Looking for that ideal last-minute holiday gift for the sports fan in your life?  Look no further than The Best American Sportswriting of 2008, edited by Bill Nack, who is one of the finest sports writers we have.  

Nack is a first-rate reporter, a dedicated craftsman, and a true storyteller.  He came up with Newsday in the late Sixties and wrote about horse racing.  His experience in the field culminated in the seminal book, Secretariat: The Making of a Champion.  In 1979, Nack joined Sports Illustrated where he excelled at the bonus, or take-out piece, writing beautifully about Willie Shoemaker, Keith Hernandez, Rick Pitino, Bobby Fischer, Rocky Marciano, and, of course, Secretariat, to name just a few. (Nack’s best work is compiled in the stellar collection, My Turf.)  

Nack now works for ESPN.com.  Roger Ebert, who has been friends with Nack since they went to college together, wrote a wonderful essay about his friend last week.  If you love words, and care about language, you must check this out.  It could be the highlight of your week. 

I recently caught up with Bill recently to chat about The Best American Sports Writing 2008.

Bronx Banter: As a writer, how do you approach a project like this?

Bill Nack: I just look for the stuff that I liked the most. The stuff that I thought was the best written and best told stories. I read 70-80 stories that Glenn Stout sent me. I got it down to 35-40 and then it became really tough to pair it down. The last ten were very difficult.

BB: Did you work with Glenn or alone?

BN:  I did it on my own. There were a couple of pieces that I had questions about but not many. He left it up to me totally. I trusted him to give me what he thought were the 70 best and after that I felt it was up to me to find the ones that I thought were the best. And occasionally, I’d call him up and say, “What do you think of this one?” Some to me were slam dunks, in fact most of them were. Jeanne Marie Laskas, SL Price. The only problem that I had was in trying to get a mix–of traditional sports with obscure sports. And I was very conscious of the mix.

BB: Did you also want to mix-up bonus pieces and newspaper stuff?

BN: Yeah I did actually. I wanted to make sure there was an adequate representation of newspaper columns which are a dying species. And when I read Rick Telander’s piece on Doug Atkins that was a no-brainer. Same thing on Rick Reilly’s piece. The piece on Bo Jackson, by Joe Posnanski, that was kind of a column, that to me was an easy one. That raised a problem because I wondered if we should have two Bo Jackson stories in one book. And I really liked the ESPN.com piece by Michael Weinreb. I loved both of them. And what I liked about them together is that they were completely different takes on the same guy. I think I did consult with Glenn on that one. I said, “Do you mind if we have two Bo Jackson stories?” And he said, “No, no, they are both very different.”

BB:  I actually like having them back-to-back for just that reason.

BN:  The one thing that I noticed in the first batch of stories that Glenn sent me was that there was no humor. It was very serious. The poor woman who was lost in the wilderness and saved by her dog, the Terry Fox run across Canada, the world’s tallest tree, Scott Price’s piece on the poor coach who died from a foul ball.  And I looked at it and thought, “God, some of this stuff is really gloomy.” I happened to be a subscriber to Golf Digest and Dan Jenkins is a regular contributor. I started looking through my old issues and ran across Dan’s piece about trying to play golf as you grow old. I started laughing as I read it, because he’s one of the funniest writers that’s ever written about sports. I finished it and thought this has got to go in there. So that’s the one humorous piece that I found. I also liked it because I’m 67 and play golf. And there are a lot of older men who still play, so I thought it had a wider appeal. It was not just funny, which I needed, but it was something that a lot of guys could relate to. You don’t have to be 67, all you have to do is be 50.

BB: Was there a sense with the Tom Boswell column on Clemens and the Hank Aaron story that you wanted to get in pieces that were timely?

BN: Oh, definitely. I did think of that. I thought people would like Tom Boswell’s piece because it is a comment on Clemens.

BB: I thought the Aaron piece was phenomenal.

BN: I showed some of the pieces around before I made my final choices. Some people loved the Tommy Craggs thing and other people said, “You can’t put this in there. Who is this guy?” I just laughed. But they were bent out-of-shape because Craggs is criticizing the press in his piece. Who is this guy to criticize the press? I said, “I have no idea and I don’t care who he is.” I thought he had a very interesting, sharp take. And when I read it I thought, you know there is a lot of truth in this. I might not agree with everything, but I thought there was a lot of truth in it. I had friends in the piece that he criticized but I ran it anyway.

