Ah, the New York Post: where Hal Steinbrenner’s statement that the Yankees will actually, you know, negotiate with Derek Jeter over his new contract gets the headline “Yankees Warn of ‘Messy’ Talks With Jeter.” (And by the way, why hasn’t the nickname Prince Hal ever stuck? Doesn’t anyone read Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, or Henry V anymore? Hank’s nickname could be Falstaff. Let’s make it happen, people.) The actual quotes from Hal:

Ben at RAB has a good reasonable view of why this is pretty much all smoke and no fire, written after SI’s Jon Heyman floated the rumor (“industry sources suggest that he could“) that Jeter might want as many as six years in a deal, but before Jeter’s agent responded to Hal’s interview (or “fired back,” as the ESPN NY article would have it) over at AOL FanHouse with the shocking suggestion that his client was worth lots and lots of money:

“While it is not our intent to negotiate the terms of Derek’s free-agent contract in a public forum,” Casey Close told FanHouse, “we do agree with Hal’s and Brian (Cashman, the GM)’s recent comments that this contract is about business and winning championships.”

“Clearly, baseball is a business, and Derek’s impact on the sport’s most valuable franchise cannot be overstated. Moreover, no athlete embodies the spirit of a champion more than Derek Jeter.”

So it goes. This has been described as “battling it out publicly,” but agents are always spewing stuff like that; it’s part of Close’s job to be a dick, with the Yankees and with the media, so that Jeter doesn’t have to be. The Yankees can’t say they’ll give Jeter whatever he wants, and Jeter’s agent can’t say that Jeter doesn’t want a massive contract. The team isn’t going to sign Jeter to some crazy six-year deal, but they’re obviously going to overpay for him, and I would imagine they’ve made their peace with that; exactly how much they’ll overpay, and for exactly how long, are the details that will be worked out over the next few weeks.

I’ll never understand how, say, $15 million a year could seem like not enough to someone, but then, the Yankees are worth billions to Jeter’s millions, so I have no horse in that race. Anyway, Jeter is generally pretty smart about these things: his last contract was absolutely massive in its own right, but since it was a bit less than Alex Rodriguez’s and was signed shortly after that firestorm, he got very, very little criticism or resentment for it. It’s quite a trick to sign a deal that nets you an average of $18.9 million a year and makes you seem moderate and reasonable, but The Captain pulled it off, and I doubt he’s gotten any less savvy in the years since.

Of course it’s possible that negotiations will indeed get messy… but they certainly haven’t yet. Sit back, relax, pass the popcorn, and may the best negotiator win.

—

Discussion Question: If Derek Jeter “embodies the spirit of a champion,” what do the rest of the Yankees embody? And what about you, what do you embody? Right now, I’m pretty sure I “embody the spirit of a nap”.

When thinking of former Yankee managers, Clyde King is hardly the first name that comes to mind. But when it comes to former Yankee skippers who devoted their lives to the game, while doing so with intelligence, enthusiasm, and style, King’s name should be placed near the top of the list. One of the few men who served George Steinbrenner as both manager and general manager, King died Tuesday from heart-related problems. King was 86.

With baseball ravaged by World War II, King made his major league debut as a right-hander with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1944. He returned to the minor leagues after the war, but eventually returned to Brooklyn, becoming a contributor to the Dodgers’ staff in the late forties and early fifties. While with the Dodgers, King became close friends with Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in the major leagues during the 20th century. The friendship surprised some, given the southern heritage of the Carolina-born King, but it was emblematic of his open-minded, outgoing, and accepting nature.

After his playing days came to an end with the Reds in 1953, King became a successful minor league manager with teams like the Atlanta Crackers and the Hollywood Stars. Noted for his knowledge of pitching, King turned to coaching with the Reds and Pirates, a springboard to his first big league managerial post in San Francisco, followed by a later stint with the Braves. As a manager, King forged a record five games better than .500, at 234-229.

King joined the Yankee front office in 1976, quickly becoming a trusted confidante of Steinbrenner. He remained with the Yankees for the next three decades, serving alternately as a super scout, coach, manager, general manager, and special advisor. King became one of Steinbrenner’s go-to men, a troubleshooter who would fill any capacity requested by the principal owner.

