AJ Burnett has pitched small in his two starts at Fenway Park this year. S-m-all. Like a bum. Burnett threw more than sixty pitches by the end of the second inning. Gave up a two-run home run to David Ortiz–yes, that David Ortiz–and, after an error by Alex Rodriguez, a two-run double to JD Drew. Burnett didn’t make it out of the third. Five runs. Bum.

That was really all Josh Beckett needed as the Sox cruised back into a tie for first place with the Yankees. 7-0 was the final. The Yanks did collect two hits…oy.

New York is now 0-6 against Boston this year. The sooner we can forget about this one, the better.  Yup, nothing but a bowl of  crybaby chowder for the New Yorkers.

Today is the annual baseball draft. The good folks over at The Baseball Analysts are live-blogging the event. 

Check, check it out.

Bronx Banter Interview

By Hank Waddles

For Yankee fans, Roger Clemens is a difficult case — even before all his recent steroid trouble. If you’re of my generation, you grew up despising him. Even though he pitched for Boston during an era when we all knew the Red Sox would never win anything, he was still a fearsome enemy. He was the gunslinger who stole your girlfriend before shooting the sheriff right between the eyes on his way out of town. There was some pleasure to be had when his skills began to decline during his twilight years in Boston, but it wasn’t too much of a surprise when he became great again — if irrelevant — during his time in Toronto. And when he came to New York in 1999, if all wasn’t forgotten, at least it was put aside. First of all, the Yanks were adding the best pitcher in the game; second, they were twisting the knife in the heart of Red Sox Nation. It was a win-win.

Roger helped the Yankees to a couple more championships, won his 300th game, endeared himself to the Boss and legions of fans, and said all the right things about wearing a Yankee cap into the Hall of Fame. But then came the defection to Houston, the self-serving Stadium announcement of his return to New York, and, finally, the steroid allegations. There was an embarrassment that we had once embraced him, and the ashes in our mouths were there to remind us that we had gotten exactly what we deserved.

But there is more to Roger Clemens. Sure, he cut corners, but he also worked harder than any of his teammates. Yes, he is hopelessly selfish and egotistical, but he’d be the first player to volunteer for visits to children’s hospitals. Whether you loved him once or never at all, whether you think he deserves a plaque in Cooperstown or a spot in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, you have to admit that Roger Clemens matters. In Jeff Pearlman’s latest book, The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality, he does his typically thorough job of cutting through the Roger Clemens mythology and getting to the heart of the man who was once considered one of the five greatest pitchers of all time. A few weeks ago Jeff was generous enough to spend part of his morning talking with me about the book, the steroid era, and a few other topics. Enjoy…

BronxBanter:  You’ve said that you love writing books, but when I spoke to you a while back while you were deep in this one, you described it as hell. How do those two things go together?

Pearlman:  The only thing I can really compare it to is running marathons. I run a lot of marathons. When I first start running a marathon, I’m really excited, and I love the first thirteen miles, and then the next four miles I sort of start feeling it, and then once you hit the twenties you start thinking, “I’m never gonna do this again. I’m neeeever doing this again.” And when you cross the finish line your first thought is, “Thank god this is over so I never have to do it again.” And then ten minutes later you’re thinking about the next marathon. And that’s how I feel about writing books. It’s nightmarish. It’s hellish. You’re solely focused — usually for a year and a half or two years — on one person, one subject, for all that time. You’re looking for these little details that seem insignificant to someone who doesn’t do it for a living, I would guess, but they become these gold nuggets for you. Finding out what someone used to drink for breakfast in the morning, silly little things like that that you think mean nothing, but they mean everything when you’re working on a book. Detail is what counts. When I was a kid I read every book imaginable, every sports book I could find, and I didn’t really differentiate between the good ones and the bad ones and the mediocre ones because I didn’t know any better. But now, when I’m reading someone else’s book, I really am looking for the details. If you’re writing a book about Reggie Jackson, everybody knows all there is to know about his three home run game in the World Series, but when you learn what sort of glasses he was wearing or where he got his hair cut or what he was saying to Mickey Rivers right before the game, that’s interesting.

