Today’s column is written as a fan, not from a myopic, academic viewpoint of the media’s coverage of the team.

I’ve been traveling a bunch over the past couple of weeks, doing a lot of driving. Naturally, since radio stinks and I don’t feel like listening to the same CDs on a loop, I fall into the sports talk radio trap. All I wanted to do yesterday on my drive to Pennsylvania was get into some Yankees-Red Sox chatter and analysis, since Aug. 6 has been marked on the calendar since the two teams were tied atop the AL East at the All-Star break.

Instead, I got drivel from Craig Carton about how last night’s game was a “look-ahead” or trap game, that it was irrelevant in the grand scheme. This, we all know, is ridiculous, because the victory combined with the Sox’ loss gives a 2 1/2 game cushion heading into the weekend. On ESPN Radio, I got next to nothing on Yankees-Red Sox ALL DAY. It was so bad that for two hours during the afternoon drive, Don LaGreca and Ian O’Connor, who were pinch-hitting for Michael Kay, were discussing why Eli Manning is not a beloved quarterback in New York and comparing his numbers to Joe Namath. Yes, for two hours.

(I don’t know about you, but as a fan I can’t really get into football until the Yankees are done. Let the Met-Jet fans get excited about football season now. They’ve got nothing else to root for. At this point, I don’t care about Manning’s contract or where he ranks among other NFL quarterbacks or debating the merits of his contract. It’s all about Yankees-Red Sox, dammit. Where are the priorities?)

Thank you to WFAN’s Evan Roberts and Joe Benigno for getting me through a crawling jam on the Belt Parkway during afternoon rush hour. They didn’t spend a lot of time on Yankees-Sox, but Roberts made a point to mention that this weekend is all about CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett. One caller asked to compare the Yankees’ record during their starts to the Red Sox’ record when Josh Beckett and John Lester have started. The Sox have a four-game edge — 30-13 to 26-18. In terms of the pitchers’ records, Beckett and Lester are a combined 22-11, while Sabathia and Burnett are a combined 21-12, an even one-game difference.

Roberts, who I covered many games with and for whom I have a great deal of respect, opined that neither Sabathia nor Burnett have performed to the “ace” level at which they’re being paid to perform. I will grant that based on the aforementioned records that may be true. All but Beckett are considered to be having off-years. Roberts went on to say that Sabathia and Burnett haven’t been “lockdown guys;” that if you polled Yankee fans if they have confidence the Yankees will win when Sabathia or Burnett are pitching, they’d say no.

I disagree on both counts.

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Over at It’s About the Money, (stupid!), there is a request that Joba Chamberlain concentrate on pitching and not acting the fool.

Here, here.

Paul Simon scored Buster. I thought this was pretty cool.

Congrats to Joe Posnaski to landing a senior writer gig at Sports Illustrated. And props to SI for nabbing Pos:

Dan Jenkins, when he was offered his job at Sports Illustrated, went to his friends at the newspaper in Texas and basically said (I wish I had my copy of my friend Michael’s book The Franchise with me so I could quote this properly): “I’d like to stay with y’all but … the New York Yankees just called.” I never wanted to play for the Yankees, of course, but I feel the sentiment. I had one of the best jobs in the world. I was offered the best.

So, sure, I took the job. It’s like Arthur says at the end of the movie: “I kept the money, I’m not crazy.”

Josh Wilker, one of the best and brightest we’ve got, shows us how to attain baseball happiness.

Mariano Rivera wasn’t his usual self last night. His “stuff” was good, the cutter had a big break to it, as broadcaster John Flaherty pointed-out several times. But he didn’t locate it well. A few runs scored on his watch (though they were charged to Phil Hughes), and the Jays narrowly missed the big hit that would sink the Yanks.

It was John Wettland time. A nail-biter, and an off-night for Rivera, who lowered his ERA to 1.96. He still earned the save. As Tyler Kepner points out over at the Bats blog, it was the 100th save for Rivera in his last 104 chances, dating back to early 2007.

“Let that sink in for a moment,” writes Kepner. “One hundred out of 104. And he turns 40 in three months. Incredible. Even on his rough nights, Rivera still inspires awe.”

