In the latest issue of Playboy, Pat Jordan profiles Billy Mays, the famous TV pitchman who died just a few days ago. It’s a snapshot of a profile but a fun, quick read.

Mays is the most famous pitchman in the world. His pitches are seen on TV in 57 foreign countries and dubbed in Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, German, whatever. The media call him ubiq-uitous, with his swept-back black hair and full black beard he touches up “by drinking only dark whiskey”—da-dum! You’ve seen him on TV, leaping out of the screen at three A.M., just before you doze off, snap- ping you awake with his screeching voice. “Hi, I’m Billy Mays, here for OxiClean!” or KaBOOM!, Mighty Putty, Hercules Hook, Awesome Auger, Zorbeez, whatever. Mays sells them all: gadgets that stick harder than any glue, dig up weeds, hold up a 50-pound gilt-framed mirror (assuming you have a 50-pound gilt-framed mirror)—so many gadgets you never thought you needed, never even thought existed until Mays went into his pitch. A 30-second pitch, never more than two minutes—a short con—screaming at you, “Watch this! I get so excited! I gotta tell you something! Buy it right now!” So you call the toll-free number, give a strange voice your credit-card information and then get a package in the mail, stare at its con tents—a gadget, a product—and wonder, Why did I buy this? But what the hell, it was only $19.95. It’s always $19.95. That’s Mays’s secret.

“It’s gotta be under $20,” Mays says. He shrugs. “I don’t know. That’s the magic number.” It also has to be an unknown item that can’t be purchased in a store, that can be seen and purchased only on TV and that appeals to a mass audience of do-it-yourselfers. Mays gets his satisfaction from sheer quantity. “I want to sell billions of things,” he says. And he has, which has made him rich (three Bentleys, million-dollar homes) and famous. There are websites devoted to either loving or hating Billy Mays. He shrugs again and says, “There’s a fine line between love and hate.” One website is dedicated to fans who want to have his baby, though most of those fans are gay men who like so-called hairy bears. They call him “one of the hottest bears on the market” and beg to be able to “boff that bear.” His haters refer to him as “an asinine piece of shit,” “a public nuisance” and an asshole. One fan says Billy Mays is his idol because he’s “so obnoxious that he’s cool” and can sell “dick to a dyke,” tap water from your own sink. A $5 bill for four easy payments of $19.95, plus shipping and handling.

“It’s all about trust,” says Mays. “I stay true to the pitch. I’m not a salesman. A salesman sells a product; a pitchman sells himself. I make people believe they have to own it.” He smiles and says, “Life’s a pitch, then you buy.”

Hey, another reason why the Internet rocks.

Here is Steven Zaillian’s script for Moneyball.

Have at it.

Variety reports that Sony Pictures has pulled the plug on Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Moneyball (thanks to Rob Neyer for the link).

Even in the climate of heightened studio caution, the turnaround news on “Moneyball” is surprising given that the project had reached the equivalent of third base. It was just 96 hours before the participants were ready to take the field, following three months of prep and with camera tests completed and cast and budget in place.

…Aside from actors like Pitt and Demetri Martin, Soderbergh is using real ballplayers — such as former A’s Scott Hatteberg and David Justice — as actors, and he also has shot interviews with such ballplayers as Beane’s former Mets teammates Lenny Dykstra, Mookie Wilson and Darryl Strawberry. Those vignettes would be interspersed in the film.While Soderbergh is confident his take will work visually, Columbia brass had doubts on a film that costs north of $50 million. That is reasonable for a studio-funded pic that includes the discounted salary of a global star like Pitt, but baseball films traditionally don’t fare well on the global playing field.

This is a shame but not a surprise. Back in the summer of 2003, I interviewed Michael Lewis and we talked about how difficult it would be to make Moneyball into a movie:

Bronx Banter: Have you sold the movie rights to “Moneyball” yet?

Michael Lewis: I didn’t have much hope that anyone would buy them. Because I can’t really see how you could make it into a movie—a good movie, anyway. What happens is, if somebody bought it for the movies, you’d have to create some sort of female role. They would just have to. You just have to twist so much. Having seen “Liar’s Poker” get bought for a lot of money, and then completely mangled in the creation of the script, and eventually never getting made. If they can’t make that, I can’t imagine how they can make this. There have been, oddly enough, some feelers from people who say they want to buy the rights. A lot of things sell, that shouldn’t sell, accidentally. That might happen, but I’d be really surprised if it ever became a movie.

“Where is she from?”

That’s what people, mostly friends and family, have said to me in private after meeting my friend Shannon Plumb. It’s her accent, you just can’t place it.  They ask, wondering if she’s a put-on artist.

She’s not. But she’s also the only true bohemian I’ve ever known. Completely unaffected, out-of-her-bird, inspired. Turns out she’s from Schenectady–by way of Pluto.