BB:  How does that compare to writing feature articles? You used the marathon analogy; are these just sprints if you’re writing a piece for SI or some other magazine?

JP:  One of the best pieces of advice I got for writing a book was when I was doing my first book, which was about the Mets. Jon Wertheim, who is a friend of mine and writes for SI, said to me, the best thing you can do is think of each chapter as an article, as a lengthy article. So I would compare an article, if it’s long, to writing a chapter. And a book is just like a big monsoon.

BB:  I heard David Maraniss say once that it was much easier to write about dead people. If he was writing a biography about a living subject – and I think he was referring to his Clinton book – he would just pretend that the person was dead. Did you seek out Clemens at all, or did you pretend he was dead?

JP:  Well, I did reach out, and it was made clear he wouldn’t talk. Hence, it really was as if he was dead to me. I didn’t think of it in Maraniss’s terms, but he’s 100% right. And it’s definitely easier to write about a deceased person, because:
A. He won’t come back and say, “That’s not right.”
B. You don’t waste all that time trying to get him to talk.
C. People are more open when they know the person won’t get mad.
D. He can’t sue you for anything.

(more…)

On the second-to-last day of my time on the Bronx Grand Jury, we ordered pizza for lunch. There were leftovers and one of my fellow jurors, a full-bodied and robust woman, told me, “Save that for the mornin, baby. I don’t care if it’s cold, my stomach don’t don’t know what time it is, only knows that it’s hongry.”

We’ve covered pizza here lately, but can we ever talk too much about it? Didn’t think so.

Peep this from Theeatenpath.

A few months ago I eagerly read Adam Hochschild’s celebrated book about the early days of the Belgian Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost. It is an evocative and engaging read. I was stopped on the subway twice, exactly one week apart, by women saw me reading the book and who were compelled to tell me how much they loved it. I have my own reasons for appreciating it–my mother spent most of her childhood in the Congo–but I think I admire Hochschild’s first effort, a memoir, Half the Way Home, even more.

Hochschild’s father was an industrialist. The family fortune was copper. They were plenty rich. Hochschild’s memoir is beautiful–empathetic, not vicious. It is written in the kind of clean, direct prose that I cherish. Everything is carefully considered and focused; I was often struck by what seemed to be left out, how many choices must have been made. There is no fat, no rambling digressions. The imagery is vivid and precise.

Here is a small sample. Hochschild describes being a boy at Eagle’s Nest, the family estate in the Adirondack mountains.

Dig this:

Bed. The time seemed endless, suspended between waking and sleep, between water and sky. Sometimes a guest played the piano, and from my bed I could hear the music echoing out across the smooth surface of the lake. Occasionally, if I woke later in the evening, I could hear the splashing and laughter and voices from the dock which meant that some of the younger guests were taking a furtive late-night swim–something out of the question during the day. Those sounds, too, merged in my mind with that of the music on the water; they seemed an image of promise, of something yearned for but undefined, of the existence of some fulfillment in life that was denied me. It was as if all year I had waited to come here for the summer; all day I had held my breath waiting for some magic moment, and now I saw only its sign; the secret remained locked away.

As I drifted to sleep there came the sound of a solitary outboard motor going slowly through the lake, a boat taking a lone fisherman home at the end of the day. Perhaps he looked up as he passed, and wondered what went on in the dark-browed houses among the trees. Then the hollow cry of a loon, the loneliest of all birds. And the calls of half a dozen other birds, whose names I did not know but whose sounds I will remember until the day I die. And just as the day ended, so did the week, with Father going, and the summer, with all of us leaving Eagle Nest, and finally those summers themselves were no more; their character gradually changed, and the exact moment that happened cannot be pinpointed, any more than you can mark the exact moment you fall asleep.