BB: The collection has some good young talent, like Wright Thompson, who has made the series several times now.

BN: I thought that was a terrific piece he did on Beijing. Really well done. Almost personal in a way. He didn’t just write a piece. He got you into it with vivid imagery. I’ve never met Wright Thompson, I’ve only read a little bit by him but I thought, this is really good. I didn’t know anything about him, but like Tommy, I liked his work and was happy to put it in this book. If you want to know the bottom line, I didn’t consider personalities, I didn’t consider names, I just put in people who contributed to making this the best possible anthology I could put together.

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Enough is never enough.

According to George King in today’s New York Post:

According to several baseball officials, the YankeesNew York Yankees remain in the Mark Teixeira hunt. But the same connected voices insist if the Yankees don’t land the switch-hitting first baseman, they will turn their money toward controversial slugger Manny Ramirez.

“If they can’t get Teixeira, they are right there on Manny,” an official with knowledge of the Yankees’ plan said yesterday.

…Only fools count out the Yankees when it comes to free agents.

I will start with a confession: I now love A.J. Burnett. I love his sizzling fastball and knee-buckling curveball and disappearing changeup. I love his sneer and his stare and his cocky glare.

I used to hate all of it when he handled my team – one, two, three – spit and walked off the mound like he owned the world. A guy like Burnett is easy to hate when he’s on the other side, but I find him irresistible now that he’s with us.

I officially fell for him last night in a bar. The music was loud, but the shouts were even louder when the news rolled across the screen: “ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick reports that the New York Yankees and free agent A.J. Burnett have reached a preliminary agreement on a five-year, $82.5 million contract.”

The barroom cheered and cheered and cheered again.

But some people were not cheering. Those people look at Burnett and see everything that can go wrong. They see his past injuries and the length and size of his contract and some other things that I can’t even understand right now because I’m in love with a talented pitcher who can get batters out.

That’s why I look at Burnett and see everything that can go right. I see the blazers and the benders and the Bugs Bunny changes. I see the frustrated Sox and Rays and Jays and O’s who will now hate Burnett as much as I used to.

I see a beautiful baseball summer with A.J. in a rotation with CC and Chien-Ming and Joba and maybe Andy, too.

And then I remember the true love this game can bring when you believe in the promise of the future and not just some possibilities drawn from the past.

It’s safe to say in all the time that I’ve known Cliff, I’ve never seen him so emotional.  I’ve seen him livid about specific plays and games–heck, he was furious (and rightfully so) when the Yankees didn’t sign Carlos Beltran in favor of Pavano, Wright and Womack.  But never anything that approaches his disgust over the AJ Burnett deal.

During the course of the season, Cliff and I will chat during a game and I’m the emotional one, flying off the handle, shouting at the top of my lungs when Alex Rodriguez just misses his pitch and fouls the ball off.  And Cliff is always collected, rational, measured.  Not a vulcan, just not easily led by his gut.

Now, I’ve savaged AJ Burnett for the past few years.  But my initial reaction here is to look for the positives.  Maybe I’m just reacting to Cliff’s reaction, and I want to keep the balance in the Bronx Banter universe (we can’t both be raving mad men at the same time, can we?), but maybe Burnett will produce.  One thing for sure–the Yankees now have a starting staff with STUFF.  Throw CC, AJ, Joba and Wang at you?  That’s STUFF, man.  When’s the last time you could say that?

My feeling is that this is Cashman pushing his chips into the middle of the table and saying, “All In.”  He’s got CC for three years, which will coincide with the end of the careers of Mariano and Posada and maybe even Jeter.  This is all about the Yankees winning now. 

Same as it ever was.  I’m not defending this deal–I think five years is crazy too–and I’m not saying that I’ve ever rooted for Burnett, but I’m open to jumping on the bandwagon.  What’s the alternative?  That he’ll be the lovechild of Kyle Farnsworth and Carl Pavano?  I already suspect that.  All I can do is be pleasantly surprised. 

And Burnett really does have STUFF.

