I was poking around the cookbook section at the bookstore a few days ago and thought it’d be fun to come up with a list of essential cookbooks (Joy of Cooking, Jacques Pepin’scomplete techniques book, Marcella Hazan, etc). On that note, it might also be cool to compose a list of essential food items that I’ve always got in my pantry: Maldon salt, a good bottle (or three) of olive oil, HP sauce (or Daddy’s if I can find it), fresh horseradish from the L.E.S., a container of cornichons…I have to think of it some more.

One item that is a sure shot member of the list is a bottle of Sriracha Chili Sauce. Last week, there was an article in the Times about this staple Chili Sauce. Check it out.

This one is for Amelia:

Amelia Louise Corcoran

Born at 6:10 pm on May 26

6 lbs, 11.8 oz, 19 1/2 inches long

She rocks, as does her mom, both of whom are doing great.

I’ll be a bit preoccupied in the short term, but I’ll do my best to continue to pull my weight around these parts while adjusting to my new lifestyle. If I come up a bit short, at least you know I’ve got a good excuse.

Wise cracks.  Dumb laffs.

Higher Learning

And think about how much fun you could have lookin’ it up in spots like these…

There was an interesting article in the Times magazine last weekend about the benefits of working with your hands:

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. I work on Japanese and European motorcycles, mostly older bikes with some “vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people.

My mother’s father was a mechanic (His wife did not approve; she thought it was beneath her to be married to a man who got his hands dirty for a living).

I have never had any interest in taking things apart and figuring out how how they work. If something breaks I pay someone to fix it. For the longest time I thought I was less of a man because I wasn’t inclined to fix, construct or build things. In many ways, I didn’t have much in common with my grandfather but I always admired him, the breadth of his knowledge, his casual confidence. He was a true artisan.

This article made me think of my grandfather. It made me stop and appreciate his calling.

The Yanks beat-up the Rangers last night to the tune of 9-2. Godzilla Matsui hit two home runs–and took what seemed like an eternity to round the bases; he looked like a tired farm animal who’d been pullling the plow for too many years–Derek Jeter added three hits, and Mark Teixeira and Robinson Cano also homered.  AJ Burnett pitched okay and clearly got plenty of help from his hitters. He threw close to 120 pitches in six innings, didn’t allow a run and gave up just three hits but also walked four. He also finished the game with seven strike outs.

“There were no mistakes,” Burnett told the New York Times. “Everything was where I wanted it to go, for the most part. Fewer walks and you can go deeper in the game, but you’ve got to start somewhere.”

Perhaps the best news of the night was watching Chien-Ming Wang look sharp in two innings of relief.  If he can return to his former self, then, man that gives the Yanks some decent pitching…Muh-hu-ha-ha.

The win, combined with a Boston loss, pulls the Yanks into a tie with the Sox for first place.

Enough mincing around, AJ Burnett needs a win. 

Which is good timing, cause it’d sure be nice to see the Yanks win this series and stay on the good foot.

Ya Heard?

I have a stack of new baseball books waiting to be read. At the top of the list is Heart of the Game: Life, Death and Mercy in Minor League America by S.L. Price. It is about the death of Mike Coolbaugh who was killed by a foul ball during a game several years ago.  Price is one of the more elegant journalists going today; he’s a true craftsman. 

The New York Times has a terrific interview with Price today:

S.L. Price: I first wrote this story for Sports Illustrated, but even early in that process felt it growing beyond the bounds of a magazine story. In my 15 years at S.I., I’ve probably never felt as satisfied with a piece while at the same time knowing there was so much more to tell; I had 50,000 words of notes by the time I filed. The stories of Bill Valentine, Bo McLaughlin, Jon Asahina and Warren Stephens — people in the park the night Mike was killed who had had personal experience with the damage a ball could do — made up a paragraph or two in S.I., and they alone summed up huge chunks of baseball history, major and minor. Then, as I got a sense of Tino Sanchez’s grief, and the parallels between his career and Mike’s, I knew I could explore modern ball by retracing their paths.