I’ve known Shannon for almost twenty years. We met at college. She used to wear a trenchcoat and carry around a thin boom box, playing Prince. Guys were bewitched by her.

She painted and acted and when we left school, she modeled, and hipsters and cool people were betwitched by her. Now, she’s married with two kids. Over the past decade, she has made a name for herself in the art world with her short films.

Shannon is a true original and one of my favorite people of all time. Loves Harpo, loves Buster, and even once had a nice jump shot (or so she says).

Here’s a mess of her movies.  Check ’em out.

Bronx Banter Interview

By Hank Waddles

For Yankee fans, Roger Clemens is a difficult case — even before all his recent steroid trouble. If you’re of my generation, you grew up despising him. Even though he pitched for Boston during an era when we all knew the Red Sox would never win anything, he was still a fearsome enemy. He was the gunslinger who stole your girlfriend before shooting the sheriff right between the eyes on his way out of town. There was some pleasure to be had when his skills began to decline during his twilight years in Boston, but it wasn’t too much of a surprise when he became great again — if irrelevant — during his time in Toronto. And when he came to New York in 1999, if all wasn’t forgotten, at least it was put aside. First of all, the Yanks were adding the best pitcher in the game; second, they were twisting the knife in the heart of Red Sox Nation. It was a win-win.

Roger helped the Yankees to a couple more championships, won his 300th game, endeared himself to the Boss and legions of fans, and said all the right things about wearing a Yankee cap into the Hall of Fame. But then came the defection to Houston, the self-serving Stadium announcement of his return to New York, and, finally, the steroid allegations. There was an embarrassment that we had once embraced him, and the ashes in our mouths were there to remind us that we had gotten exactly what we deserved.

But there is more to Roger Clemens. Sure, he cut corners, but he also worked harder than any of his teammates. Yes, he is hopelessly selfish and egotistical, but he’d be the first player to volunteer for visits to children’s hospitals. Whether you loved him once or never at all, whether you think he deserves a plaque in Cooperstown or a spot in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, you have to admit that Roger Clemens matters. In Jeff Pearlman’s latest book, The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality, he does his typically thorough job of cutting through the Roger Clemens mythology and getting to the heart of the man who was once considered one of the five greatest pitchers of all time. A few weeks ago Jeff was generous enough to spend part of his morning talking with me about the book, the steroid era, and a few other topics. Enjoy…

BronxBanter:  You’ve said that you love writing books, but when I spoke to you a while back while you were deep in this one, you described it as hell. How do those two things go together?

Pearlman:  The only thing I can really compare it to is running marathons. I run a lot of marathons. When I first start running a marathon, I’m really excited, and I love the first thirteen miles, and then the next four miles I sort of start feeling it, and then once you hit the twenties you start thinking, “I’m never gonna do this again. I’m neeeever doing this again.” And when you cross the finish line your first thought is, “Thank god this is over so I never have to do it again.” And then ten minutes later you’re thinking about the next marathon. And that’s how I feel about writing books. It’s nightmarish. It’s hellish. You’re solely focused — usually for a year and a half or two years — on one person, one subject, for all that time. You’re looking for these little details that seem insignificant to someone who doesn’t do it for a living, I would guess, but they become these gold nuggets for you. Finding out what someone used to drink for breakfast in the morning, silly little things like that that you think mean nothing, but they mean everything when you’re working on a book. Detail is what counts. When I was a kid I read every book imaginable, every sports book I could find, and I didn’t really differentiate between the good ones and the bad ones and the mediocre ones because I didn’t know any better. But now, when I’m reading someone else’s book, I really am looking for the details. If you’re writing a book about Reggie Jackson, everybody knows all there is to know about his three home run game in the World Series, but when you learn what sort of glasses he was wearing or where he got his hair cut or what he was saying to Mickey Rivers right before the game, that’s interesting.

BB:  How does that compare to writing feature articles? You used the marathon analogy; are these just sprints if you’re writing a piece for SI or some other magazine?

JP:  One of the best pieces of advice I got for writing a book was when I was doing my first book, which was about the Mets. Jon Wertheim, who is a friend of mine and writes for SI, said to me, the best thing you can do is think of each chapter as an article, as a lengthy article. So I would compare an article, if it’s long, to writing a chapter. And a book is just like a big monsoon.

BB:  I heard David Maraniss say once that it was much easier to write about dead people. If he was writing a biography about a living subject – and I think he was referring to his Clinton book – he would just pretend that the person was dead. Did you seek out Clemens at all, or did you pretend he was dead?

JP:  Well, I did reach out, and it was made clear he wouldn’t talk. Hence, it really was as if he was dead to me. I didn’t think of it in Maraniss’s terms, but he’s 100% right. And it’s definitely easier to write about a deceased person, because:
A. He won’t come back and say, “That’s not right.”
B. You don’t waste all that time trying to get him to talk.
C. People are more open when they know the person won’t get mad.
D. He can’t sue you for anything.