Over at SI.com, our pal Jay Jaffe thinks the deal could come back to haunt the Yanks, still he does point to some bright spots:

Burnett’s combination of fragility and perceived squeamishness calls to mind the darkest chapter of Yankee GM Brian Cashman’s tenure, the two deals he inked at the 2004 winter meetings with a pair of injury-riddled pitchers coming off rare healthy, effective seasons, Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright. The Yankees just cleared the former’s four-year, $39.95 million deal from the books this fall. A teammate of Burnett’s with the Marlins from 2002 through ’04, Pavano signed with the Yankees in December ’04 after a season in which he’d gone 18-8 with a 3.00 ERA in 222 1/3 innings — figures that were all career bests, but representing just the second time the pitcher had been healthy and effective over a full season. Pavano made just 19 starts in his four years in the Bronx, and his litany of injuries reached such an absurd level that his initials came to stand for “Can’t Pitch.” Wright was coming off his first healthy and effective season since 1998; he managed just 43 starts over the next three years (the last one in Baltimore) and was rarely effective. Suffice it to say that the Yankees’ recent record of banking on pitchers with sketchy track records isn’t a good one.

To be fair, Burnett is a good pitcher when healthy. Though he had never won more than 12 games prior to last season — a function of his lack of availability and the occasionally meager offensive support he had received — his ERAs have been 13 percent better than the park-adjusted league average over the past four years, which ranks 16th among pitchers with at least 700 innings in that span. His 4.07 ERA this past year was inflated by about half a run thanks to his .318 Batting Average on Balls In Play, 18 points above league average.

Burnett’s strikeout rate over those four years, 8.89 per nine innings, is even better, ranking third among that group behind Cy Young winners Jake Peavy and Johan Santana. As noted in discussing Sabathia, strikeout rate is the key indicator of a pitcher’s future success because it provides the window into his ability to fool hitters with his offerings. A pitcher’s strikeout rate generally declines as he ages, but a high strikeout rate gives him more headroom before he does so. To the extent that the Yankees must look five years into the future on Burnett’s deal, his strikeout rate offers some assurance of future effectiveness — if not availability.

Steven Goldman thinks that buying AJ is about as safe as bet as buying GM.

Anyhow, while we roll this all over, here’s a couple of You Tube delights to give you a smile.

Hey, what do you think of the AJ contract, Babs?

What about you, Joe?

C’mon now, let’s just dance it off:

The signing of CC Sabathia brings to mind the issue of large—shall we say heavyset?— pitchers. While few doubt that the 28-year-old Sabathia will help the Yankees immensely in the first two to three years of his contract, there are questions about his long-term staying power. How exactly have plus-sized pitchers aged over baseball history?

My immediate thoughts turn to two hefty lefties, Mickey Lolich and Wilbur Wood, who were dominant in their twenties, but pretty much past their prime by the time they reached their early thirties. Wood wasn’t helped by a freakish injury that occurred when a Ron LeFlore line drive nailed him in the kneecap, but the knuckeballer had already started to fade by that point. Already huge by his peak, “Wilbah” really took on grandiose proportions as a member of the White Sox in the early 1970s, once allegedly tipping the scale at about 280 pounds. By the age of 33, Wood was no longer effective. By 36, he was out of baseball and headed toward fulltime life on the farm.

Lolich never became as large as Wood did at his peak, but conditioning remained a problem throughout his career. By age 33, Lolich’s body had started to show signs of wear and tear. Though still adequate, he had clearly left his prime years behind. By 36, he was injury prone. Two years later, he was finished.  

Then there is the case of Sid Fernandez, another left-hander with a bad body who compounded his problems with a painful delivery. Fernandez enjoyed even less longevity than Wood and Lolich. El Sid started to experience serious arm problems by the age of 30, and soon lost his effectiveness. By age 34, Fernandez was headed to retirement.

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R.I.P. to one hot Betty.

Need a center fielder?

According to Pete Abraham, the Yankees may complete a trade that would send Melky Cabrera to the Brewers for Mike Cameron as soon as tomorrow.  I’ve always liked Cameron.  He seems like a good egg, an appealing guy.  Maybe not exactly the same clubhouse stature as Tony Clark, but close.  Alex Rodriguez and CC Sabathia speak highly of him I know.  He’s getting on in age but he’s a good bet to hit 20-25 homers, whiff 264 times, throw guys out and cover a lot of ground in center field.  

I would not especially miss Melky Cabrera.