On a warm Monday night at the Stadium, the first inning foreshadowed the rest of the series finale between the Yankees and Rays. Three Yankees hit long fly balls against Rays starter Andy Sonnanstine in that initial frame, including Mark Teixeira’s towering home run into the second deck of the right-field stands. The Yankees would hit several more long drives against Sonnanstine in later innings, including home runs by Nick Swisher (a two-run homer), Johnny Damon (a solo shot), and Derek Jeter (also a solo blast), all big parts of a 5-3 win over Sonnanstine and the Rays. The four home runs accounted for all of the Yankee scoring against Sonnanstine, who entered the game with an ERA of over seven.

Damon’s sixth-inning home run provided the winning margin. With the score tied at 3-3 and one man out in the bottom of the sixth, Damon launched his 12th home run of the season, easily reaching the right field seats. Two innings later, Jeter padded the lead with a leadoff home run, again hit to the familiar bull’s-eye region in right field.

Andy Pettitte’s first inning also provided a glimpse into his overall performance against the Rays. After loading the bases, Pettitte escaped on Joe Dillon’s slow roller to shortstop, handled deftly by Derek Jeter. Pettitte managed to escape from every jam he faced except for the third inning, when he permitted all three Tampa Bay runs. Though Pettitte struck out a season-high seven batters, he allowed five hits and three walks in what turned out to be a workmanlike effort at the Stadium. For his career, Pettitte has now won 16 of 20 decisions against the Tampa Bay franchise.

The two Phils, as I’m sure they’ve already been dubbed, then turned in standout relief efforts in the seventh and eighth innings. Phil Hughes, showing increased velocity with a 95 mile-an-hour fastball in his 2009 relief debut, pitched a 1-2-3 seventh. (The successful appearance will surely fuel speculation that Hughes will be used in Joba Chamberlain’s old role as the primary bridge to Mariano Rivera.) Phil Coke then followed with a scoreless eighth, setting the table for another masterful ninth inning by Mariano. More than 48 hours removed from his Saturday afternoon horror show, Rivera logged his second straight 1-2-3 appearance, capped off by a 93 mile-per-hour fastball thrown past the elevated swing of B.J. Upton.

The Yankees, now equipped with a full game lead in the American League East, will prepare for the start of a three-game series against the reviled Red Sox. It remains to be seen whether Rivera will be available for the first game at Fenway Park on Tuesday night, given that he has pitched three straight days. Joe Girardi says he’s inclined to give Rivera the night off, but the future Hall of Famer may attempt to talk his manager out of that plan, especially after throwing only 11 pitches in Monday night’s finale against the Rays.

Yankee Doodles: Nick Swisher was the only Yankee to pick up more than one hit against Rays pitching. With his 2-for-3 against Sonnanstine, Swisher lifted his batting average to a more respectable .257… Former Yankee left-hander Randy “The Snake” Choate made his second appearance of the series. The journeyman sidewinder, who was once part of the package sent to the Montreal Expos for Javier Vazquez, struck out Johnny Damon and walked Mark Teixeira in the eighth inning before being lifted in favor of former Met Jason Isringhausen. Isringhausen induced an inning-end double play from Alex Rodriguez, who heard a smattering of boos after going 0-for-3 with an error at third base… Former Red Sox outfielder Gabe Kapler hit a two-run homer for the Rays, his first of the season.

Yanks look to take the series from the Rays before they head up to Boston for the yelling and the screaming and mishegoss. Couple of guys named Andy on the hill this evening.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

Our man in Japan’s got a cool blog cookin…

Dig.

My wife Emily took me out to lunch on Saturday. We had a meal at Momofuku and then dessert at the Milk Bar. Both places are full packed full of young Hipster Doofus couples. (What do you call a group of them? Hipster Dufi? Sounds like the name of a second-rate Indie Rock band.) My friend Alex joined us. Emily got the pre-fix, which included a salad of bitter greens with guanciale and orange zest. Alex and I had the pork buns, of course, and we shared a lovely dish of sugar snap peas in a sour cream-horseradish sauce served with thinly-sliced radishes (a variation of the dish is pictured below).