(more…)

A few months ago I eagerly read Adam Hochschild’s celebrated book about the early days of the Belgian Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost. It is an evocative and engaging read. I was stopped on the subway twice, exactly one week apart, by women saw me reading the book and who were compelled to tell me how much they loved it. I have my own reasons for appreciating it–my mother spent most of her childhood in the Congo–but I think I admire Hochschild’s first effort, a memoir, Half the Way Home, even more.

Hochschild’s father was an industrialist. The family fortune was copper. They were plenty rich. Hochschild’s memoir is beautiful–empathetic, not vicious. It is written in the kind of clean, direct prose that I cherish. Everything is carefully considered and focused; I was often struck by what seemed to be left out, how many choices must have been made. There is no fat, no rambling digressions. The imagery is vivid and precise.

Here is a small sample. Hochschild describes being a boy at Eagle’s Nest, the family estate in the Adirondack mountains.

Dig this:

Bed. The time seemed endless, suspended between waking and sleep, between water and sky. Sometimes a guest played the piano, and from my bed I could hear the music echoing out across the smooth surface of the lake. Occasionally, if I woke later in the evening, I could hear the splashing and laughter and voices from the dock which meant that some of the younger guests were taking a furtive late-night swim–something out of the question during the day. Those sounds, too, merged in my mind with that of the music on the water; they seemed an image of promise, of something yearned for but undefined, of the existence of some fulfillment in life that was denied me. It was as if all year I had waited to come here for the summer; all day I had held my breath waiting for some magic moment, and now I saw only its sign; the secret remained locked away.

As I drifted to sleep there came the sound of a solitary outboard motor going slowly through the lake, a boat taking a lone fisherman home at the end of the day. Perhaps he looked up as he passed, and wondered what went on in the dark-browed houses among the trees. Then the hollow cry of a loon, the loneliest of all birds. And the calls of half a dozen other birds, whose names I did not know but whose sounds I will remember until the day I die. And just as the day ended, so did the week, with Father going, and the summer, with all of us leaving Eagle Nest, and finally those summers themselves were no more; their character gradually changed, and the exact moment that happened cannot be pinpointed, any more than you can mark the exact moment you fall asleep.

It is always the same, the sudden, stomach-dropping, jolt.  Walking along a city block, looking up at a familiar store front or restaurant, a Closed sign hanging in the door way, or a vacant window. Something has happened. Change has come, like it or not.

I gasped last night as I walked past Sal and Carmine’s pizza shop on Broadway between 101st and 102nd (They make a salty but delicious slice.)  The grate was up and a red rose was taped against the metal.  Above it was a small xeroxed obiturary from a New Jersey paper.

Sal died late last week. I’ve been eating their pizza since I was a kid.  Sal and Carmine.  Two short, taciturn men in their seventies, though they look older. I never knew who was Sal and who was Carmine, just that one was slightly less cranky than the other. These are the kind of men that don’t retire but are retired.

The funeral was yesterday; the shop re-opens today.

As I read the obituary, people stopped and registered the news.  They congregated for a few moments, some took pictures with their cell phones, and then slowly walked away, the neighbhorhood taking in the loss.

Bronx Banter Interview

Our old pal Allen Barra sat down with me recently to talk about his new book, Yogi: Eternal Yankee.

Bronx Banter: You make the argument that Yogi was a better catcher than Johnny Bench. How close was Roy Campanella to Yogi during the Fifties? Was there any catcher even close to these two at the time?

Allen Barra: In Rio Bravo, Walter Brennan asks John Wayne if Ricky Nelson is faster than Dean Martin. “I’d hate to have to live on the difference,” says Duke. The real truth is that if you take Campanella at this peak, there’s probably very little difference between Berra, Bench and Campy. The only thing I might add to that is that it’s possible that, if given the same material to work with, Johnny and Roy could have gotten as much out of as many mediocre pitchers as well as Yogi did. But Yogi did do it, and that has to give him the edge.

BB: Did Yogi really deserve the 1954 and ‘55 MVP awards? In ‘54 the Indians won and Bobby Avila had a big year, also playing a key defensive position, and Mickey Mantle had a monstrous year. And in ’55 Mantle again had another ridiculous year.

AB: That’s a tough question. I don’t know if anyone’s done a “Value over Replacement Factor” kind of analysis for those years, but it’s arguable that Yogi might have had the highest value over anyone who could have replaced him at that position. In 1954 my guess is that the difference between Mantle and Berra wasn’t that great. Avila played a key defensive position, but not more key than Yogi’s. It probably should have been Mantle in ’55, but then I think there’s an equally good case that it probably should have been Yogi in 1950 instead of Phil Rizzuto. What’s interesting is that so many people thought that it should have been Yogi those years. I think that tells us something very important about him.