Picking up on the big news of the day, SI.com’s Jon Heyman reports that C.C. Sabathia is about to sign with the Yankees.   Over at Fox, Ken Rosenthal says the deal is for seven years, $160 million.

Yowza. 

Man, I was looking for George Clinton’s “Chocolate City” on You Tube but it wasn’t available.  And to think I’ve been waiting on that one for weeks.  Dag.

This will have to do:

But be careful not to step in number two.

Tyler Kepner has more.

Joe Gordon was elected to the Hall of Fame this afternoon.  Gordon spent the first seven of his eleven-year career in pinstripes.

Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls – it’s more democratic.

Crash Davis

Of course Greg Maddux is retiring tenth on the all-time strikeout list (3371). Still, when I think back on Maddux in twenty, thirty years from now, my guess is what I’ll remember the most about him is a dinky ground ball to second base. That was the signature out of his prime, a crappy grounder, a squibber that rolled harmlessly to a waiting infielder. Or maybe a little jam shot pop-fly.  Or yeah, even a strikeout, the late-breaking fastball tailing back over the plate leaving hitters with their asses out, hands up and bats still on their shoulder.

In his prime, you rarely saw good swings or heard solid contact against Maddux.

There will be a host of tributes to Maddux this week. Here are the early birds.

Joe Posnanski:

I never presumed to think with Maddux or have a deeper understanding of why he was so good. I just loved watching him pitch, loved the whole scene, loved seeing the frustration batters would show, loved the way umpires over the course of a game became willing co-coconspirators, loved the way catchers would just let the ball tumble into the glove without moving, loved the way Maddux would fidget when he didn’t have all of his stuff working, loved it all. He was Mozart, I was Salieri, and no I couldn’t reproduce it, no I couldn’t get close to it, but I felt like I could hear the music.

Over at SI.com, Tom Verducci writes:

The magic show is over. I dislike absolutes, but of this I am sure: Greg Maddux is the most fascinating interview, the smartest baseball player and the most highly formed baseball player I have encountered in 27 years covering major league baseball. There is no one alive who ever practiced the craft of pitching better than Maddux.

…I will miss watching him pitch. In his prime, Maddux never received enough credit for the quality of his stuff. Too many people equate power with stuff, but Maddux’s fastball, at least back when he was throwing 90 mph, had ridiculous movement — late, large movement. Think about this: he dominated hitters with no splitter and a curveball that was no better than high-school quality.

That’s how good were his fastball and changeup. It wasn’t just location.

Here is Verducci’s 1995 feature profile on Maddux for SI.

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Once upon a time the winter meetings mainly consisted of boozy old general managers getting boozy and doing business.  Today, it is one of the biggest events of the baseball year, and certainly the highlight of the off-season.  It is covered breathlessly on-line and on TV.  It’s where fantasy teams are born.  It’s about rumors and gossip and Did You Hear? and I Gotta-Scoop. 

I went to the 2003 winter meetings in New Orleans after my first year blogging and introduced myself around to guys like Tom Verducci and Jack Curry, Howard Bryant and Tim Marchman, Nate Silver and Joe Sheehan.  Jay Jaffe and I went down together.  Will Carroll, who had been to the ’02 meetings urged us to come.  It’s the perfect place for a guy like Will who loves the adrenaline of the scoop world, of being on the inside, or at least being close to people on the inside.

I had a good time and met a bunch of great guys but I haven’t been back and wouldn’t want to go to another winter meetings unless I was getting paid for it.  For a writer, it is a lot of hard work.

From what I could tell in my one brief encounter, being at the meetings means a lot of standing around.  It has all the trappings of a seventh-grade dance, everybody anxious, waiting for something to go down.  But instead of the girls being the objects of desire for the groups of men, general managers like Billy Beane and Theo Epstein, personalities like Peter Gammons and Buster Olney, are the ones that everyone is gawking at, pretending that they are not being obvious. 

The hotel lobby is filled with columnists and beat writers (Internet writers and bloggiers now too), agents and their assistants, general managers and their assistants, a few managers, a stray former player possibly looking for a coaching job, smart college kids looking for front office work. 

It is a heavily cologned scene.  Too bad Hunter Thompson isn’t still around.

The Hot Stove has been ice cold this year unless you consider the Giants signing Edgar Renteria or the Cardinals trading for Khalil Greene hot transactions.  This year the meetings are in Vegas, which you would hope will enough by itself to instigate some action.  Vegas is either the best place in the world to holding the winter meetings or the worst (or maybe it’s just a little bit of both, depending on your luck).