The peas must have been par-boiled. Sugar snaps are so fresh and delicious that you don’t need to do much to them. Chang dressed them up nicely–the sauce was subtle, the flavors still direct and satisfying–without overwhelming them. The peas popped as you chewed them and made me so happy that all I could think of while eating them was ordering more.

I didn’t, since I knew we’d be toolin’ around for the next few hours in the heat. It’s likely that I won’t see that dish the next time I roll through either. The menu changes constantly at Momofuku. In fact, the next day, it was no longer being served.

Savor while you can.

Roger Federer won the French Open on Sunday in straight sets. It’s his first French Open championship, making him only the sixth man in history to earn a career Grand Slam. The victory ties with with Pete Sampris for the most Majors of all-time (14).

Here’s the seminal piece on Federer from the late David Foster Wallace (New York Times, 2006)

A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice — the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game — as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.

One thing it is not is televisable. At least not entirely. TV tennis has its advantages, but these advantages have disadvantages, and chief among them is a certain illusion of intimacy. Television’s slow-mo replays, its close-ups and graphics, all so privilege viewers that we’re not even aware of how much is lost in broadcast. And a large part of what’s lost is the sheer physicality of top tennis, a sense of the speeds at which the ball is moving and the players are reacting. This loss is simple to explain. TV’s priority, during a point, is coverage of the whole court, a comprehensive view, so that viewers can see both players and the overall geometry of the exchange. Television therefore chooses a specular vantage that is overhead and behind one baseline. You, the viewer, are above and looking down from behind the court. This perspective, as any art student will tell you, “foreshortens” the court. Real tennis, after all, is three-dimensional, but a TV screen’s image is only 2-D. The dimension that’s lost (or rather distorted) on the screen is the real court’s length, the 78 feet between baselines; and the speed with which the ball traverses this length is a shot’s pace, which on TV is obscured, and in person is fearsome to behold. That may sound abstract or overblown, in which case by all means go in person to some professional tournament — especially to the outer courts in early rounds, where you can sit 20 feet from the sideline — and sample the difference for yourself. If you’ve watched tennis only on television, you simply have no idea how hard these pros are hitting the ball, how fast the ball is moving,(4) how little time the players have to get to it, and how quickly they’re able to move and rotate and strike and recover. And none are faster, or more deceptively effortless about it, than Roger Federer.

That was a tough one yesterday. But I ain’t ascared. The Yanks are gunna come out gangbusters today.

It’s hot. Time for more fireworks.

Ka Boom.

Roger Federer has never won the French Open. But he’s reached the finals and if he wins tomorrow he’ll tie Pete Sampras for the most all-time Grand Slams (Sampras never won the French either). I’ll be pulling for him.

This, according to a piece by Matt Gagne in the Daily News this morning:

“You’re in the new Yankee Stadium. It’s absolutely a different stadium,” Rays manager Joe Maddon said before last night’s series opener in the Bronx was rained out. “It’s kind of nice, actually, because I hated the smell of the old place…. I don’t know if that odor was the remnants of the ghosts walking around, but they always had a home-court advantage in that yard.

“I’m not saying they can’t develop it here, but they had an advantage just based on the smell of the place. They could have put that in a bottle, sprayed it on somebody and you’d say, ‘Oh, Yankee Stadium.'”

Since there’s no game tonight here’s a You Tube tasting session: one time for your mind.

First up on the bill…

Old Friends.

More funny…

Doity.

The King of Swing:

Music.

Mo, Mo, Mo…

(more…)

A guy I know sent me this picture of collectable toy trains…

Dope.

When a team plays well for an extended stretch of games, the intensity of the rumor mill tends to lessen. That’s certainly been the case for the Yankees, who have played well for the last month in taking a share of the top spot in the American League East. The only prominent name that I’ve heard linked to the Yankees in recent weeks is Cleveland’s Mark DeRosa, a player that the Cubs foolishly traded over the winter for three middle-of-the-road pitching prospects. Ravaged by injuries, the Indians are going nowhere in the AL Central. DeRosa is 34 years old and just a few months away from free agency; he is almost certain to be traded sometime between now and July 31.

