Bonzone vs a Rookie tonight in Seattle.  There was no sun in New York today, just rain and wind.  Anyhow, here’s a nice picture to look at…

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

Two outs, top of the eighth. Brandon Morrow, the Mariner’s young right hander, was throwing a no-hitter against the Yanks. Hideki Matsui was on first, having drawn a walk, the third of the night against Morrow, who simply overwhelmed the Yankee offense with a live fastball and a tough breaking ball. Joe Girardi sent up Wilson Betemit, who hasn’t been seen much in recent weeks, and Betemit quickly fell behind in the count. But then he ripped a line drive to right field for a double and the no-hitter vanished. Matsui scored and suddenly the Yanks were in the game, trailing just 3-1. In the ninth, Derek Jeter led off with a single against J.J. Putz, pronounced “Puts.”* Bobby Abreu had a nice at-bat, working the count full, and then hit the ball hard to left center field. But the ball was tracked down and caught for the first out. Alex Rodriguez swung at the first pitch and hit a hard ground ball up the middle that was snagged and he was thrown out at first. Finally, Jason Giambi popped a ball close to the stands around third base, which Adrian Beltre snagged for the final out.

The Mariners did not get their no-hitter. But they did get the win, 3-1. Andy Pettitte pitched a nice game. Morrow was a whole lot better.

* In New York, if you spell your name P-U-T-Z, and pronounce it Puts you are a bigger Putz than your name suggests. Actually, I’ve heard Putz is a really good guy. Still, I’m sayin…

In 1975, the Yankees played the last of two seasons in which they called Shea Stadium their home. Reggie Jackson had not yet arrived, nor had Willie Randolph. Roy White, while still a good player, was past his peak. Thurman Munson was beginning to establish himself as a star, but was still one year away from being recognized as the American League MVP. So who was the Yankees’ best player during that final season at Shea? It had to have been the man that few remember as a Yankee. He was the same man that younger fans now remember mostly as the father of Barry Bonds.

How talented was Bobby Bonds? He was the most gifted outfielder the Yankees had during the entire decade of the 1970s, more talented than even Jackson, a future Hall of Famer. A 30-30 man with game-breaking speed, Bonds was much faster, could play center field with skill and precision, and had just as much power. Jackson was physically better only in one respect; he had a stronger throwing arm, and even that capability had diminished by the time he joined the Yankees in 1977. Bonds was certainly more talented than the man for whom he was traded to New York after the 1974 season, Bobby Murcer. Bonds had more power, speed, and range, and drew more walks. Murcer made better contact, but that was about it. Clearly, Bonds was better.

Yankee fans didn’t care that Bonds had more physical ability and was capable of putting up superior numbers. They bemoaned the loss of the beloved Murcer, whose down-home personality, smooth left-handed swing, and embodiment of the little man made him an icon at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees could have traded Murcer for Hank Aaron or Frank Robinson and still felt a backlash from fans who believed the front office had been disloyal to a favorite son.

In spite of the hostile welcoming party waiting for him at the Shea Stadium turnstiles, Bonds played well during the first half of the 1975 season. He picked up enough votes in the fan balloting to win a spot as a starter on the American League All-Star team. His only adversity occurred in June, when he missed a week’s worth of games because of a strained knee. But then came a larger obstacle, one that arrived in the form of a mid-season managerial change.

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It would be a shame if the New York Sun goes out of business but sure it isn’t looking good for the paper. I’ve really enjoyed their coverage of sports and the arts. Tim Marchman and Steven Goldman have been great, as have columns by Allen Barra, Jonah Keri, Jay Jaffe and other voices from Baseball Prospectus.

Here is Goldman’s latest, already a day old, but still worth checking out:

Unfortunately, the Yankees are about to enter a period that’s anything but standard, a period in which they may require a complete rebuilding, one that takes not one overhaul, but several. The Yankees will say that they don’t need to rebuild, that they are only a few pieces away — Mark Teixeira, perhaps, or C.C. Sabathia — from being back in championship form. Cashman will say this, and when you hear those words, you should know to a cold certainty that things are going to get worse before they get better.