Even if nothing much happens, being in Vegas at least gives caption writers and columnists plenty to work with.  We’ll see variations on a theme—Viva Las Vegas, Leaving Las Vegas, Ocean’s Eleven, The Rat Pack, Snake Eyes, Flush, Full House, Stip Poker, you name it.  Yes, the writers should have a field day.

We’ll have our ears to the ground, breathlessly following the breathless action, hoping above all else, that somebody gives us something to be breathless about.

What, if anything, do you think will change in the Yankee Universe in Vegas?

  They don’t make ballplayers like Joe Pepitone anymore. I’ll leave that up to you, the reader, to decide whether that is something good or bad for our great game.

By the time that Topps issued this card as part of its 1968 set, Pepitone had established himself as arguably the most colorful character in the history of the Yankee franchise. That was certainly a tall task of grand proportions, given the precedence of former oddball Yankees like Frank “Ping” Bodie, Lefty Gomez, and manager Casey Stengel.

Considered a can’t miss-prospect who was fully capable of playing all three outfield positions and first base, Pepitone first reached the major leagues in 1962, joining a Yankees team that featured a conservative front office and a staid approach to playing the game. Pepitone’s flamboyance ran counter to the Yankee way. Incredibly vain, he arrived at spring training flashing a new Ford Thunderbird, bragging about his new boat, and wearing a new sharkskin suit. When the young star didn’t hustle during the regular season, he was greeted with angry catcalls from his veteran teammates, reminding him not to “mess with their money.” They were referring to their almost annual World Series shares, which they felt would become threatened if Pepitone’s lack of hustle continued.

Off the field, Pepitone’s love of the fast lane reflected the lifestyle preferences of established Yankees like Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. Yet, there was something different about Pepitone’s way, which was less discreet, less subtle, and far more palpable. In perhaps his most blatant indiscretion, Pepitone occasionally didn’t show up for games, leading to speculation that he was being pursued by bookies for unpaid gambling debts.

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There’s Reggie Jackson lovers and Reggie Jackson haters.  I don’t think he cares which way they go so long as they shout, ‘Reggie!'”

Billy Hunter”

What was it that Pasternak said?  ‘Once in every generation there’s a fool who tells the truth exactly as he sees it.’  That’s Reggie.”

Jim Palmer

 
Tony Kornheiser wrote a great newspaer profile on Reggie at the end of spring training in ’78 for the Times. Reggie drove his Rolls to an exhibition game, Kornheiser rode shotgun, and got Reggie in fine form.*

Here’s how the piece, which is maybe 2,300-500 words, ends:

Jackson’s Lonely World, a Year After His Season of Hurt

March 27, 1978

By Tony Kornheiser

The uniform is tight and tapered, and he is into it in 15 minutes, ready to go. But the ride and the conversation have drone his insides dirty. Too much past dredged up. He needs something to keep his stomach down.

“There’s the man,” calls Dave Nelson, the Royal infielder, coming over to Jackson. “Congratulations, congratulations on a helluva World Series. You deserve it.”

Behind Nelson comes John Mayberry, the Royal slugger.

“Reggie!” Mayberry shouts.

“Rope, what’s up?” Jackson says.

“You, man. You, with your bad self.”

It is curious, but he seems most comfortable with members of other teams. With the Yankees, he is at his most comfortable at the batting cage, before games, when the other team’s players are close. You sense that is searching for vocal respect that only opposing players are willing to give him. It seems likely that still even after his Ruthian World Series, some of his teammates are either too jealous or too stubborn to admit that they were wrong about his ability as a player.

In the clubhouse Jackson is hesitant. Even now there is tenseness between him and many other Yankees. Yet, it may well be that he infers more hostility than actually exists.

“In the locker room I don’t feel like I’m one of the guys,” he says. “It’s hard for me to say this. I’d like to fit in, but I don’t. I don’t know if I’ll ever really be allowed to fit in. I need to be appreciated, even praised. I like to hear: ‘Nice going. Great going. You’re a helluva ball player.’ But I walk in feeling disliked. Maybe I’m overdoing it. Like I never get on anybody in the clubhouse unless it’s a situation where it’s obvious that it’s OK for me to say something. I stay in the background. I never talk to too many people, except maybe Fran Healy or Ray, the clubhouse attendant, or the press.

