A Bronx Banter Interview

By Hank Waddles

I can pinpoint the exact date when I became a Dallas Cowboys fan. On January 15, 1978, I was a young boy living in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, but without any attachment to the Lions when my Aunt Hazel and Uncle Tommy came over to watch Super Bowl XII between the Cowboys and the Denver Broncos. Uncle Tommy had bet money on the Broncos, so each time the Cowboys scored his face would twist into a painful grimace. Since I was an eight-year-old smart aleck, I thought it was hilarious and soon found myself quite naturally rooting for the Cowboys and against my uncle. When Dallas scored its final points, putting the game out of reach for the Broncos, Uncle Tommy actually slid off the couch in disgust, making me laugh out loud until my mother shushed me. My uncle passed away only a few years later, so that night remains my strongest memory of him. I’ll never know how much money he lost that night, but I gained a team.

Perhaps because I took pleasure in my uncle’s pain, the Cowboys rewarded me with a string of painful losses: to the Steelers a year later in Supe XIII (thank you, Jackie Smith); to Montana and Clark; to Riggins and the Hogs. Soon enough they descended into mediocrity and irrelevance, until Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson came to the rescue and rebuilt the franchise.

Any football fan can tell you what happened next. Jerry and Jimmy turned the team upside down, traded Herschel Walker, drafted Aikman and Emmitt, and started winning Super Bowls. Author Jeff Pearlman starts with what we know and goes deeper, talking to everyone who had anything to do with the team during that era, ranging from the players and coaches to the reporters who covered them to the women who slept with them. The result is Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty, a revealing and engaging look at one of the greatest teams in NFL history. Recently Jeff was kind enough to talk with me about the book. Enjoy.

BronxBanter
I’m guessing that this book was kind of a perfect storm – high profile football players that haven’t yet faded from the public consciousness, lots of Super Bowls, lots of sex, and lots of drugs. How long after you started this project did you realize you had hit a goldmine?

Jeff Pearlman
I would say I actually knew even before I started it. I’ll be totally honest with you – I haven’t even said this to anyone. I had a really, really, really good feeling about this book early on. Early on. This was basically my way of thinking. My first book about the ’86 Mets made the Times best seller list for six or seven weeks, and I didn’t expect it to. I had no expectations at all because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, it was my first book, and it made it. My kind of way of thinking with this, the Cowboys were like the Mets on steroids. You’re talking about a team that’s probably the most popular sports franchise in the country, much more famous figures. With the Mets, yeah, you’re talking Gooden and Strawberry, but then Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter are big New York figures, but they’re not national guys. With the Cowboys – Aikman, Deion, Emmitt, Irvin, Switzer, Jerry, Jimmy… it was pretty bountiful.

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By Joe Posnanski

OK, look, I don’t really have a lasting Yankee Stadium memory. I mean, sure, I have them, but they’re no different than the 5,483,794 lasting Yankee Stadium memories that have been told the last six months or six years or six decades or however long this “Lasting Yankee Stadium Memory” series has been running.

So the only reason I’m even writing this is because Alex pretty much bullied me into it by noodging me about it three times a day, every day since before my second child was born. I just assumed he would forget about it at some point, assumed that even for him the expiration date on Yankee Stadium memories would pass, assumed that he would let me live in peace. No. This man, like Billy Martin, simply knows no peace. I am of the firm belief now that that the best way to find Osama Bin Laden is to have Alex Belth assign him a “Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories” essay.

Anyway, what kind of unique Yankee Stadium memory does Alex even think I have? Who am I, Robert Merrill? Hey, maybe my memory was the time that me and the other short-pants kids in the Bronx skipped school and slipped past the front guards at the stadium and caught the last of Larrupin’ Lou’s three homers, which just so happened to heal my sick little brother Tommy. Or maybe it was that day in ’78 when I was a kid sitting outside the stadium and Billy Martin first threatened to hit me in my fat face and then apologized (said he had confused me for “Steinbrenner or one of them”) and then invited me to sit by him and tell Reggie he was benched.

Or maybe, seven years old, and my dad takes me to Yankee Stadium. My first game. We go in through this long, dark tunnel underneath the stands. And I’m holding his hand, and we come out of the tunnel, into the light. It was huge. How green the grass was, the brown dirt, and that great green copper roof, remember? We had a black-and-white TV then, so this was the first I ever saw in color. I sat there the whole game next to my Dad. He taught me how to keep score. Mickey hit one out.

