This is one of those fun games where all the analysis goes out the window because you can basically see any number of things happen. Pedro could get bombed, AJ could get bombed. Burnett could throw a gem. Pedro could be decent. He could maybe plunk somebody, just cause, you know? Homers and errors and relief pitchers and it’s past midnight and they are still playing. Or a pitcher’s duel. How about a so-so game, where they both allowe 3 or 5 runs in 5 or 6 innings. I can’t call it. And that’s the beauty part, right?

It’s one of those games that could be pedestrian but feels like it’s going to be surreal and nuts like so:

For pure theater, it should be good. Pedro Martinez has been a great bad guy in the Bronx and never fails to angry up the blood.

Pedro is one of the few players that draws upon the hatred of a crowd instead of needing to respond off the enthusiasm of a home crowd (and that’s the difference between Pedro and Cole Hamels according to the men that make the moves for the Phillies). Course I’d love nothing more than to see him get served, but with Pedro, you never know. Who’ll be shocked if he pitches a gem? He’s a great artist and you never know with those guys if they’ve got one last great flourish in them.

He’s never pitched in the new Yankee Stadium, that’s one thing. I’m sure the Yankee hitters will be happy to face him compared with Cliff Lee.  Yeah, the offense should be fine tonight. Yes, Joe Girardi is already working hard starting Jerry Hairston over Eric Hinske or Brett Gardner. But the mashers are supposed to mash here, so, c’mon: mash dummies.

The $99,000 question is what it has been all season: Burnett.

We’ve said all year long around here, the Yanks win the World Serious if they’ve got Burnett pitching well.

Nu? So, C’mon Meat. You kin do it. We’ll be dying right with ya.

Bombs Away, Fellas.

Let’s Go Ya-Kees!

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Jerry Hairston in for Nick Swisher; Jose Molina in for Jorge Posada.

Like the Hairston move, but as for Molina…Yipe!

Word-for-word, piece-for-piece, I think Lee Jenkins is one of the best writers at Sports Illustrated these days. His latest piece, previewing the Serious in this week’s issue, is on Blastmaster Ryan Howard:

Howard’s bat measures a stout 35 inches, 34 ounces, but in his hands it looks like a toothpick.

Those hands, big as a middle infielder’s mitt, are what former Phillies general manager Pat Gillick noticed the first time he saw Howard play six years ago in the Arizona Fall League. When Gillick is scouting a player, he looks forward to shaking the player’s hand. A strong handshake portends home run power. “That’s where the evaluation begins,” Gillick says. When he thinks back on the strongest handshakes he has felt in more than 40 years of scouting, he rattles off some formidable names: Eddie Murray, George Bell, Alex Rodriguez and Howard. (After shaking this reporter’s hand, Gillick said, “Didn’t hit many home runs, did you?” So true.)

Teammates compare Howard’s drives to golf shots because they backspin out of the ballpark and don’t stop rising until they’re out of sight. “When you hit one flush, you don’t feel a thing,” Howard says. “You just hear the pop.”

Speaking of Howard, I know I’ve mentioned this before, but man, does he ever remind me of the Boogie Down’s own, Kris Parker, KRS-ONE for short.

Okay, enough with the calmness. Time to start getting amped.

I was saddened to hear the news that Terry Miller, Marvin Miller’s wife, has passed away. Tim McCarver mentioned it during the broadcast last night.

I met her once, in their apartment, almost two years ago. It was the day before Christmas and they were celebrating their 68th wedding anniversary that day. I came on business and brought her flowers. She had short hair and wore a necklace that looked straight out of the Sixties. She was pleasent but tough. Not cold, just tough. Their apartment was bright and flooded with light (it is where the Miller interviews from Ken Burns’ Baseball were shot). It was clean and decorated in a minimal style. I imagined there would be more books. A copy of my book on Curt Flood was on one of their shelves which will forever be a part of my personal highlight reel.

I didn’t stay long. But it was a great honor to meet them both.

Terry Miller was 90.

So sayeth Pedro the Mouth, the man Yankee fans love to hate.

I was e-mailing with a friend this morning who played ball in college. He wrote:

I want to see a ton of hard hit balls tonight. I want LOUD outs when they make outs. Give AJ the lead, rip Pedro early, don’t let him sit there mugging for the cameras after 4 scoreless, reducing AJ to a supporting character in Pedro’s comeback drama. AJ will not react well to that, if it’s a staredown, AJ will blink first. Win tonight and any scenario is back on the table for the Yanks.

