On Monday evening, I attended a reading of a new collection of essays, Anatomy of Baseball, edited by Lee Gutkind and Andrew Blauner, and featuring work by John Thorn, Michael Shapiro and the late George Plimpton. Kevin Baker, the acclaimed novelist, contributed a piece on old ballparks, which features some wonderfully evocative writing about the Polo Grounds. Here is an excerpt of his chapter, At the Park:

By Kevin Baker

The ban on black ballplayers—known black players—in the major leagues finally ended in 1947, with Jackie Robinson. Within four years, a final legend would be playing in the Polo Grounds. Willie Mays was in many ways the antithesis of Ruth. Shorter and more slender at five-eleven, one-hundred-eighty pounds, Mays was all elegance and fluidity, a player whose grace caused grown men to mourn his passing from New York for decades. If the Babe had been singular in conquering the two great poles of the game, pitching and hitting, it is doubtful there ever was as complete an all-around player as Willie Mays—a five-skill player, as the terminology has it. He could hit, hit for power, field, throw, run—how he could run. He ran out from under his hat, he was so fast. He was the first man in over thirty years to hit over thirty home runs and steal over thirty bases in the same season. He hit over fifty home runs on two separate occasions, once into the wind off San Francisco bay.

He could do anything—gliding through life, it seemed, even more smoothly than Ruth had. Greeting all the adoring strangers with his own generic salute, “Say hey!” A good-natured if somewhat removed young man, up from Birmingham; up from nowhere, coached mainly by his father, a former Negro-League star. Bursting on the scene a fully formed major-leaguer, it seemed. Bursting out with all that incalculable, bottled up talent; that angry, channeled intensity those first, remarkable generations of no-longer-banned black players brought to the big leagues—Robinson and Mays, and Newcombe and Frank Robinson and Aaron and Gibson and Clemente, to name just a few. Though Mays never seemed that angry. Enjoying himself, like Ruth. Even playing stickball out on the streets of Harlem with the neighborhood kids, waving a broomstick bat at the spaldeen, splattering it over the manhole covers.

September 29, 1954: the first game of the World Series at the Polo Grounds. The strange old park has less than ten years to live, and Mays, twenty-three, in his first, full major-league season, is about to impress his image indelibly on the history of the game—and to ensure that a last glimpse of the old ballpark will be preserved in countless highlight reels. It’s the eighth inning of a tie game, two on and nobody out for the visiting Cleveland Indians, and Vic Wertz, a muscular first baseman, is at the plate. Wertz is red-hot this series and particularly on this day. He will record four hits, including a double and a triple, and now he rips another soaring fly, deep into the endless expanses of the Polo Grounds’ right-center field.

Mays is after the ball. It keeps going, and he is right after it. Running and running, outrunning the ball, miraculously bisecting the endless expanses of the ball field, running all the way out over the vast, dark fields of the republic. Here is the weird centerfield clubhouse coming into view now, the monument to Eddie Grant, killed in the Great War, the war that took poor Matty’s lungs. Here is a strange scene, frozen in still unfinished reaction: a few faces, peering out of the clubhouse windows, unable to see just where Mays is; a few of the fans, most of them men wearing hats, and some in jackets, too, even in the centerfield bleachers, just beginning to stand up, just aware something is going on that doesn’t add up. They are all captured forever, in this first twitch of a great realization.

For Mays has already caught the ball. Running straight out, he has caught it over his left shoulder with barely a shrug. He is already turning back to the infield and about to throw, even as the crowd still begins to bestir itself. He windmills a quick throw back toward the plate, and the runners are kept from scoring. The Giants get out of the inning, win the game, sweep the World Series—the only one Mays will win in his whole long incomparable career.

It was the greatest catch ever made in the World Series, perhaps the greatest catch ever. Bob Feller, the great Cleveland pitcher watching from the dugout that day, sniffed later that no one thought it was the greatest catch then. Feller, unaccountably sour for a man blessed with a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball, claimed that everyone knew Mays used to deliberately wear his hats too small so they would fall off and make everything he did look faster, better, more incredible.

But the pictures of that frozen moment show that Mays’s hat is just falling off then, obviously jarred off by how suddenly he has stopped and turned to make the throw. In fairness, it is easy to see how Feller or any other onlooker could be deceived. The over-the-shoulder catch is the hardest single play in baseball, but watching the film to this day, a casual observer will not see anything very dramatic, will notice little that stands out from the fantastic fluidity of Mays in motion. The greatness of the catch lies in how effortless Mays has made it look—lies in where he is, how far he has had to travel just to be there. He has bridged the same gap as Ruth did with his moonshots, but he has done it as a single running man catching up to the slugger’s ball, closing the circle.

More than a decade later, they were still selling boys’ models of Mays running down Wertz’s ball—preserving at least some little, plastic representation of the old Polo Grounds. Mays would leave when Horace Stoneham, the Giants’ drunk of an owner, was lured out to the West Coast, abandoning the stickball-playing kids on the streets of Harlem without a second glance. The Polo Grounds were torn down in 1964, replaced by an ill-considered housing project. Nearly all of the old ballparks met a similar fate over the next few decades—Ebbets Field and Shibe Park, Forbes Field and Crosley Field, Sportsman’s Park and Comiskey Park, and Tiger Stadium—as the club owners squirmed and ran to get away from anyplace there might be black people; to where they could find something much more vital, which is to say, parking. The old parks would be replaced, at first, by new stadiums mostly out in the suburbs—round, interchangeable, all-purpose stadiums, carpeted with artificial turf, that could be used just as easily for football games or rock concerts.