And lastly, throughout the reporting, I had this strange experience. It’s a dark moment, obviously, but while talking to everyone involved I kept thinking, “I know this is a tale of woe, so how come I feel so good?” Because everyone — at this extreme moment where there was no place to hide or fake it — kept doing the right thing. Tino in his anguish showed great respect to Mike and the life he lived, the Coolbaugh family repeatedly reached out to Tino to let him know they didn’t blame him, to support him, and, he says, that pulled him from a very dark place. The Colorado Rockies voted Mike’s family a playoff share — it ended up over $230,000 — in 2007, though they didn’t know him and he’d only been with the team three weeks and the history of stingy ballplayers goes back as far as the game’s origins, and then they refused to talk about it. The national media wanted to celebrate them, but the players and management wouldn’t say who came up with the idea, how the vote went, nothing. It was too important to talk about. Meanwhile, fans all over the Texas League and minor league baseball donated money night after night, $1 here, $5 there, to give to the Coolbaugh family. And no one did this because they thought the media might notice.

When a story whipsaws you like that — from brutal loss to heartfelt compassion — when you feel good and bad at the same time? Then I’m pretty sure it’s a story worth telling in a book.

FOX broadcasters Joe Buck and Tim McCarver provided some of the funniest unintended humor of the season when they mistook a Panamanian gentlemman for former Yankee and Royal slugger John Mayberry during Saturday’s nationally televised broadcast. Thankfully, Ken Rosenthal caught up with the real Mayberry—the one who actually happens to be the father of Phillies rookie John Mayberry, Jr. Sadly, Mayberry’s legacy remains as obscure as the ability to identify him at Yankee Stadium over the weekend. Twenty seven years after he last suited up as a major leaguer—in pinstripes, no less—he remains a relatively forgotten player, despite being one of the top left-handed power hitters of the mid-1970s.

Emerging as a top prospect in the Houston Astros’ organization during the late 1960s, John Claiborne Mayberry found his path to the major leagues impeded by first basemen like Bob “The Bull” Watson and Lee “The Big Bopper” May, one of the main pieces acquired in the ill-fated Joe Morgan trade. With no place to play their young power protégé, the Astros decided to include “Big John” in a trade that brought pitching prospects Jim York and Lance Clemons from the Kansas City Royals. The Astros would end up regretting that transaction almost as much as the Morgan mega-disaster.

Beginning in 1972, Mayberry and Amos Otis teamed up to provide the main sources of power for the Royals. When the Royals added the Hall of Fame bat of George Brett and the speed and defense of Willie Wilson and Frank White to the Mayberry-Otis core, the expansion franchise came together to win the first of three consecutive AL West titles in 1976.

During his halcyon days in Kansas City from 1972 to 1975, Mayberry put up power numbers that equaled the best of any left-handed American League slugger, with the possible exception of a fellow named Reggie Jackson. In those four seasons, Mayberry crunched 107 home runs, despite having to play half of his games in cavernous Royals Stadium, a boneyard for home runs. Big John twice compiled slugging percentages of .500 or better, and twice surpassed the .400 mark in on-base percentage. He drew 122 walks in 1973, and another 119 free passes in 1975. He also reached 100 RBIs in three of four seasons. Now let’s look at Jackson. During that four-year window, Reggie hit 122 home runs, while playing in a slightly easier park for home runs in Oakland. He achieved slugging percentages of .500 or better in each of the four seasons, but never topped the .391 mark in on-base percentage. He never came close to drawing 100 walks, reaching a high of 86 in 1974. He reached 100 RBIs in only two seasons, though he did come close the other two times.

Was Reggie better than Big John during that four-year arc? Yes, especially if we consider Jackson’s ability to steal bases and his cannonlike throwing arm in right field. Yet, Mayberry was close, closer than most fans might think at first glance. In spite of the similarity in numbers, Mayberry remained painfully underrated, mostly because of Jackson’s postseason heroics and a larger-than-life personality.

Mayberry also lacked the staying power of “Mr. October.” Beginning in 1976, Big John’s game started to fall off badly. He appeared to sleepwalk through parts of the 1977 Championship Series, which the Royals lost to the Yankees. Suspecting that the play of Mayberry was being affected by cocaine and alcohol abuse, a furious Whitey Herzog convinced the front office to rid the team of its cleanup hitter in the spring of 1978, when the Royals sold him to the Blue Jays in a cash deal. The media never publicly reported Mayberry’s alleged problems with drugs, but his level of abuse became common knowledge among the game’s insiders. That’s why so few baseball people expressed shock or outrage when the Royals acquired only a small sum of cash for their No. 1 power hitter, who was still only 29 years old. To the best of my knowledge, Mayberry has never publicly acknowledged problems with drugs, but the stigma remains in baseball circles.