Yeah. Memories. Not my memories. But at this point does it even matter? Others have told all of my memories. Sure, I was there the night when Jeter hit the November homer and listened to the recording of Frank singing “These little town blues …” again and again and again. I was there when John Wetteland went to the mound – this had to be three or four hours after he had gotten Mark Lemke to pop out to clinch the Yankees first World Series in a generation. The stadium was almost empty, and Wetteland stepped on the mound, and he just looked around … it was like he wanted just one more look.

I was there to hear Bob Sheppard say “Yankee Way,” I was there to see DiMaggio’s two-hand wave, I was there to hear a real Bronx Cheer – and it is true that all others taste like grape juice to that fine wine. I was there to see Greg Maddux at his baffling best, there to see perhaps the second-greatest team in baseball history* destroy the Padres, there to see David Cone throw one of the guttiest games I’ve ever watched, there to see Albert Belle snap at some fans, there to catch a glimpse of Bruce Springsteen, there to see George Steinbrenner, there to see Spike Lee, there to see Rudy Giuliani, there to see Mariano Rivera close the door.

*I am writing a book about the 1975 Reds, so by law I must have the 1998 Yankees behind them, and the ’27 Yankees too, and also the ’61 Yankees.

And, yes the memory that Alex probably wanted, I stood in the rain in centerfield back in 1996, the day that Game 1 of the World Series was rained out. I stood out there where (more or less) DiMaggio stood, the Mick, Bobby, Mick the Quick, Bernie, Jerry Mumphrey. I looked around, took it all in, listened for the echoes, looked for the ghosts, all of that. There were a few policemen standing in the rain too, and I thought they were going to come get me, but they seemed to understand what I was doing.

In fact, as I trudged in I passed one of them. He said: “Getting your Lasting Yankee Stadium Memory for Belth, right?” New York police officers are wise.

Joe Posnanski is the author of The Soul of Baseball, columnist for the Kansas City Star, and superstar blogger for SI.com.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately.  I can’t get into hoops, I’m not a huge football fan.  TV is dull.  It’s cold outside. So I’m brushing up on my sportswriting history.  Newspaper guys, magazine writers, guys who did both. Boxing writing.  You really have to dig to find a lot of the good stuff, especially newspaper columns. Not that much is on-line.  Only a small bit of it has ever been anthologized.  There are so many guys that are practically forgotten to younger generations. 

I’ve been through a bunch of Sport, some issues of True, the newspapers, of course.  I raided the Inside Sports microfilm at the library last weekend. That was a great magazine for a handful of years, maybe ’79-83ish, the early years. Tom Boswell was their baseball guy, Gary Smith became a star writing features about football, Pete Dexter did kick-ass profiles of boxers and assorted hardguys. Roy Blount, Jr and Robert Lipsyte had columns.

And you know else did some great bonus pieces for them? Tony Kornheiser. I’ve found stories he did on Nolan Ryan, Mike Schmidt and Bill Walsh, all of which are very entertaining. And he did a profile on Joe Namath that should be in sports writing anthologies.

Kornheiser had chops, he was a good reporter as well as a skilled craftsman.  He was able to apply the same loose intelligence and humor that he later used in his newspaper column and his TV persona to long-form magazine writing. 

Here are two random Kornheiser bits from when he was at the New York Times (’76-79):

Philadelphia was having its face slapped by a bully of a winter, and Jimmy was coming from practice where he had attempted murder on a few dozen tennis balls. He had a sealskin coat over his shoulders and the former Miss World on his arm. As he walked past a group of fans one of them called out in a fatherly way, “Button up, Jimmy. It’s cold outside.”

Jimmy didn’t bother to stop, he gave his exit line of his way out of the door. “This is seal, my friend–ever see a seal die of the cold?” The former Miss World began to laugh. Jimmy always leaves them laughing, even if most of his wisecracks can’t be printed.

Jimmy Connors is the master of the single-entendre. He says what he wants, when he wants, to whom he wants. He is a Star. Heis demeanor, his philosophy, is rooted in something the Fonz likes to say: Live fast, love hard, and don’t let nobody borrow your comb. The Fonz gets away with it because–aayy–he’s the Fonz. Connors gets away with it because he wins.

