From Joe Sheehan at SI.com:

[Mark] Teixeira is, in some ways, lucky. Whether it’s the afterglow of a championship, a bigger target in Javier Vazquez or the team’s 12-7 mark, his brutal April has escaped the tabloids’ spotlight. Perhaps this is progress, because in every measurable way, Teixeira, 30, is the same hitter he was a year ago. There are some fluctuations in his contact numbers — not quite as many line drives, a few more ground balls — but nothing that indicates a change in talent level given the limited number of plate appearances. No, Teixeira is mostly hitting in bad luck; he has an absurd .137 batting average on balls in play, the second-lowest mark in the game to Travis Snider, who has just been sent back to Triple-A. Also, just 9.5% of his fly balls have left the yard, about half of his career rate. Teixeira is doing what he does, just not getting the same results; his slow start in 2009 featured similar, if less extreme characteristics. There’s nothing to worry about here.

Be nice to see Teix break out tonight. Here’s hoping AJ Burnett is strong–but not too strong–and that the Yanks take the series before they return to the Bronx for the weekend.

Ya hoid?

[Photo Credit: Ken Aviation]

Supper at Emmaus, By Caravaggio (1610)

The b-side wins again:

On a more distressing note, here are more details on a sad story that just keeps getting sadder.

Okay, I know it’s early for blueberries but this just looks so damned tasty I couldn’t resist:

The Wall Street Journal ranks the the greatest Yankees by their stats, economic impact and cultural relevance. No surprise at number one.

If you didn’t see this story by Jason Fry, do yourself a favor, it’s a gem.

I also really dug this piece by King Kaufman about playing catch with his seven-year-old son:

It is fun. I’d forgotten that. It’s been coming back to me as we toss the ball back and forth, usually from only 40 feet or so. I just love playing catch. I always have.

…I’ve never really felt that some great mystical communication was going on when I was playing with a friend, or with my dad. It’s fun to play catch with someone I hardly know too. I love the rhythm of it. The simplicity. I love the sound, the pop of the glove when there’s a little mustard on the throw and it’s caught square in the pocket. Catch is a little hypnotizing. It ought to be the most boring thing in the world, but I’ve never ended a game out of boredom. I’ve worn out my arm a few times, though.

I love playing catch with my son not because some magical, wordless discourse travels between us but because I love playing catch and I love that he enjoys playing it with me.

I don’t know about anything mystical but having a catch is one of the great pleasures in this life, at least when you’ve got the right partner. My brother is one of those guys (Jon DeRosa is one of those guys, Glenn Stout is too). Can’t think of many things better, really. My bro knows how to throw, how to pitch, how to toss pop flys and grounders, just the way I like. We have fun with it, and have a lot of laughs.

Don’t even have to talk. I like that. The satisfying pop of the glove when the ball hits the pocket just right, the appealing sensation of hitting the target dead-on. I like the feeling of knowing how to throw and catch, knowing that I’ve got good mechanics and that I look good doing it. My vanity about it cracks me up. In my mind’s eye it makes me feel competent and good, the realization that I could have a catch with a big leaguer and not humiliate myself. I may not have been any good as a player but I’m certain that I can at least imitate one.

[photo credit: Weblog of the Turner Family]

Judith Beheading Holofernes, By Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1599)

Cool and gray in Gotham. Time to cool out…

Meanwhile, dig this dope mix, A Downtown Affair by Osita and Osore.

The good folks at SNY are running a fun kidcaster contest, for kids ages 7-15. The winner gets a half-an-inning in the SNY booth at a Mets game. If only I was still a kid…

The best pizza jernts in the country according to gayot.com (via MSN).

Jay Jaffe hipped me to this from Miller Park Drunk: 10 Reasons Bob Uecker is better than whoever your announcer is.

Most tremendously excellent.

Ted Berg talks with Donnie Baseball. What fresh hell is this?

[Editor’s Note: Here’s another one from the Pat Jordan vaults, a short, cutting profile of Burt Reynolds, from the late Eighties. While Pat reserves his harshest criticism for himself, but he’s especially hard on jockish, so-called tough guy actors like Reynolds and Tom Selleck. He thought Reynolds wasted his talent and was willfully lazy for easy money and fame.

When this story was published Reyonlds’ publicist called Pat and called him the “evilest man in the world, the anti-christ.” Pat said, “Then I’ll see you in Hell.”

No business like show business. Enjoy.]

By Pat Jordan

It was just a wink. But it defined the rest of his career.

“They told me I couldn’t do it,” he says. “It would break down the wall between the actor and his audience. But the movie was just a cartoon. Smokey and the Bandit. Cotton Candy. I just wanted to say to the audience, I hope you’re having as much fun as I am. So I looked in the camera, and winked.”

