By Luis Guzman

(as told to Alex Belth)

I grew up in Greenwich Village in the 60s on 10th and Hudson. I went to PS 41. Then when I was ten, we moved to the LES, to the Lower East Side. All my life I’ve been a Yankee fan, B. Mantle, Pepitone. I remember Horace Clarke, Kekich, Peterson, Hamilton, “the folly floater.” When I was between the ages of say 10 and 14 which would have been ’66 to 1970, I’d get together with my buddies in the Villiage, my man Wayne Teagarden, my boy Norman sometimes too, and we’d shine shoes outside of the bank of 7th avenue and Christopher Street. We’d shine shoes in the morning, make enough money, sneak on the train, get up to the Stadium, and sneak into the bleachers. We’d make $2-3 dollars which was pretty good back then. Sometimes we’d pay to get in, it depended. It was fifty, seventy-five cents. We’d fill up on hot dogs and soda and cracker jack, which was the thing at the time.

Back then, they had day games during the week. We used to go out Sunday for bat day and hat day and ball day and yadda-yadda day. It was great. I’d go to every Old Timers’ game, that was a big thing for me, and nothing was bigger than the day Mickey Mantle retired. We had seen Mickey play, he had hit a few home runs when I was there, that was big stuff man. But that day, his family was there, it was heavy.

Between 66-70 the Yankees weren’t doing too good. But we watched Mickey Mantle wind down his career, and you’d see other guys that would come in—Yaz with the Red Sox, Luis Aparicio with the Twins, Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew.

We didn’t know at the time but the old Stadium was…it was amazing. They had those beams that would come down and we’d wonder how anybody would be able to see if they had to sit behind one of them. But we were always in the bleachers, the right field bleachers, cause we used to like looking into the bullpen to see who is warming up. Remember when the bullpen was in the tunnel? We’d be talking to the pitchers.

Back then Yankee Stadium was a real relaxed, kicked-back kind of a place. They didn’t have guys coming onto the field between innings like now, it wasn’t this high–security place. It’s when it was a ballpark. Dude, we used to wait for the third out in the top or bottom of the ninth and after the third out we’d jump over the railing and run around all over the outfield. There would be fifty, one hundred kids running around. But that’s all we’d do was run around. We were respectful about it. We’d wait for the last out, you know, bro.

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Alexi the barber has been looking for me. He doesn’t use telephones or emails and the only instant message he’s ever delivered is a quick right hook. I got the word from a guy who was talking to another guy who got a haircut earlier this week.

“Alexi was asking about you,” I was told. “He ain’t mad, but he wants you to own your words.”

I didn’t need a haircut, but I stopped at the barbershop to settle the score.

“Where have you been?” Alexi asked. “Your guy Roy Jones got clobbered on Saturday.”

“He put up a good fight,” I countered. “And win or lose he’s still my guy.”

“You don’t know when to quit,” Alexi said. “Your Yankees didn’t make the playoffs and now Jones got beat. What have you got left?”

“I stand behind my team and my guys,” I snapped. “The Yankees are gonna win the World Series next year. Derek will win the batting title, A-Rod the MVP, Wang the Cy Young and Mariano will save at least 50 games. And Roy will bounce back in his next fight, too.”

“So you’re a stubborn one?” Alexi asked.

I nodded.

Alexi smiled and said:

“I like that.”

Jay Jaffe pays tribute to Preacher Roe, pictured below with Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson, who passed away yesterday.

Herb Score died today.

Score was perhaps most famous for being drilled in the face with a line drive off the bat of Yankee infielder Gil McDougald. Score did manage to come back, but arm trouble derailed what looked like a promising career. His decline was blamed on the beaning, but Score shrugged it off. McDougald was equally as devastated by the beaning, if not more so.

From Terry Pluto’s The Curse of Rocky Colavito:

“I know it was an accident. It looked like the poor guy just couldn’t get his glove up in time. The nicest thing was that Herb’s mother spent a long time on the phone with me. I’ll never forget that. But I never felt the same about baseball after that.”