“The Star You Love To Hate”
April 10, 1977

Here is a nice little piece of writing from a feature story on Catfish Hunter:

Underneath the folksy, good-ol’-boy exterior, with all his talk about bird dogs, killin’ them hogs and farmin’ them soybeans, Jim Hunter is an intelligent, thoughtful, honest and astonishingly secure man, the kind of man who’ll wear raggedy overalls to town becacuse he’s a farmer and that’s what a farmer wears even if he has millions in the bank. He has a touch of Senator Sam Ervin in him, the ability to draw a perfect picture of a horse without having to label it “Secretariat.” “Cat doesn’t demand respect,” said Fred Stanley, his teammate, “he just gets it.”

July 3, 1978

Robert Motherwell

He was good.

This smokes.

By Charlie Sheen

(as told to Alex Belth)

I was born in New York but I’ve lived out here in L.A. since I was three. But I’ve always rooted for the Yankees. I also rooted for the Reds because my dad was a big Reds fan. Reggie was one of my childhood heroes and the reason I learned to hit left-handed. He took the world center stage in the Bronx. I was 12, 13 the perfect age. I remember the Reds sweeping the Yankees in ’76 when I was with my dad in the Philippines on Apocalypse.

But the first time I actually went to Yankee Stadium was in 1991. My dad was shooting in Pittsburgh and I flew in the nigh before he wrapped. He was a doing a movie-of-the-week or a mini-series. We decided to do a baseball pilgrimage. We went to game at the old Three Rivers that night. I think we saw both Bonds and Van Slyke go yard. After the game we got on the elevator to leave and Joe Morgan walks on. I happened to be wearing a Reds hat. And I had met him briefly at some point back in the day. He shook my hand and gave me a hug and I introduced him to my dad who was so impressed that I knew Joe Morgan.

The following morning we got out on the road and we took a road trip to Cooperstown to the Baseball Hall of Fame. We visited the Mecca. The next morning we drove to New York and went to a game that night at the Stadium. It was a trip because if I’m not mistaken they were playing Texas. Fifty-five has always been a recurring number for me and the first guy up was Brian Downing and he was wearing 55. You’d have to look it up if it was Downing but it was 55. I just remember thinking, “Wow, of course my first game and the first hitter would have to wear 55.”

We had a great time at that game. Pretty sure Mattingly hit a three-run bomb in the eighth to put it out of reach. When one of the security guys comes to us afterwards and says, “You guys want to see Monument Park?” Everybody’s gone and we got a private tour. Then we’re walking back across the field and I say to my dad, “Hey, let’s go to the dugout. Let’s see what this looks like from the players’ perspective.” So we’re sitting in the dugout and I look under the bench and there’s a ball wedged-up under one of the seat supports. So I pull it out and based on the tint of the ball—it had red clay on the stitches, it didn’t say ‘practice’ on it—I’m convinced that it was a used in a game. It was a foul ball that shot into the dugout and stayed there.

We kept it. I had to leave New York the following morning. I was digging through my stuff at the hotel room and I couldn’t find the ball. I’m like, Great, dad kept it. Okay, it was his first game, he’s entitled. So I’m on the plane the next day and about halfway through the flight I’m going through my carry-on and there’s the ball in a little plastic bag. It said, “Hey Charlie, Thanks for taking me out to the ballgame.” There was such a cool, full-circle feeling about that trip. Then of course, finding the ball on the plane. I still have it of course.

The other memory is a little bizarre. Went to a game in ‘96, mid-season before they started making their move. Took a buddy of mine, David O’Neill. He’s a director and a writer and an old friend of mine. We were in a box but he had never been there so he said, “I’m going to go see what this place is like, I’m going to go walk around.”

Comes back with a foul ball that he has caught off the bat of Paul O’Neill. What are the odds? And, another example of him being about the fifth person I took to their first game that got a foul ball. I’ve been to what, a thousand games in my life. Never even touched one.

I bought out the left field bleachers in Anaheim in the mid-‘90s in a game against Detroit. I bought 2,600 seats in the left field pavilion and I sat out there with three friends. I was going to force the hand of the baseball Gods and that didn’t even work. Nothing. Four balls hit the wall that night. And the next night, I watched on television as like maybe four or five landed not just in the section but pretty much in my seat of the day before. It was one of those reminders that you can’t force the organic flow of the American Pastime.

Charlie Sheen is the star of the CBS comedy Two and a Half Men.