So should the Yankees make a play for DeRosa? I’d say yes, but within reasonable limits. Let’s begin with DeRosa’s potential contribution. As well as the Yankees have played since Johnny Damon hit that three-run homer on a Sunday afternoon against the Orioles, their bench remains mediocre at best. Francisco Cervelli and Brett Gardner have been assets, but the Yankees have received precious little offense from their backup infielders and have virtually no power in reserve—at least until (or if) Xavier Nady returns. DeRosa would solve the latter two concerns. He can play third, second, or first, along with the outfield corners. He has above-average power, along with a team-first grittiness that would play well in New York.

Yet, the Yankees should be conservative in what they offer for DeRosa. After a career year for the Cubs in 2008, DeRosa brought back only three mid-level prospects on the trade market. In the midst of a mediocre campaign with the Indians, DeRosa’s value has decreased further. I might be willing to give up two young pitchers—pick two from a group that includes Anthony Claggett, Jonathan Albaladejo, Edwar Ramirez, and Christian Garcia—but no more. I’m not giving up Mark Melancon, or Alfredo Aceves, or even an injured Ian Kennedy. DeRosa would help, but he’s not currently worth a price tag involving any of those right-handers. If the Indians insist on any of the three, I’d suggest that Brian Cashman hang up the phone…

(more…)

Wednesday afternoon, Yankees GM Brian Cashman held a press conference in which he discussed Chien-Ming Wang’s return to the starting rotation.

“He’s a starter and he’s got a huge history of nothing but success,” he said. “It’s time to find time to slot him in.”

Now is, and was, that time. Wang made Cashman and manager Joe Girardi look smart for two innings, until he reverted to the pitcher whose ERA resembled the national debt ticker in midtown Manhattan. Was that what the Yankees were waiting for?

Speaking of waiting, the way the Yankees have treated Wang, admittedly rushing him back before accurately gauging his progress, one wonders if he was accelerated and placed in the starting rotation in order to be showcased to potential trade suitors. Cashman would never say that and no local scribes have gotten that provocative yet, but the possibility cannot be ruled out.

Newsday’s former Yankee beat man Jim Baumbach went there, sort of, giving some insight into the tenuous relationship the organization has had with Wang, going back five years.

The Yankees gladly would have traded Chien-Ming Wang in a package for Randy Johnson during the 2004 season if only the Diamondbacks had any interest in him. After the trade deadline passed with no moves, the Yankees even let Wang pitch in the Olympics, something they never would have done if they thought Wang was a legitimate prospect.

Is he right? Think about it. The Yankees could have signed Wang to a long-term deal last year, but opted not to. They instead signed Robinson Cano to a long-term deal and took Wang to salary arbitration, where the pitcher was awarded a $4 million contract. This year, the Yankees and Wang went to arbitration again, with the righty getting a $1 million raise.

Baumbach wasn’t done, though. In a column recapping Thursday’s victory, in which the Yankees got Wang off the hook, Baumbach wrote:

Seemingly every time the Yankees talk about Chien-Ming Wang, they reference how he won 46 games for them in the previous 2 1/2 seasons, as if that should count toward something here in 2009.

But we’re more than a third of the way through this season, and pretty soon the Yankees will have to come to grips with the fact that the pitcher who used to be their ace hasn’t been heard from since he hurt his right foot last June in Houston. And there’s no guarantees that pitcher is going to make it back this season.

It should be noted that the pitcher who won 46 games from 2006-08 only won one playoff game in that time frame. In 2007, his second straight 19-win season, he lost both of his ALDS starts, pitching just 5 2/3 innings over those two appearances and logging a 19.06 ERA. Why is this relevant? The Yankees told Wang what they thought of his ace status by shelling out $242 million in long-term contracts to pitchers they believed had a better upside. That the 2009 version of Wang looks more like the pitcher who faced Cleveland in ’07 as opposed to the one who helped lead that team to a wild-card berth hasn’t helped his case.