The Mets brought Mays back to play in what may have been the ugliest of them all, Shea Stadium, a park that already looked irredeemably shabby when it was brand new. He was forty-two years old when he appeared in the 1973 World Series, and even though he managed to drive in the winning run in one game off a future Hall-of-Fame pitcher, he staggered sadly about the outfield, misplaying balls. Everyone gasped that Willie Mays had grown old, and in his embarrassment he retired after that fall.

He had lasted, in the end, nearly as long as the terrible new cookie-cutter ballparks would. Trying to capitalize on memories and luxury boxes, the owners found an excuse to tear down most of them down after only a generation or so. In one town after another, baseball has returned to the inner cities, to new parks that were ostentatiously designed with quirky, eccentric features—a rightfield wall that is part of an old warehouse; a small knoll in deep center, even a swimming pool in bleachers. They are improvements over the round bleak stadiums of the 1960s—though somehow they never recaptured the beauty of the old parks, revealing themselves, ultimately, as what they were: an exercise in ready-made nostalgia. The past, once uncoupled, is not so easily regained.

The Anatomy of Baseball is available at Amazon.com.

The Yankees hit four home runs this afternoon to overcome a rocky fifth inning from Mike Mussina and avoid being swept by the Indians in the finale of what proved to be a disappointing 4-5 homestand. Mussina allowed just one baserunner through the first four innings, but handed a 3-0 lead in the fifth thanks to home runs by Johnny Damon (a 330-foot pop fly to right field) and Jason Giambi (a two-run shot that sailed over the right field foul pole) in the bottom of the fourth, Moose gave it all back.

That inning started ominously when Mussina hit Ben Francisco in the back with a 2-2 pitch. Franklin Gutierrez followed with a single that dropped in front of Bobby Abreu and pushed Francisco to third. After a Ryan Garko pop out, Casey Blake hit a shot to deep right that Bobby Abreu was unable to catch up to at the wall (prompting Pete Abraham to ask, “Does Bobby Abreu wear one of those invisible collars that shocks him when he gets too close the wall?”). The ball hit the warning track, then the wall, and popped up in the air as Abreu spun around looking for it and Francisco trotted home. Finding the ball to his right, Abreu fired in to relay man Robinson Cano, who threw home to try to get Gutierrez attempting to score from first, but Cano’s throw, which was in plenty of time, was low and skipped past Jose Molina allowing Gutierrez to score and Blake, who now has 22 RBIs on just 21 hits, to move to third. A subsequent single by Kelly Shoppach scored Blake, knotting the game at 3-3.

Cano instantly made up for his bad throw by leading off the bottom of the inning with a double. Wilson Betemit followed with a hard drive into the gap in left. Francisco tracked it down for the first out, but with his momentum heading back and toward center, Cano was able to tag and move to third with ease. With the go-ahead run on third and one out, Jose Molina hit a grounder to short that allowed Jhonny Peralta to freeze Cano in his tracks, but Johnny Damon picked Molina up with an RBI double that gave the Yankees a lead they would not relinquish.

In the seventh, Cano drove Indians’ starter Paul Byrd from the game with a solo homer and Wilson Betemit greeted reliever Masa Kobayashi with a bomb over the 408 sign in dead center. Meanwhile, Ross Ohlendorf pitched two shutout innings allowing only a single. It was just the third time all year, Ohlendorf, who has been primarly used as a long reliever, pitched in a game the Yankees eventually won, and just the first time all year he pitched in a game the Yankees won by less than six runs. That was important, because the Yankees hope to eventually move Ohlendorf into a setup role.

Ohlendorf was followed by Joba Chamberlain, who faced two of the three batters he faced in his blown save on Tuesday night, Grady Sizemore, who walked to start Tuesday’s rally, and David Dellucci, who homered to finish it. Rather than throwing lots of curve balls and getting beat on a fastball, as he did on Tuesday, Chamberlain threw lots of fastballs and struck out Dellucci on a slider to end a 1-2-3 frame. Mariano Rivera pitched around a double to pick up his ninth save and nail down the 6-3 Yankee win.

The Yankees now travel to Detroit to start a seven-game road trip against the Tigers and Rays before coming back home to face the Mets. Kei Igawa will make his 2008 Yankee debut tomorrow, but try not to think about that until you have to.

More encouragingly, Alex Rodriguez was taking grounders at third and cuts in the cage before today’s game, and hitting some genuine blasts in batting practice. The Yankees say Rodriguez will get another MRI before being cleared for some rehab games, and all that (the MRI and the rehab games) will have to happen before he comes off the DL. Still, barring any setbacks, Rodriguez should be activated next week.

Rich Lederer and his son are on the east coast taking in some baseball, “a trip of a lifetime.” They started in Boston on Sunday, then visited Cooperstown before arriving in Manhattan early yesterday afternoon. I spoke to Rich via cell phone just after he arrived in the Bronx hours later to see Yankee Stadium for the first (and last) time.

“You’ll never believe who rode up here in the subway with…Cliff Lee.”

Well, the least Rich or his son, Joe could have done was accidentally bump into Lee, stepping on his foot, or jamming his shoulder. Something. They did not which was too bad for the Yankees. Lee continued his staggering early season success as the Tribe shut-out the Yanks, spoiling another fine outing from Chien-Ming Wang.