By Pat Jordan

I was 12 the first time I visited Yankee Stadium in 1953. I had been invited to appear on Mel Allen’s pre-game TV show because, as a Little League pitcher in Connecticut, I had pitched four consecutive no-hitters and struck out every batter I faced except two. I arrived in a tan suit, and tie, with my glove in a paper bag. I expected the Yankees to ask me to throw a few, and then sign me to a contract. But they didn’t. Mel Allen just talked to my parents, then asked me a question. I mumbled and answer and sulked. That’s all I remember about the Stadium on my first trip.

The next time I went to the stadium was in 1959, when I was 17, and trying to get the Yankees to give me a bonus. That trip, I remember clearly. The Yankee p.r. person ushered me and my older brother down to the team’s press room which, I was amazed to discover, had wood-paneling painted white with blue pinstripes.

Mel Allen was there, again, at a table. He mistook me for Rocky Colavitao, the Cleveland Indians slugging outfielder. Why not? We were both Italian. But he didn’t remember me from six years before. Then I was led to the Yankees’ clubhouse, where all my heroes were in various states of dress. I gawked at my idol, Whitey Ford, with his freckled red skin and blue eyes, and Yogi Berra, squat and homely, and Mickey Mantle, sitting in a whirlpool. I thought Mantle was ten feet tall as a kid but when he got out of the whirlpool I, at 6’1″, towered over him.

I dressed into a Yankee uniform, then went out to show my stuff to the Yankee scouts. When I stepped out of the dugout the vastness of the Stadium loomed up all around me. It was the biggest place I’d ever been in. Now that I was no longer a boy, I wasn’t interested in such things. The scouts sat behind the home plate screen while I warmed up on a mound behind home plate. Johnny Blanchard was catching me. When I finally cut loose with my first fastball Blanchard turned towards the scouts, said something, and tried to slip a sponge into his mitt, without me noticing it. But I did. After that, each succeeding fastball exploded in his mitt and around the Stadium like a canon’s roar. I will never forget it.

After I finished throwing, I went into the general manager’s office where the g.m and my brother bargained over my bonus, while I sat there silent at a big conference table. The Yankees offered me a $36,000 bonus and I was crushed. The Braves had offered me $50,000, but I desperately wanted to pitch for the Yankees in their Stadium which I had come to see, over the years, as my rightful baseball home.

But, alas, it was not to be.

Pat Jordan, the author of A False Spring and A Nice Tuesday, is a freelance writer.

I miss firejoemorgan.com. I think they could maybe be harsh at times, but they were seldom wrong, and that site is still the first thing I think of when I come across a really awful piece of sports writing; its recent silence has left a void. Yesterday I came across an ESPN the Magazine (quit looking at me like that — I get it free!) “Page 2” piece that really demands the FJM treatment.

I’m certainly no Ken Tremendous, but I’ll give it my best shot. And so without further ado I give you Mike and Mike – whose show I’ve never actually heard, and now I know why – on the Yankees’ offseason. It doesn’t seem to be available online, so I’ll just have to type out the highlights for you. Here we go:

The Big Question

THE YANKS NEEDED PITCHING, A FIRST BASEMAN, AND SOME PATIENCE. THE MIKES SAY TWO OUT OF THREE AIN’T GOOD.

Wait up. “Needed”? Did they sign Sabathia while I wasn’t looking?

GREENY:… after the success of the Rays and other small-market teams, is New York being smart by throwing money around instead of developing its farm system?

But… they haven’t spent any money yet!

Granted, they’ve offered Sabathia a pretty huge contract (though I don’t see how that prevents them from simultaneously developing their farm system). Moving on, then, I love the idea that since the Rays were successful last year, the best strategy for the New York Yankees would be to have a small budget – as if the Rays won because of that and not in spite of it.

Tampa doesn’t have a choice here; they’re not passing on Mark Texiera just because they prefer the young players in their system. If a one-legged man wins a race using a prosthesis, it’s inspirational, but that doesn’t mean you should train for your next 5K by cutting off one of your legs.

GOLIC: Unfortunately, what you don’t find with the Yankees is patience. They feel like they have to win right now.

Probably a fair criticism.

Last year, the team tried to go with young arms, but some of them got hurt, and it didn’t work. So while that may be the right thing to do, don’t expect them to do it… What I wanted to see is just how aggressive they’d get in bidding for the top players.

There’s that past tense again. Are they writing from the future? Tell me, Mikes, how was the Inauguration? Did Springsteen play?

