The Yankees retire so many numbers and give out so many plaques that reading about the latest immortal to be honored always feels like something straight out of The Onion. But there you have it, the hits keep coming.

For more Stupid Human Tricks, here’s Alex.

And we’d be remiss if we didn’t salute our ol’ pal Jason Giambi who announced his retirement today. Giambo is five months older than me to the day and I suppose I always liked him because he was in my grade.

He was a good fella. I’m sure we’ll see him as a coach soon enough.

[Photo Credit: Stephen Anzaldi]

Found via Longform: check out these excerpts from Cameron Crowe’s story, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”:

Jeff Spicoli, a Ridgemont legend since third grade, lounged against the doorframe. His long dirty-blond hair was parted exactly in the middle. He spoke thickly, like molasses pouring from ajar. Most every school morning, Spicoli awoke before dawn, smoked three bowls of marijuana from a small steel bong, put on his wet suit and surfed before school. He was never at school on Fridays, and on Mondays only when he could handle it. He leaned a little into the room, red eyes glistening. His long hair was still wet, dampening the back of his white peasant shirt.

“May I come in?”

“Oh, please,” replied Mr. Hand. “I get so lonely when that third attendance bell rings and I don’t see all my kids here.”

The surfer laughed-he was the only one-and handed over his red add card. “Sorry I’m late. This new schedule is totally confusing.”

Mr. Hand read the card aloud with utter fascination in his voice. “Mr. Spicoli?”

“Yes, sir. That’s the name they gave me.”

Mr. Hand slowly tore the red add card into little pieces, effectively destroying the very existence of Jeffrey Spicoli, 15, in the Redondo school system. Mr. Hand sprinkled the little pieces over his wastebasket.

It took a moment for the words to work their way out of Spicoli’s mouth.

“You dick “

Mr. Hand cocked his head. He appeared poised on the edge of incredible violence. There was a sudden silence while the class wondered exactly what he might do to the surfer. Deck him? Throw him out of Ridgemont? Shoot him at sunrise?

But Mr. Hand simply turned away from Spicoli as if the kid had just ceased to exist. Small potatoes. Mr. Hand simply continued with his first-day lecture.

Photo Credit: rumbunter.com; Feb. 21, 2014

 In a nice cross-section of serendipity, determination and a little help from good folks along the way, Pittsburgh Pirates All-Star outfielder Andrew McCutchen (that is, Senior Editor of Derek Jeter’s media platform for professional athletes called The Player’s Tribune) lays out his thoughts and experience in an intriguing and well-thought assessment of how baseball has increasingly frozen out children (and potential talent) from lower income families.  It’s a great read…

This is so cool. 

Hey you guys. I’ve been light on posting here at the Banter recently but I haven’t been idle. Recently, I’ve reprinted a pile of good stories at The Stacks.

Dig in:

John Lardner on Charles A. Lindbergh; James Wolcott on Diner.

Donald Hall’s 1986 Sport profile of Red Auebach.

John Ed Bradley’s killer 1993 SI story on Buster Douglas.

Gary Smiths’ 1982 Inside Sports feature on Dean Smith. 

Chapter on Dean Smith from Will Blythe’s book, To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever. 

Mark Kram Jr.’s 1986 Philly Mag story on Steve Sabol. 

[Photo Credit: USA Scanning]

Scorsese’s New York. 

The Yankees and Alex Rodriguez continue their childish dance.

[Photo Via]

James Shields head for the sunshine and there’s plenty to be enthusiastic about in San Diego.

Head on over to the New York Times where David Waldstein takes a look at Rob Refsnyder:

At some point this year, whether in spring training, on opening day or later in the regular season, Refsnyder is likely to be introduced to Yankees fans for the first time, and some of them may look at him with the same bemused expression that the players and coaches at those California showcases wore.

Amy Mihyang Ginther with her birth mother, Park Jeong-hee, at Park’s home in Gimcheon, South Korea.Why a Generation of Adoptees Is Returning to South KoreaJAN. 14, 2015
Refsnyder is a top Yankees prospect, a gifted hitter who has been invited to his first major league spring training this month and hopes to soon become the team’s starting second baseman. He was adopted from South Korea by parents with German and Irish backgrounds, as was his older sister, Elizabeth, who was a talented softball player in college.

While you’re at it, check out Mike Axisa’s recent appreciation of Willie Randolph. 