It is overcast and rainy but not unpleasent in New York today. A warm, moist day. Mike Mussina and the Bombers try to avoid the sweep this afternoon. Cliff will be in the Big House and he’ll have an account posted later tonight. As for me, I’m going to meet Rich after work. I’ve known Rich since 2003 and we’ve been buddies since. We speak on the phone every couple of weeks, but we’ve never met in person. So last week he’s packing for the trip and he asks, “Should I bring my mitt?”

“Hell, yeah.”

So the first thing we’re going to do when we get together this evening, rain or shine, is go up to Central Park and have a catch.

Talk about a fine how do you do!

Go Yanks!

A few days ago I was hanging with some seamheads talking shop. The subject got around to the great Mariano Rivera. When I told Steve Goldman just how much I appreciate watching Rivera, Steve said, “It’s like watching Fred Astaire in his later years.” Isn’t that a great comp? Think Astaire in Bandwagon. (Speaking of which, has anyone ever had more fetching legs than Cyd Charisse?)

Jack Curry has a piece on Rivera today in the Times:

“I’m proud of what I do,” Rivera said Tuesday. “And I take it seriously. I don’t take it for granted. I don’t forget where I came from. I don’t forget what I had to do to get here. That, to me, is important.”

I was in a Barnes and Noble last night and I found a picture book of Latin American baseball stars (I’m sorry but I didn’t catch the title). I flipped to a full-page spread of Mariano, wearing shorts and flip flops, throwing a ball to a kid with a make shift bat, somewhere on the dusty streets of Panama. The picture looked dated–late ’90s maybe–but it reminded me of how far Rivera, and so many other Latin players, have come to play ball in the big leagues. I think Rivera is sincere when it says that he doesn’t take things for granted. And neither should we.

I also liked this bit from Curry’s article:

After David Dellucci belted a three-run homer off Joba Chamberlain to push the Indians past the Yankees, 5-3, on Tuesday, Dellucci spoke respectfully about Chamberlain, who does not have even a full season in the majors. But when the topic switched to Rivera, Dellucci switched from respect to reverence.

“Facing him is like playing a video game,” Dellucci said. “His ball is an optical illusion. It’s fun because it’s so nasty. You want to go up there and see that pitch because of how nasty he is.”

Baby, You Nasty.

In just the fourth matchup in American League history of undefeated pitchers with at least five wins each, 6-0 Chien-Ming Wang scattered three runs over seven innings and yielded to scoreless relief work by Kyle Farnsworth and Jonathan Albaladejo.

It didn’t matter. Cliff Lee, who entered the game with a 5-0 record, a 0.96 ERA, an absurd 0.56 WHIP, and an irridiculous 16:1 K/BB ratio, improved all of those marks, save the WHIP, in seven absolutely dominant shutout innings. Throwing mostly fastballs, Lee pounded the corners, throwing 74 percent strikes but hardly any of them off the black. Though his fastball clocked in around 90 to 91 miles per hour, it exploded through the zone, giving it the illusion of being in the mid-90s. Adding to that illusion was the speed with which Lee worked. Riding an obvious high of adrenaline and confidence, Lee seemed to be back in his windup before the hitter even had time to contemplate how Lee and his catcher, Kelly Shoppach, were working him. After the third out of each inning, Lee sprinted back to the dugout, almost as if he wanted the bottom half of each inning to get over with so that he could get back out there and pitch. When the top half of the next inning arrived, Lee would sprint back out to the mound.

The only baserunner Lee allowed through the first four innings came on a bloop single to shallow left by Hideki Matsui. Matsui took a defensive swing on a rare curveball from Lee and was so surprised that he didn’t foul it off that he almost didn’t run to first base. Down 3-0, the Yankees threatened in the fifth, sixth, and seventh, but came up empty each time. In the fifth, Melky Cabrera and Robinson Cano singled with one out, but Lee struck out Morgan Ensberg and got Jose Molina to fly out to strand them. With two outs in the sixth, Bobby Abreu reached on an infield single to first baseman Casey Blake that should have been ruled an error as Blake’s flip to Lee covering the bag arched too high and allowed Abreu to reach. Shelley Duncan followed with a double to push Abreu to third, but Lee got ahead of Matsui 1-2 and struck him out with a nasty curve ball that looked like it actually curved behind Matsui before dropping into the zone. The Yankees got another two-out infield single in the seventh when Morgan Ensberg drilled a pitch into the ground in front of home and beat it out, but Lee struck out Molina on four pitches to end his night. Rafael Perez pitched around a two-out Abreu double in the eighth, and Rafael Betancourt worked a 1-2-3 ninth to nail down Lee’s sixth win of the year.

Lee is now 6-0 with a 0.81 ERA, 0.60 WHIP, and 19.5 K/BB. He’s averaging more than 7 1/3 innings per start and has not allowed a run in any of his four road starts this year. After his first four starts, Baseball Prospectus’s Rany Jazayerli wrote that Lee had turned in quite possibly the most dominant series of starts ever. The Yankees got a close up look at Lee’s dominance last night, and it’s for real. The only question is how long he can keep it up.

I want to let you know that I’ve made mistakes in many columns I’ve written, for which I’m sorry. I’ve apologized to those editors, my family (my harshest editors), and when warranted, you, the reader. Like everyone, I have flaws. I make poor word choices at times, have typos and write grammatically incorrect sentences. I maintain, however, that I’ve never used steroids or Human Growth Hormone to write a Yankee Panky column for this Web site.

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Phew. Now that that’s out of the way, what did we do before the Internet? While away in Italy, with no game highlights to speak of aside from the UEFA Cup and ATP Tennis on CNN International, the only way to get any info on the Yankees was via cyberspace. Since my last post, top stories have ranged from Joe Girardi banning candy from the clubhouse to the extremes of a near automatic win when Chien-Ming Wang starts and a near automatic loss when the now defunct 4-5 combination of Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy take the mound.

