Merry Christmas, y’all. (Pictures and words from Walt Kelly.)

There were the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots and these dudes, the Golden Gate Quartet.

Niz, Briz.

Did you ever order a Coke and get a Diet Coke by accident? I have a sensitive palette and can’t abide diet soda. It tastes all wrong to me. That’s how I felt from the opening credits of Up in the Air, the new George Clooney vehicle. I just didn’t care for the taste. And I wanted to like it.

The movie looks good and features solid acting (Vera Farmiga is especially alluring) and there are a few winning light comedic scenes but I didn’t believe a minute of it, the rhythm, the dialogue, anything. The tone was off–not off-beat, just off. I thought it was cynical, self-satified, and phony. Not clever or funny but sour, a lemon. I know a lot of people have enjoyed it (it really spoke to Joe Pos, for instance). But for me, it simply didn’t taste right.

This one comes from the Mrs…

Hey Yo Tip What’s Wrong With Snails?

Following baseball these days–following anything in pop culture, really–can be dizzying. There is so much analysis and commentary from so many places that it is difficult to keep up with it all. I don’t Tweet which puts me behind the curve. But I read as much as I can, as quickly as I can point and click, so that opinions and facts are coming out of my ears. It is tough to tell the experts from the amateurs and vice versa.

Where do you turn?  Who is reliable? This probably depends on your bent. And while the volume can be overwhelming, the sheer amount of information that is available is impressive and often rewarding. It just requires time and the ability to filter the nuggets from the rubbish, which is easier said than done.

l find that Tyler Kepner is doing a great job of covering the Yankees for the New York Times. He mixes reporting (the quality that is most often missing from the blogosphere) and analysis especially well at the Bats blog. He isn’t the only one thriving these days, but his efforts stand-out. We’re lucky to have him on the beat but his talents have become broader than just a guy who covers the Yankees.

Chalk one up for the good guys.

One year ago today, Todd Drew wrote his final post for Bronx Banter (and for all I know it was the last thing he ever wrote, period). The next day he went into the hospital. He never made it out. We miss him terribly at the Banter though his spirit lives on. I’m sure he’d relish all the Hot Stove activity, all the kibbitzing, all the passion.

So here’s raising a toast in his honor. Spill a little on the ground, and enjoy a moment of silence to remember out dear friend.

Here is his final post, which is grace under pressure if I’ve ever seen it:

SHADOW GAMES: Baseball and Me

By Todd Drew

I went to a baseball game after my father’s funeral. I also went to one after finding out about my mother’s brain cancer.

It was selfish and heartless. I felt guilty before and embarrassed after, but for nine innings I felt only the game. That’s the way it’s always been between baseball and me.

It was my friend when I didn’t have any others. And it has always been there to talk or listen or simply to watch.

Baseball helps me forget and it makes me remember. That’s why it was exactly what I needed on the worst days of my life.

But there were no games when a doctor told me that I had cancer. The neighborhood was out of baseball on that cold November day. No one was playing at Franz Sigel Park or John Mullaly Park. And there wasn’t even a game of catch in Joyce Kilmer Park. The last game at the old Yankee Stadium was long gone and Opening Day at the new Yankee Stadium was long off.

So I went home and wished for one of those summer days when I was a kid and my mother would send me to the ballpark with a paper sack stuffed with her famous tuna-fish sandwiches. That was back when you could slip through a delivery gate with the beer kegs and watch batting practice. And it was always okay to come home late with a beat-up scorecard and popcorn stuck between your teeth.

The doctor told me that tomorrow’s surgery and chemotherapy treatment might keep me in the hospital for 10 days.

“At least it’s December,” I said. “There aren’t any ballgames to miss.”

And I will be ready to slip through a delivery gate with the beer kegs when the new Yankee Stadium opens. I’ll watch batting practice with one of my mother’s famous tuna-fish sandwiches and come home late with a beat-up scorecard and popcorn stuck between my teeth.

Cancer can’t change the way it will always be between baseball and me.

First Nick Johnson. Is Javier Vazquez next?

Update: Yes, with LOOGY Boone Logan for Melky, LHP Michael Dunn, and pitching prospect Arodys Vizcaino. So who goes to the bullpen? Joba or Hughes? And does this mean Granderson’s in left with Gardner in center, or is there one more big move on the way?