GREENY: This strategy

The one they haven’t actually implemented yet?

is indicative of the biggest problem the  Yankees have: they lack a vision. Take the Steelers.

They play football.

… They have a blueprint for success and stick to it. The same goes for the Jazz.

There’s really not a baseball team you’d like to bring up here? Red Sox, maybe? A’s? No?

They’ve had the same coach for 20 years and the second-best record in the NBA in that time.

Is he seriously suggesting that the Yankees should try to be more like the Utah Jazz?  Nothing against the Jazz, who are a model of competence and class when compared to the Knicks (though to be fair, so was Lehman Brothers), but would anyone actually like to swap the Yanks’ last 20 years for the Jazz’s? Would New York be better off right now if they’d made it to the World Series only twice and lost both times?

If the Yankees really decided to build from within, it would be shortsighted to leave those plans behind just because of one bad year and some injury problems.

That’s true – it would be. Hey, has anyone told Brian Cashman about this?

GOLIC: You know if they’ll be able to help themselves.

What?

I don’t know if he maybe meant “You don’t know if they’ll be able to help themselves,” or perhaps “You know they won’t be able to help themselves,” but I also don’t care. This whole piece is like a PSA for what happens when magazines lay off too many members of the editorial staff in one go.

When the Hall of Fame Game died an unceremonious death on a rain-drenched Monday in June, Hall officials could have taken the easy route in opting for a low-maintenance minor league game between two Triple-A teams. Instead, they took a path that will require more work and preparation—but it’s a path that will benefit both the Hall of Fame and the Cooperstown community.

The recent announcement regarding the inaugural Hall of Fame Classic Weekend, which will replace the Hall of Fame Game and will be capped off by an old-timers’ game on June 21, should be received favorably by all fans who live within driving distance of Cooperstown. Given the state of the economy, it’s encouraging to hear that a major weekend of activity will coincide both with Father’s Day weekend and the official start of summer.

Frankly, this is something that the Hall of Fame should have done years ago. After all, what better place to celebrate nostalgia than a place where nostalgia is nurtured 362 days a year? The cancellation of the Hall of Fame Game gave Hall officials the vital push they needed to make an annual old-timers game a reality here in central New York. Let’s also not downplay the role that new Hall of Fame president Jeff Idelson (the former PR director for the Yankees) played in the final decision. Former Hall leader Dale Petroskey had major reservations about the old-timers game concept; he once told me that the sight of older Hall of Famers struggling on the field of play could prove embarrassing. The Hall has addressed that shortcoming by attempting to draw from a pool of younger, recently retired stars.

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Let’s gush over him just a little bit more, shall we?

Sean Penn cracks me up.  He makes me laugh nervously when I watch his anguished performances.  He’s a fine actor but such an…actor.  So when I saw the previews for Milk and saw Penn as the Gay activist address a crowd with a bullhorn…”I know you’re angry…I’M ANGRY!” that was enough to get me giggling.  

This is gunna be good.

Gus Van Zant directed the bio-pic which gave me hope that this movie would be a riveting experience.  False hope, as it turns out.  The movie, like so many of its kind, is an earnest civics lesson.  It is well-crafted and informative and dramatically dull.  Penn gives a deliberate performance and he’s game–he throws himself into the role.  But it also feels self-aware.  So does the entire movie. 

I guess I’ve always expected the comic in Penn to re-emerge.  His small role in Fast Times has turned out to be an anomoly, though I thought he walked away with Carlito’s Way too. 

I don’t mean to suggest that the role of Harvey Milk is a funny one, necessarily, but the character does have a quick-witted sense of humor and it offered Penn a new challenge.  He gets credit for trying, but in the end, it is a studied performance.  He is restrained when you feel he should be manic.  And the blame falls squarely on a static script that doesn’t allow the characters to develop in complicated or interesting ways.    

Penn and Van Zant and James Franco and the rest of the filmmakers have good intentions, but that alone is not enough to make a memorable movie.

Remember when Mickey Rourke was going to be the next big thing? 

He had nice turns in Body Heat:

and Diner:

Some people swear by The Pope of Greenwich Village (I am not one of them): 

But as soon as Rourke became a star, he became less interesting, predictable, a flat-joke, and then he wasn’t a star long, unless you account for his runaway fame in France (and there’s no accounting for that, is there?).  He left Hollywood and became a boxer and then returned to the movies, mostly B-level action movies made for DVD.