Pedro’s pitches are much slower and much less intimidating. He CANNOT throw the fastball by them, so he will try to get everybody out with the changeup. This is high school baseball strategy for the hitters: when the opposing pitcher canot throw the fastball by you, you adjust your approach. You try to hit the slow stuff up the middle and try to take the fastball the other way. If you gear your timing to the slow stuff, you can’t be fooled. I won’t be upset if they guess fastball while ahead in the count and take big swings and misses, but there should be minimal strikeouts and minimal weak shit induced by being way out in front of the changeup. With 2 strikes, stay back, hit the changeup back up the middle, fastball the other way.

Sounds like a plan.

No reason to get un-Dude, here. Lee was a sombitch, not much you can do about that (I couldn’t decide if I hated him or loved him for his deadpan Buster Keaton catch). We’ll have plenty of time to get amped about Mr. Pedro and Mr. Burnett as the day rolls along.

For now, how about a deep breath, and some lightness of being:

It is raining in New York City. The sidewalks are covered with leaves. But that can’t squarsh our excitement.

And more from us:

Over at Baseball Prospectus, Jay previews the Serious. Be sure to pop by Jay’s live chat this afternoon, starting at 2 p.m. est too.

The Yankees’ hard-fought six-game win over the pesky Angels has me thinking: this is the franchise’s second most satisfying American League pennant of my lifetime. Now I’m sure that a few Yankee fans will point to the 1996 Championship Series, which ended a 15-year World Series drought, or the 2003 pennant, capped off by the unlikely home run from a slumping Aaron Boone against the dreaded Red Sox. Without question, those two watershed postseason moments rate very near the top of the list, but in my mind, the 2009 pennant victory over the Angels ranks as second only to the satisfaction that came in the fall of 1976.

As a Yankee fan who was born during the winter of 1965, I had known only of mediocre baseball in New York, brief moments of unsustainable success, and a string of perennial also-ran finishes, a period of frustration that lasted through the end of the 1975 season. My early years as a baseball fan exposed me to the decline and retirement of Mickey Mantle, the unfulfilled promise of Johnny Ellis, the torn rotator cuff of Mel Stottlemyre, and the all-too-frequent domination by the rival Baltimore Orioles. By the summer of 1976, when I turned 11 years old, I was ready for some newfound success and an end to the nostalgic pining for the glory days of the early 1960s.

The bicentennial year brought not only a yearlong celebration of the country’s independence, but also the best Yankee team of my young life. Guided by a brilliant Billy Martin, who was in his vintage years as a manager, the Yankees won the American League East despite the lack of a legitimate cleanup man. A nice fellow named Chris Chambliss, a solid figure of a first baseman and a voice of reason in a chaotic clubhouse, occupied the cleanup role in caretaker fashion. He would serve the Yankees respectably as the No. 4 hitter (or the fifth-place hitter against left-handers), but fell several rungs short of stardom and was really only buying time in the middle of the order until the Yankees could acquire someone of more Ruthian quality. Or Jacksonian quality, as the case would be.

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Playin’ Records.

This is one is so hype. (I dig it to death.)

This one is so sweet.

How about makin’ records? Like Pete.

Or using them to sell smokes. Like Fred.

Also…Hinske in, Guzman out.

According to Sam Borden at the LoHud Yankee blog, Pedro Martinez will start Game 2 in the Bronx.

That’s juicy, man.

Baby, baby.

I was not accepted into college. Didn’t have the grades to get in. I had planned to go to art school so I focused on my portfolio (sort of), and didn’t care about grades. Then, when I changed my mind about art school during my senior year, I was in a bad spot. Not getting into any school, was humiliating.

During freshman year of college when all of my friends were away, I lived with my father in my grandparent’s apartment in Manhattan, took three classes at Hunter college, and worked for a post-production company in midtown. Economics, Anthropology and a 400 level course on Samuel Beckett. I barely passed the first two, but tackled the Beckett class with enthusiasm and earned a B.

I didn’t understand a lot of what I was reading or what the professor was talking about. But I faked it well enough (I put a lot of effort into faking it.) I’ll never forget studying for the mid-term. I was sitting at the dining room table of my grandparent’s apartment, hand-written notes covering half of the table, when my father’s friend Jim Nolan dropped by.