“I never small-talk with anyone; I don’t feel that anyone cares to talk to me. So I kind of shut up. I’m always the one who has to initiate the conversations. Sometimes I hear my voice in the locker room, and I wasn’t to take it back. I don’t want anyone to look at me or feel uncomfortable around me.”

These words are hard to hear and harder, perhaps, to say.

And then there is a game to play. He is at peace playing baseball. He starts in right field and plays five innings going to bat three times. Two outs and one RBI single. The people, who react to him as they react to no other Yankee—loud boos, even louder cheers—are satisfied. He has been held down, but not out.

With permission to leave early, Jackson showers, dresses and goes to his car for the drive home. There is a crowd, as usual. He sings autographs and discusses the care, its paint job and the reason he likes to park in the shades instead of the sun. Before leaving he takes a towel and wipes it down, wiping even the inside carpeting, making sure it is perfectly clean.

Forty miles outside Fort Myers he is playing his tape deck, and the chorus of the song repeats, ‘We’re all in this together.” Jackson is singing along. “All my life,” he says, “I wanted a car like this. I know it’s a rich man’s car. I’m proud I can afford it.”

“He should be happy,” says Chris Chambliss. “He has everything he could want.”

“Are you happy?” Jackson is asked.

“For print?” he answers as the car moves almost silently past the swamps on Alligator Alley.

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By Glenn Stout

It was a nothing game.

September 24, 1992. A Thursday night. The Yankees in fourth place and the Tigers in sixth, neither of them close to the Blue Jays, or, apparently, with any chance of ever getting close to the Blue Jays or anyone else atop the division for at least a few more years. A young Scott Kamienicki vs. an aging Frank Tanana, one-time hard thrower whose fastball had come and gone and left behind a pile of guts and guile.

We were down from Boston, my girlfriend and I. She’d recently moved back in with me after getting a grad degree from Columbia and living and working in Mount Vernon for a few years, and we had some business to take care of in the city.

It had already been a funny day. Taking a bus somewhere downtown I’d seen Liza Minelli poking around outside some antique bathroom fixture store. Down by City Hall I’d used of one of those high tech public bathrooms that had cost 50 cents and gave itself a shower afterwards, like something from the Jetsons. Then I saw Rudy Giuliani walking down the street.

We went to the game – a nice early fall night. Only about 12,000 people were in the Stadium, so we had pretty good seats, probably the best seats I’d ever had for a major league game anywhere at that point – the main boxes, not too high up, almost dead on a line with the left field foul line. We might have paid twelve dollars a ticket, which also would have been the most I’d ever spent on a baseball ticket at the time.

I saw Nicolas Cage. He had better seats, right behind the plate, but still 20 or 30 rows up.

There wasn’t a whole lot of care on display on the field that night. Mattingly played hard, as always, and cracked a couple of doubles, and this new kid in center field, Bernie Williams, had a good night. But almost everyone else one either team – Charlie Hayes, Rob Deer, Tartabull – was packing it in; you could tell.

Seventh inning. Yankees ahead 4-0. Tanana throwing changeups off changeups and the occasional big sloppy curve – nothing much over eighty miles an hour. The crowd was already starting to file out.

Leading off, Gerald Williams. Rookie. I remember liking Gerald more than Bernie at first. He moved like a ballplayer, while Bernie moved like an antelope still wet from birth.

Gerald Williams hadn’t done much so far – a fly out, a strikeout. But now Tanana, thirty-nine years old and in his nineteenth year of major league baseball, gave him a pitch.

Williams didn’t miss it. I’ll never forget the trajectory – almost straight down the line, a little hook to it like a golf shot, that one bright spot against the black going smaller…

And Gerald Williams watching it, and walking, slow toward first before, barely, breaking into a trot. His first major league home run.

I was watching him saunter toward first when I heard someone yelling, not just to get someone’s attention, but REALLY yelling, I mean angry “I’m gonna ruin your face” kind of mad.

It was Frank Tanana. Pissed. Chewing Williams’ ass out every step he took all around the bases for standing there and showing him up. And Williams did speed up – not much – just enough to let Tanana know he heard but at the same time not so much to let him think he had been intimidated. And Tanana kept yelling.