Now Rourke is back in the mix. The critics liked him in Sin City. And you can just smell an Oscar nomination for him in The Wrestler, his new feature, which looks to be a downbeat, arty riff on Rocky.

Pat Jordan profiles Rourke (His Fists Are Up and His Guard is Down) in today’s New York Times Magazine:

You meet Mickey, you can’t help liking him. He rescues abused dogs! He cries a lot: over his stepfather’s supposed abuse; the loss of his brother to cancer and his dogs to old age; the failure of his marriage to the actress Carré Otis. He admits he destroyed his own career, because, as he puts it: “I was arrogant. . . . I wasn’t smart enough or educated enough” to deal with stardom. He is candid about the people he has crossed paths with: Nicole Kidman is “an ice cube”; Michael Cimino, the director of “Heaven’s Gate,” “is crazy” and “nuts”; and the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. is “a liar.”

So what if he cries at the same moment in the same story in every interview? So what if his candor sometimes sounds like the bad dialogue from one of his many bad movies (“I have no one to go to to fix the broken pieces in myself”) or that his self-deprecation seems culled from the stock stories of so many fading actors (“I was in 7-Eleven, and this guy says, ‘Didn’t you used to be a movie star?’ ”)? So what if he seems disingenuous, at best, when he says he can’t remember that critics nominated him one of the world’s worst actors in 1991 (“I probably would have voted with them”) or even making a terrible movie that went straight to video, “Exit in Red,” in 1996 — despite the fact that the love interest in that movie was then his wife?

Mickey Rourke is, after all, an actor. The roles he has played and the life he has lived have so blurred one into another in his mind’s eye that even he doesn’t seem to know when he’s acting or when he’s being real. He has spent his entire adult life playing not fictional characters but an idealized delusional fantasy of himself.

I love me some Good Times.

Sometimes a baseball card encompasses more than just the main player featured within the borders of its photograph. That actuality has influenced one of the habits of the hobby that I particularly enjoy—“sleuthing,” or trying to figure out the identities of the other players on the card, whether they are in the background or off to the side of the card.

In some cases, trying to identify background players is difficult, because of the fuzziness of the photograph or the awkward angle provided by the camera. In other situations, it’s much easier, and on rare occasions, a collector might come to the realization that the “other” player is actually much more famous than the featured player. That is certainly the case with this 1972 “In Action” card of John Ellis (No. 48 in the set), a traveling-man catcher and first baseman who was probably best known for serving as Thurman Munson’s backup in the early 1970s. This card could just as easily have been chosen as the action card for Harmon Killebrew, who happens to be the “other guy” in the photograph—the Twins’ first baseman who is holding Ellis on during an afternoon game at the old Yankee Stadium, sometime in 1971. A member of the 500-home run club and one of the game’s quietly nice guys, “Killer” earned baseball immortality when he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1984.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not), Killebrew was already featured on another one of the 1972 “In Action” cards, so there was no need to create another action photo for the Twins’ slugger. Still, it’s interesting that Topps cropped the photograph in the way that it did, making “Killer” just as prominent as Ellis on the facing of the card. Did Topps do this intentionally, because of Killebrew’s status as a star, or was it merely an accident? I honestly have no idea, but I do know that this 1972 Johnny Ellis carries no extra value because of the incidental presence of one of the greatest sluggers in the game’s history. This card is worth about the same amount of money as most common cards of 1972’s lower-numbered series, no more and no less. Still, it’s a fun card to have, especially when you can procure a picture of a Hall of Famer at the far more reasonable price of a journeyman.

Ellis might have settled for journeyman status, but he started his career as a popular player in the tri-state area who was once ticketed for stardom at a time when the Yankees badly needed such a quality. As a late 1960s contemporary of Munson, Ellis was actually regarded as an equal prospect by some scouts. In fact, some targeted Ellis, and not Munson, as the heir apparent to the long line of great Yankee catchers that had recently halted after the decline and trade of Elston Howard.

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These guys were very good together in this movie.

Maybe DeNiro’s funniest comic performance. And the last time Grodin was great.

Hub Fans Bids Kid Adieu, John Updike’s fan-in-the-stands piece about Ted Williams’ final ball game is one of the most anthologized and famous stories in all of sports.  It first appeared in The New Yorker and it is now re-printed on-line at Baseball Almanac.  