BB. Was there any year that Yogi should have won an MVP when he didn’t?

AB: Well, as I just mentioned, there was 1950. And you could turn the ’54 argument on its head and ask why Al Rosen, an Indian, wins the MVP [in 1953] when Yogi’s team won the pennant. I’m not saying Rosen didn’t deserve it, I’m just saying that if Yogi had won it, nobody would have gone to the barricades to say he didn’t deserve it, and I’d argue that he was also one of the top five players in the league in 1952. It’s more difficult to figure the value of a top-flight catcher. He did so many things to hold his pitching staffs together back then, I just don’t know if you can figure his worth compared to payers at other positions.

BB: It ‘s well known that Yogi helped Elston Howard when he joined the team but did Yogi ever question or go on the record about the Yankees’ institutional racism?

AB: No, I’m not aware that anyone in that period did. For one thing, when you talked to the players of that era, they all say, “Well, every year we heard that they were brining black players up through the minor league system, and we thought each year would be the next year.” I think there’s something to that – Gil McDougald told me something to that effect. I mean, the Yankee players were ready for it. They had no objections at all to integrating the team. It was only after a few seasons of George Weiss signing a black player for the minor league system and then trading him that they began to catch on. I’d have to say, though, that while the Yankees front office was as racist in its policies as the Boston Red Sox, the Yankees themselves got good marks from Elston and Arlene Howard and Larry Doby for their overall attitudes. Both the Howards and Doby put Yogi at the top of their list of good guys. Arlene Howard told me that Yogi and Elston “hit it off right away.”

BB. I know that walk rates were up in the Fifties and comparatively Yogi didn’t walk that much. But he was contact hitter and it’s hard to point this out as a major flaw. That said, were there any noticeable holes in his game, either offensively or in the field?

AB: No, none, and it ought to be mentioned that though Yogi didn’t walk that much, his on-base average was actually six points better than Johnny Bench’s in about the same number of games, and that’s what’s important. No, Yogi had no flaws. We all know he wasn’t much of a catcher until Bill Dickey learned him all of his experience, but by 1949 he was a very good catcher, and by 1950 the Yankee staff was pretty much relying on him to call their pitches. Or rather, he knew them well enough to call their pitches for them – did I just make some kind of Yogiism? Anyway, all that crap in David Halberstam’s The Summer of ’49 about Allie [Reynolds] and Yogi not getting along is fiction. All the Yankees told me so.

(more…)

Bronx Banter Book Excerpt

Everybody Loves Yogi

One of the most anticipated baseball books of the spring is Allen Barra’s biography on Yogi Berra: Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee (W.W. Norton).  Yogi is perhaps the most beloved Yankee of them all but he is also one of the most underrated great players of all time.   In his enthusiastic and provocative manner, Barra makes the case for the unadulterated greatness of Yogi.

Here is an exclusive excerpt.

By Allen Barra

He was the guy who made the Yankees seem almost human.

—Mickey Mantle

Sometime in the summer of 1941, two of the great legends of baseball narrowly missed making a connection that would have radically altered baseball. Some historians place the date in 1942, but the two men with reason to remember it best, Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola, say, and I have taken their word, it was ­1941.

Lawrence Peter Berra, a then somewhat stocky, ungainly looking ­sixteen-­year-­old Italian-American kid from the “Dago Hill” area of St. Louis, had attracted the attention of the best organization in the National League for a tryout in Sportsman’s Park. Jack Maguire, a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals, told his boss, general manager Branch Rickey, that Berra had a powerful left-­handed swing, a great arm, and heaps of potential. Rickey wasn’t sure; he was more interested in another kid from the Hill, Joseph Henry Garagiola, a year younger than Berra. Garagiola was thought by Rickey to be faster, smoother, and more polished. Dee Walsh, another Cardinals scout, talked Rickey into signing Garagiola with a $500 bonus, but Rickey was skeptical about offering anything at all to ­Berra.

Rickey had been getting reports on both boys all summer, not just from his scouts but also from two of his outfielders, Enos Slaughter and Terry Moore, who occasionally showed up to give pointers at the WPA baseball school at Sherman’s Park. Rickey’s initial offer to young Berra was a contract—but no bonus. To a boy that age, a professional baseball contract, even without a bonus, was nothing to be scorned. But Lawrence, displaying the kind of stubborn integrity that would, in just a few years, stymie the most powerful organization in sports, balked. “In the first place,” he would tell sportswriter Ed Fitzgerald nearly two decades later, “I knew it was going to be tough enough to convince Mom and Pop that they ought to let me go away. But if Joey was getting $500 for it and I wasn’t getting anything, they would be sure to think it was a waste of time for me.”

