This’ll put a pep in yer step:

Wayne Coffey had a piece about the struggling Jesus Montero yesterday in the News:

“In a lot of ways it’s good for young players to hit these speed bumps, because this business is full of them, and life is full of them,” says Mark Newman, the Yankees’ senior VP of baseball operations. “He’s one of the better young hitters we’ve had in our system since I’ve been here (22 years). I am confident that he will hit. Our baseball field personnel – the coaches and coordinators – think he’s going to hit. You can’t find anyone in our organization who doesn’t think he’s going to be a really good player.”

…”If he tastes a little failure here, learning how to grind it out can help him get to the big leagues,” [Triple-A hitting coach, Butch] Wynegar says.

Newman said Jeter “is the strongest athlete mentally that I’ve ever been around.” Jeter had to deal with his onslaught of errors. Montero has to deal with his paltry home run total and his .234 average. The Yankees are not worried.

And how. It ripped into the piece this afternoon delivering line drive-bat-crackin’-goodness.

It was a close game for six innings, good pitcher’s duel between Andy Pettitte and Mitch Talbot. Every team in baseball wore white hats today, including the Yankees. I usually don’t go in for alternative NY caps, aesthetically not morally, but these looked good. And Pettitte looked regal and in command in the middle of the beautiful field on a nice spring day, hot but with a breeze.

Alex Rodriguez hit a solid line drive to right center field for a two-out RBI in the first. He whiffed in his next at bat and then got hit with a pitch. Now it was the bottom of the seventh and the bases were juiced because the Indians intentionally walked Mark Teixeira to pitch to him, Yanks holding a 2-1 lead.

Paul O’Neill had been talking about Alex being due to bust out sometime over the next couple of days on the YES broadcast. So Rodriguez gets into a fastball and hits a bomb to dead center, good for the 20th grand slam of his career. Only Manny and Lou Gehrig have more. Rodriguez needs four more for the all-time lead.

Robbie was hitching round the back bumber of the score truck, stepped up after the slam and lined a solo homer to right. Later, Rodriguez added an RBI double. Derek Jeter, Curtis Granderson and Nick Swisher had two hits each, and Brett Gardner had three. Eleven runs in all, a series win, and a damn fine way to make up for what happened on Saturday.

Final Score: Yankees 11, Indians 1.

Good show boys, good show. And oh, by the way, Andy Pettitte is 7-1, with a 2.48 ERA. Not bad for an old man.

(Here we go, yo)

“It’s gunna be a good summer.”

[Photo Credit: Bags and AP Photo/Frank Franklin II]

Hazy, too. Good day for a picnic or a baseball game…

[Picture by Bags]

This is just so cool.

[Photo Credit: Jakarta Globe]

How best to follow-up Saturday’s disastrous loss? How about having a guy who hasn’t won a game since last August stick it up your ass? Well, that’s just what happened today, an otherwise gorgeous day in the Bronx. Justin Masterson, last seen around these parts working out of the Red Sox bullpen, is a big, broad-shouldered guy who throws a good sinker. He’s had some rough luck but was in good form today–struck out eight, got plenty of ground balls and made short work of the Yankees for six innings.

The Bombers didn’t have many chances. They put runners on second and third with one out in the fourth and didn’t do dick with it (Nick Swisher and Juan Miranda stuck out to end the inning). Meanwhile, AJ Burnett cruised, until two outs in the seventh when he hit a batter, Jeter made a throwing error, and a fly ball sailed over Nick Swisher’s glove in right for a triple. Swisher, who made a good catch and ran into the wall earlier in the game, came up slowly.

The Indians had a 3-0 lead and the Stadium was silent. But the Yanks rallied in the bottom of the inning. Swisher led-off with a single to center and moved to second on a force out by Miranda. Brett Gardner was next and he slapped a grounder past Masterson for base hit. Masterson didn’t miss fielding it by much, bad luck. Runners on first and third, one out. Francisco Cervelli pinch-hit for Chad Moeller in the nine hole and whiffed on a good sinker, down-and-in. Then Masterson got two strikes on Jeter and tried to bury a sinker in on his hands just like he did to Cervelli but the pitch didn’t snap and Jeter jumped all over it and banged a single to center. Everything happened fast. The line drive, the throw home, Gardner’s slide, the umpire’s call–safe!

