Well, that’s one way to limit Phil Hughes’ innings.

Like lions attacking a herd of wildebeests (or whatever it is that lions attack herds of), the Blue Jays have spent this series picking off the Yankees’ young – first Ivan Nova, who was good but not quite good enough to escape two nights ago, and now Phil Hughes, who was less good. The Yankees were behind the entire game and lost 6-3 but, thanks to the Angels’ 12-3 thrashing of the Rays, remain in a tie atop the AL East.

There’s been much discussion of Hughes’ unspecified innings limit recently, and so it would, in a sense, be nice that he pitched less than four innings tonight – except that he threw 106 pitches in those three and two thirds innings, his shortest outing of the year. They were fairly high stress, and definitely frustrating, as over and over again he got a batter to two strikes before eventually allowing a hit. According to Girardi after the game,  3.2 innings is still just 3.2 innings, but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Neither does bringing in Javy Vazquez in relief – it would, except I thought the whole issue was he had a dead arm and needed rest, and I don’t see how pitching 4.1 innings on short notice is going to enliven said arm. I assume the Yankee trainers know more about this than I do, so probably it’s fine… but then again with an off-day tomorrow, why push your luck? The Yankees don’t necessarily need Hughes and Vazquez at their best to have some postseason success this year, but it’s hard to see them getting far without at least one of them. Anyway, the good news is Vazquez pitched well (maybe his arm is only mostly dead?), allowing just one run, on an Aaron Hill homer, and finishing out the game.

Meanwhile, Jays starter Brett Cecil is not this good – at least, not against any other team. As the guys at River Ave Blues point out, he’s now got a 1.64 ERA against the Yanks, and a 4.21 ERA against non-Yankees. Whether that’s because he’s doing something particularly effective against the Bombers, or an accident of small sample size, I can’t really say, but in any case he was effective again tonight, allowing seven hits and two walks, but limiting the damage to two runs over eight innings. The Yankees got two runs in the fourth, when Robinson Cano doubled and Marcus Thames, batting right behind him, homered; they tacked on one more in the ninth, when Eduardo Nunez singled home Austin Kearns. It was a short-lived rally, and the Yankees head into their needed off-day still perched on top of the standings, but a bit battered- Nick Swisher’s knee is hurting now, hence his absence from tonight’s lineup.

The Yankees still have two series to play against the Blue Jays, one home and one, the last of the season, back in Toronto. So you haven’t seen the last of these guys. Presumably the Yankees and their coaches will be watching a lot of Brett Cecil video between now and then.

Yanks hope to have their way with the Jays tonight in Toronto and take this series.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

More Rothko…

Christopher Walken: scene-stealer.

In fact, this scene might be the best in the entire movie, which isn’t nearly as engaging as the original BBC mini-series, but is interesting just the same:

No small thanks go to our man, Ted Berg:

Simple pleasures are the best. Brown butter and sage: a good combination:

Thanks to Technicolor Kitchen for the inspiration.

Silly, dated, but still slammin’.

And this one’s got a Mickey Mantle reference…

David Kindred has a new book about the Washington Post. It got a favorable review last weekend in the New York Times Book Review:

Kindred still lives near Washington and has maintained friendships with a number of Post reporters. He was granted permission to write this book by Leonard Downie Jr., The Post’s executive editor from 1991 to 2008, over mild objections from the corporate chairman, Donald E. Graham. (“It takes just one person saying something stupid to hurt you,” Graham tells Kindred.) Graham needn’t have worried. While pulling no punches in detailing at least one scandal involving a plan to sell access to government officials and journalists at exclusive “salons,” not to mention a notorious newsroom fistfight and the pain of “managing decline,” Kindred makes no attempt to disguise that the team he’s rooting for plays home games at 1150 15th Street NW. “Morning Miracle” may be the best semi-insider’s account we’ll get about a newspaper’s losing season of red ink, cutbacks and institutional angst amid the current industry crisis. This loser, it should be noted, won 11 Pulitzers for work done during the period Kindred is writing about, 2007 through 2009.