Hedging, Rickey offered $250. Branch Rickey was the most influential executive in baseball—by the end of the decade, it was estimated that nearly 37 percent of all big league players had been developed in one of his farm systems—and Larry’s brash reply took him aback: “No, I want the same as Joey’s getting.”2 Rickey did not mention to Berra how much a month he would be earning under the contract, and Berra never asked. “That didn’t matter to me. I would have taken anything. All I was interested in was that if Garagiola was getting $500, I wanted $500, too.” Yogi would later take pains to emphasize that he wasn’t jealous of his pal, but he was convinced, from years of sandlot and street games, that he was as good a ballplayer as Joe. Garagiola disagreed. “Yogi wasn’t better than me,” recalls Joe. “He was much better. There were a lot of good ballplayers on the Hill at that time, and ‘Lawdy’—as his friends called him, echoing his mother, who couldn’t pronounce ‘Larry’—was the best. You know how kids choose up sides with a bat, one hand on top of the other until you reach the end of the handle? When the last hand got to the top, the first thing said was ‘We want Lawdy.’ ”

(more…)

Ba Ba Booey

I groaned when Pat Jordan told me the Times assigned him to do a piece on the playwright, screenwriter, director, Neil LaBute.  Pat’s writing has an almost feral quality and when matched with a plump, if deserving target like LaBute, well, you know it is not going to be pretty.  I’ve seen a couple of LaBute’s movies and can’t think of one good thing to say about them.  I found them empty and vicious and completely phony.  The thought of what a hard old sharp shooter like Jordan would do with a misanthropic mo mo like LaBute was not exactly appetizing.

The story is in this week’s New York Times Magazine.  I think Pat went easy on him all considering though I don’t imagine that LaBute will see it that way.

One of the reasons I enjoy reading Joe Posnanski’s blog is because he relishes talking about sports the way fans do. He takes bar room topics, often in list form, and riffs, with reason and humor and a sense of fun. Who was the best so-and-so, what was the greatest such-and-such. The enthusiasm he shows for this kind of banter is what makes Pos so appealing–and he’s as well-liked a sports writer as I’ve ever met. The sabr-numbers crowd dig him and the mainstream guys like him too.

I was in Pos-mode the other day when I read Chris Ballard’s SI cover story on LeBron James. King James is only 24, a man-child, physical-mental freak of historically great proportions. The guy is twenty someodd pounds shy of 300, for crying out loud. I had no idea he was that big. And he’s so fast. He could play strong safety in the NFL.

Along with Kobe Bryant, James is the greatest player in the game and he’s only getting better. So I thought, when we talk about the greatest basketball players in the post-Jordan Era, it’s got to be Shaq, who you can’t really compare with Jordan because of the position; Kobe, who has won three titles and is certainly great, but not at Jordan’s level, especially off the court in terms of mainstream popularity and influence; and James.

Of course the league has been filled with other iconic players since Jordan level, including Allen Iverson, Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett, but not ones whose appeal crossed over to a wider audience. They are just hall of famers in the game. Nobody has reached the level Jordan attained. Jordan followed the greatestness of Magic and Bird seemlessly and he brought it to a crescendo that was peerless.

I thought about guys on that level—Jordan and Tiger Woods, Babe Ruth—as I read an old GQ article by the novelist William Kennedy. In 1956, Kennedy was a kid reporter working for the Albany-Times Union when he interviewed Louis Armstrong, who was in town for a gig. Kennedy went up to his hotel room and talked with him for an hour and a half. He wrote a short nothing piece on it for the paper but saved his notes.

My awe and reverence for Louis continued to grow through the ensuing years, and somewhere in the late 1970s I conducted an after-dinner poll as to who was the most valuable person who had ever lived, and Satchmo won, with five votes. William Faulkner got four, Michangelo three, Beethoven, Muhammad Ali and Tolstoy two each, and Dostoyevsky and Busby Berkeley one each.

…He was a giant in his youth: the first major soloist in jazz, the man to whom every last jazz, swing, modern jazz and rock musician after hism has been and is indebted, some via the grand-larceny route. Music has changed radically since the seminal days of jazz, but Satchmo’s achievement has not been diminished. No one has superseded him in jazz eminence the way Crosby superseded Jolson and Sinatra superseded Crosby and the Beatles superseded Elvis, and I will never know who or what really superseded the Beatles.

Who else, in sports, in the arts, in popular culture, is on this level?

(more…)

Unlike many of my contemporaries, I did not grow up reading Bill James. I wasn’t familiar with James’ Baseball Abstracts until my cousin gave me his collection in 2002, but in many ways, Bill James is the Internet–the outsider, the guy writing in his basement, intellectually curious, irreverent, superior, caustic and funny. The guy who doesn’t have to actually face the athletes, who really doesn’t have any interest in talking to them.