Mayberry revived his career partially north of the border, compiling OPS numbers of better than .800 in three consecutive seasons for the Jays. A poor start for Mayberry at the beginning of the 1982 season, coupled with the Yankees’ struggling fortunes, would bring the two parties together. With the Yankees thankfully abandoning their disappointing run-and-stun offense headlined by Dave Collins and Ken Griffey, George Steinbrenner decided to remake the team in midseason—a common occurrence in the 1980s. The Boss began to target potential trade candidates. At the same time, the Blue Jays furiously shopped Mayberry, whom they believed was cooked at the age of 33. Much to the delight of the Jays, the Yankees put together a fairly hefty package for Mayberry: prospects Jeff Reynolds and Tom Dodd and veteran first baseman Dave Revering.

Suffering from a severe case of wishful thinking, I was thrilled with the trade. First, it marked the end of the “Bronx Burners,” an experiment that manager Gene “Stick” Michael never seemed to embrace. And more importantly, it brought the Yankees the kind of player I’ve always loved in the Bronx—the left-handed slugger. I loved watching the super-sized Mayberry stand at the plate, striking the kind of intimidating pose that only Willie Stargell could do better. If the Yankees could no longer have Reggie Jackson, they could at least have Big John Mayberry.

Unfortunately, the trade occurred about a decade too late to benefit the Yankees. Weighed down by a slowing bat and growing flab in his midsection, Mayberry couldn’t crank up the power anywhere near his levels in Kansas City, or even in Toronto. (I really have no idea whether Mayberry was using drugs while with the Yankees, partly because I never heard the drug rumors until five or six years ago.) In 215 Yankee at-bats, Mayberry lofted only eight home runs, leaving him with a slugging percentage of .353, his worst in six years. The power-deprived Yankees, who needed a lot more help than Big John could provide, finished four games under .500 and ions behind the division-winning Brewers of Harvey Kuenn. About the only consolation that came from the Mayberry trade was the failure of any of the three ex-Yankees to do anything in Toronto. Revering, Reynolds, and Dodd all flopped for the Jays’ organization, either at the major league or minor league level.

In the spring of 1983, my father bought me a complete set of the newest Topps cards, which included a nifty action shot of Mayberry wearing Yankee pinstripes. I liked the card, but it would soon become a novelty item. During the latter days of spring training, the Yankees came to the same conclusion the Jays had determined the previous summer. With a growing supply of first basemen and designated hitters, the Yankees gave Mayberry his unconditional release.

Shortly thereafter, when no teams came calling, Mayberry decided to retire. As far as I know, he had never returned to the Stadium since, certainly not for any Old-Timers’ Games or to throw out any ceremonial first pitches. That all changed on Saturday, when Mayberry made it back the Stadium, not to watch the home team, but to watch his talented son begin his own major league climb. As a bonus, he saw junior hit his first major league home run.

So the next time that Big John makes it back to the Bronx, we’ll know it’s him. That’s a promise from Buck, McCarver, and the rest of us.

Bruce Markusen is the author of seven books on baseball and can be reached via e-mail at bmarkusen@stny.rr.com.

Yup, that’s what happens when you get the early crew covering a late night game.  An 8 o’clock start was pushed back a couple of hours by rain–no, by hail if you can believe it–and by the time the Magic dashed the high hopes of Lebron James and the Cavs to take a 3-1 series lead in the Eastern Conference NBA finals, I was just about shot.

It was 2-0 Texas when I fell out.  Yanks couldn’t get the bit hit early against Kevin Millwood, Joba Chamberlian didn’t look great, and Melky Cabrera had to leave the game after crashing into the center field wall.   The bullpen couldn’t hold it down late.

Final Score: Rangers 7, Yanks 3.

Here’s the recap from the News, Post and the Times.

The Yanks remain a game out of first place.  Both Toronto and Boston lost too.

The Bombers get back to their more normal chapeaus, and A-Rod seeks to continue his resurrection . . . consider this the official game thread.

Yankees/Rangers (Chamberlain/Millwood)

I caught the highlights of the Cards-Brewers game yesterday. Fitting that it came a day before the 50th anniversary of the famous Harvey Haddix near pefecto.

Gerald Eskenazi covered the game and he wrote about his experience in the Times over the weekend.

I remember reading about this game when I was a kid and I still find it heartbreaking, don’t you?