In the New York Observer, Howard Megdal adds:

New York also has numerous questions to answer in their lineup. Jason Giambi had a monster first half. But Giambi seemed to wear down in the second half, and while New York is highly unlikely to pick up his option, the Yankees need to decide if it is worth bringing back this popular player as he turns 38. Of course, if New York doesn’t, the free agent market offers the allure of Mark Teixeira and Adam Dunn.

But an even more interesting question seems to be Robinson Cano, who the team was counting on to continue his seeming march toward stardom. Instead, Cano’s average has now dropped from .342 in 2006 to .306 in 2007 and .269 in 2008. His slugging percentages over that time also dropped from .525 to .488 to .411. If the Yankees are convinced that the 25-year-old Cano is unlikely to return to superstar form, the team could deal him. But a hot September would go a long way toward returning Cano to the team’s good graces, and putting his 2008 more in line with his 2007 stats. Considering that Cano is a career .365/.385/.596 hitter in September/October regular season games, this is not an unlikely event.

The Rays needed a win and they played well on Thursday night while the hapless Yanks played like they had a plane to catch.  Okay, that’s not fair.  Maybe it just seemed that way.  Scott Kazmir was solid, allowing just one hit over six innings, though he did walk five batters.  But Darrell Rasner didn’t make it out of the second inning and gave up five runs.  Alfredo Aceves threw five innings in relief, giving up just one run and was a bright spot, and the Yanks did make it interesting late. 

Tampa led 7-0 going into the ninth but the Yanks scored five runs before calling it a night:  with two out, Derek Jeter smacked a three-run homer to right and then Alex Rodriguez hit an absolute blast into the catwalk in left.  Rodriguez’s shot was dumb nice, career dinger #550.  But it was too little too late, the story of the Yankees’ season, as Xavier Nady popped out to end the game. 

Rays 7, Yanks 5.

So our boys take the long cross-country flight to Seattle where Melky Cabrera will re-join the team.  Speaking of cross country, check out this soporific soul classic by Archie Whitewater, the perfect lullaby for a long trip:

It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? 

Hey, how about dem Yanks?  Be nice to see them continue to give the Rays troubles, wouldn’t it?

C’mon boys, time to spoil all the fun down south.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

I know I threw a ton of stuff at you today, so here’s a quick linkorama to a feast of New York Giant goodies:

Giants for a Day: Dreaming of the old Penn Station and the Polo Grounds:

Lookit Here: A video piece with accompanying article on the New York Giants Nostalgia Society for SNY.TV.

So Long, Farewell: Arnold Hano and Roger Angell bid farewell to the Polo Grounds.

Bronx Banter Video Bites:

Number One: An Introduction.

Number Two: The Truth Hurts.  Tales from the dugout in the ’54 World Serious.

Giants Fan in my Soul: A guest article by Greg Prince.

Bronx Banter Bite Number Three: The Candy Man Can (aka, The Del Crandel Story).

Number Four: Spahnie, How I Luv Ya.

Number Five: The Lady is…An Ump. 

Number Six: Showtime.

And finally, here’s one last morsel, a New York Giants reading list from Greg Prince:

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Perry Barber has umped fantasy camps and spring training games for years.  This past winter, she worked home plate for a Mets-Cards exhibition, part of the first all-female umpiring crew to work a big league game. 

Dig: 

Here’s a bit from one of the Koolest Kets I’ve ever had the chance to meet, the one and only Perry Lee Barber: a Jepoardy champion at age 19, a nightclub singer who opened for Springsteen, Billy Joel and Hall and Oates in her twenties, and a huge baseball fan who has been a professional umpire for the better part of the last thirty years:

I Kid, I’m a Kidder…

What’s a matta, kid?  Can’t take a joke?

Richie talks about how hard it was not to root for the Giants when he was working the visiting team dugout at the Polo Grounds: 

By Greg W. Prince

Fifteen years after the New York Giants played their last game.

