Javy “Puttin Out the Fire (with Gasoline)” Vazquez makes his re-debut in the Bronx this afternoon at the River Avenue Oil Slick.

Let’s hope his stuff is as crisp as this gorgeous spring day, and…

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

In a television interview in 2002, Larry King asked Julia Child which foods she hated. She responded: “Cilantro and arugula I don’t like at all. They’re both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.”

“So you would never order it?” Mr. King asked.

“Never,” she responded. “I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.”

I’ve long considered cilantro, what we used to call coriander, to be the Steely Dan of herbs–you either love it or hate it. For the longest, I didn’t dig it at all, but since I’ve learned to appreciate and desire Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican cuisine, I’ve also learned to appreciate, and even crave, cilantro as well.

There’s a fun piece in the Times today by Harold McGee about how cilantro: 

“I didn’t like cilantro to begin with,” [Jay Gottfried, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who studies how the brain perceives smells] said . “But I love food, and I ate all kinds of things, and I kept encountering it. My brain must have developed new patterns for cilantro flavor from those experiences, which included pleasure from the other flavors and the sharing with friends and family. That’s how people in cilantro-eating countries experience it every day.”

“So I began to like cilantro,” he said. “It can still remind me of soap, but it’s not threatening anymore, so that association fades into the background, and I enjoy its other qualities. On the other hand, if I ate cilantro once and never willingly let it pass my lips again, there wouldn’t have been a chance to reshape that perception.”

[Photo Credit: Pinch My Salt]

Dining Room Overlooking the Garden, By Pierre Bonnard (1930-31)

[Photo Credit: Peter Morgan/AP]

Course there was lots to enjoy yesterday: the ring ceremony, Gene Monahan, Godzilla, (and Jerry Hairston, Jr!), the Boss, and an Opening Day win.

Alex Rodriguez was appropriately geeked about getting his ring:

“A lot of guys are saying they’re not going to wear it. They think they’re too cool. I’m calling BS on that,” Rodriguez said. “I will wear it and wear it every day.”

Fortunately, the dude is rich enough to have bodyguards cause first thing I thought about when I read this was Stephon Marbury getting robbed outside of a nightclub. Word to Herb.

Then, there was this too…

[Photo Credit: Chris McGrath/Getty Images]

Photo courtesy of the NY Yankees

The Yankees got their shiny new rings today, and they were just as subtle and understated as you might expect. But if the swelling music and the giant hunks of ice were not exactly humble, the ring ceremony itself still managed to be lovely – because of the presence of Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra, the glee of the crowd, and the obvious joy on the players’ faces as they jogged out to collect – and a perfect prelude to a 7-5 win.

The highlight was the reception for Hideki Matsui, now the Los Angeles Godzilla of Anaheim, who was given a ring, a huge ovation from the fans, and hugs on the field from all his teammates. I can hardly wait for the inevitable squawking about the horrors of fraternizing with the “enemy.” This may be the most amicable player-team divorce I can recall, and it was nice to see the uber-professional Matsui reap the benefits of that. Even the many Yankee-haters of my acquaintance find it hard to work up any bile for the guy.

(Less fuss was made over current Padre Jerry Hairston Jr’s presence, but I like that he flew all night to be in the Bronx for this moment – without even asking permission, because he was afraid someone might say no. It’s always nice to get a sense that the players care as much or more than the fans; it helps us feel less silly).

As for the game itself, it was about as low-stress as Yankees-Angels games ever are. Is there any Major League player we know better, at this point, than Andy Pettitte? How many times over the last few years have I tried to find a new way to describe a start like this? He got himself into trouble and then he got out of it; he was not dominant or overwhelming, but he was enough. Pettitte’s demeanor and persona do not seem to fit the word “crafty” (more like “aw shucks”), but he has gradually turned into one of those lefties; I wouldn’t necessarily say he strikes me as a deep thinker, but he knows what the hell — “the heck”, he might say — he’s doing. Today’s final line was six innings pitched and no runs allowed, despite five hits and three walks, aided by six strikeouts.

The offense was provided by Nick Johnson and Derek Jeter, who hit solo homers early on, and the Yankees tacked on gradually via a slew of infield singles, walks, and doubles, which never quite coalesced into a huge inning but came out to the same thing in the end. It was a good homecoming for Johnson, who came through in several key moments (and managed not to lose any limbs), as did Cano, an ultra-patient Swisher, and the usual suspects – Jeter, Posada, and of course Mariano Rivera, who saved Chan Ho Park and David Robertson from themselves with his usual easy flair.

So far, so good.

What else?

[photo credit: yehwan]

Home: Where we want to be.