As far as Phil Hughes is concerned, he is in the bullpen now, and as Baumbach and others have written, the Yankees view his future in the rotation. The same is true with Wang. He’s viewed as a starter. But what happens if and when Brian Bruney or Damaso Marte return to their respective relief spots? Whose future is in the Yankees’ rotation then? Will the Yankees wait that long to make their move?

We’ll know the answers soon enough.

Late spring mid-week matinee against the Rangers, not so terribly exciting, right? Wrong. Not only is this afternoon’s game the rubber game of the series, but the Yankees enter the day tied with the Red Sox atop the AL East and a half game behind Texas for the best record in the American League. Though it would surely be a temporary condition, a win today could put them alone in first place with the best record in the league. A loss could drop them to second place with the league’s third-best record.

That’s fun, but even more important is the return of Chien-Ming Wang to the rotation. To recap quickly, Wang broke his foot running the bases in Houston last June, missed the rest of the season, then opened 2009 by giving up 23 runs in six innings across his first three starts (34.50 ERA). He was placed on the disabled list with what the Yankees claimed was weakness in his hips stemming from the foot injury. After working out in Tampa, Wang threw 13 scoreless innings across two rehab starts for Triple-A Tampa, but the Yankees weren’t thrilled with the velocity or drop on his sinker and decided to keep him on the farm. Then, on May 21, Joba Chamberlain got hit with a comebacker and had to leave his start in the first inning. The resultant strain on the bullpen motivated the Yankees to activate Wang immediately and stick him in the pen. He pitched three moderately effective innings the next day, but in his two outings since then, he’s been excellent, throwing two perfect frames against the Rangers on May 27 and three scoreless against the Indians on Sunday, striking out five in those five innings.

With Phil Hughes having stumbled in his last start, the Yankees have swapped the two, starting Wang today and putting Hughes in the bullpen (count me among those glad to see them keep Hughes in the majors). The Rangers bats will tell us all we need to know about how well Wang is pitching, but I also go back to this great video analysis from the MLB Network’s Dan Plesac for a an idea of what to look for in Wang’s mechanics: balance on that right foot, a high leg kick, hands in close to the body, getting on top of his pitches, particularly the sinker, and throwing on that downward plain.

The Rangers counter Wang with former White Sox prospect Brandon McCarthy, who is finally healthy and pitching well. McCarthy has allowed more than four runs in a start just once this year and pitched fewer than five frames only in that same start. Last week, he shut out the Astros. In his last start, he held the A’s to one run on three hits over six innings.

Mark Teixeira, who sat out last night’s game having bruised his ankle on that take-out slide on Tuesday night, is back in the lineup. Francisco Cervelli gets the start behind the plate after Jorge Posada got hit with a variety of bats and balls in last night’s game. Derek Jeter also gets a game off, with slick-fielding Ramiro Peña starting behind the groundballer Wang and Nick Swisher moving up to bat behind Johnny Damon in the two-hole.

In other news, A.J. Burnett was suspended six games for throwing at Nelson Cruz the other night, so maybe Hughes will get another start anyway. Vicente Padilla, who has reportedly been placed on waivers by the Rangers, was merely fined.

Over at SI.com, Kevin Armstrong has a glowing profile of the Boston Globe’s glory days covering sports in the 1970s. It is a snap shot of a lost era and the piece comes at a good time, with the newspaper industry in peril. 

The Globe featured such talents as Bud Collins, Ray Fitzgerald, Leigh Montville, Leslie Visser, Bob Ryan and Peter Gammons. Armstrong details how Ryan and Gammons, both locals, were sports-mad, how they were enthusiastic, competitive reporters, and how, in some cases, they had cozy relationships with the teams they covered–Gammons shagged flies with the Red Sox and even “held a locker in the Sox clubhouse.”

Talk about a time gone by.