…Kindred is a connoisseur of journalists’ voices, exquisitely attuned to the trouble they’re in, but carrying on while they still can. Some of the best writing here is a powerful implicit argument for the irreducible value of sophisticated and fearless accountability reporting. His chronicle of how Dana Priest and Anne Hull meticulously pursue their investigation of the disgraceful treatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, from the first nebulous lead to the final stages of nailing a multipart exposé, is superb. The war correspondent Anthony Shadid (now with The New York Times), the feature writer Gene Weingarten and the Post team that covered the mass shooting at Virginia Tech provide further examples of exemplary work. Kindred’s portrait of The Post’s 2008 presidential election coverage is a love song to everyone from the headline writers and the front-page designer to the Pakistani immigrant who delivers the paper at dawn in the Virginia suburbs.

Kudos to Mr. Kindred. This one sounds interesting…Here’s an excerpt.

Tim Marchman on the aging Derek Jeter.

It seems like Johnny Damon will stay with the Tigers. Up in Boston, Dan Shaughnessy doesn’t understand why.

Git it in gear, fellas. That sombitch Bautista hit a game-winning dinger and spit in yer grill last night. You gunna just take that?

We’ll be root-root-rootin’ you on…

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

[Picture by Bags]

Mr. Rothko on a rainy day…

Over at the Pinstriped Bible, Jay Jaffe weighs in on Javier Vazquez being skipped a turn:

Like an injured wasp, Javier Vazquez is still able to sting once in awhile, but he’s desperately in need of being relieved of his misery with a rolled-up newspaper, or at the very least swatted to the sidelines. On Saturday, his season reached another low point, as he yielded four runs in three innings against the Mariners, the majors’ lowest-scoring team. While the Yankees nonetheless emerged with a win thanks to strong work from Chad Gaudin and a late offensive burst which produced five unanswered runs, the start marked the third straight time that Vazquez had failed to reach five innings.

Alas, this should surprise exactly no one. After Vazquez allowed 10 baserunners and six runs (three earned) in 5.1 innings during his first start of the month, manager Joe Girardi admitted that his velocity was down, while pitching coach Dave Eiland conceded, “He has a little dead arm,” which isn’t as serious as it sounds. “Dead arm” is a term for muscular fatigue, a warning sign from the body but something which will improve with rest, rather than a structural problem with ligaments or cartilage which would require intervention.

What Will Johnny Do?

Go back to Boston? Thomas Wolfe said you can never go home again, though Boston was never really Damon’s home, just the most-celebrated stop of his career. On the other hand, Damon was an army brat, so who knows? I assume he’ll end up back at the Fens when all is said and done here, though I’d be amused if he stayed with the Tigers.

Rays manager, Joe Maddon, hopes Damons stays put as well.

Bacon, lettuce and fried greenish tomato…

Why the hell not?

From Ideas in Food.

I’m not afraid to admit it, I went through a heavy Bob and Doug phase. Had both of the albums, had ’em memorized.

Yes, I was a dork:

No use in steerin, now.

As fun as dumb can be:

Dig this most excellent essay on the old New York Herald Tribune by William Zinsser (who wrote a helpful book about writing):

Much has been written about the Herald Tribune’s bright stars in those postwar years: the foreign editor Joseph Barnes, the foreign correspondent Homer Bigart, the city reporter Peter Kihss, the sports columnist Red Smith, the Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Nat Fein, the music critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Virgil Thomson, and many others. But the paper never forgot that its readers were an infinitely mixed stew of interests and curiosities, and it had experts squirreled away in various nooks to cater to their needs: the food critic Clementine Paddleford, the fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard, the stamps editor, the crossword-puzzle editor, the garden editor, the racing columnist Joe H. Palmer.

Palmer was typical of the paper’s passion for good writing, nowhere better exemplified than in the sports section. It was in those pages, as a child baseball addict, that I found my first literary influences. The Trib sportswriters were my Faulkner and my Hemingway, and now I was in the same room with those bylines-come-to-life: Rud Rennie, Jesse Abramson, Al Laney. Laney, who covered golf and tennis, never took off his hat. I often paused at the sports department to watch those Olympians, wreathed in cigarette smoke, tapping out their stories with ferocious speed—especially Abramson, who seemed to have the entire history of boxing at his fingertips.

