pinstripes. And it was absolutely tumultuous for Valentino, perhaps the most dramatic year in his life. Not only did Valentino do Yankee radio broadcasts that summer, but he also performed play-by-play for the New York Nets, who still had Julius Erving and were still in the ABA, and the NHL’s New York Islanders. It was a hectic time for Valentino, especially in the spring, when the Yankees, Nets and Islanders were all playing simultaneously. Given such a breakneck schedule, it became understandable why Valentino endured a heart attack in July. Then, during his time in the hospital, Valentino suffered a second heart attack. Two heart attacks meant an end to his one season of broadcasting in the Bronx.

Valentino’s life had almost ended a month earlier, and through circumstances under which he had no control. After a Yankee home game on June 13–Friday the 13^th as a matter of fact–Valentino was driving home when he was hit head-on by a drunk driver. The collision thrust Valentino partly through his windshield. Miraculously, he survived the terrifying accident, only to endure the two heart attacks later in the summer. No one should have to go through that kind of a year.

After a 15-month layoff, Valentino returned to broadcasting, but not at the major league level. Determined to announce games once again, He took a job announcing New Orleans Pelicans minor league games. By 1980, he was back in the big leagues, doing play-by-play for the Oakland A’s. Valentino’s friendship with Billy Martin, who was guiding the “Billy Ball” A’s at the time, helped him land the job. Finally, a good break had come Valentino’s way, after all those near tragedies of 1975.

That Valentino somehow made it through 1975, and then fought his way back to a major league broadcast booth, is remarkable. He managed to live until his early eighties, when a pair of strokes and prostrate cancer finally took his life. That’s fighting. And that’s surviving. Dom Valentino, God bless you…

***

Saturday afternoon’s miraculous comeback from a 9-0 deficit will likely become a Yankee classic, and for good reason (it happened against their hated rivals and occurred on national TV), but it’s not the first time that the Bombers have come back from such a margin against the Beantowners. On June 26, 1987, the Yankees played the Red Sox in a Friday night game at the Stadium. They fell behind the defending American League champions, 9-0, after the first two innings.

In the bottom of the third, the Yankees then went to work against a young Roger Clemens By the end of the inning, the Yankees had knocked “The Rocket” from the game, banged out nine hits against a trio of Red Sox pitchers, taken advantage of an error and a passed ball, and scored a bushel of 11 runs. The big blows came from Dave Winfield (a three-run homer), Gary Ward (a bases-loaded single), and of all people, Wayne Tolleson (another bases-loaded single).

But the Yankees could not maintain their sudden prosperity. Rich Bordi, called on to pitch long relief after a failed start by Tommy John, immediately gave up two runs in the top of the fourth, as the Sox tied the game. The two teams would not score again until the bottom of the 10^th, when Mike Pagliarulo drew a leadoff walk against Calvin Schiraldi, moved to second on Rick Cerone’s sacrifice bunt, and came home with the game-winning run on Tolleson’s RBI single.

Not surprisingly, Don Mattingly put himself right in the middle of the offensive heroics. He went 4-for-6, scored two runs, and drove in another. Willie Randolph added three hits and a walk, while Winfield chipped in with his three-run shot, the Yankees’ only home run of the night.

The offensive outburst overshadowed the good work of the Yankee bullpen. After Bordi coughed up the lead, Cecilio Guante gave Lou Piniella three and a third innings of scoreless relief, lefty Pat Clements pitched shutout ball for two and two-thirds, and Tim “Big Foot” Stoddard picked up the win by notching the final out in the top of the 10^th. For those three pitchers, the game might have represented the highlight of their brief Yankee careers.

And just to give you a little flavor of the era, some of the other Yankees who played that day included a veteran Claudell Washington, platoon specialist Mike Easler, and the good-hit, no-field catcher, Mark Salas.

Yes, that was 25 years ago. A different time and an era. But the same result–an incredible come-from-behind win against the Sox.

Bruce Markusen writes “Cooperstown Confidential” for The Hardball Times.

Check out this piece on Satch Paige by Ian Couch over at the New Yorker’s sports blog.

It’s raining again in New York this morning and that’s a good thing–boy, do we ever need the rain. The Yanks are in Texas for three games to start the week. The Rangers are the best team in baseball.

Check out this piece by Marc Carig for the Star-Ledger;  this one by Tyler Kepner on the Rangers’ general managerJon Daniels, while over at River Ave Mike Axisa looks at the Yankees rotation for the series.