Pluto continued: “[McDougald] retired after the 1960 season at the age of thirty, even though there was plenty of life left in his career. He batted .289 in the seven years through 1957, and .253 in the final three seasons after Score’s injury.”

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By Rob Neyer

My first visit to Yankee Stadium, and for that matter my first visit to the East Coast, was in 1991. I was working for Bill James then, and accompanied Bill to New York for the annual Society for American Baseball Research convention. At that time, I had seen only five major-league ballparks, and none east of Cleveland.

Of course I’d been reading about Yankee Stadium since I was a little boy. By 1991 I was utterly obsessed with baseball — this was before I developed any other serious interests — and in a sense Yankee Stadium was New York.

Just one problem: When Bill and I were in town, the Yankees weren’t. Instead we went to a Mets game at Shea. Now, I don’t mean to complain because it was baseball and it was New York and of course there’s been plenty of history at Shea Shadium. But it wasn’t where Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio played. So one afternoon during our stay, I hopped on the subway and headed for the Bronx, just to see what I could see.

From the outside, I couldn’t see much. If you’ve been there, you probably know that the building doesn’t look like much (and I didn’t walk around to the third-base side to see the big Louisville Slugger). But a big gate beyond the right-field corner was open to the sidewalk, and I could see the field, blindingly green in the sunlight. I wanted to see more, so I scrunched up my courage and walked in like I belonged there.

I got about two steps when a beefy security guard with a mustache and a blazer stepped right in front of me. I couldn’t see the green anymore.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Uh. I just wanted to, umm, see the field.”

“You can’t do that.”

So that was Yankee Stadium, and would be for nearly nine years.

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Some people are turned off by armchair pyschoanalyis, but not me. I love it, far more than I enjoy breaking down managerial decisions or roster construction. So let’s return to our favorite superstar head-case, Alex Rodriguez.

This summer, a magazine writer who once wrote a piece on Rodriguez, told me that the Yankee third baseman is clearly a bright and sensitive guy, the kind of guy who doesn’t feel comfortable in the locker room environment. “He knows it, so does everybody,” the writer told me.

I’ve asked some of the Yankee beat writers about Rodriguez and they contend that he isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, but that he does try, too-hard, to be one of the boys.

At the end of the season, I spoke to a Yankee scout who said what I’ve always assumed–Rodriguez’s problems stem from the fact that he didn’t have a father in his life as a kid. Armchair Shrink 101.

I got to thinking about this last week when I re-read an old–and expertly written–profile on Jimmy Connors and his stage mother Gloria, by Frank Deford (SI, 1978):

Playing, competing, with a racket in his left hand, Jimbo is more a Thompson [his mother’s madien name] than a Connors—in a sense, he is Jimmy Thompson. Has any player ever been more natural? But then, in an instant, he wiggles his tail, waves a finger, tries to joke or be smart, tries too hard—for he is not facile in this way, and his routines are forced and embarrassing, and that is why the crowds dislike him. He is Jimmy Thompson no more. He is trying so hard to be Jimmy Connors, raised by women to conquer men, but unable to be a man…He is unable to be one of the boys.

Rodriguez is the natural, he works as hard as anyone, yet he still comes across like a candy ass not a bad ass. I believe that he’s such an achiever that he can do anything he sets his mind to, but he also has a knack, a gift, for getting in his own way, for saying the wrong thing, for coming across exactly how he doesn’t want to come across.

He’ll be in the gossip pages all winter. After what some considered a “down” year in ’08, I can’t wait to see how he’ll produce next season.

Some of my favorite magazine pieces by Pat Jordan are about his past–his failed baseball career, and his childhood growing up with a father who was a professional grifter.  Here’s a fine example of the latter, from the SI swimsuit issue in February, 1987.

Bittersweet Memories of My Father, The Gambler:

I remember the day I first became aware of the pervasiveness of my father’s gambling in our lives. I was eight years old and just beginning my love affair with baseball, which was encouraged by my parents. We were Italian-Americans and my mother loved the Yankees—DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Crosetti, Lazzeri, Berra, Raschi. She hated only Eddie Lopat and, later, Whitey Ford (my secret idol) with their pink, freckled Irish faces. (Today, approaching 80, my mother has a photograph of Dave Righetti taped to the mirror in her kitchen.)