Ruling over that domain was the sports editor, Stanley Woodward. Built like a 250-pound fullback, he was as sensitive to good writing as a 125-pound poet. No hoopsters or pucksters played in his pages, no batsmen bounced into twin killings. Woodward had recently hired two stylists to add luster to his stable. First he plucked Red Smith from the Philadelphia Record, thereby presenting to a national audience the best sportswriter of his generation. Then he imported Palmer, an English professor at a college in Kentucky, to write a column called “Views of the Turf.” I knew nothing about horses, but Palmer’s columns, a blend of erudition and wit, strewn with allusions to Shakespeare and Chaucer, took me into a picaresque new world, often straying far from “the turf.” I still remember a column extolling the virtues of Kentucky jellied bourbon.

Ivan Nova came out for his first Major League start spitting fire. With adrenaline flowing to his lanky right arm, and his spirits lifted by a fantastic Gardner-to-Cervelli double play, he blazed fastballs of 97 and 98 miles per hour to get himself out of trouble in the first inning. And Yankee fans rushed to mlb.com to check the pitchFX to validate the startling reading on the YES gun. They were not disappointed by those results, but they were disappointed that the Jays won the battle of the bullpens, 3-2.

Coming into the 2010 season, River Ave Blues filed this report on the young hurler. After being unprotected in the rule 5 draft, claimed and quickly returned, Nova put a few nice starts together in Trenton in 2009, earned a promotion to Scranton. With most of the Yankee pitching talent in the low minors to start 2010, Nova was an easy choice to add to the 40 man roster this offseason as there was a good chance he could provide depth for the Major League staff if injuries or Javy Vazquez came to pass. And here we are.

Nova comes in with a reputation as a bit of a worm-killer. He’s a tall-drink-of water, and his motion and action on the fastball (after he calmed down and found his 94 mph groove) and lack of a quality second pitch, reminded me of Chien Min Wang. I really liked Wang, even when he was forced to carry the load as the Yankees de facto ace. A healthy Wang is an ideal back-of-the-rotation innings eater. Solid, if unspectacular. I doubt that Nova could be as good as Wang, but, for now, I’d like to see more of him and less of some other guys.

Aside from a good fastball, however, Nova did not show much else. Filed under “not much else” should be that lame curve that Jose Bautista hit into the stands to pad his league leading total. The game was tied in the sixth when Nova sent a high fastball Bautista’s way (did he expect another non-breaking curve?). Notice I didn’t say high and inside. It might have been a little off the plate, but it never had a chance to hit the guy. It was exactly like that time Manny Ramirez lost his junk and caused all that commotion when Clemens threw a high, but not-that-inside, fastball back in the 2003 ALCS.

Anyway, Bautista decided to take serious offense and was looking to hit one a thousand feet his next time up in the eighth. He came  up a couple hundred feet short, but still deposited the game winning homer after turning on an inside heater by David Robertson. He styled to the extreme and relished his curtain call. Oh, how I wanted that to come back to bite his ass, but, alas. Earlier in the game, Flash mentioned Bautista has 38 home runs, and zero to the opposite field. He couldn’t imagine that the Yankees would pitch him inside in this series. He ended up hitting 2 inside pitches (mistakes, no doubt) over the left field wall for all of Toronto’s runs.

Bautista now has six home runs and twelve RBI versus the Yankees in 2010. And the Jays have taken six out of ten from the Yanks. The Red Sox already won, so all that’s left to do tonight is to root for the Angels (and clean the living room, do the dishes, take out the garbage, put the laundry away, check work emails). Go, uh, let’s see, Scott Kazmir. Hmm. That’s probably not going to work.

On another note, does anybody watch the Little League World Series? I tune in on occasion, but almost always turn it off quickly because the umpiring is so atrocious. The pitcher can get a strike any time he hits the catcher’s glove, no matter how far into the opposite batter’s box the catcher sets up. Jose Molina employs the same strategy. It never seemed to work for the Yankees, but it sure worked for the Blue Jays tonight. The one to Granderson in the ninth was closer to the on-deck circle than to home plate.

Yanks Jays.

No frills, just banter.

Ivan Nova, the World is Yours.

[Picture by Bags]