The Yankees play a handful of games each year like this one, a brisk National League-style pitcher’s duel. The kind of game where both starting pitchers are on, the umpire has a liberal strike-zone, and the line drives find leather. It helps when Roy Halladay is pitching. He gave up a lead-off single to Jorge Posada in the seventh and still managed to get through the inning in six pitches and less than four minutes. It was twenty to nine. The game hit a speed-bump late when relief pitchers and base-runners, nerves and a little schvitzin’ took over. They still finished in a managable  two hours and thirty-five minutes.

Andy Pettitte had a crisp breaking ball and six strikeouts. He also was lucky. Derek Jeter snagged two line drives and Marco Scutaro lined-out twice to Alex Rodriguez. Melky Cabrera made a fine running catch to rob Vernon Wells of an extra base hit in the seventh. Pettitte was talking to himself, I saw him mouth “four-seamer” twice and had flashbacks to Game Six of the 2001 World Serious when he tipped his pitches. 

The veteran got himself into trouble in the fourth loading the bases with one out,  Yanks ahead 2-0. Alex Rios lined out to Eric Hinske for the second out and Aaron Hill scored (Hinske’s throw…well, at least he hit the cut-off man…on a bounce). But Pettitte re-grouped and hummed along until he gave up a bloop double and then a walk with two out in the seventh.Phil Hughes entered the game with a 0.95 ERA in twenty relief appearences, and John Blazed a couple of heaters past Jose Bautista him, then put his head to bed with a pretty uncle Charlie.

The Yanks scored twice against Halladay in the first inning and then he resumed his official duties as the Hit-Nazi (“No hits for you!”). Johnny Damon singled and scored on Rodriguez’s double to the gap in right-center field. They got a break when Halladay muffed a weak-feed from Kevin Millar, and Matsui reached on an error. Rodriguez rounded third and Halladay made a good throw to the plate, beating him. But Rodriguez slid into the catcher’s glove and knocked the ball free.

The Yanks had another shot a couole of innings later. First and third and Matsui got a hold of one. Rios and Vernon Wells converged in right center and at the last moment, Wells made a basket catch on the warning track, a few feet away from the electronic scoreboard on the outfield wall. After that, Halladay was a mother. Until the top of the eighth when Damon (18) and Mark Teixeira (27) hit back-to-back homers with two men out. I yelled and scared my wife. Moe Green, the kitten, a bona fide scaredy cat, took off. The older cat, nappin’ on the job, opened one eye, saw I was acting crazy and went back to sleep. I flexed and yelled some more and my wife told me to calm down. I overruled her and carried on.

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Just wondering if David Ortiz has gotten to the bottom of anything yet. While Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez were front page news for weeks because of their involvement with PEDs, Ortiz, after the initial news cycle, seems to be getting a pass. Are people just fed-up with it all? What gives?

There is a long interview with Gay Talese in the new edition of The Paris Review. This caught my attention:

INTERVIEWER: Are you equally interested in everyone you meet?

TALESE: One of the key facts of my life is that I was raised not in the home, but in a store. My father had been an apprentice to his cousin, a famous tailor in Paris who had movie stars and leading politicians as clients. My father left Paris in 1920 on a ship to Philadelphia. He hated Philadelphia and developed a respiratory problem, and someone suggested he move to the seashore. In Ocean City, New Jersey, he bought an old store on Asbury Avenue, the main business street, and he opened the Talese Town Shop. On one side of the store he set up a tailor shop. On the other side my mother, who had grown up in an Italian American neighborhood in Park Slope, Brooklyn, opened a dress shop. Above the store my parents had an apartment.
       The tailor business never really worked out. The craftsmen were fine, but there weren’t quite enough people in Ocean City who wanted to pay for handmade suits. So my mother became the wage earner. All the money we made was because of my mother selling dresses. She was successful because she had a way of getting women to talk about themselves. Her customers were, for the most part, large women, women who did not go to the beach in the summertime. My mother would give them clothes to try on that made them look better than they thought they had any right to look. She wasn’t a hustler. She made her sales because they trusted her and liked her, and she liked them back. I was there a lot—folding the dress boxes, dusting the counters, doing chores—and I learned a lot about the town by eavesdropping. These women, telling my mother their private stories, gave me an idea of a larger world.