Update: With Arodys Vizcaino in the deal, does your opinion of the trade change?

Update: Fangraphs thinks both teams win here.

You won’t get the chance to kick Jason Marquis around, ya snot-nosed punks.

Since we hail from the Bronx, it is high time we served-up some Boogie Down Productions.

Here’s a classic from the second BDP record:

Fresh! For ’88, You Suckas!

Click here for the original sample from Stanley Turrentine.

Dig this terrific Aretha mix by Oliver Wang.

The movie Crazy Heart is dedicated to a musician, the late Stephen Burton. My pal John Schulian, an avid country music fan, e-mailed me this weekend about Burton:

Bruton was one of those classic Texas guys. His daddy, Sumpter Bruton, owned the best jazz record shop in Fort Worth. Bruton himself settled in Austin and played guitar and mandolin in bands that backed Bonnie Raitt, Kris Kristofferson and Billy Joe Shaver. Only late in life did he gain confidence in his own singing and songwriting, and he wrote some great damn songs. I’ll send you my favorite from youtube. Every Sunday night he and a bunch of other great Austin musicians got together at the Saxon Pub and played in a band called the Resentments. Yeah, I’ve got a T-shirt and all the albums they put out as a result of popular demand. Bruton was a good guy. I met him a couple times between sets while he was hanging around outside having a smoke — and there, I suppose, is the bad habit that killed him. But he kept picking until the end, working on Kristofferson’s last album and helping Burnett with the Crazy Heart score.

How about this for a Jeff Bridges Film Festival?

The Last Picture Show
Fat City
The Last American Hero
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
Cutter’s Way
Starman
Tucker
The Fabulous Baker Boys
The Fisher King
American Heart
The Big Lebowski
Crazy Heart

I love gibberish.

We had a decent snow storm in New York last night, so I was up early this morning digging out Emily’s car. Which felt good because I was looking for a way to make up for being a schmuck about countless other things around the house (can you actually say that your wife is a nag if you are a lazy dope who turns her into one?) My neighbor Louie was out there too. His wife’s car looked ready to run a race. “I was out here at five a.m.,” he said.

Louie worked for an insurance company located in the Twin Towers but was at a doctor’s appointment that fateful Tuesday morning. He lost all of his co-workers, more than 500 in all. He says he hasn’t been the same since. He isn’t as lively as before. But he got married to a nurse, a great gal named Bee (half-Mexican, half Puerto Rican, Louie calls her a “Chicarican”). Louie has had a tough time finding work ever since but his pension kicks in starting in February. He wants to have us over to celebrate.

Meanwhile, he’s a great neighbor, always looking for a way to help, looking to keep useful. He gave me some rock salt this morning as I was digging out my wife’s car and then we went over to the cafe to pick up breakfast.

Uh, this can’t be a comfortable development.

According to Tyler Kepner in the Times:

[Johnny] Damon said in a text message Friday that the Yankees had offered two years and $14 million, while he had offered to return for two years and $20 million. That was true, a Yankees official confirmed, but by then, the Yankees and Johnson had nearly finished their deal and it was too late to turn back.

The official, who was granted anonymity because the Johnson deal has not been announced, said that Damon’s agent, Scott Boras, wanted a two-year, $26 million deal when he spoke with General Manager Brian Cashman on Wednesday.

In a telephone interview, though, Boras said the Yankees did not begin negotiations with him until Thursday at 4 p.m., when they proposed the two-year, $14 million offer. Boras said he soon countered at two years and $20 million, and Cashman rejected it.

Why didn’t they want Damon back at two-years, $20 million?

Not sure I’m understanding the Yankees’ thinking here.

I went to see Crazy Heart last night and was not disappointed. It is a good, unaffected movie that provides satisfying pleasures, notably getting to watch Jeff Bridges in the lead role. He’s a great American actor and he’s in top form here. It is a story that we’ve seen countless times–it made me think of the Verdict and the Wrestler, but without the tension–but while it is familiar it doesn’t feel stale. It also isn’t self-consciously “small.” The tone feels spot-on (and so does the music), slack, just like Bad Blake (Bridges).