Jim wore a leather bomber jacket and had the rugged good looks and easy charm of the kind of blue collar hard guy that Gene Hackman or Paul Newman played in the movies. Tough but tender. Funny, but in a sly way. Not an intellectual. Not from New York.

Jim sat down with me and asked what I was studying. I told him about the mid-term and Beckett and everything I had to study. I picked up a piece of paper and said, “Nothing is more real than nothing.” He looked at me waiting for more. “Descartes said that,” I added.

Jim thought for a long moment. “Nothing is more real than nothing.” He considered it some more. Then: “You know what? I wish that guy was sitting right here, right now cause…I’d…like…” Jim thought some more. “…to…punch him right in the mouth. Nothing is more real than nothing. Yeah, I’d like to punch him right in the fuggin face.”

That’s my favorite Jim Nolan story and it jumped to mind last night as I read an article in The New Yorker about Wes Anderson. I couldn’t figure out who I wanted to punch more–Anderson or the guy who wrote the article.

I just got a subscription (a birthday gift) and this was my first issue–I haven’t read the magazine on a regular basis since I was in high school and Pauline Kael was still writing for them. And it serves me right that an over-written and meandering profile of Anderson (with talk about “mood” and “tone”), who I find hopelessly self-absorbed and precious, was there to greet me.

Pow, right in the kisser.

Over at ESPN.com, Howard Bryant takes a look at a Boffo World Serious match-up:

This is the World Series everyone who cares about top-shelf baseball has been waiting for: a National League team that plays with an American League attitude — and actually has a power threat on its bench to play designated hitter — that features a comparable, fearsome lineup versus the pre-eminent American League team, with a $200 million-plus payroll in its inaugural year in its $1.3 billion stadium built for one purpose — to win the World Series at all costs.

How both teams arrived at the summit underscored the critical distance between each and its closest competitors, and neither has been challenged this postseason the way they will challenge each other during the coming week.

…Underneath the global issues lie delicious subplots: Pedro Martinez pitching once again against the Yankees in a pressure situation; Lee and Sabathia, the two former Cleveland aces, pitching against each other instead of as the front end of a pitching rotation as they once did. Two homer-friendly ballparks not necessarily favoring either home team will provide the stage, two rabid fan bases providing the acoustics. And there will be no shortage of stars: Cy Young winners Martinez, Lee and Sabathia; World Series MVPs Rivera, Cole Hamels and Derek Jeter; and regular-season MVPs Rodriguez, Howard and Rollins. If the World Series has been something of a dud this decade — three of the past five Series have been four-game sweeps and none has gone beyond five games, while the Series hasn’t reached a Game 7 since the Angels beat the Giants in 2002 — Phillies-Yankees portends to provide the antidote.

There is an interesting review of Mark Frost’s new book about Game Six of the 1975 World Serious over at Pitchers and Poets:

Game Six is a difficult to review because it seems to reach in so many different directions. Foremost is the action of the game, which carries the narrative momentum forward, and even constantly broken up by various back stories, manages to maintain coherence. Frost writes in enough detail, and with enough perspective, that even taken alone, the game sequences would never be mistaken for a newspaper recap. His description of Carlton Fisk’s famous twelfth-inning home run, allotted an entire chapter, merits a special mention for its lyricism.

Then there are the various back stories. If the action of the game is the book’s engine, then these histories are its cargo. They are what make Game Six valuable, but also at times what make it unbearably weighty. These are histories of commentators and coaches, players and owners, even of the franchises, their cities, and of baseball itself dating back to the 19th century. Their goal is a raising of the stakes. Framed by all these things, the game is meant to take on greater significance. But while none of the stories seem extraneous, their vitality and immediacy are inconsistent; some lend urgency to the action on the field, others are merely anecdotal.

These kinds of books, re-creating the past, are tough to pull off. Anyone read this one yet?

Yanks finally tame the Halos:

Larry Roibal, on-point once again:

Yeah, that was goodness all around last night, wasn’t it?

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The Yanks have given us a wonderful season so far. It’s been as good as any in recent memory, really it has. Tonight gives the biggest game of the year, the first truly big game at the new Yankee Stadium. Here’s Cliff’s take, leftover from yesterday.

As you know, I’m generally a nervous fan, but after the Yanks lost Game Five I felt confident that they’d come back and close the Angels out in Game Six. Then there was an extra day off and now the butterflies have taken over and I’m Shook Bird like so:

I don’t remember the last time I felt this anxious.