[Photo Credit: Elevated Encouragement]

Game got rained out so I’m watching “Spellbound” with the wife. She loves Hitchcock.

She is ascared, stressed, and can’t stop asking questions. “I love this movie,” she says. “Oh, I just love it.”

“How can you be typing at a time like this?” she says.

About the best thing that could have happened to the Red Sox tonight was a rainout. They got it and avoid facing C.C. Sabathia. Too bad.

Yanks have a challenging week ahead in Texas and then back in the Bronx against the Tiger.s

[Photo Credit: Arthur Brower via the Lively Morgue]

Mr. Evans:

08 My Funny Valentine

[Photo Credit: Traysaun/ballie]

This past Thursday the wife and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. We got married, just the two of us, in the Bahamas. After the ceremony and the pictures, we returned to our hotel room. It was a Thursday afternoon. The wife went into the bathroom to wash up and I clicked the TV on and saw on the ESPN ticker that the Yankees were losing to the Indians. I turned the TV off and after the wife and I consummated the marriage we later turned the TV back on and saw that the Yanks had won, and that Alex Rodriguez hit a game-ending grand slam.

This afternoon the wife and I went downtown to enjoy massages. I e-mailed a Red Sox pal of mine and predicted one thing–that Freddy Garcia would get his tits lit, which was precisely what happened. I saw that the Sox scored twice in the first on my phone just as we arrived at the spa. Bad enough there was troubling news about Michael Pineda before the game. Dammit. I turned the phone off and didn’t turn it back on until we left a good while later. Score was 9-5. Swisher had just hit a grand slam after the Yanks trailed 9-0. Predictable, I thought. Well, at least they are making it respectable.

Little did I know that the White Sox pitcher Phillip–Don’t Call Me Humbert–Humber was on his way to completing a perfect game against the Mariners in Seattle. The Yanks were down 9-1 in the 7th, with one out and Russell Martin on first when Fox cut away to the White Sox game. By the time Humber had his perfecto and was interviewed for TV and Fox returned to Boston, Swisher’s grand slam got the Yanks back in the game. Runners were on the corners and Mark Teixeira was at the plate. Joe Buck and Tim McCarver were excited. Tex already had a solo homer and now, batting left-handed, he popped a three-run dinger over the Green Monster. Most of the damage was not televised.

The score stood at 9-8 when the wife and I got to the restaurant for dinner. The game was on the TV at the bar and so I stayed at the bar, with the wife’s blessing–she sat in our booth following on the phone–as we waited for our food. That’s where I saw the Yanks take the lead. And then some. The Bombers scored 7 in the 7th and 7 more in the 8th on their way to a ball-busting win that will not soon be forgotten. Games like this, even in April, are memorable. It was a rousing win for the Yanks and a punch-in-the-face loss for the Sox, “rock bottom,” according to Bobby Valentine.

Final Score: Yanks 15, Sox 9.

I couldn’t think of a sweeter anniversary gift from the so-called Baseball Gods.

Thank you. And the wife thanks you, too.

 [Photo Credit: Corey Sipkin/N.Y. Daily News]

The Red Sox look to get even with the Yanks this afternoon. Fab Five Freddy Garcia–flammable so far this season–will pitch for the Bombers. C’mon, Freddy, hold that pill like a fuggin’ egg and throw the crap out of it.

Derek Jeter DH
Nick Swisher RF
Robinson Cano 2B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Mark Teixeira 1B
Curtis Granderson CF
Andruw Jones LF
Russell Martin C
Eduardo Nunez SS

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Bliss is Fats.

2-19 Honey Hush

[Photo Credit: :: Kate::]

I know it’s only April but is there anything as sweet as the muted sound of Fenway Park when the Red Sox are losing? The place had a terrific celebration before the game yesterday but for the final three innings it was blissfully quiet. Which can only mean good things. The Yanks hit five solo home runs (including two by Eric Chavez) against Clay Buchholz and Ivan Nova had a nice curveball going as the visiting team spoiled the day for the home nine.

Final Score: Yanks 6, Sox 2.

[Photo Credit: John Tlumacki/Boston Globe; Michael Dwyer/AP]

Yanks and Sox celebrate a big anniversary at Fenway.

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

Nova on the hill.

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

[Featured Image via It’s a Long Season; photo of Zim via Sports Illustrated]

Mariano Rivera shredded the Twins last night to seal a thrilling victory. Joe Mauer, one of the greatest batsmen in the game, was the second out. Mauer saw one pitch, an insistent, boring cutter and it destroyed him.