That was it for Masterson, who was replaced by the lefty Tony Sipp. Curtis Granderson doubled to right, Jeter moved to third, and then Teixeira, batting right-handed, quickly fell behind 0-2. He took a couple of balls, fouled pitch off and then hit a bomb into the left field bleachers.

Exhale and cheer!

Burnett came back out and pitched a scoreless eighth, striking out the final two batters.

In the bottom of the eighth, the Insurance Truck showed up: Cano, single, Swisher, single, Miranda, double. Swisher dangled his right arm as he ran the bases like he was doing his best Jeffrey Leonard. Gardner flied out to shallow right, not deep enough to score Swisher but Cervelli drove a ball far enough to bring Swisher home (Swish has been incredibly hot, let’s hope he’s not too hurt).

Our man Mariano pitched the ninth. Struck out the first two batters and then broke a bat on a dribbler to mound. Mo jumped up with both feet like a frog, avoided the bat, landed, fielded the ball, smiled and then threw to first for the out.

Ball game, smiles: Relief.

Yanks 7, Indians 3.

[Photo Credit: AP Photo/Kathy Willens]

The less said about yesterday’s game the better. I’m willing to forget the whole thing if you are.

New day, new game. Let’s get it right today, will ya, boys?

[Picture by Bags]

Randy Winn has been DFA’d as Curtis Granderson rejoins the team. It was for the best. Seems like a nice guy, like he’s cousins with Bernie Williams or something, but he couldn’t catch up with a good fastball. It was time to go.

On a more somber note, Gary Coleman passed away today. He was 42.

I was a huge fan of Diff’rent Strokes when I was growing up. Coleman was a major comic influence, right up there with JJ from Good Times. Reggie was a guest star on Diff’rent Strokes and so was Ali, who helped Arnold deal with a bully named the Gooch. Along with Steve Martin’s “Wild and Crazy Guy” bit, “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout Willis?” was a seminal catch phrase, the can’t-miss-sure-to-make-you-laugh-schtick. The rasberry. The verbal banana peel. He delivered it well.

My sister and brother loved it, kids at school loved it. The beauty part was that we waited all week for him to say it and so did he. My favorite part was how Coleman sometimes looked like he was going to break character and crack up, because it was that funny. Just like they used to crack up on the Carol Burnett  Show.

I visited my grandparents in Belgium for the summer when I was twelve. Summer of ’83. I was starved for the English language. They had Happy Days and Starsky and Hutch on TV but they were dubbed into French. Fortunately, a Belgian TV station played what they called  Arnold in English with Flemish subtitles. It was life-saving.

Colman was like Spanky McFarland from the Our Gang comedies–irrepressibly great when he was young. Completely charming. Effortless.

As they got older, the freshness wore off and they weren’t as natural or cute. They became self-aware, polished. The downside of child acting–washed-up at fourteen. Still, Coleman hit the high notes plenty of times and set the bar for child stars in the Eighties. Few of them could touch Coleman at his best.

R.I.P.

Vacation Friday. Bump it.

Busta!

Our man Hank Waddles has a good interview with Norman Ollestad. Nice job, once again, Hendree.

Dig.

[Photo Credit: Quicksilver]

With Bill Madden’s new book on George Steinbrenner topping many of the sports bestsellers lists, it’s an appropriate time to look back on the first year of “The Boss’” reign as the game‘s most recognizable owner. That would be 1973, when the Yankees were in the midst of a 12-year absence from postseason play. Still three years removed from ending their lengthy playoff drought, the Yankees embarked on a new era not fully aware of how life would change under the thumb of “Big George.”