I still say the Yanks find a way to win this series because I don’t want to fathom them not winning. As bad as things felt in 2004 I wasn’t surprised by it. The Red Sox were due. That they won in dramatic fashion made some kind of cosmic sense. I get that. But now, this is the Yankees’ time. Course the Angels won’t go out like chumps but it’s time for Good Andy and the Bombers to flex and be:

FRESH for 2009, you suckas!

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

It is warm but raining in New York.

Bob…

Some laughs.

sss

At least the Yanks made them earn it.  Okay, that’s the good spin. Of course, I’ve been mulling over the various failures–AJ Burnett, an unfortunate fastball right down the pipe to Vlad Guerrero, Nick Swisher’s final at bat, Joe Girardi’s drive to become tighter than Gene Mauch’s ass–but in a game the Angels had to win, the Yanks didn’t roll over.

Today is one of those challenging days…is the glass half-full or half-empty? Did the Yankees blow their chance or will they pick themselves off the mat and roll come Saturday night–if the weather holds up, that is. (I believe they will come out strong in Game Six.) Got too much time on our hands, either way.

Fug it, Dude, let’s go bowling.

Oh, I got the day off from work. But I live on the seventh floor of my building and they are doing work on the roof. So guess who was up early?

Oy and veh. Fug it, I’m going to the movies:

It was the best of games, it was the worst of games, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

Well, at least nobody got guillotined at the end of Game 5.

First it looked like the Yankees were going to go down quietly, after a first-inning blowup by AJ Burnett; then they made a dramatic late-inning rally and took the lead in the blink of Darren Oliver’s eye; then the bullpen faltered, and New York trailed again by just one; and then they loaded the bases in the 9th inning against skittish closer Brian Fuentes with two outs and a full count, and Nick Swisher popped up. The Angels won 7-6. Now that‘s the Angels-Yankees baseball we all know and love and discuss at length with our therapists.

A.J. Burnett looked just awful in the first, and the Angels took him apart: Figgins walked, Abreu doubled, Hunter singled,  Guerrero doubled, Morales singled, and when the smoke cleared, it was 4-0. The next few innings featured plenty of hard-hit balls, but Burnett – via a combination of unpredictable stuff and luck – got through them without allowing another run, and by the 4th or 5th he was in a groove and pitching well. Meanwhile, John Lackey turned in a impressive performance, and his breaking stuff was tying the Yankees in knots.

In the seventh inning, though, he finally faltered, and loaded the bases with two outs, at which point Mike Scioscia – in a move that would have been second-guessed endlessly had the Angels lost – yanked him for Darren Oliver. Lackey was furious – you could see him saying “This is mine! This is mine!’ when Scioscia came to the mound – and presumably got more so when Darren Oliver immediately gave up a three-run double to Mark Teixeira, who came out of his ALCS slump with a bang. The Angels, having seen enough of Alex Rodriguez, intentionally walked him; but Matsui singled, and then Robinson Cano whacked a triple that traveled so far, Matsui actually scored from first. The Yankees were up 6-4, and while it wasn’t the biggest comeback I’ve ever seen, it was probably one of the most sudden: boom, just like that.

But Burnett struggled when he came back out for the seventh, as Mathis singled and Aybar walked. Girardi then turned to Damaso “Gulp” Marte, who fielded a bunt and then got Abreu to ground out, but a run scored in the process. Next in was Phil Hughes, who walked Torii Hunter and then gave up singles to Guerrero and Morales. The Angels were back on top, 7-6. Mariano Rivera cleaned up Joba Chamberlain’s mess in the eighth, but although the Yankees came tantalizingly close to a two-out, ninth-inning rally (following a second intentional walk to A-Rod), they fell just short.

I’m sure people will spend much of the off-day arguing over who to blame, and that is the fan’s prerogative. But to me, while there were certainly plenty of managerial moves you could disagree with, the basic truth is that when AJ Burnett and Phil Hughes allow 7 runs to score on the road, that’s gonna be a tough game to win.

The Yankees are still up three games to two in the series, and they’re heading home to the Bronx – where, ridiculously priced half-empty oligarch seats aside, at least the fans don’t need any ThunderStix to make some noise – and so all is far from lost. With the NLCS already over, Game 6 has been moved from 4 PM Saturday afternoon to 8 at night. Andy Pettitte will be on the mound for the Yankees, and I will be at a dinner party, trying to decide exactly how rude I’m willing to be in order to check the score during the meal.