Now, it appears all the mainstreamers, for on-field matters anyway, are focusing on three key things: 

• How is Melky Cabrera leading the team in home runs? Joel Sherman’s Hardball blog addresses this question by comparing Cabrera’s statistics to those of Bernie Williams at the same stages of their careers. The offensive numbers are strikingly similar. The greatest difference is that at Age 23, Cabrera is a much better all-around ballplayer than Williams was.

• Why is Robinson Cano in the bottom three among qualified batters in average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage? Will he emerge from his slump? Tyler Kepner of the New York Times had a thorough take on the slump, and analysis from teammates, including Derek Jeter. The only thing missing was that Cano, after being called up in 2005, went 2-for his first 23 at-bats.

• The timer is on for Jason Giambi’s release. The Giambino is in a worse funk than Cano, except he doesn’t have youth on his side or an optimistic band of media types rooting for him in print. I noticed an interesting contradiction in reporting, most notably from the same paper. Sherman and George King, in the Post, had different takes. Sherman called Giambi’s continued presence in the lineup a "liability," while King showed the Yankees’ continued faith in the former MVP.

• Perusing YESNetwork.com, David Justice says the Yankees do not appear to be built for a championship. Also, Steven Goldman provides insight on the Hughes-Kennedy demotions as only he can.

OFF-DAY RECAP
Off-days are fun to devour as much information as possible from as many different outlets. You can tell which papers, TV and radio types are on the pulse of things and are dedicated to providing the most information possible. The Times had only one Yankees story, on Cano, while the Daily News had not only the continuing saga of Roger Clemens, but a great bit from former beat man Anthony McCarron on how the Yankees could approach transitioning Joba Chamberlain to the starting rotation. After another subpar eighth–inning performance against the Indians, it would not be surprising to see Big Stein the Younger issue a media manifesto calling for a Chamberlain change. The Post had a wide variety, including a feature on Derek Jeter’s captaincy and climb up the all-time Yankee ranks.

Newsday had an interesting recap of Joe Girardi’s week, which included a contentious Q&A with reporters. Is anyone else waiting for the rash of stories comparing the situation Girardi walked into here in New York to the one he left in Florida?

This week marked Round 1 of Torre vs. Randolph, the all-National League version. What were the odds of features being written about their prior stints with the Yankees, or Torre’s reactions to the rampant booing at Shea recently? Stay tuned for more of the same in three weeks, when the Dodgers come to Shea, with a smattering of Torre praise for Girardi.

YES, IT’S BOBBY MURCER
Friday night was a great night, not only for the Yankees’ victory, but to see and hear Bobby Murcer back in the broadcast booth. The man has endured several bouts of poor health in recent years and rebounded well. Five years ago, he had an emergency appendectomy that kept him out for the last couple of months of the season. Now, he’s back after recovering from a brain tumor and continued rounds of chemotherapy. You would be hard-pressed to find someone in the Yankee organization who is as respected and universally considered with such class and grace as Mr. Murcer.

And David Cone, after the sting of his failed comeback with the Mets wore off, has been a welcome addition to the YES broadcast team.

Until next week …

Yesterday afternoon, Pete Abraham excerpted a portion of Cynthia Rodriguez’s chat with Michael Kay on the new YES program, YESterdays:

“As tough and big as [Alex] seems, he is real wimpy around doctors or any type of medical situation. I don’t know why I thought the birth of our child would be different. In the middle of the night, I realized that I needed to go to the hospital. I wake him up. The first thing that comes out of his mouth, ‘Can we call your mother?’ And I started, ‘No. Let’s wait and make sure that I am in labor, and make sure that, you know, it’s the middle of the night.’ And go to the hospital and everything. And finally, a few hours later, I said, ‘I think you can call my mom now.’

“Uh, and the color came back to his face when I told him he could call my mom. And then forget it. I was like not even having a baby; he was the one. The one nurse had a cold cloth on his head. The other nurse had the blood pressure on his arm. And my mother was like rubbing his back. And he is passed out on a couch. And I am there, in the middle of labor. And really, I am not being paid much attention to besides the doctor and a couple of nurses. And he is there moaning. In between pushing, I am going, ‘Honey, are you OK?’ And are you breathing? Are you OK?'”

I can’t even watch child birth on TV, so I can only imagine how I’d fare up close. Still, this story reminded me of another, more upsetting reality for baseball wives. From Pat Jordan’s classic profile of Steve and Cyndi Garvey, “Trouble in Paradise”:

The other day my daughter fell out of a tree and broke her wrist.  My husband and I rushed her to the hospital.  While she was in the operating room I had to fill out a questionaire for a nurse.  When I said my husband’s occupation was ‘baseball player,’ she asked, for what team?  I told her.  Then she asked, what position?  I got so pissed off, I shoved the paper at my husband and told him to deal with her, she was obviously more interested in him than our daughter.  Now there’s another woman who’s gonna think I’m just a stuck-up wife of a star.

 

Anyway, just before they set my daughter’s wrist, my husband had to leave to go to the stadium.  He couldn’t wait.  That’s the clearest vision of when the game comes first.  Before anything.  It’s so cut-and-dried with him.  I got furious.  It’s always been like that.  Another time I had a baby while he was playing in the World Series.  When they wheeled me back from the delivery room–I’m just coming out of the anesthesia–the nurse is putting on the TV.  ‘I thought you’d like to watch your husband playing in the World Series,’ she says.  I screamed at her to shut it off.  Hell, he didn’t come to watch me.  I could have died in childbirth and my man wouldn’t have been there.  The burden is always on the wife’s shoulders.  Her man is never there.