Coming only weeks after he purchased the franchise for less than $10 million, Steinbrenner’s first spring would not pass without major controversy, though it had nothing to do with his ability to rant and rave. The flames were instead fanned by two unconventional left-handers, Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson, who decided the time was right to announce that they had swapped wives, children, and family pets. One could not have blamed Steinbrenner for questioning his new investment right then and there, what with 40 per cent of his projected starting rotation daring to do something that much of the civilian population would never even have considered.

The Yankees had other personnel problems, too. Their middle infielders, Horace Clarke and Gene “Stick” Michael, carried lightweight bats that would have made them utility players in today‘s game. The Yankees lacked a quality all-around right fielder, a position that featured the over-the-hill talents of Matty Alou and Johnny Callison. Their first baseman, the 38-year-old Felipe Alou (Matty’s older brother), had not been a premium player since the late sixties, when he played the outfield for the Atlanta Braves. The pitching staff, though featuring top-tier talents like Mel Stottlemyre and Sparky Lyle, lacked the depth of some of the other elite staffs in the American League and could not carry an offense that ranked tenth among 12 teams in runs scored.

(more…)

Sir Christopher Lee just turned 88 years old on Thursday. Lee isn’t just a splendid actor, he’s also a very special icon to kids who grew up with “Chiller Theater” and horror movies on the late show. Younger moviegoers probably know him best from Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy and George Lucas’ recent Star Wars prequels. No matter what kind of roles Lee has played over his long, illustrious career, from Sherlock Holmes to Saruman the White to Scaramanga (The man with the golden gun, in the 007 flick of the same name), for many move freaks all over the globe, he will always be Count Dracula.

Of course, Lee wasn’t the first screen Dracula, and there have been many since, but for my money, he was the best. Watching him in his first appearance as the Count, in 1958’s The Horror of Dracula, I’m still scared. Another terrific British actor, Peter Cushing, played Van Helsing versus Lee’s Dracula and starting in the late ’50s they created one of the all-time great screen pairings.

Looking back at his impressive body of work, it’s clear what a great screen presence he is: erudite, charming and radiating intelligence and sexuality–even when he’s playing the Mummy. Here’s a snippet of Lee in one of his greatest non-vampiric roles, as Lord Summerisle in the 1973 cult classic The Wicker Man.

Happy Birthday, Sir Christopher–-here’s hoping you’re around for a few more… C’mon, you didn’t think I wouldn’t give you a little taste of Dracula, didja?

On Monday, as I was continuing to gather research for the column I thought I’d be writing this week, Alex Belth sent me an e-mail with a topic idea that I found so intriguing, I had to put my other one on the back burner.

Why has Mark Teixeira received a free pass from the NYY fans and the NY media?

Interesting question, no? He hasn’t really gotten a free pass from the Bronx Banter community. We don’t apologize for anybody. Hell, I was still killing Brett Gardner when he was catalyzing the offense. But the question is warranted. It got me thinking.

Naturally, on my way home from work that night, I threw on WFAN and Steve Sommers had the recently engaged Sweeny Murti on to schmooze, and Sommers immediately asked him about, among other things, when Teixeira would start hitting. I wondered if Alex’s question had merit. When the Yankees arrived in Minny, Tex’s line was .209/.327/.378. Thanks to his efforts of the last couple of games, Teixeira is over the .215 mark and a little further away from the Mendoza Line. But the consistency hasn’t been there; he has gone hitless in exactly half of the Yankees’ 46 games. He had the big three-home-run game in Boston and has only four dingers in the other 45. We know Tex a slow starter, but April’s supposed to be the only bad month. We’re nearing Memorial Day, and Mark Teixeira’s numbers look like they should be on the back of Steve Balboni’s baseball card, not his.

(Speaking of the “baseball card” theory, can we put a moratorium on that whole thing? The premise that players off to bad starts will ultimately rise to the stats that appear on their baseball card is just tired. It’s not a real answer to the short term, even if that ultimately will be the case.)

And yet the majority of the local scribes, while maybe not letting him slide, haven’t heaped criticism upon him like the Boston writers have done with David Ortiz both last year and this year. Last season, when Teixeira got off to the slow start, the “he’s a slow starter” refrain was common, and he was still taking a lot of walks and getting on base, which helped deflect some of the criticism that could have come his way.