I admire Updike’s elegant writing and observations but actually I prefer Ed Linn’s behind-the-scenes account of the same afternoon that was featured in Sport magazine.  But the ultimate Williams profile has to be Richard Ben Cramer’s Esquire article, What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? (1986):

Ted Williams can hush a room just by entering. There is a force that boils up from him and commands attention. This he has come to accept as his destiny and his due, just as he came to accept the maddening, if respectful, way that opponents pitched around him (he always seemed to be leading the league in bases on balls), or the way every fan in the ball park seemed always to watch (and comment upon) T. Williams’s every move. It was often said Ted would rather play ball in a lab, where fans couldn’t see. But he never blamed fans for watching him. His hate was for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t feel with him, his effort, his exultation, pride, rage, or sorrow. If they wouldn’t share those, then there was his scorn, and he’d make them feel that, by God. These days, there are no crowds, but Ted is watched, and why not? What other match could draw a kibitzer’s eye when Ted, on the near court, pounds toward the net, slashing the air with his big racket, laughing in triumphant derision as he scores with a killer drop shot, or smacking the ball twenty feet long and roaring, “SYPHILITIC SON OF A BITCH!” as he hurls his racket to the clay at his feet?

And who could say Ted does not mean to be seen when he stops in front of the kibitzers as he and his opponent change sides? “YOU OKAY?” Ted wheezes as he yells at his foe. “HOW D’YA FEEL?…HOW OLD ARE YOU?…JUST WORRIED ABOUT YOUR HEART HA HA HAW.” Ted turns and winks, mops his face. A kibitzer says mildly: “How are you, Ted?” And Ted drops the towel, swells with Florida air, grins gloriously, and booms back:

“WELL, HOW DO I LOOK?…HUH?…WHAT DO YOU THINK OF TED WILLIAMS NOW?”

If and when you have the time do yourself a favor and check out both of these classic pieces.

Winkler rules in this movie. Keaton’s great too.

It’s always nice to watch guys at the game of their game, as Pollack and Hoffman are here. Here’s some Thanksgiving laffs on the house.

Tootsie not only holds up. It’s a classic.

From Pauline Kael’s review:

…When Hoffman delivers the kind of performance he gives here, the talk in the media about his being overpaid seems beside the point. The movie is inconcievable without him. Once Hoffman was committed to the project, the scriptwriters began to shape the central character to fit him, and then they went further. In its final form, Tootsie is based on Dustin Hoffman, the perfectionist; he’s both the hero and the target of this satirical farce about actors.

…Sydney Pollack, who was an actor in his earlier years, originally went to Hollywood (in 1961) as a dialogue coach for John Frankenheimer; essentially he’s still a dialogue coach, and this works better for him here than it ever has before. Having dealt with stars most of his life, he knows how impossible they can be, and he has been able to make Tootsie something practically unheard of: a believable farce. The picture has more energy than anything else he has done; it’s almost alarmingly well cast, and the lines of dialogue collide with a click and go spinning off. Pollack himself gives some jabbing, fast readings; he plays a major role–that of Michael’s agent–with zest.

December, 1982

They might of hated each other while they were filming it, but they sure were funny.

How ’bout some Moose-for-the-Hall banter on Turkey Day? Got to keep busy doing something before the football and the cranberry sauce and sleepiness. Cliff and Jay have at it in the video above and here are some links that build a case for Mussina.

Allen Barra in The Wall Street Journal:

The naysayers note that he has never won a Cy Young Award (though he placed in the top six in nine of his 18 seasons); that he doesn’t have a World Series ring (though he’s pitched in two Series as a Yankee); that he has a losing record in the postseason (though he has a respectable playoff ERA of 3.42 and has struck out 145 batters in just 139.2 postseason innings); that he never led the American League in earned run average (though he was in the top six 10 times); and that he led the league in wins just once (1995, though he finished second three times, including 2008). But such arguments focus on what he hasn’t done, rather than on his achievements — which are considerable.

To make the case for Mr. Mussina in the Hall of Fame, start with winning. His 270 victories against 153 defeats are good for a won-lost percentage of .638, tied with Hall of Famer Jim Palmer for 10th among pitchers with 3,000 or more innings pitched. He won at least 11 games for 17 consecutive seasons.

Dick Lally at Baseball Library.com continues:

Mussina compiled statistics that become even more impressive than they first appear when you view them in the context of the era in which he played, a period in which offense dominated the game. During the 18 seasons in which he played, Mussina’s e.r.a. was 100 or more points below the league average. To give you an idea of the rarified level of performance those numbers represent, consider that Tom Seaver pitched for 20 seasons, and accomplished that feat in “only” 10 of them; Steve Carlton posted e.r.a.’s that low in only five seasons.