David Chang is a big deal New York chef. He owns four restaurants in the east village. Last year he was profiled in the New Yorker:

He never set out to become a famous person. He just wanted to see if he could open a noodle bar. Now he finds that he’s a public figure, criticized and praised—but mostly praised—by people he’s never met. “Getting these awards freaks me out—the last thing I want is a Michelin star—because I know I’m not the best,” he says. When he thinks about the cooks he worked with at Craft and Café Boulud and how they were so much more skilled than he, and had put in more years than he had, and yet here he was getting all these prizes and all this attention, he feels himself starting to panic. Sometimes he tries to comfort himself thinking about all the bands he loves that made great music even though they were terrible musicians, but somehow it’s not the same. “I feel like I’m losing my ability to understand reality,” he says, “like when someone loses their hearing, they can still speak English, but their speech eventually becomes distorted because they can’t hear themselves. I don’t want to be this crazy. It’s tiring. I just want some mental clarity. But I don’t like that I’m becoming more self-aware of all my problems. It doesn’t make me feel better—I just feel unease almost all the time. I’m a total head case right now, I cannot keep this up. All I want to do is f***ing move to Idaho and ski and fish and read books. All I want to do is run away and stop.”

There are several mother figures in his life who worry about his health and try to persuade him to run away and stop: Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet; Dana Cowin, the editor of Food & Wine; Alice Waters, the founder of Chez Panisse. “I never thought that I’d be able to be, like, friends with Alice Waters,” he says. “And for her to actually care about me—that is so weird. I think Ruth told her that I had shingles, and that’s when Alice had an intervention at lunch. She was like, ‘You’re not doing anything more, no more, no more!’ ” Then, there are the older-brother chef figures who know he’s not going to stop but who tell him to calm down. Andrew Carmellini bought him yoga lessons. “It was just when Momofuku started to really roll,” Carmellini says, “and I was, like, ‘Dude, I’m telling you from personal experience, you need to chill out.’ ” Mario Batali, who has opened seven restaurants in New York, three in Las Vegas, and two in L.A., while hosting two programs on the Food Network and appearing regularly on “Iron Chef,” comes into Noodle Bar a fair amount and gives Chang counsel. “Mario’s big thing to me is ‘Dave, would you f***ing be happy?’ ” Chang says. “He loves it. He loves life. I want to love life as much as Mario loves life.” He sighs. “It’s not that I’m not happy; I’m just fearful for the future,” he says. “I’m fearful that everything’s gonna be taken away. Fear is a driving force for most of the things that I do. I don’t know if that’s healthy.”

I was downtown over the weekend and stopped into Momofuku Bakery and had the famous pork buns. $9 for two pork buns.

If you can restrain yourself you can eat one in four bites. I ate the first one in five and savored the second in six. At about a dollar a bite it’s so worth it. You can also order the pork buns with a deep fried, slow poached egg.

Believe it. These pork buns are the Truth, man.

Then I had a slice of Arnold Palmer cake. That’s a cake made like the drink–lemonade and iced tea.  It was wild. The desserts are playful and crazy. They used to have Lucky Charms ice cream. I saw Sour Patch kids ice cream, and Atomic Hot Ball ice cream while I was there. Could be hectic but could be amazing. They also sell specialized milk and butter.

Here’s a piece with good pictures.

It was supposed to rain and thunder and carry on this weekend but it turned out nice after all.  Even today, it looks pleasant outside.  The sun is out, a breeze is coming through our living room window. Anyone going to a cook-out?  I’m just coolin at the crib, got some things to take care of, and will check out the game this afternoon.

I like Mark Bittman’s cookbooks–though I’m not fanatical about them like some people–but think he’s a cornball on TV.  However, his shorter video bits for the web are excellent. 

Dig it:

We got the pitcher’s duel that we expected.  Okay, it wasn’t a 1-0 game with both starters going the distance, but it was pretty good.  Cole Hamels allowed two runs over six innings; scattered eight hits, didn’t walk a batter, and struck out six.  CC Sabathia gave up a bunch of hits too, nine, over eight innings.  He didn’t walk anyone either, struck out four, but allowed three runs.  Not bad, but not good enough.

The Phillies scored first.  Carlos Ruiz reached on a two-out single in the top of the third inning and then Jimmy Rollins lifted a fly ball to shallow right-center field.  Brett Gardner raced in and dove for it, but he could not make the catch and the ball rolled behind him.  Ruiz was waved home. Right fielder Melky Cabrera, picked up the ball and made a good throw to the cut-off man, Robinson Cano. Cano dropped the ball and Ruiz scored easily.  It was a careless play on Cano’s part.  I don’t know if he would have nailed Ruiz, but it certainly would have been close. Shane Victorino singled Rollins home to make it 2-0.