In an All in the Family episode called "Edith Finds an Old Man," Edith does exactly as the title describes. She brings home an elderly loner she found wandering through the supermarket, Archie blusters, we learn some valuable lessons about how society should treat senior citizens and Gloria declares toward the end that since she didn’t know her own grandparents, we can adopt Mr. Quigley (and his girlfriend, no less) as honorary Bunkers.

I recall that sitcom moment here because I suppose I did the same thing as Gloria Stivic. I adopted the displaced New York Giants as my own grandpa: my own baseball grandpa.

Never mind that I never saw the New York Giants play. Never mind that the New York Giants ceased to exist five years before I began to commence. Never mind that there is no trace of Giants fandom in my biological lineage. Never mind that I don’t care a whit for the San Francisco Giants. To me as a real-time New York Mets fan, the San Francisco Giants are just some windy stopover on the way to getting swept in San Diego.

I’m a New York Mets fan in my heart and a New York Giants fan in my soul. Those are my teams. Earlier this season, I prematurely wrote off the 2008 Mets as dead. But the Giants, they’re actually deceased since 1957.

Your team being dead at the present time, however, is no excuse for not remaining loyal to it.

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Richie McCabe was the bat boy in the Indians dugout at the Polo Grounds during the ’54 Serious.  Here’s a little story about an encounter with Bobby Avila:

I’ve souped-up a series of exclusive Bronx Banter takes on the summer gathering of the New York Giants Nostalgia Society.  They are intended to be little nuggets of Noo Yawk Lovliness.

Here’s the first of six short clips that will be posted over the course of the day.

Dig ‘Em:

In the coming weeks, we’ll see more than our fair share of tributes to Yankee Stadium. Here are a couple of excellent farewells to the old Polo Grounds…  

Arnold Hano, who wrote the terrific account of Game One of the 1954 World Serious, A Day in the Bleachers, was on hand for the Giants last game at the Polo Grounds. He wrote about the experience for Sports Illustrated:

It was a few minutes before one o’clock in the afternoon, and Willie Mays and Valmy Thomas were socializing in center field of the Polo Grounds with Pittsburgh Pirate Outfielder Jim Pendleton, against all the rules of the game. It was obviously going to be that sort of day.

Wafted across the field, through the gravel-throated public-address system, sweet music entertained the early crowd. A fan sang softly, "Sweetheart, if you should stray/A million miles away/I’ll always be in love with you." It was that sort of day.

The sky was gray, and there was a ring around a hazy yellow sun. It was also that sort of day. A fan walked through the bleachers. "Wanna buy a crying towel?" he said. "Buy a set of crying towels." There were no other vendors. You couldn’t buy a scorecard in the bleachers. You couldn’t buy a hot dog or coffee. The vendors hadn’t showed up. The concession stand was open, though. You could get a beer. There are two big signs in the Polo Grounds that read: "Have a Knick." The concession man was selling Ballantine’s.

At 1:32 the public-address announcer said, "Will the guests of the Giants assemble at home plate?" A fan near the third-base boxes snarled, "We’re the guests, you jerks.

Six-and-a-half years later, Roger Angell said goodbye to the Polo Grounds in a short essay for The New Yorker:

What does depress me about the decease of the bony, misshapen old playground is the attendant irrevocable deprivation of habit–the amputation of so many private, and easily renewable small familiarities.  The things I liked best about the Polo Grounds were wights and emotions so inconsequential that they will surely slide out of my recollection.  A flight of pigeons flashing out of the barn-shadow of the upper stands, wheeling past the right-field foul pole, and disappearing above the inert, heat-heavy flags on the roof.  The steepness of the ramp descending from the Speedway toward the upper-stand gates, which pushed your toes into your shoe tips as you approached the park, tasting sweet anticipation and getting out your change to buy a program.  The unmistakable, final "Plock!" of a line drive hitting the green wooden barrier above the stands in deep left field.  The gentle, rockerlike swing of the tloop of rusty chain you rested your arm upon in a box seat, and the heat of the sun-warmed iron coming through your shirtsleeve under your elbow.  At a night game, the moon rising out of the scoreboard like a spongy, day-old orange balllon and when the whitening over the waves of noise and the slow, shifting clouds of floodlit cigarette smoke.  All these I mourn, for their loss constitutes the death of still another neighbhorhood–a small landscape of distinctive and reassuring familiarity.  Demolition and alteration are a painful city commonplace, but as our surroundings become more undistinguished and indistinguishable, we sense, at last, that we may not possess the scorecards and record books to help us remember who we are and what we have seen and loved.