For a candid and revealing portrait of what is like to be the wife of a ball player, consider Home Games: Two Baseball Wives Speak Out, written by Bobbie Bouton and Nancy Marshall. Both women are divorced their husbands, Jim Bouton and Mike Marshall.

"You gotta attack all the time," [Joba Chamberlain] said in a contrite tone. "You can’t take a pitch off. You never think you’re doing that, but you should attack more with the fastball. I didn’t attack the zone as much as I should have." (John Harper, N.Y. Daily News)

Joba Chamberlain’s face was puffy and sweaty, his eyes glassy and red-rimmed.  His head had just been in his hands, his fists balled, grabbing at his cropped hair.  A white towel hung over his head and his large chin jutted up.  Sitting on the bench, it looked as if he was going to burst out bawling and for the first time her truly looked like Joba the Hutt.  I thought about Chamberlain’s father, Harlan, who has been ill this spring.  I thought about how he had just shook his catcher off several times.  Then I thought, dag, this has never happened to the kid before.  

"Everybody gets tested in this game," said David Cone on the YES broadcast.  "Nobody is invincible.  We knew this would happen sooner or later.  The real test is in how he’ll react next time out."   

Pinch-hitter Dave Dellucci turned around a 96 mph fastball from Chamberlain and yanked it into the seats in right field, dealing Chamberlain his first ego-crushing blow in the big leagues.  Not his first lost, but the first big blast.  There were no midges this time.  Everything was set up according to plan.  Pettitte kept the team in the game, Farnsworth got two big outs in the seventh and Chamberlain came on in the eighth with a one-run lead.  As Cone noted, Chamberlain didn’t necessarily make a bad pitch, it’s just that Dellucci guessed right and beat him to the spot like a basketball player running to a place on the floor, setting his body and picking up an offensive foul. 

It was reminiscent of George Brett turning around the Goose’s high heat though not as dramatic.  Dellucci, who was briefly a Yankee, and who still uses the theme from "The Godfather" as his intro music, smiled broadly as he was greeted by his teammates.  If I could sit on my ass all night, then come off then bench and turn around Kid Dynamite’s heater like that, hell, I’d be grinning too.

Chamberlian’s outing started poorly when he walked Grady Sizemore on a 3-2 slider.  Joba shook off his catcher Jose Molina twice to get to his breaking pitch.  With one out, he issued another walk, this time to Jhonny Peralta.  But, Cone added, it was an "unintentional intentional walk," as the Yankees were not going to go after Peralta, who had homered earlier against Andy Pettitte.  Molina came out to the mound several times, there was also a meeting with the pitching coach, and Chamerlain threw more curve balls than usual. 

It was a humbling moment for the dynamic young Chamberlain but one where Cone, who is starting to find a rhythm as a color man, rose to the occasion.  Cone’s voice is raspy but not deep or commanding.  At first, it is flat and indistinguishable from that of John Flaherty or Al Leiter.  Cone seemed ill-at-ease initially, unpolished.  But I’ve found his insights to be sharp and compelling–he was all over Pettitte in Cleveland for telegraphing a change up that was rocked for a home run.  Not in a critical beatdown way, just as an observation.  I think Michael Kay deserves some credit for guiding Cone and breaking him in.

When Kay reported Ian Kennedy’s impressive line from his triple A start, Cone said that IPK got the message.  That turned out to be the best news on a night where the Yanks lost, 5-3.  Again, it was a game that appeared to be drawn up perfectly.  Only this time, Joba stumbled and so did the Yanks.   

Since the Yankees and Indians split a four-game series in Cleveland a week ago, the Yankees split a pair of three-game sweeps and the Tribe went 2-3. All five wins, by both teams, came against the hapless Mariners, who are now nursing a five-game losing streak. The rain erased a sixth Cleveland contest, conveniently pushing C.C. Sabathia out of this week’s three-game set in the Bronx by pushing his last start up a day.

Still, things won’t be easy for the Yankees this week. Lefty Cliff Lee, who starts tomorrow, is off to a literally unbelievable start, going 5-0 with a 0.96 ERA and a 0.56 WHIP. Tonight, the Yanks will have to face Fausto Carmona. Carmona’s an interesting case. He’s 3-1 with a 2.60 ERA, but an alarming 1.73 WHIP and a backwards 1:2 K/BB ratio. Carmona’s allowed less than a hit per inning, has given up just one home run in six starts, and he’s still getting his groundballs, so it seems his only real problem is those darn walks. Since he’s been able to win while wild, odds are he’ll settle down and return to his overall dominance before too long. The Yankees certainly hope that doesn’t start tonight. The Yankees found Carmona unhittable in the ALDS last year, but won both of his starts against them in the regular season.

On the other side of the ball, the Indians have responded to their inconsistent and generally underperforming offense by rejiggering their lineup in the last week, dropping Travis Hafner and his Perdue pop-up timer to sixth and moving right fielder Franklin Gutierrez up to second on the heels of a hot start to last week. That puts David Dellucci, still the team’s hottest hitter, in the third spot and pushes the slumping Ryan Garko down to seventh. Finally, today they designated Dellucci’s platoon partner Jason Michaels for assignment in favor of 26-year-old rookie right-handed outfielder Ben Francisco despite the fact that Francisco is hitting a mere .228/.308/.315 with triple-A Buffalo. I guess folks are desperate all over.

