Our dude Nova…

Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Brett Gardner LF
Alex Rodriguez DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Chris Young RF
Chase Headley 3B
John Ryan Murphy C
Didi Gregorius SS
Rob Refsnyder 2B

That’s a whole lotta scrap at the bottom of this lineup. Be great if Robbie Ref does something good, wouldn’t it?

Never mind the locals:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: TS Flynn]

I was talking to a friend on the phone with the game on mute when Alex Rodriguez popped  a home run over the Green Monster in the first inning. Course I had to interrupt our conversation to report what had just happened. My friend was amused, “Oh, you’re rooting for Alex Rodriguez again?” And I told him, I’d never stopped.

It was an evening of good news for the Yanks. Big Mike pitched very well, his offense got lucky, thanks to some fast runners taking advantage of a couple of fielding gaffes by the Sox, and The Twin Towers closed it out in the final two innings. By that time the Yankee lead was four runs but Joe Girardi wasn’t leaving anything to chance–his best two relievers were going to nail this one down (after the game, Girardi told reporters that he wants Miller to pitch twice this weekend but not on back-to-back days, so we can expect to see him again Sunday).

Last piece of good news–especially to our pal Dimelo, president of Stephen Drew Fan Club–is that Rob Refsnyder is joining the big league club today.

Final Score: Yanks 5, Sox 1.

[Photo Via: NYC Nostalgia]

Of course, to most everyone in America that’d be the Yankees, but for us, it’s the folks up at Fenway.

It’s a nice pitching match-up of Big Mike and Clay Buc.

Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Brett Gardner LF
Alex Rodriguez DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Brian McCann C
Garrett Jones RF
Didi Gregorius SS
Stephen Drew 2B
Cole Figueroa 3B

Never mind the pain, think pleasant thoughts and:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: Godgazer]

Tanaka rebound? Check. Gardy an All-Star? Check. Yankee win? Check.

A good afternoon in the Bronx. And now, to end the first half, the Yanks go to Boston.

Promises to be annoying. In the meantime, let’s be happy like the gals in this picture. Especially for Gardner.

Picture by Bags

Afternoon baseball in the Bronx today.

Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Brett Gardner LF
Mark Teixeira DH
Brian McCann C
Garrett Jones 1B
Didi Gregorius SS
Chris Young RF
Stephen Drew 2B
Cole Figueroa 3B

Masahiro’s on the bump. Let’s hope fer good things for him and the sorta, kinda, not so bad, pretty good–but not that good–New York Yankees.

Never mind the drizzle:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Picture by Bags

Happy Days are here again. 

What does it take to get CC Sabathia a win these days? Homers, lots of them. And a quick hook, so he doesn’t decompose after the fifth. And it doesn’t hurt at all for the other starter to leave injured after three innings. Maybe the bullpen bailing him out when he gets in trouble and some shiny defense along the way at points, but that’s the crux of what needs to happen. And if the baseball gods smile upon him and allow him to keep the ball in the yard during his abbreviated stint, well, there’s a chance.

Mark Teixeira supplied two homers and some shiny defense. Drew, using this season to prepare for his upcoming audition as an extra in The Walking Dead, chipped in another blast. Joe Girardi supplied the quick hook and the bullpen locked things down until the freshly reinstated closer Andrew Miller almost undid all that careful work.

Before his injury, Andrew Miller had only allowed two hits once in 26 appearances. And he only allowed one home run. He doubled the tally on both accounts, but held the lead at 5-4. And CC got a very rare win.

Sabathia’s demise calls to mind another very sad baseball story – that of Catfish Hunter. Both mega-stars in their twenties who came to pitch the Yanks into the World Series for big bucks, their careers dashed in their early thirties due to chronic health problems. Hunter did not have Sabathia’s opt-out clause and subsequent extension, and he retired at the end of his original five-year contract at the age of 33. If Sabathia had not re-worked his deal before his opt-out clause kicked in, he’d be retiring at the end of this year, at the age of 35.

Hunter had won so often so early and he appeared so regularly in October that when he did retire, he had done enough to get Hall of Fame votes. His career pales considerably when viewed with current metrics, but you don’t often hear too many people complain about his inclusion.

Sabathia has been the better pitcher for me, but I wonder if two more years of getting smashed by every right-handed hitter in the league will put a permanent stain on his record. Both guys are damn easy to root for though, maybe that will throw a veil over the gory ending.

It’s sad to be finsihed before you’re ready and I don’t think anybody was ready. Probably CC most of all.

Photo via Sports Illustrated

Game might be pushed back some tonight on a count of rain.

Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Brett Gardner LF
Alex Rodriguez DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Chris Young RF
John Ryan Murphy C
Didi Gregorius SS
Jose Pirela 2B
Gregorio Petit 3B

Meanwhile, Ellsbury and Miller are back!

C’mon, ol’ CC, we’re behind you, dude.

Never mind the umbrellas:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Picture by Bags

Peekaboo. I suppose you can say this is the theme of tonight’s contest, as quite a few things you haven’t seen in a while occurred while I was away:

Yanks kicked off their latest homestand against the recently anointed All Star battery of Sonny Gray-Stephen Vogt and the Oakland A’s’; of note, Gray had missed two starts due to a severe case of salmonella poisoning, so while it behooves us to wish him the best of health going forward, it was also important for the Yanks to take advantage of any rust he might have accumulated during his time off.  And so it appeared they did; after starter Nathan Eovaldi gave Oakland a head start with a run in top of the first, the Yanks responded with two of their own by loading the bases right from the start and scoring leadoff hitter Brett Gardner and Chase Headley on a looping infield single by Brian McCann and a hard hit by Garrett Jones.  It seemed like they could have gotten more in the frame, but had A-Rod not flied out and Mark Teixeira not struck out during the earlier run-making seminar, then Chris Young popping out to first wouldn’t have been quite as irritating.

Eovaldi ran into some issues in the third when the first three batters reached base on singles, the third one by All Star Vogt plating a run, but then he struck out trade-bait Ben Zobrist induced  a double-play to escape with the game tied. It stayed that way until the next inning when… (double-checking my notes)… Didi Gregorius drove in McCann on a line drive single to right center.  I’ve heard he was getting better with that bat-thingie… so it stood for a couple more innings as Sonny got his groove back and stifled the Yanks for the rest of his start (7IP, 3ER, 3BB, 5 SO, 2.20), while Eovaldi pitched into the sixth.

That’s when Girardi turned away from baseball for a minute and breaking out the chess board, removing Eovaldi with 86 pitches and one out for lefty Chasen Shreve. There was no official explanation at the time for this move as many probably feared that he was hurt, so I suppose in Girardi’s mind this was genius (and it might have been as Eovaldi has been high and low all season, though lately he’s been on a bit of a hot streak). Shreve struck out Josh Reddick, which was purportedly what Joe was thinking of when he made the move, but then Billy Butler; out of pure habit which has defined his career against the Yanks, homered just inside the fair pole in left. Derp.

The game stayed tied into extra innings, where All Star Dellin Betances, pitching a second inning (again, a Girardi decision) hung a breaking pitch to leadoff hitter Brett Lawrie, who promptly deposited it in the Billy Butler Bank of New York (left), giving the lead back to the A’s. For Betances, this was his eighth earned run in his last 14-1/3 innings after having given up absolutely nothing for the first couple of months of the season (there are lots of stats to throw in that basically say the same thing).  I’m not going to give him a hard time; he’s young and has been exceptional since last season, so if this is what others are calling a rut, there are plenty of reasons to think he’ll come out of it soon; not the least of which is the pending return of Andrew Miller on Wednesday.  But for now, Eovaldi had a relatively good outing go to waste on a questionable decision that backfired, and the Yanks tried hard to make up for it in the bottom of the tenth against former Yank Tyler Clippard when he walked Gardner and Alex in between pop-ups by Drew and Headley, but after going 3-0 on Teixeira, he battled back with a strike and a foul before throwing a change-up that everyone in the stadium knew he was going to throw, and because they also knew that Teix always seems to miss change-ups, that’s exactly what happened.

After the game, I guess there was no point in asking Joe why he did what he did because I didn’t hear a word from him in any post game report (note: Joe actually did admit to being a bit overconfident in the match-ups). I did hear poor Dellin telling himself and the reporters that it was just another game and he would have to knuckle down and get himself right.  Somehow it just didn’t seem fair; it wasn’t his idea to pitch two innings and give up a go-ahead homer in a close, relatively low-scoring game that didn’t need to get there, but that’s Life in Baseball, and you’re an All-Star, so keep it moving kid and don’t let it get to you.

A winnable game under the circumstances, but a rather annoying 4-3 10 inning loss.

The Yanks are back home to face tough young Sonny Gray on a steamy night in the Bronx. Will Nathan Eovaldi have another good outing? I doubted he could put together back-to-back solid starts and I was wrong. The book is still out on Eovaldi but let’s hope the Yanks can end the first half of the season–six games, three against the A’s, three in Boston against the Red Sox–4-2, you heard?