Mariano breaks a lot of bats. And he’s caused a few guys to chuck their bats after missing entirely. But what he did to Mauer, I’ve never seen before. Mauer hit the ball – a dribbler to second base – and still lost his bat into the seats. This wasn’t a guy slipping or getting fooled; Mariano literally knocked the bat out of his hands.

I thought of a good-guy gunslinger shooting the bad guy in the hand, or a fencer twirling the epee out his opponent’s grip. But more powerful than that. Maybe one of these moments captures it best:

[Featured Image: Getty]

Check out this moving story by Josh Wilker.

[Featured Image: David Goldman]

A friend recommended this book to me. I read it last month. It is beautiful.

At the New Yorker blog, The Book Bench, Kelly Stout writes:

At the suggestion of a colleague, I picked up William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” which first appeared in The New Yorker in two parts in 1979, and for me, falls into that category one semi-secretly curates: Books I Really Ought To Have Read Already. But no matter; now seems as good a time as any for a novel about nostalgia. Maxwell’s narrator—who is sometimes thought to be a shade of the author himself—remembers a moment in his youth, following the death of his mother, when he “had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.” The boy develops a habit of dwelling in the skeleton of the house his father and stepmother are building for their new life, when he discovers “I had found a way to get around the way things were.”

Edward Mendelson wrote in The New York Review of Books that “in Maxwell’s realistic fiction no one learns and no one changes,” and indeed, “So Long, See You Tomorrow” is a study in craving the past, even for characters like the narrator’s forward-looking father, who solves the problem of his first wife’s death with a marriage to someone new. The narrator tells this story just about a half-century after it happens, timing that recalls the forty-year cycle of nostalgia that Adam Gopnik writes about in the magazine this week. The novel is a balm for anyone attracted to the half-soothing, half-sinister sense that everything was better just before it got bad. Without earnestly condemning his own impulses toward glancing backward, the narrator laments that, “Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed.”

Here is the Mendelson article cited above:

William Maxwell was a plain-speaking, seemingly realistic novelist who wrote autobiographical stories about middle-class life in small towns and urban neighborhoods. At first he tried to imitate Virginia Woolf’s lyricism, but he soon cleansed his style of ornament and exaggeration. He wrote in taut, laconic rhythms that evoked the spare speech of his native Midwest, and portrayed his characters’ inner and outer lives with economical clarity and nuance. His props and characters were indistinguishable from real settings and persons from Lincoln, Illinois, where he was born in 1908, and Manhattan, where he lived most of his adult life until his death in 2000. Almost every episode in his fiction was reconstructed from events in his life, rearranged for concision and elegance. In a few heightened moments in his novels and stories, he imagined what the furniture and fixtures in a room might say if they could speak among themselves, unheard by human ears, but he presented these moments as metaphors for the sad reality of human moods.

Maxwell had two separate careers as a writer; both overlapped his third career as fiction editor of The New Yorker. His first career, as a writer of realistic novels and stories, began when his first novel appeared in 1934 and continued in such books as The Château (1961) and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). In 1946, a year after he married a young painter, he began a second career as a writer of magical folktales in the style of Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm. In these tales the magic hidden beneath the surface of his realistic fiction emerges with explicit and often comic force, and their world is partly the familiar modern one, partly a timeless fairyland, and wholly his own invention.

[Photo Credit: Hengki Koentjoro]

This was the song I didn’t want to listen to yesterday. Thought it would make me too sad. But then I did listen to it and I played it again and again and marveled at its power. A friend of mine said, “It doesn’t convert you to the Confederacy or anything, but it kinda makes you understand the Confederacy, which is a bold thing.” Amen.

And here is a great version from “The Last Waltz.”

Rest in Peace, Levon.

I’ve always had this image of Yankees’ radio announcer John Sterling working on his game during the off-season. He’s sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, a copy of the latest roster, and a shaky understanding of what listeners might find clever or cool.

“Teixeira… Teixeira… Mark Teixeira… Hmm, what about this? On your Mark, get set… Go Teixeira! No, that’s not gonna work. C’mon, big John! Wait — I got it! You’re on the Mark, Teixeira! That’s gold, baby, gold!”

Some of Sterling’s catch phrases are simply awful, but others are, admittedly, a bit catchy. I’ve always liked the line he usually drops when Curtis Granderson goes deep. “Who can do it? The Grandyman can!” Sure, it’s easy, but I like it.