In all my years of Yankee fandom and in the time I covered the team, the only person I can recall who got similar treatment during this bout of adversity was Bernie Williams. Bernie would routinely hover near .200, .225 or .250 for the first six weeks of the season (in 2002, he was a .236 at the end of April and ended up hitting .333), and then when Memorial Day came around, find his stroke, usually from the right side of the plate, and go through long stretches when he’d carry the offense.

Alex offered up a list of reasons why he thought Tex was getting off easy:

1. The Yankees are winning.
2. He’s a good fielder.
3. He’s good with the media.
4. The Yankees are winning.
5. He plays with A-Rod.
6. The Yankees are winning.

(more…)

Yanks go for the quick sweep of the Twins. Minnie won the last game in the New York series and now try to save face at home. Nice-looking new ball park out there, too. There were some gorgeous shots of the sunset and the moon against the city skyline on the YES broadcast last night.

We’ll see if Javy’s finger is a problem. Or anything else for that matter. But he’s had a couple of decent starts. Hope he builds on it.

Be nice to have have the Score Truck show up and take ’em back home to the BX in style.

Whadda ya say, boys?

[Picture by Bags]

Even by his own high standards, Josh Wilker’s piece on meeting Bill Lee stands out. He kilt it, as they like to say.

I’ve been having trouble writing since I got back from my book tour through the Northeast, possibly because the foundation of my writing has always been whining and complaining, and what’s left to whine and complain about if you get to meet Bill Lee at the Red Sox Team Store right outside Fenway on Yawkey Way?

…I could have talked baseball with him all night, but he was of course besieged by fans. I noticed that he always asked each person where they were from, and wherever it was, he had been there and had a story to tell about it, a way of connecting. Everyone walked away smiling.

When the signing was over, we watched an inning of the game on a television in the store. Bill didn’t want to go across the street to the game because he’d be mobbed.

“When I go I make sure to always have a cup of beer in both hands so people can’t ask me to sign stuff,” he said, “but then people just buy me more and more beer and I end up getting hammered.”

Excelsior!

Display Cakes, By Wayne Thiebaud (1963)

There’s a good piece by Tyler Kepner on Trevor Hoffman today in the Times:

“The hitters are going to let you know,” Hoffman said. “They’re talking awfully loud right now. But I still feel I have something in the tank.”

[Photo Credit: The Brewers Bar]

Ted Berg’s blog always has something for me every time I stop over. Yesterday, he posted a classic AP Photo of Hideki Irabu who was arrested for Second-Degree Awesomeness earlier this week (I don’t usually take delight in another person’s misery, even a public figure, but I’ve always felt warm-and-fuzzy for Irabu’s misadventures–he was the one true degenerate on a Yankee team filled with boy scouts).

Then came  a post about some of the craziest–nasty or delicious, you decide–food I’ve ever seen.

Check this out, from a joint called Ditch Plains:

Whoa, Daddy. That’s hectic, man. Or “Mad hectic,” as my wife would say.

Oy and vey.

[Photo Credit: Always Hungry]

Have you ever walked out of a movie? First time it happened to me was when my Old Man couldn’t stand Time Bandits and we left the theater–on 86th street near Lexington Ave–half-way through. I saw it again years later and didn’t think it was that bad. I just remember it being muddy and British.

We’ve all sat through movies we don’t like (I think my mom was trying poison me by taking me to see Chariots of Fire), but for me, a bad movie is always easier to take than say, bad theater. Heck, I’ve even sat through movies I hate just so I could get angry–Born on the Fourth of July, Thelma and Louise and The Crying Game come to mind. But I think the only other movie I’ve ever walked out on is Eyes Wide Shut. I went in not expecting much and hung with it for the first hour or so when I found it campy and unintentionally amusing. But finally it got so boring and pretentious that I happily walked out. And I didn’t feel ripped-off, I felt liberated.

So? What movies–if any–have you ever walked out on?

Yeah, she had it going on. And Ike was a superior talent even if he was a world-class louse.

[Picture from Wax Poetics]