Brett Gardner CF
Chase Headley 3B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Brian McCann C
Garrett Jones RF
Chris Young LF
Didi Gregorius SS
Stephen Drew 2B

Never mind the heat:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

It’s too hot to get worked up over All Star game snubs–Alex Rodriguez, Brett Gardner–but that’s just me. You guys might be irked about it. Much as I’d tune in to see Rodriguez I’d rather he get a few days off to rest. Gardy? Well, hopefully, he’ll get another chance. He’s had a really nice season so far.

Dellin Betances and Mark Teixeira will represent the Yanks.

Picture by Bags

My latest reprint for The Daily Beast gives Nat Hentoff on Louis Armstrong:

Louis Armstrong, summoned by King Oliver, came up to Chicago in the summer of 1922, Buster Bailey reports that “Louis upset Chicago. All the musicians came to hear Louis. What made Louis upset Chicago so? His execution, for one thing, and his ideas, his drive. Well, they didn’t call it drive, they called it ‘attack’ at the time. Yes, that’s what it was, man. They got crazy for his feeling.”

His feeling. Even toward the end of his life, when many of the same tunes would be played night after night, month after month, Louis could still, as trombonist Trummy Young remembers, make a sideman cry.

His feeling. Billie Holiday, a young girl in Baltimore, listening to Louis’s recordings: “He didn’t say any words, but somehow it just moved me so. It sounded so sad and sweet, all at the same time. It sounded like he was making love to me. That’s how I wanted to sing.”

There has been no jazz musician so widely, deeply, durably influential as Louis. And no trumpet player who could do all he could do on the horn. Once, Louis told journalist Gilbert Millstein, “I’m playin’ a date in Florida, livin’ in the colored section and I’m playin’ my horn for myself one afternoon. A knock come on the door and there’s an old, gray-haired flute player from the Philadelphia Orchestra, down there for his health. Walking through that neighborhood, he heard this horn, playing Cavalleria Rusticana, which he said he never heard phrased like that before. To him it was as if an orchestra was behind it.” 

Collage by Louis Armstrong. 

The scare on Saturday came when Dellin Betances gave up a two-run, game-tying home run in the ninth inning. But in the bottom half of the inning, the Yanks scored the winning run when a throw got away from the first baseman for a moment and Jose Pirela skipped home like an errant bottle rocket shooting across the lawn.

Today wasn’t so tidy. The Yanks were behind all game but did mange to bring the tying run to the plate in the 7th. There was hope, and then there was none. Fifteen minutes later they were down for good. More horseshit fielding–man, this has turned out to be a weirdly bad half a season of defense for the Yanks.

8-1 was the “bad day” Final.

Picture by Bags

Happy 4th, you guys.

It’s Big Mike and the Gang this afternoon on a grey, overcast 4th in New York.

Brett Gardner CF

Chase Headley 3B

Alex Rodriguez DH

Mark Teixeira 1B

Garrett Jones RF

Ramon Flores LF

John Ryan Murphy C

Didi Gregorius SS

Stephen Drew 2B

Never mind the firecrackers:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via This Isn’t Happiness]

Update: Yanks with the nifty 3-2 win yesterday and looking for more this afternoon. Carry on with this thread and:

Let’s Go Yank-eyes!

Now, that was the way the start of the Fourth of July weekend.

Masahiro Tanaka got out-pitched by Chris Archer but the Yanks were able to chase Tampa’s ace from the game with two men out in the 7th. Trailing 3-0, Mark Teixeira had the big knock in the 8th, hitting a 3-run home home run.

Just felt like the Yanks were going to win the game, never mind the double plays they hit into to end the 8th and 9th innings. When Evan Longoria was called out at second after a replay review in the 11th, the good vibes continued. Longoria slid into second and for a fraction of a moment came off the bag. Nice catch by the Yankees to even review it. Strangely, for my glass-half-empty-ass-self, I still felt hopeful even after the Rays scored a couple of runs in the top of the 12th.

The bottom of the inning went like this: Brett Gardner walked–oh, those lead-off walks–and after Chase Headley whiffed, Alex Rodriguez hit an excuse-me single to right. It was a slow ground ball, squibbed off the end of his bat, but since the Rays were positioned for him to pull, a sure fire double play turned into a single, with Gardner taking third. Rodriguez smiled on his way to first, and could have been singing “With a little bit of luck” if he was a musical theater kind of guy.

Gardner scored when Mark Teixeira singled hard to right field. It was a relief too because Teix took the first pitch of the at bat, a fastball right down the middle, and I figured that’d be the best pitch he’d see. The one he singled on wasn’t as good, but fat enough.