(more…)

I remember having a strange but welcoming feeling when Alfonso Soriano replaced Chuck Knoblauch at second base.  Plays that would have previously made me tense suddenly were made with ease.  It’s not that Soriano was any great shakes as a fielder–he wasn’t–it’s just that he wasn’t a mess either.  I don’t think Jason Giambi was a complete disaster at first, but in retropsect he seems like one since Mark Teixeira is in town. The season is still young, but doesn’t it seem like Teixeira is making brilliant plays almost every day? I think he’s the best fielding first baseman the team has had since Mattingly.  Tino was solid, but he wasn’t this good.

Teixeira and the Yanks have their hands full today with Cole Hamels. CC Sabathia, who has pitched well of late, goes for the Yanks.  It’s hazy in the Bronx with rain in the forecast for this afternoon.  Let’s hope they get this one in and here’s hoping the Yanks can win this series.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

Apropos of nothing, here’s a bit on Milo Manara, the Italian artist, most famous for his erotic drawings.

 Dude, and I’m one lucky so-and-so.  I’ve still got the original.

And here I thought I’d missed all the dramatic comebacks. I was away last weekend, bridesmaiding (and if that’s not an action verb, it should be), and for the first time in years was mostly without internet and TV – so I didn’t catch any of those three walk-off wins. I hasten to add, in case the lovely bride is reading this, that it was of course completely worth it. But fortunately the Yankees were willing to give me a little encore today, coming back from a two-run ninth inning deficit with another big homer from A-Rod, who continues to give the world the finger, and a Melky Cabrera single to beat the Phillies 5-4.

Regardless of the outcome, I’m loving this weekend’s baseball – I get a kick out of seeing Yankees fans pulling for the Mets, and vice versa. A rare moment of city-wide unity, even if it is based on a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” sort of sentiment.

Andy Pettitte was the starter today, and he looked pretty good in the early going. In fact, he looked pretty good all afternoon if you just ignore a crucial five minute stretch in the middle there. In the second he allowed a solo shot to Raul Ibanez, which is the fashionable thing to do this spring, and then held things down ’til the fifth. Meanwhile the Yankees evened things up right away, when Cano doubled (or when Jayson Werth lost the ball, if you want to be less charitable) and Cabrera and Swisher got him the rest of the way home.

J.A. Happ was the Phillies starter, a classic URP situation. Mark Teixeira got two hits but other than that and Cano’s run in the second, New York didn’t put a dent in him. The game stayed tied at 1-1 until Pettitte slipped  a bit in the fifth, with a base hit, walk, and home run from John Mayberry (Jr.), in his first Major League game.

(Mayberry doubled in the seventh, too. I was all ready to start seriously disliking this kid but then he looked so happy, I couldn’t hold it against him. His dad, who played for the Yanks at the very tail end of his career, though before my time, was in the stands – but FOX kept cutting to an entirely unrelated middle aged black Phillies fan, and misidentifying him as Mayberry, for more than an inning. Awkward. I was relieved when they announced their mistake, though, because I’d been wondering why the first guy they had onscreen didn’t seem all that proud.)

After that Pettitte buckled down and got through the seventh without further damage; and really, four runs in seven innings isn’t too bad against an offense like the Phillies’. This start pretty much encapsulated what I’ve come to expect from Pettitte these days: he doesn’t usually have the stuff to totally shut down a good-hitting team anymore, but he won’t let things get completely out of hand either.

Derek Jeter’s homer in the seventh made it 4-2, well within stirring comeback range. And so in the bottom of the ninth, Damon walked, Teixeira struck out on three hideously nasty Brad Lidge sliders, and A-Rod came to the plate. I have to say, given Teixeira’s AB, my hopes were not high at this point. But Rodriguez had a good at-bat, laid off a couple of low sliders, and waited out a fastball, which he then blasted into the seats — it wasn’t one of his tape-measure shots but he still knew right away it was out and took a little pause before breaking into his trot. I may never know what to make of that guy, but whatever else he is, he’s sure not boring.

After that Cano singled and stole second, and Melky worked out a nice careful at-bat and singled him home. There was a big happy celebratory knot of players on the field, and AJ Burnett marched off very businesslike and determined to fetch the whipped cream. This was the Yankees 17th come-from-behind win this season, and their 9th in their last at-bat, which if you want to be all glass-half-empty about it means they’re falling behind an awful lot, but still it’s fun to watch.

Meanwhile, up at Fenway, Omir Santos of all people just hit a game-winning two-run homer off of Papelbon. And Toronto lost, too. Can I get you anything else?