It’s my guess that Sterling never thought he’d have to go to the well three times in one game for Granderson, so I’ll forgive him his regrettable call of Grandy’s third home run on Thursday night. (Yes, you read that correctly, the Grandyman went deep three times, and I have to believe Sterling is still kicking himself for not coming up with this line instead: “Curtis, you’re once, twice, three tiiiiiimes a Grandy!”)

Ah, but there was a game, so we should get to that.

Aside from Granderson’s historic night, I felt like I had seen this game before. First, a Yankee regular was given half a day off at DH, and Eduardo Núñez was inserted into the lineup. I can understand the urge to rest veterans like Alex Rodríguez and Derek Jeter, but Robinson Canó?

It took only three batters for this decision to blow up. With one out and a runner on first base, Joe Mauer pounded a routine ground ball out to second. Núñez fielded the ball cleanly, but then threw the ball high and wide to first. Teixeira was able to snag the errant toss, but he was pulled away from the bag and Mauer was safe.

Phil Hughes was on the mound, and he responded by striking out Josh Willingham for the second out, then proved he’d been paying attention during the first three game of the series by walking Justin Morneau on four pitches. Hughes could’ve gotten the next batter and no one would’ve thought about Núñez’s error again, but he didn’t. Ryan Doumit singled to left to score two runs, then Danny Valencia followed with a double to score two more, and the Yankees were down 4-0.

There’s a strong temptation to point out that all four of those runs were unearned and lay all the blame at the feet of Mr. Núñez, but Hughes has to shoulder at least half of the responsibility. Games often turn on a single at bat when the pitcher either makes his pitch or doesn’t. Hughes didn’t make his pitch, but as it turned out those mistakes to Doumit and Valencia didn’t determine the game.

Granderson started the climb back with a one-out solo home run in the top of the first, and three batters later Teixeira launched a two-run shot to bring the Yanks to within 4-3. Then a funny thing happened — Hughes started making his pitches.

For a four inning stretch from the second to the fifth inning, Hughes allowed just two hits and never felt much pressure from the Twins.

Meanwhile, the Yankees kept clawing their way back. Núñez did his best to make up for his earlier error by doubling with two outs in the second, then scored when Jeter rifled a single into right field, the 3,110th base hit of Jeter’s career, tying him with his boyhood idol, Dave Winfield. Just as we were digesting this and thinking about all the Hall of Famers Jeter’s likely to pass on the hits list in the next month, Granderson struck again, belting his second homer of the game to grab a 6-4 lead. Two innings later he’d hit his third of the game, another solo shot, and the score was 7-4.

The weight of Hughes’s long first inning finally took its toll in the sixth. After wisely walking Morneau to lead off the inning, Hughes floated a change up to Doumit. Doumit rubbed his eyes in disbelief, licked his chops, and dispatched the ball deep into the night. The lead had shrunk to 7-6 and manager Joe Girardi had no choice but to lift his starter, but it didn’t matter. The bullpen was coming in, so the game was over. Boone Logan, Rafael Soriano, David Robertson, and Mariano Rivera (or, LoSo-RoMo) came in and turned out the lights: 3.2 IP, 4 H, 4 K, zero hope.

Much has been made of the ineffectiveness of the Yankee starters and their paltry total of three quality starts, but the bullpen has been the yin to that yang. If we award starting pitchers a quality start for lasting six or more innings and yielding three or fewer runs, why not give an entire bullpen a Quality Finish for an equally effective closing? (For all I know, this statistic might already exist, but please allow me to continue thinking that I made it up.)

Let’s say that a team will get a quality finish when a game is closed in one of two ways: two innings or less with no runs allowed or three or more innings with one run allowed. Using that definition the bullpen has notched ten quality finishes. The folks at Elias will have to tell you how that compares to the rest of the league. I can tell you that the bullpen ERA sits at 1.83, which is pretty good.

Before we go, here’s an interesting note about Jeter. He’s currently riding a ten-game hitting streak, the 44th double-digit streak of his career, which ties him with Al Simmons for fourth place all-time behind Tris Speaker (47), Hank Aaron (48), and Ty Cobb (66), Hall of Famers all.

A nice win for the Yanks. Here’s hoping they bottled that bit of momentum and took it with them up to Boston.

Yankees 7, Twins 6.

[Photo Credit: Frank Franklin II/AP Photo]