So, Yanks down 5-4, first and second for Brian McCann. Oh, a double play loomed in our minds but McCann golfed a fastball over the fence in right field for a 3-run, game-ending home run instead.

Smiles, cheers, high-fives, first place. After the game, Brett Gardner called it “the biggest win of the year for us, by far.”

Yanks 7, Rays 5.

Illustration by Michael Sloan.

The Yanks are back home this weekend to face the Rays.

While management makes nice with Alex Rodriguez, our boy Masahiro looks to get on the good foot once again. Only trouble is he’s going against the formidable Chris Archer.

Brett Gardner CF
Chase Headley 3B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Brian McCann C
Garrett Jones RF
Chris Young LF
Didi Gregorius SS
Stephen Drew 2B

Never mind sweet charity:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Charles Harbutt via This Isn’t Happiness]

Welcome to the long holiday weekend.

Hope everyone’s got cooled-out plans ahead.

High fives all round.

Photo via Kateoplis.

Ah, now this looks like it’s worth your time. Nicholas Dawidoff’s New York Times Magazine profile of the great Robert Frank:

Sixty years ago, at the height of his powers, Frank left New York in a secondhand Ford and began the epic yearlong road trip that would become ‘‘The Americans,’’ a photographic survey of the inner life of the country that Peter Schjeldahl, art critic at The New Yorker, considers ‘‘one of the basic American masterpieces of any medium.’’ Frank hoped to express the emotional rhythms of the United States, to portray underlying realities and misgivings — how it felt to be wealthy, to be poor, to be in love, to be alone, to be young or old, to be black or white, to live along a country road or to walk a crowded sidewalk, to be overworked or sleeping in parks, to be a swaggering Southern couple or to be young and gay in New York, to be politicking or at prayer.

The book begins with a white woman at her window hidden behind a flag. That announcement — here are the American unseen — the Harvard photography historian Robin Kelsey likens to the splash of snare drum at the beginning of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”: ‘‘It flaps you right away.’’ The images that follow — a smoking industrial landscape in Butte, Mont.; a black nurse holding a porcelain-white baby or an unwatched black infant rolling off its blanket on the floor of a bar in South Carolina — were all different jolts of the same current. That is the miracle of great socially committed art: It addresses our sources of deepest unease, helps us to confront what we cannot organize or explain by making all of it unforgettable. ‘‘I think people like the book because it shows what people think about but don’t discuss,’’ Frank says. ‘‘It shows what’s on the edge of their mind.’’

…When Frank began his expedition upriver into the heart of American ambivalence, photography remained, as Walker Evans said, ‘‘a disdained medium.’’ Only a few American art museums collected photographs. Most of the published images portrayed figures of status. One notable exception was the work of Dorothea Lange. Frank respected her compassion but considered her Dust Bowl pictures maudlin — triumphalist takes on adversity. ‘‘I photographed people who were held back, who never could step over a certain line,’’ he says. ‘‘My mother asked me, ‘Why do you always take pictures of poor people?’ It wasn’t true, but my sympathies were with people who struggled. There was also my mistrust of people who made the rules.’’ That impulse seems particularly potent today, during our charged national moment — our time of belated reckoning with how violent, enraged, unbalanced and unjust the United States often still is. To look again at the photographs Frank made before Selma, Vietnam and Stonewall, before income inequality, iPhones and ‘‘I can’t breathe,’’ is to realize he recognized us before we recognized ourselves.

The Yanks didn’t score but 3 runs by Nathan Eovaldi pitched well, the bullpen was even better, and even though Dellin Betances walked a couple of batters in the 9th, struggling to locate his curve ball, eventually he got it to bend the way he wanted to, got a strike out to end the game and sent the Yankees home, 3-1 winners.

[Photo Credit: Jing Huang via MPD]

One last game for the Yanks in suburban L.A. Let’s hope they avoid getting swept but I’m not so sure about ol’ Nathan Eovaldi being good two starts in a row yet, you know? Either way, it’s a late afternoon game in Southern California in the beginning of July–I’m sure the light will be beautiful, so there’s always that to look forward to.

Also, Carlos is achin’ and they’ve brought a new kid up and his name is Taylor Dugas. C’mon, is that right? Taylor Dugas? What a name. It’s gonna fun to see what he’s about.

Brett Gardner CF
Chase Headley 3B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Brian McCann C
Garrett Jones RF
Chris Young LF
Didi Gregorius SS
Stephen Drew 2B

Never mind the red eye:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Cameron Gardner]