My father was a Yankee fan, too. Only for him they were less a team he could point to with ethnic pride than one he could confidently lay 9 to 5 on.

One Sunday afternoon in July, my father invited three of my “aunts” and “uncles” to the backyard of our suburban house for a cookout. None of them was, in fact, my real aunt or uncle—they were my father’s gambling cronies—and, even more significantly, my father was not a cookout kind of guy. He took no pleasure in neatly mowed suburban lawns, especially if he had to mow them.

…The afternoon of my father’s cookout was hot and sunny. My “uncles” stood around the barbecue fireplace under the shade of a maple tree and sipped Scotch. They made nervous small talk while simultaneously listening to a Yankee-Red Sox game coming from a radio propped on the kitchen windowsill. My father was bent over the barbecue, lighting match after match and cursing the briquettes he was unable to ignite. He was a dapper little man who dressed conservatively—gray flannel slacks, navy blazer—and he always wore a tie, even around the house. He was very handsome, too, in spite of his baldness. He had pinkish skin, youthful eyes and a neatly trimmed silver mustache. He truly fit the part, at least in his dress, of a suburbanite entertaining guests. Even if those guests did look as if they had just stepped out of the cast of Guys and Dolls.

…My mother, a dark, fierce little birdlike woman, and my “aunts” sat around a circular lawn table that was shaded by a fringed umbrella. They were sipping Scotch, as well, while playing penny-ante poker—deuces and one-eyed jacks wild—and chatting. I stood behind them and followed their play of cards.

Soon I got bored with the adults and I lost myself in the baseball game. When DiMaggio hit a home run for the Yankees, I shouted, “Yaa!” and clapped my hands. Suddenly, I was aware that everyone was looking at me. My father’s face was flushed. I caught my mother’s eye. Her lips were pursed in a threatening smile. She called out sweetly, “We musn’t root for the Yankees today, Sweetheart! Uncle Freddie is down 50 times on the Red Sox.”

For those of you who are so inclined, I hope you took the Jets and the over today.

I was a little too young for the original SNL.  I remember the end of the Bill Murray years and when I was in middle school the Eddie Murphy-Joe Piscapo was a big deal.  A few years later, I loved the Billy Crystal-Martin Short–Harry Shearer–Christopher Guest stuff–which you never see in re-runs these days–but I never really loved the show after that.  Some bits and performers here and there, sure, but never as an “event.”

Anyhow, thanks to You Tube, here’s a Saturday Night Revue of silliness for you:

Warming Up

First Course

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Peace to James for sending me a link to this mp3 medley of “Impeach the President” tunes.

Dizzy Gillespie played a Sax?

Although his name can be found right below that of the already-legendary Alex Rodriguez in reference books like Total Baseball, he has been mostly forgotten since his playing days ended in 1983. That’s more than a bit sad, partly because the original “A-Rod” left such a distinct impression on me—first as an opposing player and then during a late-career turn with the Yankees.

Aurelio Rodriguez couldn’t hit like today’s more well-known “A-Rod,” but he was one of the most graceful defensive third basemen of the 1970s. Rodriguez had the range of a shortstop and the throwing arm of a right fielder; along with his smooth hands, those skills combined to form a delightful package at the hot corner. In fact, I’ve never seen an infielder with a stronger arm than Aurelio. (A list of such arms would have to include recent infielders like Shawon Dunston and Travis Fryman or current-day players like Rafael Furcal and Troy Tulowitzki. All terrific arms, but all a notch below that of Rodriguez. ) That cannon-like right arm, which Ernie Harwell often described as a “howitzer,” made him a treat to watch during his many stops with the White Sox, Orioles, Yankees, Padres, Tigers, Washington Senators, and Angels.

A product of Cananea, Mexico, Rodriguez struggled with English during his early major league career with the Angels. As Rodriguez once said without bitterness, he knew only three words of English during his first ten days with California. “Ham and eggs” became a frequent refrain, resulting in a less-than-balanced diet for the young Rodriguez.