Man, how I wish I could have seen that joint up close.

Earlier this summer I went to a meeting of the New York Giants Nostalgia Society up in the Bronx. Here is a piece I did for SNY on the meeting:

“For some reason the Giants didn’t get a love lock on the people of New York the way the Dodgers did on the people of Brooklyn,” says Roger Kahn, whose seminal book, “The Boys of Summer”, helped perpetuate the myth of the Brooklyn Dodgers. “The Giants were New York’s original team. The old New Yorkers rooted for the Giants. The Yankees were tourists.”

The Giants were New York’s first baseball dynasty under the helm of John McGraw and led by superstar pitcher Christy Mathewson. But they were soon eclipsed by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the Yankees. “You never could refer to the Giants as Dem Bums or as Fat Cats,” says Arnold Hano, author of the “A Day in the Bleachers,” the classic first-person account of Game One of the 1954 World Series in which Willie Mays made his famous over-the-shoulder catch.

“The Yankees were Fat Cats, the Dodgers were Bums, and the Giants were in somewhere in between. They were like the middle child. They didn’t have any gloried stars: Mel Ott and Bill Terry and Carl Hubbell were great but it was hard to have fan clubs for them. They were bland. Priests in Brooklyn were praying for Gil Hodges to break out of slump. Why didn’t that happen to the Giants? Maybe because Brooklyn is the land of churches.”

In addition, I shot and produced a short video for SNY.  Here it is.  Hope you enjoy (and thanks go to Dave, Jonah, Fred and Jay for helping me put it all together):

My grand father was a circumspect, bookish man who believed that actively rooting for a sporting team was an essentially foolish activity, a waste of time.  At least the impression I always got.  He was the most passive fan you could imagine but he was a Giant fan because the Giants were New York’s team when he was growing up.  My father, hot-tempered and emotional, took after his mom’s side of the family and rooted for the Dodgers, even though he was raised in Washington Heights.  He was ten when Jackie Robinson joined the team, and liked to tell me that he was "second to none" as a Jackie Robinson fan.  I heard the names Pee Wee and Pete Reiser and Cookie Wookie Lavagetto as a kid but I never heard about any of the Giants, other than Willie Mays.

Of course, we all know about the Dodger’s enduring legacy in Brooklyn, but I’ve always found it curious that the Giants are all but forgotten.  After all if I could go back in time, I’d go to the Old Penn Station:

…and the Polo Grounds:

That said, I’m going to make today all about the old New York Giants who started playing ball in San Francisco fifty years ago. Much more to come shortly…

Going, going…

Gelf’s Varsity Letters reading series is back in action tomorrow night downtown at the Happy End Lounge (302 Broome street, between Forsyth and Eldridge).  Harvey Frommer, who wrote the text for a gorgeous new over-sized book about Yankee Stadium, Remembering Yankee Stadium: An Oral and Narrative History of "The House that Ruth Built", will be there as a featured speaker as will Buster Olney, who wrote The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, and David Zirin, author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play.  If you are around, pop on over and check, check it out. 

Thanks to the tireless word machine better known as Joe Pos, I caught up with Nick Dawidoff’s recent feature on Johnny Mac for the New York Times Magazine.   

Mac is still a pill, after all these years. 

I caught some of Midnight Run on TV recently and was struck by how many cigarettes were smoked in that movie.  It didn’t faze me at the time, of course, but now…Man, it’s hard to imagine that the Smoking-is-Foo! Universe is still so relatively new, isn’t it?  In childhood photographs of anyone my age and older, you’ll see all forms of grown ups smoking, ashtrays on the coffee tables.  Smoking was replete.

I gave up smoking more than ten years ago.  But every once in awhile I’ll see an old movie that still makes smoking look, if not glamourous, then at least desirable.  What are some of your favorite smoking flicks?