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My favorite part about asking people for their list of ten essential baseball books was not learning that "Ball Four" or "Glory of Their Times" are so popular. We already knew that. What really turned me on were the titles I had never of like Man on Spikes, or the ones that I knew precious little about like The Celebrant and The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. I was over at Jay Jaffe’s new crib in Brooklyn last Friday and he showed me his copy of the card book which looks like terrific fun.  Dig this:

"Earl Torgeson’s two favorite activities were fist-fighting and breaking his shoulder, both of which he did whenever he got the chance. On the back of this card it says, "Torgy likes a good practical joke" – which is the biog writer’s subtle way of suggesting that he enjoyed knocking people’s teeth out. He is probably also the only left-handed hitting first baseman over 6’2" who ever stole 20 bases in one season."

 Brendan C Boyd and Fred C. Harris.

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Who knows if I’ll ever do another of these, but for now, here’s a stab at a new Banter feature: the monthly Farm Report. All stats are as of the morning of May 5. We’ll take it team by team:

Triple-A Scranton Wilkes-Barre

Major league fans have already seen most of Scranton’s top April hurlers, including Darrell Rasner (0.87 ERA in five starts), Edwar Ramirez (13 Ks and zero runs in 9 IP), Jose Veras (1.38 ERA, 18 K in 13 IP, 9 SV), Jonathan Albaladejo (1.29 ERA), and Chris Britton (2.45 ERA).

Sean Henn was dominating in his rehab assignment (1.35 ERA, 0.90 WHIP), but was designated for assignment to clear room on the 40-man roster for Chad Moeller’s return. Since being demoted, Billy Traber, the man who beat Henn out for the Opening Day LOOGY job, has struck out 7 against one walk in 4 1/3 innings with a similarly stellar 0.92 WHIP despite an artificially high ERA. Third lefty Heath Phillips has been solid thus far with a 2.87 ERA, a 1.02 WHIP and 15 Ks in 15 2/3 innings.

Scott Patterson, the one Opening Day roster finalist who hasn’t seen the majors yet this year, has been underwhelming despite a still-strong strikeout rate, thus far proving the Yankees right for insisting he prove himself in triple-A before getting his first taste of the majors.

In the rotation, the triple-A debuts of Jeffrey Marquez and Alan Horne have not gone well. Marquez has a 7.47 ERA after six starts, and Horne left his second start after two innings due to a strained biceps and has been on the DL ever since. Horne is throwing in Tampa and could make an intrasquad start Saturday.

In better rotation news, the Yankees have converted career-long reliever Dan Giese to starting with excellent results (1.32 ERA, 0.91 WHIP in five starts). Kei Igawa should be in the big leagues over the weekend, so we’ll talk about him then.

Speaking of big league returns, Wilson Betemit, rehabbing from pinkeye, has gone 6 for 17 with four doubles and four walks against three strikeouts in five games spent mostly at third base. Expect him back with the big club soon.

At the other corner, Juan Miranda, who many had hoped would arrive as a second-half reinforcement for first base, slugged just .367 before hitting the DL with an unspecified shoulder injury on Friday. However, Eric Duncan has shown some signs of life, hitting .270/.382/.459.

Brett Gardner, who claims to have tweaked his swing in the Arizona Fall League last year, is hitting .302/.377/.462. The power represented by that last figure is the key to his becoming a viable major league starter. Curiously, he’s only been successful in five of his nine steal attempts despite an 84 percent career success rate entering the season.

Finally, the Yankees have added catcher J.D. Closser to the Scranton roster to deepen their catching corps while Jorge Posada is on the DL. Closser is a failed Rockies prospect from earlier in the decade, who never did hit in any of his major league shots (71 OPS+ in 160 games), but has a .277/.378/.455 career minor league line, which is significantly better than that of either Chad Moeller or Jose Molina.

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Like rooting for the Yankees? Like going to see them play? As we already know, that ain’t a cheap proposition. And when they move next door? Yikes, forget about it. Mike Lupica has the gruesome details.

Last week, I read an interview with our pal Pete Abraham over at a Respect Jeter’s Gangster, where he mentioned that he listens to Old School Wu Tang Clan. A few months ago, I had a discussion with a kid at work who claimed that Biggie Smalls and Tupac were Old School. Which leads me to this: What exactly determines whether you are from the Old School or not? Does it simply mean anything that is more than ten years old? Whitey Herzog is from the Old School. Ditto Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin and Bix Beiderbecke for that matter. In Hip Hop terms, Old School means funk and soul records from the ’60s and ’70s and then the early days of Rap records, maybe through 1983. I guess you could call Run DMC Old School, ang go through ’86, but I generally don’t. However, a kid in his mid-twenties would think of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest as Old School I suppose. But Biggie, Tupac and the Wu? I guess that means Nas and Mobb Deep are Old School too. Or maybe I’m just getting old. What’s your take?

My pint-sized Ansel Adams applying her craft at the Botanical Gardens.  Hey, if anyone out there is still looking for a Mother’s Day gift, please consider one of Em’s lovely photocard series. 

Thanks!

Getting to know Pat Jordan has been one of the highlights of my brief time hanging around sports writers. First, Pat was candid and funny in an interview I did with him for Bronx Banter back in 2003, then he occasionally gave me writing tips as I worked on my first book, a biography of Curt Flood. After that book came out, I approached Pat about doing a compilation of his best stories. I was shocked that one didn’t already exist. It’s the kind of project he’d never offer up on his own but he was more than delighted to be involved. So I wrote a proposal, got the book sold, and then we had a wonderful time going through well over one hundred profiles and finally selecting 26 stories to appear in the collection The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan.