Dan Rosenheck furthers Lally’s argument in a piece for the New York Times:

During Mussina’s 18-year career, league leaders in E.R.A. have posted marks 47 percent below the league average; by contrast, during the 18-year period from 1946 to 1963, the E.R.A. leaders were just 37 percent better than the average.

Some of that difference can be accounted for by the lower innings totals accumulated by modern pitchers. That should not be held against Mussina, because although contemporary bullpen usage has enabled him to pitch more effectively, it has also prevented him from compiling the large innings totals.

But Mussina has benefited from another factor: the greater control modern pitchers can exert over the game. One of the chief insights of applying statistical analysis to baseball in the last decade has been the importance of distinguishing between events that involve the defense — non-home run hits and fielded outs — and what number crunchers call the Three True Outcomes: strikeouts, walks and home runs.

It will be interesting to see how it all pans out especially with the likes of Maddux, Glavine, Clemens, and the Big Unit all hanging it up roughly at the same time. But I believe at some pernt, Moose will jern them in Cooperstown.

Dude, Suzanne Goin is fierce.  I absolutely love her.

Here’s some light, uncomplicated fare (cough, cough) she served up with Bittman on his PBS show.

Porkalicious.

During the first couple of months of the 1996 season, every time I saw Derek Jeter on TV I couldn’t help but think of John “No Question” Starks, the combustible shooting guard for the Knicks. It was the body language, the cock-sure posture. I adored Starks even though he was a fine mess.

Oh, no, I thought when Jeter strutted up to the plate, his ass sticking-out, chest-puffed up, here’s the second coming of that knucklehead Starks.

Of course Jeter soon showed himself to be the antithesis of Starks. He was composed and collected, even when he made the usual rookie mistakes. Twelve years later, Jeter is not only the greatest shortstop in Yankee history, and one of the most marketable players in the game, he’s a sure-fire Hall of Famer.

Jeter, the team captain, is accessible but dull with the press but his enthusiasm on the field has always been evident. He smirks when he steps into the batter’s box, engages the fans while he’s on the on-deck circle, and chats up the opposition when they reach second base. No matter how tense the situation, he looks like he is having a good time out there. He’s a natural. It’s as if he were built to be a ballplayer–mentally, physically and emotionally.

Jeter personifies Tom Boswell’s description of “a gamer.”

Baseball has a name for the player who, in the eyes of his peers, is well attuned to the demands of his discipline; he is called “a gamer.” The gamer does not drool, or pant, before the cry of “Play ball.” Quite the opposite. He is the player, like George Brett or Pete Rose, who is neither too intense, nor too lax, neither lulled into carelessness in a dull August doubleheader nor wired too tight in an October playoff game. The gamer may scream and curse when his mates show the first hints of laziness, but he makes jokes and laughs naturally in the seventh game of the Series.

Jeter also has an edge. He is acutely aware of his position, his celebrity, and his surroundings. He’s terse with reporters if they push him. He rides his teammates. In 2004, Alex Rodriguez hit a long home run one day–the kind that Jeter could only dream about hitting. After Rodriguez returned to the dugout, Jeter stuck out his chest and mocked Rodriguez. It was funny but sharp.

“Derek Jeter knows how to give teammates a hard time,” said former teammate John Flaherty on a YES broadcast a few years ago.

Later, Flaherty told a story about arriving to the Stadium one afternoon hours before game time. Jeter was taking early batting practice on the field. Hardly anybody was around. Only Jeter and a batting practice pitcher were on the field. Flaherty took off his jacket upstairs in the YES booth as Jeter continued to hit. Without turning around, Jeter yelled, “Hey, Flaherty, nice tie.”

Now when I think of Jeter, when I think of how his career will wind up, I mostly think of Cal Ripken. I think of a superstar with a tremendous amount of pride. I don’t think he’ll ever be asked to leave shortstop by the Yankees even as his fielding continues to decline. His contract is up in two years. If he remains healthy he should get 3,000 hits not too long after that.

I can’t imagine him playing anywhere but the Bronx, can’t imagine him playing anywhere but short, no matter how it impacts the team. This isn’t the ultimate team player we’re talking about, this is the team captain.

I wonder if he’ll still be having a good time by the time he reaches the end.