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Kid Koala’s Drunken Trumpet Style

Can you guess the name of the record with the horn that he’s manipulating?

By Todd Drew

Memories Are Forever

The memories will not stop. Sometimes they come in the middle of the night and you have to walk. So you head down five flights to Walton Avenue. You pass the spot on East 157th Street where a bat boy once found Satchel Paige asleep in his car after driving all night from Pittsburgh.

Memories say it was 15 minutes before the first pitch when the boy shook him awake. It also says that Satchel asked for five more minutes and then threw a two-hit shutout.

Memories say things like that.

You cut over to Gerard Avenue where a Mickey Mantle home run would have landed if the Stadium’s roof hadn’t gotten in the way. That’s how the memories tell it anyway.

You walk up River Avenue behind the bleachers of the old Yankee Stadium. There will be no more games here, but you keep coming back because this is where your memories are.

You move past the millions that have huddled in the cold and the heat and the rain and sometimes the snow for tickets. The line wraps around the block and down East 161st Street near where a Josh Gibson home run once landed.

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By Kevin Baker

There are so many choose from, it’s hard to pick just one. There’s my first (and only) game in what was truly the old (pre-1976) Stadium, the first major-league game I ever attended, back in 1967. It was against the California Angels, and as I recall Horace Clarke hit a home run, and Joe Pepitone lost the game on an error. Par for the course for the Yankees of that year.

There were the World Series clinchers in both 1996 and 1999. The 1996 game was especially thrilling, a very close contest with the crowd roaring continuously, and the stands literally shaking. It also featured tens of thousands of Yankees fans, waiting to get in, breaking into a “F**k the Bra-a-a-ves!” version of their tomahawk chant. Afterwards, people were carrying around a coffin, marked Atlanta Braves, like something from four or five decades ago. The 1999 clincher was a little less exciting—the Yanks already had a 3-0 lead in games, and Clemens shut the Braves down for most of the game—but it does stand out for watching Mariano Rivera break Ryan Klesko’s bat three times in the ninth, reducing a team that was about to be swept in the World Series to helpless laughter.

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For years, John Sayles’ third movie, Baby It’s You  (1983) was unavailable on DVD.  But I saw it on the Netflix site last week.  What a pleasant surprise.  It hadn’t been released because of something to do with clearing music rights (Altman’s buddy movie, California Split, had similar troubles, though it too now is on DVD).  Baby It’s You was the first theatrically released movie to feature the music of Bruce Springsteen. 

I first saw it on VHS more than fifteen years ago and thought it was a charming coming-of-age story about a tough Italian kid (the Shiek, played by Vincent Spano) and a middle-class Jewish girl (Jill Rosen, played by Rosanna Arquette) set in Trenton, New Jersey in the Sixties.  Arquette has never been better.  I don’t know if Sayles has either.  

Sayles has made some interesting, thoughtful movies, but I’ve always found his directing style clunky.  The story here is nothing innovative but the direction, the cinematography, the performances (and yes, the soundtrack) all have an emotional directness that is winning.

In the original Times review, Janet Maslin wrote:

Music is a major part of ”Baby, It’s You,” as the title may indicate. The score consists of rock songs that more or less correspond to the time, although Sheik’s entrances are accompanied by Bruce Springsteen songs; these may be anachronistic, but they suit Sheik to a T. These touches, as well as the generally impeccable period details and the evocative cinematography by Michael Ballhaus (who shot many of R.W. Fassbinder’s later films), suggest that ”Baby, It’s You” was a labor of love for everyone involved.

Netflix it.

William Bendix as Babe Ruth.  What?  You think Goodman was any better?

“When you stop learning, you’re through.” –Buck O’Neil

Dig the latest from Joe Pos, who is so on-point about his old pal and the president-elect it makes you want to smile.  Well done, Pos. 

Mmm hmm.

And I got more hits than Sadaharu Oh.

Robert Whiting, who has written expertly about Japanese baseball for years, has three-part series on the Great Japanese Slugger in the The Japan Times:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Dig it, Dogs.

By Hart Brachen

“My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.”

Hank Aaron

Head on over to the Sport Magazine Gallery and check out Pat Conroy’s 1974 cover story on Hammerin’ Hank Aaron.