The photography is excellent, and the director, Scott Cooper, cuts between tight shots of Bridges on stage–you feel as if you are in his whiskers–and long shots of the big open sky in the southwest. Bridges carries the movie with grace. He doesn’t make a false step, and the supporting cast of Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall are outstanding too. I don’t think Gyllenhaal has ever been lovelier–she’s radiant. She comes to interview Bad Blake in his hotel room and he says something about how she makes the rest of the room look ugly, and he’s right. She blushes and he says he can’t remember the last time he’d seen somebody blush and that feels so right too.

Farrell plays Bridges’ former protoge who is now a big star. The filmmakers and Farrell display admirable restraint in his scenes which would have been easy to turn into a satire. He plays a cheese-ball pop singer and he sounds like one too, but he isn’t ridiculed for it, lending his scenes on stage with Bridges depth and subtlety. Actually, that is what the movie really offers, some nice, subtle moments. Actors at the top of their game, working together, nothing showy. Duvall shows up half-way through and threatens to ruin the continuity because he’s “Robert Duvall.” But he slides right into the story, and he’s crackles. His scenes with Bridges are wonderful, especially the one where they go fishing together (I love the camera move in that scene as well).

The ending doesn’t really work, but it didn’t disturb my enjoyment much. The pleasures this movie offers might be humble but they are sustaining.

Right on time for Friday night, one of my favorite cuts of ’em all:

And here’s the Sister Nancy sample:

Topps issued this card, its final regular card for Mickey Mantle, during the spring of 1969. The listed position of “first base” doesn’t seem quite right for an all-time great outfielder, but “The Mick” looks good here, still handsome and his weight under control. Yet, he didn’t play that season. After reporting to spring training, Mantle decided that his aching knees, along with the rest of his diminishing skills, simply mandated that he call it quits. I wish that Mantle had played a little bit longer, if only to allow me to have remembered seeing him play.

Even thought I have no first-hand recollections of Mantle, that doesn’t mean that I never saw him take the field. Quite the contrary. My family occasionally delights in telling me how I used to walk up to our black-and-white television set as a small child, and then begin jumping and screaming when I saw Mantle step up to the plate. This would have been in 1967 or ’68, when I was either two or three years old. So you can see how I wouldn’t remember these episodes. But my family assures me that they actually did happen.

What can a three-year-old know about baseball? I suppose I could have recognized a home run when it was hit, but my knowledge of secondary leads, the roles of middle relievers, and the intricacies of the infield fly rule must have fallen a bit short of diehard standards. I’m not even sure how I knew Mantle was the man on those Yankees. After all, he was at the end of his career, struggling to play a new position at first base, and merely a shell of the five-tool ballplayer who had helped center field become the position of glamour in New York City during the 1950s. Perhaps my father clued me into Mantle’s importance. I can just hear him whispering to me, “One day, this guy will be in the Hall of Fame.”

In spite of my early obsession with Mr. Mantle, I somehow lost touch with his legacy. During the 1970s, I had little interest in Yankee history; I was far more concerned with Bobby Murcer (and then Bobby Bonds), along with Thurman Munson and Mel Stottlemyre, followed by the wave of winning that came to town in the form of Jim “Catfish” Hunter, Ron Guidry, and Reggie Jackson. By then, the Yankees of the 1960s had become forgotten. I had no memories of those teams; if anything, I was tired of hearing that the Yankees’ last period of glory had come to an end in 1964.

(more…)

Ken Rosenthal says enough already, the Yanks and Johnny Damon/Scott Boras all need to recognize: they need each other.

Who didn’t like Nick Johnson? He was a good kid, a pleasant, chubby-cheekedguy with a sweet swing and a good glove. Larry Bowa’s nephew. The one who never could stay healthy. A nice Yankee that fell away. 

Well, according to Ken Davidoff, he’s back, to the tune of one-year and five-and-a-half million. Why Johnson and not Godzilla Matsui? I can’t call it. Davidoff goes on to say that this surely spells the end of Johnny Damon in pinstripes. So no Matsui, no Damon, but Nick Johnson?

All I can think of is that noise that Scooby Doo used to make when he was confused, “BBBOORRPP?”

It’s not that I’m unhappy to see Johnson back–I’ve always liked his game and he’ll make an ideal number 2 hitter behind Derek Jeter–but I wonder if he can stay healthy and more to the point, I wonder what else the Yanks have up their sleeve. Johnson alone is not enough. Or am I missing something?

Hmmmm.