[Photo Credit: Dan Farrell/N.Y. Daily News]

Here’s a beautiful story by my pal Kip Stratton about his step-brother:

I’d not seen my stepbrother Dale in more than two years when a bitter norther slammed into Texas in December 1989. Schools closed, pipes burst, and sleet-covered highways took on the look of salvage yards. I was sitting alone one blue-gray afternoon, listening to the frozen rain tick on the windows of my house in Belton, when the phone rang.

It was Dale’s mother, and she was in a panic. She was at Arlington Memorial Hospital, where her son was in intensive care. “He might not live through the night,” she said. “You’ll have to tell your mother and stepfather. They’ll never believe me if I call them.” I knew she was right; ever since her divorce from my stepfather, more than thirty years earlier, he had done little to hide his loathing for her, even after he’d retained custody of their two sons, Elden and Dale, and rebuilt a family with my mother and me. I promised to be at the hospital as soon as I could, then phoned my mother in Oklahoma. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked, stunned. I told her I didn’t know.

But that was not exactly true. Sitting in the car on my way to the hospital, inching across the ice on Interstate 35, I played news headlines from recent years over and over in my head. AIDS, a disease unknown to Americans just a decade earlier, was filling hospitals and clinics and hospices across the country with patients covered in lesions and fighting for each breath as their lungs were steadily destroyed. And in the late eighties, only one outcome awaited its victims: death.

[Photo Credit: Bruce Wrighton via MPD]

Sometimes a story comes along, jumps out at you, and won’t let go. Such was the case last year with Jeremy Collins’ beautifully-rendered memoir piece, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Greg Maddux.” It took a long time for the story to come together for Collins and when I finished my only concern was, “Maybe that’s all he’s got.”

Then he let me reprint an earlier variation featuring Sly Stallone and Rocky. It doesn’t have the same polish or control as the “Maddux” story, but it’s still really strong, proof that perhaps Collins is more than a one-trick pony.

Now comes his latest for SB Nation Longform, “The General Who Never Was,” a profile of the scoundrel Bobby Knight. It’s another beaut–told with precision and care:

What were the obstacles standing in Knight’s way of creating an enduring legacy? It wasn’t complicated. Zero-tolerance? Try common sense. All Knight had to do, in the words of former Indiana Trustee Ray Richardson, was “stop being a jerk. Try being a decent guy.” Or in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, a Hoosier who had seen war: “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

In the end, I’m not sure what Knight saw when he looked out into the faithful crowd of fans and followers. Maybe in the blurry smokescreen of self-regard he didn’t see us at all. Not once did he mention the power of reading or wish the high school students in the stands well. Barely once in the onslaught of self-sentiment could he even speak the name of our shared motherland: Indiana, In-dee-anna, Indiana.

Instead, he put his hand up in an oddly formal gesture of farewell and held it there. Just like at Dunn Meadow back in 2000 after he asked everyone to bow their heads and observe a moment of silence in honor of himself and his family.

Never good at goodbye, I shouldn’t have expected more.

My pal Glenn Stout, series editor of the Best American Sports Writing and longform editor at SB Nation, has done a stellar job of shepherding young storytellers these past few years. So far–at least to my mind–Collins is his best find, a true breakaway talent. Can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

[Photo Credit: Zach Long/AP]

Over man in Texas, Mark Lamster, wrote this fascinating profile about an equally fascinating guy named Robert Bruno:

The house itself is unoccupied and has been since 2008, when Robert Bruno, the charismatic if somewhat mysterious sculptor who had made the house his life’s work, died at age 64 after a prolonged battle with colon cancer.

As meticulous as he was capricious, Bruno had built the house with virtually no assistance over the course of some 30 years, designing and modifying it as he went, frequently tearing out portions that no longer pleased him. On an apparent whim, he was known to jettison months of work. It was a process that seemed to take as many steps backward as forward and left friends and neighbors to wonder if he would ever finish. Indeed, after so many decades, they had come to understand that finishing was something that didn’t matter to him.

“The truthful answer is it was unimportant,” says Dudley Thompson, a retired Lubbock architect who was a longtime Bruno confidant. “I visited him frequently while he was doing it. It rarely came up. He just enjoyed doing it. … The doing it as he thought it should be done was his only priority.”

The work, not the end result, was the thing for Bruno.