There have been other writers who played a big part in influencing the current generation of baseball writers–from Tom Boswell and Peter Gammons to James’ protogee Rob Neyer and Bill Simmons.

But for me, the early role model was Roger Angell because he was a writer and a fan. Here is Angell discussing his first baseball assignment for the New Yorker in the spring of 1962 (from a wonderful interview conducted by Jared Haynes “They Look Easy, But They’re Hard,” originally published in Writing on the Edge in 1993):

I was in my forties–I was forty-one–and I knew enough to know that I didn’t know a great deal about baseball, even though I was a true-blue fan. I’d followed baseball all my life. But I was wary of talking to players; I felt nervous about that.

…And also, although it was not a conscious plan, I wrote about myself, because I was a fan. It set a pattern for me. I am a fan, I refer to myself as a fan, and I report about my feelings as a fan, and nobody else, to my knowledge, does that. It’s not great thing, but those old restrictions on reporting seemed to say that you can’t put yourself in the piece and you can’t betray emotion. It’s funny, because most of the beat writers are just as much fans as the rest of us, or more so. If you sat up there and didn’t care about baseball in some personal way, it would be a deadly assingment, I think, year after year.

Angell is an editor first and a writer second. So who influenced his approach to writing about baseball?

A great model for me was Red Smith, who was a model for almost every sportswriter. The great thing about Red Smith was that he sounded like himself. His attitude about sports was always clear. He felt himself enormously lucky to be there in the pressbox. He was not in favor of glorifying the players too much–Godding up the players, in Stanley Woodward’s phrase. But was Red Smith in every line. You knew what he had read and what his influences were.

I don’t try to be a literate sportswriter; I try to be myself. It’s as simple as that. Everybody’s got to find what their voice is. You’ve got to end up sounding like yourself if you’re going to write in a way that’s going to reward you when you’re done. If you end up sounding like somebody else, you’re not going to be any good. You won’t get anywhere. Readers are smart. They will pick up whether the tone is genuine or not. Tone is the ultimate thing writers have to think about. You could write on a given subject–a ball game or a national crisis or a family crisis–in twenty or thirty different ways. You only have to pick what you want people to make of this.

Words to live by.  Angell has often said that writing and baseball may look easy but they are both extremely hard. I try to never forget this because neither gets easier with practice.  I can’t get away from the reality with writing because I do it regularly, but it’s more tempting to lose track of how hard it is to play the game.  

I’ll always be grateful to Angell for making this clear.  And for setting a wonderful example of the writer as fan.

Last Friday night, I had the pleasure of listening to George Kimball read from his new book at Gelf Magazine’s Varsity Letters reading series.  (Here are two video links: One and Two.) The book,Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing is a must for anyone interested in the fight game.  

Kimball was there for it all and conveys the excitement these four champions brought to the game in this expertly reported book that is written in pleasing, straight-forward prose.

For a sampling of Kimball’s work, check out his archive at The Sweet Science.  For example, here is his story on the Hagler-Hearns brawl: 

Nearly a quarter century later it remains a high point of boxing in the latter half of the twentieth century. Some knowledgeable experts have described it as the greatest fight in boxing history – which it probably wasn’t, if only due to its brevity. But its ferocious first round, which to this day remains the standard against which all others are measured, was undoubtedly the most exciting in middleweight annals, and one of the two or three best opening stanzas of all time.

What did Bob Arum know that the rest of us did not? Already in the midst of an age in which it had already become obligatory to sell every big fight – and many smaller ones – with a catchy slogan, the promoter who had already staged (with Don King) the Thrilla in Manila, as well as served as the impresario for Evel Knievel’s ill-fated attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon, christened the 1985 matchup between Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns simply “The Fight.”

This Friday, Kimball will be interviewed by none other than Pete Hamill (who wrote the foreword for the book) at the  Barnes and Noble in Tribeca (97 Warren street).  7 pm, ya heard? 

Again, anyone with a remote interest in boxing should brave the cold and check out what promises to be a riveting chat.

Following baseball for nearly 40 years has taught me at least one principle: no deal is ever done until both sides have announced it. The failed Mike Cameron trade reinforces that notion. Just a week ago, some media sources were proclaiming it a done deal. A week later, it has been declared dead, apparently over the Yankees’ unwillingness to pick up all of Kei Igawa’s exorbitant salary. So for now, Igawa and Melky Cabrera remain Yankee property—for good, bad, or indifferent.

I have to admit I was lukewarm on the rumored acquisition of Cameron. Yes, he would have been an immediate upgrade over Cabrera and company, and would have come with the bonus of allowing the Yankees to be rid of Igawa, who seems to have no clue about pitching in the major leagues. Yet, the 36-year-old Cameron would have represented only a short-term solution, probably two years at the maximum. He also would have affected the offense’s continuity, with his rather alarming windmill propensity at the plate. Cameron piles up strikeouts the way that Bobby Bonds once did, but without the levels of power and patience that Bonds once displayed during an all-star career.