Mike Vaccaro in the Post:

These are the kinds of days the old place was built for, when there was bunting draped all around her, when even on the coldest April days you could always coax a whisper of summer out of the sky. Opening Day at Yankee Stadium: five words that never grew tired across the generations.

The move across the street seems more permanent now than it ever did last year. The old place is coming down in hunks and chunks — “It looks like ruins,” Yankee manager Joe Girardi said — and soon there really will only be memories where Ruth and DiMaggio and Mantle did their finest work.

No, as much as the new Yankee Stadium saw last year — all those walk-off wins, all those pies to the face, all those postseason victories and that one final, glorious, championship-clinching win against the Phillies — today is when it officially becomes the Yankees’ home for good.

This morning I see a guy on the train reading Kill All Your Darlings, a fine collection of essays by Luc Sante. So we chat for a minute and I get to thinking about this wonderful essay by Sante, My Lost City:

The idea of writing a book about New York City1 first entered my head around 1980, when I was a writer more wishfully than in actual fact, spending my nights in clubs and bars and my days rather casually employed in the mailroom of this magazine. It was there that Rem Koolhaas’s epochal Delirious New York fell into my hands. “New York is a city that will be replaced by another city” is the phrase that sticks in my mind. Koolhaas’s book, published in 1978 as a paean to the unfinished project of New York the Wonder City, seemed like an archaeological reverie, an evocation of the hubris and ambition of a dead city.2 I gazed wonderingly at its illustrations, which showed sights as dazzling and remote as Nineveh and Tyre. The irony is that many of their subjects stood within walking distance: the Chrysler Building, the McGraw-Hill Building, Rockefeller Center. But they didn’t convey the feeling they had when they were new. In Koolhaas’s pages New York City was manifestly the location of the utopian and dystopian fantasies of the silent-film era. It was Metropolis, with elevated roadways, giant searchlights probing the heavens, flying machines navigating the skyscraper canyons. It was permanently set in the future.

The New York I lived in, on the other hand, was rapidly regressing. It was a ruin in the making, and my friends and I were camped out amid its potsherds and tumuli. This did not distress me—quite the contrary. I was enthralled by decay and eager for more: ailanthus trees growing through cracks in the asphalt, ponds and streams forming in leveled blocks and slowly making their way to the shoreline, wild animals returning from centuries of exile. Such a scenario did not seem so far-fetched then. Already in the mid-1970s, when I was a student at Columbia, my windows gave out onto the plaza of the School of International Affairs, where on winter nights troops of feral dogs would arrive to bed down on the heating grates. Since then the city had lapsed even further. On Canal Street stood a five-story building empty of human tenants that had been taken over from top to bottom by pigeons. If you walked east on Houston Street from the Bowery on a summer night, the jungle growth of vacant blocks gave a foretaste of the impending wilderness, when lianas would engird the skyscrapers and mushrooms would cover Times Square.

Bring in the bass…

Previewing the Angels…

Meanwhile, Tyler Kepner gives his first impressions of Target Field:

You cannot overstate how cool the massive old-fashioned Twins logo in center field is. The Minneapolis and St. Paul characters will share a neon handshake every time a Twin hits a homer. Like the Mets’ apple or Bernie Brewer’s slide or the Phillies’ giant Liberty Bell, this is a distinctive feature that will have special appeal to kids.

…As Peter Pascarelli of ESPN points out, it doesn’t remind you of anywhere else, and that’s a good thing. But there are some of the best elements of other parks, like the evergreen trees behind the center field fence (similar to Coors Field in Denver) and the nearby downtown skyline, like Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Cleveland.

Martine’s Legs, By Henri Cartier-Bresson (1968)

Love this bass line, man.

The classic is still classic even if modern editions don’t include the recipe for simmered porcupine.

Admittedly, when your team finishes dead last and does so mostly with mediocre veterans and an insufficient amount of young talent, it’s difficult to find the silver lining. It’s sort of like the guy standing on the deck of Titanic shouting, “What a wonderful view we have of that shiny iceberg!” That’s the kind of blind optimism that all of us find annoying–if not downright nauseating.

If there was a bright spot to be found on the awful 1990 Yankees, it was Roberto Kelly. On a team bogged down with too many Bob Gerens and Oscar Azocars, Kelly was a legitimately talented prospect. He possessed four of the requisite five tools, lacking only in arm strength, which was merely average for a center fielder. Kelly also looked like a pure bred athlete. Long and lean, but well toned from top to bottom, Kelly played the game elegantly. Scouts looking for a recipe of future stardom did not need to look any farther than the graceful Kelly.