Baseball-Reference tells me that Pat Kelly followed with a walk and Bernie Williams, this time running like an adult antelope, tripled, knocking out Tanana, and the Yankees went on to win 10-1, but to be honest, I don’t really remember much else about the game.

But I’ve got a great excuse. You see, when I was down by City Hall earlier that day, my girlfriend and I had applied for a wedding license. We went back the next day and got married in a ceremony that took precisely 27 seconds.

Or about as long as it took Gerald Williams to run around the bases.

Glenn Stout is the series editor of the Best American Sports Writing and the author of many books, including Yankee Century.

I caught the YES Hot Stove show last night.  The panel featured veteran newspaper men Hal Bodley, Murray Chass and Jack Curry.  It has become all too easy to call out Chass which is a shame because he was so good for so long.  So I won’t pile on but he really didn’t come off well.  He monopolized the conversation and what he said…oy.  Bodley was fine if somewhat bland and Curry was good as usual. 

And our pal Steve Goldman distinguished himself in an oddly-conceived segment as the “Interweb Expert.”

Dig:

Pete Dexter is a hard guy. Dark. He writes hard–succinct, almost scary-clean prose–and he sure lived hard when he was a columnist in Philadelphia from the mid-Seventies through the mid-Eighties. Later, he became a novelist and wrote screenplays.  His newspaper columns and a few longer magazine pieces were compiled in the fine collection, Paper Trails.

I’ve heard Dexter compared favorably with legendary newspaper columnists Jimmy Breslin and Mike Royko.

Steve Volk wrote an excellent profile of Dexter a few years back that is worth checking out.  In Philly, Dexter was friends with the fighter Randall Tex Cobb.  Cobb and Dexter got into a brawl in a baroom that almost cost Dexter his life:

The night he was beaten near to death is Dexter’s signature biographical moment—the instant in time when his already colorful life story entered the realm of myth.

Dexter, so the story goes, was a hard-drinking Philadelphia newspaperman who met up with a bunch of Grays Ferry toughs. They were upset by a column he’d written about a drug-related death in the neighborhood. They beat him with baseball bats.

Dexter suffered a broken pelvis and enough broken skin to warrant 60 stitches. He recovered from his wounds, and—this is important—stopped drinking. Then he proceeded to become one of America’s best fiction writers.

There are, though, problems with the story.

For one, Dexter himself says the incident doesn’t look so important to him through his 63-year-old eyes—he didn’t hear a redemption song in the sound of his own pelvis cracking. Then there’s the matter of the baseball bats.

For a taste of Dexter’s work, take a look at this beautifully-crafted story he wrote for Sports Illustrated in the mid-Eighties:

Early on the afternoon of Feb. 4, 1982, a truck driver named Albert Brihn, on the way to a sewage-treatment plant off PGA Boulevard just outside Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., noticed something lying in a clearing of pine trees 60 feet off the road connecting the treatment plant to the street. It looked like a dummy.

Mr. Brihn delivered his load and headed back out. On the way, the thing in the clearing caught his eye again. Then something else—a buzzard, floating over it, banking again and again in those grim buzzard circles. Suddenly the thought broke, and Mr. Brihn knew what the thing was.

He stopped the truck and walked to the body. It was a man dressed in a black bikini bathing suit. There was a gold chain around the neck threaded through an Italian horn of plenty. He studied the body—there was a hole to the right of the nose, another at the right temple, both with muzzle burns, and there was a tear between the nose and the mouth where a bullet fragment had passed going out. As he stood there, the chest rose and fell twice. It was 1:30 in the afternoon.

A little more than 10 minutes later, the paramedics from Old Dixie Fire Station No. 2 arrived in an ambulance. If you believe the signs you see coming into town, Palm Beach Gardens is the golf capital of the world. It is home to a large retirement community—in this case a financially secure retirement community—so when one of its citizens expires, serious efforts are made toward not leaving the body lying around. Certainly not long enough to attract buzzards.

This particular body, of course, did not belong to someone of retirement age. The paramedics were there in 10 minutes anyway, and took it, the chest still rising and falling, to Palm Beach Gardens Community Hospital, where, at 3:36 p.m., the chest went suddenly still. Michael J. Dalfo was 29 years old, and the coroner’s report would say he died of two .25-caliber bullets, shot at close range into his head.