With Cameron apparently off the board, I’d like to see Brian Cashman resurrect talks for one of three younger center fielders available in trades: the Dodgers’ Matt Kemp, the Cardinals’ Rick Ankiel, and Kansas City’s David DeJesus. Of the three, Ankiel might be the most realistic. He’s available, mostly because he’s a Scott Boras client who is one year removed from free agency. The Cardinals don’t think they can sign him by next fall, at which time Boras will likely send Ankiel spiraling full throttle into free agency.

Cashman talked to the Cardinals about the 29-year-old Ankiel during the recent winter meetings (which once again proved to be a disappointing flop and an unmitigated bore, but that’s another story). The Cards expressed interest in Ian Kennedy, whom they really like as a rotation option for 2009. If the Yankees could package Kennedy with Cabrera and perhaps a fringe minor league prospect (someone like Chase Wright or Steven Jackson), maybe a deal could get done.

If the Yankees could sign Ankiel past 2009, he would provide several long-term benefits. He has real power (he hit 25 home runs in 2008, a remarkable achievement considering that he has been an everyday player for only four seasons). He also has a Clementian throwing arm that could play well in either center field or right. The Yankees could use Ankiel in center while Austin Jackson develops at Triple-A and then shift him over to right once “Ajax” is ready for prime time delivery.

Because of his late start as an outfielder, Ankiel might not hit his prime until he’s in his early thirties. By then, he may have improved his patience at the plate and his fundamentals in the outfield. Even if he doesn’t, he looks a lot better than what the Yankees currently have in center field…

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Remember when Mickey Rourke was going to be the next big thing? 

He had nice turns in Body Heat:

and Diner:

Some people swear by The Pope of Greenwich Village (I am not one of them): 

But as soon as Rourke became a star, he became less interesting, predictable, a flat-joke, and then he wasn’t a star long, unless you account for his runaway fame in France (and there’s no accounting for that, is there?).  He left Hollywood and became a boxer and then returned to the movies, mostly B-level action movies made for DVD.

Now Rourke is back in the mix. The critics liked him in Sin City. And you can just smell an Oscar nomination for him in The Wrestler, his new feature, which looks to be a downbeat, arty riff on Rocky.

Pat Jordan profiles Rourke (His Fists Are Up and His Guard is Down) in today’s New York Times Magazine:

You meet Mickey, you can’t help liking him. He rescues abused dogs! He cries a lot: over his stepfather’s supposed abuse; the loss of his brother to cancer and his dogs to old age; the failure of his marriage to the actress Carré Otis. He admits he destroyed his own career, because, as he puts it: “I was arrogant. . . . I wasn’t smart enough or educated enough” to deal with stardom. He is candid about the people he has crossed paths with: Nicole Kidman is “an ice cube”; Michael Cimino, the director of “Heaven’s Gate,” “is crazy” and “nuts”; and the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. is “a liar.”

So what if he cries at the same moment in the same story in every interview? So what if his candor sometimes sounds like the bad dialogue from one of his many bad movies (“I have no one to go to to fix the broken pieces in myself”) or that his self-deprecation seems culled from the stock stories of so many fading actors (“I was in 7-Eleven, and this guy says, ‘Didn’t you used to be a movie star?’ ”)? So what if he seems disingenuous, at best, when he says he can’t remember that critics nominated him one of the world’s worst actors in 1991 (“I probably would have voted with them”) or even making a terrible movie that went straight to video, “Exit in Red,” in 1996 — despite the fact that the love interest in that movie was then his wife?

Mickey Rourke is, after all, an actor. The roles he has played and the life he has lived have so blurred one into another in his mind’s eye that even he doesn’t seem to know when he’s acting or when he’s being real. He has spent his entire adult life playing not fictional characters but an idealized delusional fantasy of himself.

If you want to ruin a party, just bring up religion or politics. This isn’t a political blog, but I had to at least acknowledge the day.

‘Member this mid-Nineties Underground Posse cut?

Sadat, Large Pro, Puba, Finesse. ‘Nuff Said.

But we’re going back again in a couple of weeks…

Baseball and rock ‘n’ roll are such elemental and ubiquitous American inventions that it’s a bit perplexing that they don’t really fit together. Baseball just doesn’t rock, no matter how hard stadium public address systems try to force the issue. Baseball is a game of calm, precision, suspense and strategy. For that reason, there are precious few worthwhile rock songs about the game.