The book is now out and Pat, a self-diagnosed troglodyte who still uses a typewriter and refers to himself as “the last knight of the freelance,” might be just that–the last guy who still makes a living strictly as a freelance magazine writer. Which isn’t to suggest he’s completely resistant to change, as he’s been busy doing publicity all ’round the ‘Net ever since his Jose Canseco piece appeared at Deadspin at the end of March. Derek Goold caught up with Pat for a nice blog entry he did on Rick Ankiel, and here is a profile on Jordan from the Florida Sun-Sentinel. There are also interviews with Rich Lederer, Will Carroll, Bill Littlefield for Only a Game, and Deadspin.

I like the following bit about the craft of writing from a Q&A with Playboy:

JORDAN: I grew up with radio and as a result I’d go to bed at night listening to “The Shadow,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Batman and Robin,” “The Green Hornet” and with radio I had to use my imagination to figure out what they look like. What does The Shadow look like? And so it stimulated my imagination and it made me very conscious of the way things look. To this day I’m very detail oriented, but unlike Tom Wolfe, who lists 48 things that a guy is wearing to supposedly describe him, I say it is not the accumulation of detail, it is right details. If you get the right details, you allow the reader to create the scene himself. It is always about the reader, I want the reader to think he wrote the story and that I didn’t.

PLAYBOY: You mention this in the book’s forward…

JORDAN: You create the ideal story when at the end of it the reader can’t yellow out a paragraph on page three and point to where you told him what the story was about. The reader needs to think that they discovered something in the story that the author didn’t because the author didn’t spell it out. If the writer doesn’t hand it to him the reader to thinks that they are in the process of discovering more of the story than the writer intended to put in. I think of it as a collaborative deal.

PLAYBOY: So you’ve made a living by making people think that you aren’t as smart as you actually are?

JORDAN: Exactly. They don’t think that you are leading them and they don’t know you set it up bit by bit. As far as sentences go, I feel that you should never have a sentence so complex that the reader has to stop and go over it again to get the meaning. The same applies to images. If you use a metaphor you need the reader to not reread the metaphor over again and sit down and think, “What does he mean a cow is like a moon?” If the reader has to unravel a sentence or a metaphor, that’s bad. You want them to read it all through effortlessly so they would be reading the story as if they were looking over your shoulder when you were typing. Some stories come easily. The stories you think came easily you think are genius and it comes out later that they weren’t that good. And the one that was like pulling teeth, that you had to bang on your typewriter like hammering nails into wood, that you hated doing because it was so hard to get right, you find out that that was the good one. In the end you want it to appear that the story is flowing out of you and that it is effortless. These are all the things that you do that nobody knows about.

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Carlos Silva? Nah, son. Chill. After beating Seattle’s two best pitchers on Friday and Saturday, the Yanks poured it on Mr. Silva beating him about the face and neck to the tune of eight runs in three innings. The Bombers scored six in the third–the first time they’ve scored more than five in an inning this year (they did it thirty times last season). Melky Cabrera hit a moon shot in the frame, and his best pal Robbie Cano, the Heckle to Melky’s Jeckle, momentarily broke free of his horrid slump by homering as well (Silva had him down in the count and then did him a favor by leaving a fastball up in Robbie’s happy zone). That makes six homers for Melky; he hit eight all of last year. The boys at the top of the lineup did their job and more for the second straight game: two hits for Damon (who also made a nice catch), three for Bobby Abreu and four for Derek Jeter. Even better, Darrell Rasner gave up just a couple of runs over six innings and the Yanks completed the three-game sweep of the M’s, 8-2. Smiles all around on what turned out to be a sunny afternoon in the Bronx. New York’s record is now 17-16.

Ian Kennedy was sent to the minors and Kei Igawa will rejoin the big league club.

According to Anthony McCarron in the News:

As Joe Girardi said, it’s up to Kennedy how fast he returns to the majors.

Apparently, he told Kennedy, it could be a couple of starts or 15 starts, depending on how he does. As Kennedy put it, “If you want to pout or moan, that’s what will happen. A couple starts, I’d rather have that happen.”

The Yankees are concerned with Kennedy’s confidence, though he said he had plenty. At the same time, he admitted that he doesn’t have as much confidence as he did last September or during his meteoric rise through the minors. He also seemed to be uncomfortable with the idea that each of his starts here are magnified and “under a microscope.”

Believe it or not, the team actually has a day off on Monday. Cleveland is in town for a three game series starting Tuesday night.

Oooh, two in a row. Whadda ya say we make it an even three? 

Bronx Banter: Arthur Avenue

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Mike Mussina held the Mariners to one run on seven hits over six innings, walking no one and striking out a season-high five men, including the M’s three, five, and six hitters, all flailing at changeups to cap his outing in the sixth inning. The performance earned him his third straight win as the Yankees put 15 men on base against Felix Hernandez and plated six of them. Johnny Damon had the big day, going 3-for-5 with two doubles and a two-run homer. Derek Jeter also went 3 for 5 with a double. Jose Molina drew his first walk of the year and snapped his 0-for-23 slump with a single in his next at-bat. The 6-1 score allowed Joe Girardi to stay away from his high-leverage relievers, passing the ball instead to LaTroy Hawkins, Edwar Ramirez, and Jose Veras, each of whom pitched a scoreless inning. Veras, in his first work since being called up, retired the side in order in the ninth on ten pitches, eight of them strikes, picking up a K to end the game.