Yet the article left me feeling unsettled.  For instance, Armstrong writes, “The pieces all came together in 1975. As politicians tip-toed around Boston’s tinderbox of busing-related racial issues, the Globe prepared for an unprecedented run.”  According to Howard Bryant’s book about racism and Boston sports, Shut Out, the Globe did plenty of tip-toeing around racial issues as well. Armstrong writes about Will McDonough, “a tough-talking Irishman,” with affection, but does not call into question McDonough’s attitudes on race (detailed here in an article by Glenn Stout).  “McDonough wrote for all fan bases,” reports Armstrong. I don’t know if the brothers from Roxbury would agree.

But my biggest gripe with the piece is the lack of historical context. If the Globe was, as Armstrong contends, arguably the best sports department ever–and perhaps it was–who else is in the conversation? For some perspective, I e-mailed John Schulian, a former sports columnist with an encyclopedic knowledge of the great newspaper sports departments.

Here is Schulians’s reply: 

Call me a cranky old man if you must, but I think the piece is missing something very important — the names of all the great sports sections that are legitimate challengers to the Globe’s alleged omnipotence. Where’s Stanley Woodward’s New York Herald Tribune? What about the two glorious eras that the L.A. Times enjoyed? What about the wars in Philadelphia between the Bulletin and the Daily News? Just for the hell of it, I might even throw in Newsday when Jack Mann was preaching anarchy on Long Island and the irreverent New York Post of the Sixties and Seventies. And what, pray tell, about the staff that Blackie Sherrod put together at the Fort Worth Press when Eisenhower was in the White House?

If those sections don’t get at least a tip of the hat, Mr. Armstrong has written in a vacuum. Worse yet, he has failed to provide some much needed perspective. The Globe was splendid, all right, but part of the reason it scaled the heights it did was because it was pushed by the competition, in Boston and nationally.

I loved the Globe that Mr. Armstrong extols at marathon length, and I’m an enthusiastic admirer of any number of its writers for both their intrepid reporting and dextrous prose. But I think it’s fair to say that none of them ever matched the Herald Trib’s Red Smith and Joe Palmer word for word. (If Woodward had succeeded in hiring John Lardner to write a column, too, it would have put this best-section-ever nonsense to rest for eternity.) The rest of the roster wasn’t bad, either: Jess Abramson on boxing and track and field and college football, and Tommy Holmes on baseball, and Al Laney writing features, and the boss, Stanley Woodward, kicking ass whenever he found time to write a column. Roger Kahn, Jerry Izenberg, Jack Mann and Pete Axthelm came along later, as if the Trib’s literary needed more gloss. Think they could play in the same league as the Globe? I do.

There must be a lot of old Philly guys who think they could have held their own in that fight, too. At the Bulletin 30 and 40 and — it doesn’t seem possible — 50 years ago, you had true giants like Sandy Grady and George Kiseda working wonders with the language and investing their stories with social consciousness. Every kid the Bulletin hired learned by their example, from Ray Didinger and Mark Heisler to Alan Richman, Jim Barniak and Joe McGinniss. They had to hustle, though, because Larry Merchant was sports editor at the Daily News and he was bent on giving the paper a reputation for more than stories about pretty girls cut in half on vacant lots. He brought Grady and Kiseda to Philly, saw them defect to the Bulletin and responded by hiring away Bill Conlin. He found Stan Hochman in San Bernadino. And he had a beautiful madman named Jack McKinney writing boxing. By the time Merchant decamped for New York in the mid-Sixites, he had established a tradition that would last for decades more. Think of this, if you will: When I worked at the Daily News, from 1984 to 1986, my fellow columnists were Hochman, Didinger and Mark Whicker — any one of us by himself would have been enough for most papers —  and we had Conlin on baseball, Hoops Weiss on college basketball, Phil Jasner on the 76ers, Jay Greenburg on the Flyers and Paul Domowitch on the Eagles. When the subject of the Globe came up, we always said they had the best Sunday section going. But that was only because we didn’t publish on Sundays. The other six days of the week, we thought we were as good as anybody. Yes, even the Globe.