That’s not to say there aren’t some great baseball songs in other genres. “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” the 1941 novelty hit from Les Brown and his Orchestra, is a stone cold classic, and “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?,” written by Buddy Johnson and recorded by both Johnson and the Count Basie Orchestra in 1949, is a jump-band variation on that theme that’s nearly as good a song and a superior cultural signifier (Johnson name checks African American major leaguers Satchel Page, Roy Campanella, Don Newcome, and Larry Doby). Bob Dylan’s “Catfish” from 1975 is great as well, but it’s not rock, it’s acoustic blues.

Being more of a fan of jazz than of baseball, my dad goes for David Frishberg’s “Van Lingle Mungo”, though I consider it more of a tone poem than a song. Still, I’ll take Frishberg’s list of names over any version of Terry Cashman’s trite “Talkin’ Baseball” (originally “Willie, Mickey, & the Duke”). “Joe DiMaggio Done It Again” is a fun alt-country tune, but it’s removed from it’s place and time as part of the Mermaid Avenue sessions in which Billy Brag and Wilco set long lost Woody Guthrie lyrics to music.

There are rock tunes that reference baseball, but aren’t really about the game. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”, speaking of DiMaggio, is the most famous. Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” contains a variety of baseball references (including Joe D yet again), but Joel uses the game to greater effect in 1978’s “Zanzibar” (“Rose he knows he’s such a credit to the game, but the Yankees grab the headlines every time”) and also drops a Yankee reference into “Miami 2017”. “Zanzibar” also uses a bit of the “bases” metaphor best employed by Phil Rizzuto in Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf’s “Paradise By The Dashboard Light”. More recently, Belle and Sebastian’s “Piazza, New York Catcher” is something of a cryptic love song in which Piazza (and Sandy Koufax, who isn’t actually named) are either incidental or symbolic, and the only baseball reference in Kanye West’s “Barry Bonds” is the title. Of course, extending the conversation to hip hop brings in hundreds of references, from the Beastie Boys having more hits than Sadaharu Oh or Rod Carew to Jay-Z having “A-Rod numbers.”

For a long time, John Fogerty’s “Centerfield” seemed like the only proper rock song that was actually about baseball. As a result, it quickly became overplayed to the point that it is now one of the few 1980s hits I can’t stand (and I can stands a lot), though if it weren’t so trite it would have held up better. Fortunately, “Centerfield” finally has some company this year. A quartet of alt-rockers, the most famous of whom is R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, came together earlier this year as the Baseball Project and released a 13-song album devoted entirely to songs about the game and players including Ted Williams (via a rewrite of Wings’ “Helen Wheels” called “Ted Fucking Williams”), Curt Flood, Satchel Page, Fernando Valenzuela, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Ed Delahanty, Harvey Haddix, and Jack McDowell (“The Yankee Flipper”).

More recently, Eddie Vedder, who is name-checked in “The Yankee Flipper,” released a Cubs anthem called “All The Way” (as in “someday we’ll go all the way”), and E Street Band guitarist Nils Lofgren released “Yankee Stadium,” a tribute to the doomed ballpark which he cowrote with his wife, Amy. Unfortunately, neither really fits on the list of rock songs about baseball. Vedder’s song deserves to be listed among the classics above, but it’s more of a prostest/drinking song than a rock song (and veers dangerously close the list of team fight songs below). Lofgren’s tune, though well-intentioned (“For every soul who entered here/we raise a glass we shed a tear”), just isn’t very good. Lofgren’s vocal delivery is off-putting and, not surprisingly, the best part of his song is the guitar solo.

Of course, Lofgren already has his baseball song bonafides from Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” (that’s him in the beret with the white guitar), but that’s another one of those songs that mentions baseball, but isn’t really about it.

So what’s your favorite song about the game? What did I miss?

Note: Even though Yo La Tengo once covered “Meet the Mets” and “Here Come the Yankees” by the Sid Bass Orchestra and Chorus, a 1967 Columbia Records release that was the best thing to come out of CBS’s ownership of the team, is a personal favorite, team fight songs don’t count. That includes “Tessie” by Boston’s Dropkick Murphys, and the Sammy Hagar-meets-Kenny Loggins “Let’s Go Mets Go” from 1986. Having said that, be sure to check out Larry Romano’s trapped-in-time “Rock In The Bronx” from 1993. Also worth a look are the abominable “Super Bowl Suffle” rip off “Get Metsmerized,” also from 1986 (cripes, how many songs did the Mets need?), and the horrendous 1987 update of The Twins’ 1961 anthem “We’re Gonna Win Twins.” Actually, pregnant women and people with heart conditions should probably skip those last two.

I really enjoyed the fact that the Yankees brought out the U.S. Army Field Band to kick off Sunday’s pre-game ceremonies by playing a pair of Sousa marches thereby echoing the band John Philip Sousa himself led on Opening Day in 1923.

This ain’t that:

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