[Photo Credit: Leaflet]

Over at SI.com, Jay Jaffe’s winter report card gives the Yanks a preliminary grade of B-:

New York has exercised atypical financial restraint this winter, yet managed to shore up trouble spots by adding younger and less expensive players. Gregorius and Headley are the two youngest in the lineup, with McCann, who turns 31 in February, the only other regular younger than Drew. Meanwhile, the influx of new pitchers over the last two years leaves Sabathia and Capuano as the only pitchers over 30. Payroll will still be well over $200 million, but Cashman has ensured the Yankees more flexibility down the road, and the farm system is much improved thanks to better drafting and a burst of international signings. Whether or not they deviate by adding Shields, it’s a coherent philosophy that better sets them up for the long haul, even if they fall short of the postseason again in 2015.

[Photo Credit: USATSI]

Never mind that pigskin nonsense, you’ve got 8 days left to see the beautiful Mattise show at the Modern.

I’m rooting for the Seahawks but think the Pats will win. This’ll be to Brady what ’09 was to Jeter.

Hope I’m wrong.

Either way, you guys, enjoy!

Fake or not, I’m trying this recipe from Patricia Wells today. Gotta couple of pork chops I’m going to do something with. Serve it all with a salad of some sort. Chips and salsa before that. Super Bowl Sunday eats.

Hut…Hut…

[Image Via: Simple Dreams]

Please don’t play this song, said no woman ever.

Picture by Bags.

That’d be our man Charlie Pierce:

Watching Marshawn Lynch run with the football these days is like watching Jim Brown in short bursts. (Brown ran like Lynch all the time, and that’s why he’s the greatest football player who ever lived.) Watching him in interviews is to see an artist at work — a natural deconstructionist, fashioning a media event to his own intriguing style.

Lynch doesn’t like to talk — and despite all the criticism he’s received, this seems to stem from a genuine reluctance almost bordering on shyness. But he has moved beyond simply not commenting. He now turns the very odd waltz between the reporter and the athlete into something resembling a parody of itself. Lynch was threatened with a half-million-dollar fine if he didn’t show up to take questions from people dressed like carrots at media day. (This, it must be said, is from a league that originally gave Ray Rice a two-game suspension.) So Lynch showed up, and he answered every question with the phrase, “I’m here so I won’t get fined.” To me, this seems a perfectly reasonable answer, and it clearly is the unvarnished truth. However, it was not received that way. All the people who had ginned themselves up beyond all recall to defend Western values against deflated footballs now rose up against Lynch for disrespecting … well … something anyway.

…Lynch owes only an honest day’s play for an honest day’s dollar, something he does with fair regularity, by my calculations. He doesn’t owe me or any mook like me any more than that. He does not owe The Brand any more than that, either. And in a way, that’s what the whole mad week was about. The Brand. The Patriots were accused of offending the league’s brand with deflated footballs. Kraft chose to try to protect his own brand instead of the league’s. And Lynch, god bless him, accused of heresy against all the brands, chose to laugh up his sleeve at the whole idea. In his own way, following his own drummer, Lynch is in rebellion against the tyranny of The Brand, and against all the artificial and corporatized encrustation that has covered all of our sports, and especially the NFL, and especially this one event. He may not be doing this consciously; I think he still just doesn’t like talking to strangers. But he’s striking a genuine blow against a genuine empire.

Play ball.

[Photo Credit: USATSI]

Over at Grantland, dig this nice appreciation of our man Gene Hackman by Steven Hyden:

If you love movies, it’s hard not to miss him. So, for the past month I’ve been watching Gene Hackman films — not just the iconic ones,2 but also the deep cuts, good and bad. Almost all of them are worth seeing, because Hackman himself is almost always worth seeing, but also because the man had a knack for picking projects that have only gotten more strange with time. I refer to films like Prime Cut, in which Hackman plays a Kansas City gangster named Mary Ann who forces Sissy Spacek to lie naked in a pen at a sex slave farm until Lee Marvin comes along; Cisco Pike, a far-out drug thriller set in early-’70s Los Angeles in which Hackman plays Big Foot Bjornsen to Kris Kristofferson’s Doc Sportello; and Loose Cannons, a confoundingly stupid buddy-cop comedy costarring Dan Aykroyd that has one of the all-time great Netflix plot summaries.

Never mind an oddity like All Night Long.

Or Full Moon in Blue Water:

Hyden continues:

Hackman for me is the greatest living American actor because — with the exception of the Reverend Frank Scott in The Poseidon Adventure — I always buy what he’s selling. Even when the movie is bad, you believe what Hackman is telling you, right down to the last “heh-heh.”

Hackman’s my favorite.