Mussina’s line in his last three starts:

18 IP, 18 H, 5 R, 2 HR, 2 BB, 10 K, 3-0, 2.50 ERA, 1.11 WHIP

If the Yankees can give Carlos Silva his usual beating tomorrow (Silva has a career 7.59 ERA against the Yankees), they could enter Monday’s off-day having swept Seattle, which would push them back up over .500 and make their poor showing against Detroit seem a distant, hazy memory.

Someone stuck a microphone in front of Hank Steinbrenner again yesterday.

A couple of weekends ago, my wife and I attended an outdoor event in what was supposed to be rainy weather only to wind up with sunburns when the sun came out and stayed out. A couple of days later, Becky came home from work and grumbled, “If one more person says to me ‘did you know you’ve got a sunburn’ I’m going to scream.” Strikes me that Hank’s comments amount to the equivalent. Hey, Yankees, did you know your season isn’t going that well? I wonder if Joe Girardi knows that. Hey, Joe! . . .

At least Hank was being timely. Amid his grousing was this bit of sabermetric brilliance:

“We just can’t win one out of five games, every time Wang pitches. It’s not going to work. It’s not a good win percentage.”

Indeed, the Yankees went out and snapped a three-game losing streak behind Chien-Ming Wang last night. But wait . . . why wasn’t it a four-game losing streak?

Because the Yankees have won Mike Mussina’s last two starts, as well. They’ll try to make that three straight behind Moose this afternoon, and will clinch their fourth series win of the season (out of 11 series) if they do.

Mussina only lasted five innings his last time out, but has allowed just four runs over his last 12 innings and has been sharp both times out, pitching like the kind of wily veteran junkballer we’d all hoped he’d become in his later years. Today will mark his first start against the M’s since 2005. Last year his only appearance against Seattle was his lone relief appearance amid his early-September exile from the rotation. He did not face the M’s at all in 2006.

Opposing Mussina will be King Felix Hernandez who, at age 22 and in his fourth major league season, is living up to his nickname in the early going with a 2.22 ERA while averaging 7 1/3 innings per start. In his last start, Hernandez struck out ten A’s in seven shutout innings, but came back out for the eighth and failed to retire any of the first four men he faced, all of whom would come around to score (three of them against the bullpen). Hernandez has thrown 110 or more pitches in each of his last four starts, and 115 or more in three of those four. Given his collapse at the end of his last start, one wonders if that’s too much for a 22-year-old arm this early in the season.

Hernandez faced the Yankees just once last year, coincidentally in the same game at Safeco park that included Mussina’s relief appearance. Hernandez held the Yanks to one run on five hits over seven innings in that outing, though the Bombers did draw four walks against him.

Today’s Yankee lineup is what is likely to be the default lineup while Alex Rodriguez and Jorge Posada are both on the shelf, though it’s the first time in the five games Rodriguez has missed that Joe Girardi has actually used it, in part because this is just the Yankees’ second game against a righty starter in that span.

L – Johnny Damon (LF)
R – Derek Jeter (SS)
L – Bobby Abreu (RF)
L – Hideki Matsui (DH)
L – Jason Giambi (1B)
S – Melky Cabrera (CF)
L – Robinson Cano (2B)
R – Morgan Ensberg (3B)
R – Jose Molina (C)

We got the pitching duel we expected last night. Chien-Ming Wang held the Mariners to one run on three hits and a pair of walks over six innings while striking out five. Wang left after 90 pitches due to a cramp at the base of the thumb of his pitching hand, but Kyle Farnsworth, Joba Chamberlain, and Mariano Rivera finished the job by allowing just one more Mariner to reach base (via an Ichiro Suzuki single off Chamberlain) over three scoreless innings. For Seattle, Erik Bedard retired the last 14 men he faced.

However, Before Bedard locked things down, his defense committed four errors, three of which contributed directly to two of the three runs the Yankees scored against Bedard. In the first, Derek Jeter reached on a grounder that scooted under shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt’s glove for an error. He was plated by singles by Bobby Abreu and Hideki Matsui. In the second, Morgan Ensberg led off with a hard shot that ate up Adrian Beltre at third base, also ruled an error. Ensberg was subsequently nailed at second base when Jose Monlia struck out on a hit-and-run, but second baseman Jose Lopez had the ball squirt out of his glove as he made the tag for the Mariners’ third error. Alberto Gonzalez then singled Ensberg to third and Melky Cabrera drove both runners in with a double.

The fourth Seattle error came in the third when catcher Jamie Burke dropped a Jason Giambi popup in the swirling winds. Giambi subsequently stuck his shoulder in front of one of Bedard’s 10-to-4 curveballs, but was stranded when Ensberg and Molina flew out to end the inning.

And that was it until the sixth, when Ichiro reached out and served a sinker low and away into center field, stole second and third, and scored on a groundout for the only Seattle run of the night.

Among the three Yankee relievers, Kyle Farnsworth and Mariano Rivera were particularly impressive. Farnsworth, for the first time in recent memory, was simply blowing the opposing hitters away with heat, striking out two and throwing 10 of 14 pitches for strikes.

With Bedard out of the game, the Yanks padded their lead by scoring a pair of runs against relievers Ryan Rowland-Smith and Sean Green in the eighth to set the final at 5-1.

The cherry on top of the evening was Bobby Murcer’s return to the YES booth. Unlike last year, when the only obvious sign of his illness was his lack of hair, Murcer does appear a bit diminished by all he’s been through, but he was in good spirits and good form in the booth and was greeted warmly by everyone, of course.