The stunning fact about Aaron’s assault on The Babe was that he came on so suddenly. For years, Willie Mays was the leading pretender to the throne. Willie made a hard run for it until time sent its battalions up against his flesh. Those of us who loved Willie watched our hero backed against the outfield wall by the caprices of old age, by that semi-death of extraordinary athletes who dance too long, then stumble home in a last graceless waltz that is the cruelest, most public humiliation of sport. Years ago, the world knew that The Babe was safe from Willie. But in 1971, a 37-year-old man hit 47 home runs and the chase was on again. The next year Aaron hit 34. Last year he hit 40 and at the end of the season was staring eyeball-to-eyeball with Babe Ruth.

…It was…in many ways, one of the most boring sports stories of the century. Every sportswriter in the country searched the rills and slopes of his brain hoping to find the different angle, the fresh approach or a new way of looking at Hank’s assault on Babe Ruth’s record. They asked Hank every conceivable question. They interviewed every person who had known Hank in the past 40 years, from Vic Raschi, who surrendered Hank’s first home run, to Aaron’s daughter, sons, sisters, brothers, mother, father, managers, coaches, players and friends. There was something about the obscenely crowded press conferences with Hank that made a reporter feel like a participant at an orgy. After each game last season, the flock gathered to ask Hank the same watered-down questions and Hank, salivating on cue, would render the same colorless, good-natured answers he had delivered the day before and the day before that. The chase ate up a lot of good words, and left a lot of semi-burned out reporters staring into the outfield lights.

And if you missed it, do yourself a favor and check out Tommy Cragg’s wonderful 2007 piece on Aaron for Slate:

Because he was so outwardly bland in personality and performance, Aaron seemed to take on character only in relation to things people felt strongly about: Willie Mays, Babe Ruth, civil rights. On his own he was, and remains, an abstraction, someone whom writers could only explicate with banalities like “dignified.” Our perception of Aaron today stems almost entirely from his pursuit of Ruth’s 714 home runs, in 1973 and 1974, during which time he faced down an assortment of death threats and hate mail. By then, Aaron had shed his reticence and begun to speak out against baseball’s glacial progress on matters of race. Still, very much his own man, he seemed to dismiss some of the loftier interpretations attached to his home-run chase. “The most basic motivation,” he wrote in his autobiography, I Had a Hammer, with Lonnie Wheeler, “was the pure ambition to break such an important and long-standing barrier. Along with that would come the recognition that I thought was long overdue me: I would be out of the shadows.”

No matter. Aaron was fashioned into something of a civil rights martyr anyway. “He hammered out home runs in the name of social progress,” Wheeler recently wrote in the Cincinnati Post. And Tom Stanton, in the optimistically titled Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America, dropped what has to be the most unlikely Hank Aaron analogy on record: “[P]erhaps it’s The Exorcist, the period’s biggest movie, that provides a better metaphor for Hank Aaron’s trial. … Hank Aaron lured America’s ugly demons into the light, revealing them to those who imagined them a thing of the past, and in doing so helped exorcise some of them. His ordeal provided a vivid, personal lesson for a generation of children: Racism is wrong.”

Small wonder that, upon eclipsing Ruth, the exorcist told the crowd, “I’d just like to thank God it’s over.”

There is an old man in the South Bronx named Eduardo. He has a deep scar on his cheek and walks with a limp. No one remembers exactly when he arrived in the neighborhood and some will probably forget him as soon as he’s gone.

He came from Mexico and lives on Woodycrest Avenue with a family from Senegal. None of them can vote, but they all did their part. Eduardo sat up with the whole family – mother, father, two boys and a girl – and watched election results come in last night.

“It was like a ballgame,” Eduardo said. “We always watch on television and when something happens we can hear the Stadium crowd. Sometimes – when it’s a big home run – the windows rattle.

“It was like that when Obama won,” Eduardo continued. “We heard people cheering in the streets. I only wish I could’ve been there.”

Eduardo smiled.

“Maybe I’ll be able to vote one day,” he said. “That would really be something.”

And it would never be forgotten.