From day one, Kelly brandished a picturesque swing from the right side of the plate. I felt that if Kelly could improve his pitch-taking ability even slightly, he could become a consistent .310 to .320 hitter who could hit 25 home runs, steal 30 bases, and draw 50 to 60 walks a season. Well, it didn’t happen. In some ways, Kelly peaked during his 1989 season, when he batted .302 with 41 walks in his first full major league campaign. After that, his patience at the plate never improved, his batting average regressed substantially, and his strikeout totals mounted. Offensively, Kelly increased only his power, as he reached a high of 20 home runs in 1991. Even in the outfield, Kelly’s progress seemed to flatline. Although he covered a substantial amount of ground with his gliding gait, he sometimes made bad breaks on batted balls and too often looped his throws into no-man’s land. Instead of getting better, Kelly simply stagnated, and in some areas, retrenched into mediocrity. For a Yankee team desperately in search of building blocks, Roberto Kelly was becoming a frustrating liability.

(more…)

Thanks to Baseball Think Factory for the link.

A few days ago, Torii Hunter called Hideki Matsui, “The Los Angeles Godzilla of Anaheim.”

Well, done, sir.

What are you favorite baseball nicknames? I’m of the Bob Lemon School and think you should just call everyone “Meat.”

PREFACE: Writing a game recap on the Sunday of the Masters Tournament is not the easiest thing to do for a golf nut like myself. I guess that’s what DVR is for. Not knowing what I should watch sandwiched between my daughter’s naps and my wife’s grading schedule, I decided to record both. I zipped through the Yankee game first and then caught up to the goings-on at Augusta National later on. Deadlines are deadlines…

The YES telecast was odd. The pregame show featured a segment with Michael Kay and Tino Martinez venturing into the stadium and dissecting key points to the game from a couple of empty seats. This being the first YES game I’ve seen this season, I don’t know if this is a one-off experiment or a regular feature to break up the previous formula of keeping the broadcasters off camera and filling that spot with video (B-roll). If you’ve read my work here for the past three seasons, you know I like to watch the games on mute — an old habit from my days working at YESNetwork.com — so this feature was even more hilarious with Tino Martinez moving his mouth and having no sound come out. Based on the reviews, that’s not too far from what happens with the sound on.

The new graphics and layout look clean and are clearly tweaked for HD. The pitch counter is a nice addition to the bug in the upper left-hand corner. That bug has also been condensed so that it doesn’t extend across the entire top border of the screen.

The question heading into Sunday, as it seems to be every time A.J. Burnett takes the mound, is “Which guy will show up?” The first inning featured the version we’ve come to sort of expect, going back to last October: 21 pitches, two runs allowed, two hits, a walk, only one first-pitch strike to the six batters he faced. His weakness in holding runners played a factor into the two runs scored, as both Jason Bartlett and Carl Crawford stole second to set the table for the Rays’ lead. Bartlett took advantage of Burnett throwing an off-speed pitch, while Crawford just beat a bang-bang play on a pitch-out, which featured a strong throw from Jorge Posada.

Rays starter James Shields, although he may not possess the explosive stuff of Burnett — or implosive, depending on the day — does have similar foibles. Mainly, Shields is prone to falling behind early in the count and opening up innings for the opposition. The Yankees adhered to that scouting report in the second inning, when A-Rod led off with a walk and three batters later, Curtis Granderson ripped a 3-1 fastball into the right-field corner to cut the deficit to 2-1.

The meat of the order — A-Rod, Robinson Canó, Jorge Posada and Granderson — forced Shields into a similar predicament the next time around in the fourth inning. But after A-Rod led off with a double and Posada walked with one out, Granderson and Swisher stranded them both to kill the rally.

Burnett, on the other hand, found his rhythm after hiccuping his way through the first inning. He retired 10 straight batters from the point when he walked Evan Longoria in the first and B.J. Upton in the fourth. He fired first-pitch strikes to nine of those 10 hitters. Pat Burrell’s leadoff single in the fifth — the first hit allowed by Burnett since the first inning — came on a 2-0 count.

(more…)

Last Sunday I was in Albeturkey and I stopped by to watch some high school kids play.

Today, the Yanks and Rays play indoors down in Tampa. Rubber game and all. Todd Drew’s boy, AJ Burnett on the hill as the Yanks look to win the series.

Second turn for Tino Martinez in the broadcast booth today. I figure Tino–eager to please in the manner of an over-achieving high school junior–to be awful on TV. Another boring ex-jock chock full of cliches. Company Man. But with O’Neill on Friday night in the blowout, he had a few moments of insight, some self-deprecating humor. Who knows, maybe he’ll have some spark, after all.

Big shoes to fill, though. I thought Coney was a budding star and he certainly was the most entertaining, unpredictable, and candid analyst on YES. If they ever get him together with Mex Hernandez, someone’s getting arrested.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

So sorry I’m late, guys. But better late than never a game thread for the Saturday Fox Game of the Week.

Grill and serve.