…INTERVIEWER:  When did you realize that you had talent?

TALESE: Never. All I have is intense curiosity. I have a great deal of interest in other people and, just as importantly, I have the patience to be around them.

Talese has been one of my inspirations because he’s always been fascinated by the characters on the margins, and because of his unyiedling curiosity. I am a great fan of his journalism, particularly during his glory days at Esquire in the Sixites.

Earlier this year, Jonathan Van Meter wrote an excellent profile of Talese and his wife Nan, the celebrated book editor, in New York magazine. Talese does not come across as being sympathetic, but the piece provides a sharp look at his career, which imploded during and after the writing of “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” a book that became Talese’s “Apocalypse Now.”

Talese has a new book coming out about his marriage. I have no idea if it will be worth reading; I thought his last effort, “A Writer’s Life,” was meandering and dull.

If you are not familiar with Talese’s work, here is a selection of his essays, including Looking for Hemingway, a takedown of George Plimpton and his Paris Review crew, and perhaps Talese’s most celebrated story, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.

I went to Citifield last night and watched the Mets score five runs against Dan Haren and still lose.

“Whadda ya expect,” a fat guy in the Don Zimmer mold told me on the subway ride home. “These guys are a bunch of mo-mo’s. How are you gunna win with mo-mo’s?”

I had no words for him.

But I did learn that Joyce Randolph, who played “Trixie” on “The Honeymooners,” is Tim Redding’s great aunt.

Go figure that.

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Yaz is still Boston’s King in the clutch, according to Kirk Minihane of WEEI (Peace to the Think Factory for the link).

Michael Pollan had a long, but engaging piece in the Times magazine yesterday about state-of-the-art cooking shows and how they’ve changed the way we look at cooking and eating. First, he riffs on Julia Child:

The show felt less like TV than like hanging around the kitchen, which is to say, not terribly exciting to a kid (except when Child dropped something on the floor, which my mother promised would happen if we stuck around long enough) but comforting in its familiarity: the clanking of pots and pans, the squeal of an oven door in need of WD-40, all the kitchen-chemistry-set spectacles of transformation. The show was taped live and broadcast uncut and unedited, so it had a vérité feel completely unlike anything you might see today on the Food Network, with its A.D.H.D. editing and hyperkinetic soundtracks of rock music and clashing knives. While Julia waited for the butter foam to subside in the sauté pan, you waited, too, precisely as long, listening to Julia’s improvised patter over the hiss of her pan, as she filled the desultory minutes with kitchen tips and lore. It all felt more like life than TV, though Julia’s voice was like nothing I ever heard before or would hear again until Monty Python came to America: vaguely European, breathy and singsongy, and weirdly suggestive of a man doing a falsetto impression of a woman. The BBC supposedly took “The French Chef” off the air because viewers wrote in complaining that Julia Child seemed either drunk or demented.

That learning to cook could lead an American woman to success of any kind would have seemed utterly implausible in 1949; that it is so thoroughly plausible 60 years later owes everything to Julia Child’s legacy. Julie Powell [author of “Julie and Julia”] operates in a world that Julia Child helped to create, one where food is taken seriously, where chefs have been welcomed into the repertory company of American celebrity and where cooking has become a broadly appealing mise-en-scène in which success stories can plausibly be set and played out. How amazing is it that we live today in a culture that has not only something called the Food Network but now a hit show on that network called “The Next Food Network Star,” which thousands of 20- and 30-somethings compete eagerly to become? It would seem we have come a long way from Swanson TV dinners.

Pollan continues:

The Food Network can now be seen in nearly 100 million American homes and on most nights commands more viewers than any of the cable news channels. Millions of Americans, including my 16-year-old son, can tell you months after the finale which contestant emerged victorious in Season 5 of “Top Chef” (Hosea Rosenberg, followed by Stefan Richter, his favorite, and Carla Hall). The popularity of cooking shows — or perhaps I should say food shows — has spread beyond the precincts of public or cable television to the broadcast networks, where Gordon Ramsay terrorizes newbie chefs on “Hell’s Kitchen” on Fox and Jamie Oliver is preparing a reality show on ABC in which he takes aim at an American city with an obesity problem and tries to teach the population how to cook. It’s no wonder that a Hollywood studio would conclude that American audiences had an appetite for a movie in which the road to personal fulfillment and public success passes through the kitchen and turns, crucially, on a recipe for boeuf bourguignon. (The secret is to pat dry your beef before you brown it.)