Forgive me for rattling on this way, but I want to make sure Mr. Armstrong realizes that history is littered with sports sections that could have given the Globe a run for its reputation. They didn’t always have a lot of money for travel, and they didn’t always have staffs that were two deep, but they were smart and inventive and indefatigable. They were also good. Think of how Jack Mann wove Newsday a world-class staff out of old-timers like Bob Waters, the boozy, eloquent boxing writer, and hot young kids like George Vecsey and Steve Jacobson. (Tony Kornheiser came later — and he was something special.) They were so good that Newsweek did a feature on them at a time when most managing editors were almost ashamed to admit their papers had sports sections. At the New York Post, meanwhile, Milton Gross — called “the Eleanor Roosevelt of the sports pages” by the Village Voice’s Joe Flaherty — was always catching a ride home with Floyd Patterson or Don Newcombe after they’d lost ingloriously. Leonard Shecter wrote a vinegary column, and when he moved in, Merchant took his place. Paul Zimmerman covered pro football and Vic Ziegel covered baseball and boxing and wrote slyly funny columns. Even Murray Kempton came down from Olympus to write a classic piece about Sal Maglie after he’d been done in by Don Larsen’s perfect game.

Meanwhile, out in the hinterlands, there were more sports sections catching fire. In Fort Worth, Blackie Sherrod found three kids — Dan Jenkins, Bud Shrake and Gary Cartwright — who were as irreverent as they were gifted and he turned them loose on the world. There was a fourth, Jerre Todd, who is said to have been every bit their equal, but he left the business to make a fortune in advertising. So it goes. But remember this: On a lot of days, the best writer in the joint was still Sherrod.

I can understand, however, why his Press gets forgotten. Hell, there was hardly anybody buying it when it was in business. Not so the L.A. Times, which had two eras in which it could hold its own against any sports section in the business. Indeed, it was the only one that had the space and manpower and budget to compete with the Globe. The Times’ first golden era was in the Seventies when Jim Murray was at the height of his powers as a columnist. But there was lots more to read after you finished his 900-word epistle, great long rambling stories by Jeff Prugh and Dwight Chapin and Ron Rapoport and solid beat reporting by Mal Florence and Ross Newhan and Ted Green. Hard as it is to believe, the Times was even better in its second dalliance with glory. Get a load of the talent they had in the Eighties: Rick Reilly, Richard Hoffer, Mike Littwin, Alan Greenburg, Randy Harvey, Mark Heisler, Scott Ostler, Bill Christine and . . . I know I’m forgetting somebody. Talk about an abundance of talent. When Reilly left for Sports Illustrated, the Times went out and hired Mike Downey, who was as good a columnist as there was. And the section never missed a beat.

You know what? I haven’t mentioned the Washington Post and the reign of George Solomon. I know George wouldn’t appreciate that. I was there in his early days as sports editor, when he was getting it past repeated ass-kickings by the Washington Daily News (Jack Mann again, and Andy Beyer) and the Washington Star (my old friend David Israel was its rowdy young columnist). George could wear you out with his boundless energy, but damn, did he have a great eye for talent. Not just prize imports like Kornheiser, Dave Kindred and Michael Wilbon, but discoveries like Tom Boswell and David Remnick and John Ed Bradley. And, really, how many other sports editors can say that the editor of the New Yorker once covered boxing for them?

Certainly nobody at the Boston Globe.

For another take on the history of sports writing, check out this piece, originally written for GQ, by Alan Richman.

Is there any doubt left that Alex Rodriguez is the most-hated great player ever to play in New York? Last night, Rodriguez collected an RBI single in his first at bat and then failed in his next three times up, including a rally-killing double play with the bases loaded. He was booed with increased intensity each time.

They even booed when he had two strikes against him. A two-strike boo? Really?

Oh yeah, the Yanks are still in first place. This in stark contrast to the reception that David Ortiz has gotten at Fenway Park.

Dag.