Audiences loved it. That conspiratorial wink united them with the actor in his inside joke. This movie was just a lark. He didn’t take it seriously. He wasn’t really acting. He was just partying with friends in front of a camera, and he invited the audience to join in. His fans were so grateful they made his movie one of the biggest grosser of the year, 1977, and they made him a No 1 Box Office Attraction. A Star. But more than that. Their favorite actor. The actor they liked the most. Which was his problem.

“I thought acting was synonymous with being liked,” he says. “I courted my fans. I passionately wanted them to like me. I thought being liked meant I was a good actor.”

The critics weren’t so accepting as his fans. That wink didn’t play well with them. They read into it, not the actor’s good-spirits toward his fans, but his contempt for them, and his craft. It wasn’t an actor’s role to be liked by his fans. It was to entertain them. Just because he was having fun with his friends – Jackie Gleason, Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, etc. – in a host of Sophomoric movies (Smokey and the Bandit, Iⅈ Cannonball Run, I&II) that actually did seem to be filmed parties of actors acting silly, that didn’t mean his audiences were having fun. They would have fun only as long as that wink deceived them into believing they were inside those parties. That they were getting drunk, cracking inside jokes, oogling beautiful girls, and crashing expensive cars with the actor and his friends. But the truth was, they weren’t and never would be. They were irrelevant to those parties, except that they made them possible by the vast sums of money they paid to see them on screen. When, and if, they woke to the deceit of that wink, how it made the actor rich at their expense, they’d stop paying to see such movies. Which they did. But not until after they made him a No 1 Box Office Attraction for five consecutive years.

(more…)

Our thoughts and prayers are with Steven Goldman, whose father has been ill. Steve is a friend. Hang in there, old chum.

Tom Verducci has lunch with the “Core Four” (also the subject of this week’s SI cover story).

Talk about chops. This guy wasn’t half-bad, huh?

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)

A revival of August Wilson’s Fences, starring Denzel Washington opened last night. I saw the original with James Earl Jones more than twenty years ago and recall it being a powerful night of theater. I think Washington can be a dynamic performer but I haven’t been interested in his work for a long time. This might be good though. 

From Ben Brantley’s review today in the Times:

There’s an exhilarated craziness in his eyes and a confrontational glint that dares us not to believe him. On the subject of his own life, Troy — a former Negro League baseball star turned sanitation worker, and a man whose name aptly evokes a legendary, ruined splendor — is a first-class mythmaker. Which means he’s also a first-class storyteller and a first-class self-deceiver, and that we’re going to hang on to his words.

Mr. Washington, a two-time Oscar winner, has his own personal specter to wrestle with in this production, directed by Kenny Leon and featuring a magnificent performance by Viola Davis as Troy’s wife, Rose. By starring in the first Broadway revival of “Fences,” which picked up about every major prize on offer in 1987, when it arrived on Broadway, Mr. Washington is stepping into the outsize shadow of James Earl Jones.

Large of frame and thunderous of voice, Mr. Jones has a titan’s presence that invested the embittered Troy with an aura of classical tragedy. He was big in every sense of the word, and there was instant pathos in the spectacle of a giant confined by the smallness of a world hedged in by 1950s racism. Mr. Washington has the fluid naturalness we associate with good screen actors, and when he played Brutus in the 2005 Broadway production of “Julius Caesar,” he often seemed to fade into the crowd of milling revolutionary Romans.

Not an onion and not exactly garlic, it’s the spring thing: Ramps! 

From chef Yoshi Yamada at Gourmet.com:

I have not put ramps in my pipe, but I have smoked them—and also roasted, sautéed, blanched, pickled, braised, and puréed them. I have eaten them raw and dirty, and I have cleaned so many in a row that I almost wished for winter again. This year I may take a few home to put under my pillow, just because…my precious. I’ll buy a little grill and set it up on my fire escape, coating the ramps in olive oil, salt, and pepper and grilling them until the white flesh is soft and smoky but still toothsome, the leaves limp and folded in on themselves, tender, wet, and charred at the edges. Then I will eat them—right from the grill, with a little fresh bread if I can wait, but probably just by the handful, with nothing else.

At Babbo, one way we prepare ramps is by heating a sauté pan until the olive oil is just beginning to smoke. We pull the pan off the flame and toss in the ramps, shorn of their leaves. We hear the sizzle, see the spattering oil, and toss them once or twice, calming the pan before placing it back on the flame. We sear them until the whites are blistered, brown, and soft. We add garlic to the pan to amplify that flavor, toasting it to make it taste nutty. After 6 minutes and 30 seconds in boiling water, we add 4 oz of linguine—supple but still al dente—to the pan. We throw in breadcrumbs for texture and add the julienned raw ramp leaves, which wilt in the steam of the pasta and bring a brightness of color and flavor to the dish. We toss everything a few times before plating and then grate Pecorino Romano over the top, so that it melts slightly by the time the dish makes its way onto the table. It may be my favorite pasta ever.

The recipe.

The result:

The must-read of the day comes from the incredibly dope site, Whose Voice is That? 

Bob Sheppard: Voice of God; Scholar of Speech.

‘Nuff said.