But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them to do so. Cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing. But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the culture’s continuing, if not deepening, fascination with the subject. It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking about it — and watching it.

I am not an especially ambitious home cook but I enjoy the PBS cooking shows best because they show the audience how a dish is prepared (though the Martha Stewart produced cooking show is as bad as anything on The Food Network, with sexy close-up shots of the food, and amplified sizzling sounds from the pan, and virutally no instruction on how things are made).

But as Pollan explains, food shows are not about education these days. They are about turning you on and getting you hungry. Not the worst thing in the world, but as Pollan suggests, all these glossy TV shows have had one concrete result: they keep us out of the kitchen.

The annual SABR convention took place this past weekend in Washington D.C. Our own Diane Firstman was there and I’m sure she’ll have some stories to tell. I’m never been to a SABR function and don’t think I’d make the effort unless the festivities were held in New York. At the same time, I’m sure you could learn a ton just hanging around the hotel lobby.

Alan Schwarz has a piece on the convention in the Times, and over at The Hardball Times, Chris Jaffe lists ten things he didn’t know before SABR 39.

A writer friend once told me that one of the best things he ever did was play baseball in his Thirties. The experience gave him a true idea of how difficult the game is to play well. I played ball in high school but never competitively after that. And the truth is, I’ve become less physically active in my Thirties, which is to say I’m far from being in-shape. Still, I’ve been hanging around the Uptown Sports Complex near me in the west Bronx for a story I’m working on, and today I had my second hitting lesson in the past couple of weeks. Hitting off a tee, soft toss, live bp, ground balls.

It was humbling. My mind remembers the mechanics: pivot and explode with the hips, keep your weight back, hands back and then swing down and through the ball, it’s just that my body can’t keep up. I lunged, shifting my weight to my front leg. In no time, I was exhausted, but the instructor kept up the pace. Finally, he had mercy on me. And I was happy, drenched in sweat.

It’s not that I expected to do much better. Hitting is too difficult to pick back up that quickly. But it was a good exercise. It reminded me what a science it is, and how tough it is to do well. My mind was thinking about my weight and my shoulder dropped; I concentrated on my hands and didn’t thrust my hips. Oy.  Think I’ll hit the gym, do some running, and work on the legs before I go back and hit again. 

Winning games isn’t easy, as the Yanks have shown us in Chicago. But they won today, 8-5 and something unusual happened. In the top of the ninth, Melky Cabrera booked around the bases and slid into third with a triple, making him the first Yankee to hit for a cycle since Tony Fernandez in 1995. He slid, yelled and raised his fist back at the Yankee dugout, and later scored. It capped-off a terrific day for Cabrera who helped bail-out CC Sabathia (“CC was so-so,” said Michael Kay on the YES broadcast) and the Bombers.

No sweep for the White Sox. Yanks are still a half-game ahead of the Red Sox who won again today. The Bombers have tomorrow off and then get to face Doc Halladay on Tuesday night.

Then, the fun starts back in the boogie down come Thursday: Joba, AJ, CC and Andy will go against the Red Sox. There will be no lack of drama.

What more is there to say?

Thurman Munson died 30 years ago today.

Ah, wonderful. AJ Burnett finally had that lemon of a performance as he put his team in an early hole that buried them for the day. They had their chances but the Yankees have seemingly done everything wrong in the first three games in Chicago. Once again, they did not come through with the key hit with runners on base, did not mount any significant rallies. Meanwhile, the Sox piled on late and as the White Sox cruised, 14-4. Coupled with another Red Sox win, the Yanks lead is down to just a half-a-game. Boston and New York are tied in the loss column.

Anyone get a wee bit frustrated watching that game yesterday? Did the broadcasters on Fox put you over the edge? I was hanging by a thread myself.

I’ve been waiting for AJ’s bubble to burst (oh perfect, a FOX telecast) and shame on me cause the Yanks sure do need AJ and CC to bring it this weekend.

Whadda ya say, Meat? Yanks need a stopper today.

Got to be in it to win it.