King moved into the Yankee spotlight in the middle of the 1982 season, when he became the team’s third manager that summer, succeeding Bob Lemon and Gene “Stick“ Michael. Under King’s leadership, the Yankees limped to a 29-33 finish. Several of the veteran Yankees claimed that he was actually a spy for Steinbrenner, a charge that King denied.

After the season, the Yankees bumped King back to the front office. In the mid-1980s, with the Yankee front office in a state of constant turmoil and upheaval, Steinbrenner turned to King to run the entire baseball operation. He promoted King to general manager, giving him [relatively] full authority to make trades and sign free agents. King impressed a number of Yankee watchers at the 1984 winter meetings. Coming to the meetings with a detailed and organized plan, King engineered a blockbuster trade for Hall of Fame leadoff man Rickey Henderson. King also swung lesser trades for useful role players like Ron Hassey and Henry Cotto, and stole hard-throwing reliever Brian Fisher from the Braves for a declining Rick Cerone. (After the winter meetings, King also acquired a young Jay Buhner from the Pirates in exchange for the washed up pair of Steve Kemp and Tim Foli.) Bolstered by the wintertime pickups, the Yankees improved by ten games in 1985, winning 97 games. Unfortunately, the Yankees ran second to a powerhouse Blue Jays team that won 99 games and claimed the American League East.

Some historians, including this one, regard King as the Yankees’ most effective general manager of the 1980s, but that stature did not prevent him from being fired in 1986. Now demoted, King returned to being a lesser known member of the front office. Whether working in a position of power or simply serving as a scout, King also developed a reputation as one of the game’s great storytellers. Always approachable, King loved to talk baseball, spinning his tales in his trademark southern drawl.

Along the way, King managed to accomplish something that few others can claim. He somehow worked for 30 years under the imposing thumb of George Steinbrenner, before finally retiring in 2005. If nothing else, lasting that long while working for “The Boss” should earn Clyde King at least half of a plaque here in Cooperstown.

Jeanne Verdoux’s got it going on.

There is a new biography of Roald Dahl.

Check out this review in the L.A. Times:

For those who do not know Dahl’s grown-up stories, one of his most beloved — if I may use that word — is called “Pig” (1959), about an orphan raised by a tender, vegetarian aunt. The boy’s talents as a young vegetarian chef are depicted in a magical, mystical tone. When the aunt dies, the boy buries her and goes to the city where he encounters, gasp … pork! He loves it, and ends up with his throat slit by a butcher. Pure horror.

“Storyteller” is a dense, satisfying book about a mercurial author. The biographer, Donald Sturrock, frankly addresses Dahl’s darker moods and speculates as to their origins in biographical details. Dahl did face struggles in childhood and as a parent, but so do many, and some even worse. What, then, can explain his dark charisma, the beauty of his threatening prose? It seems that like a character in a folk tale, he was just so inclined. And, then, in a stroke of good luck, he was at an early age introduced to folkloric, literary stories and fell in love especially with Hillaire Belloc’s “Cautionary Tales for Children” and “The Classic Fairy Tales” by Iona and Peter Opie.

Though the details of Dahl’s life — his affairs and his losses — are told sensitively here, and are riveting, “Storyteller” is most fascinating when it retells and analyzes his body of work for grown-ups and children, revealing them to be cut from the very same cloth as that of fairy tales. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales.” As with all the great fairy-tale authors, Dahl makes them new, revisiting the themes of childhood, violence, power and magic.

Good lineup at Gelf’s Varsity Letters Speaking Serious tomorrow night in BK: Howard Byrant, Tommy Craggs and Dave Jamieson.

Yo, check out this recipe for homemade Nutella over at the most cool blog, I made that!

Or if your fat ass is feelin’ lazy, just go out and cop one of these:

More Solomon…

Remakes are a tricky business. Well, I should specify remakes of great movies are a tricky business (e.g. “The Maltese Falcon” had been adapted for the screen twice before Huston & Bogart got their hands on it, and no one seemed to notice). Don Siegel’s 1956 film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is, to my view a great movie. However, it was a B-movie, made on the cheap with few resources beyond a great story (adapted from Jack Finney’s novel “The Body Snatchers”) and a terrifically skilled director. Maybe that’s what drove Philip Kaufman to remake “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” in 1978. Whatever his motivations were, it’s one of the few remakes that really work: respectful of its source material, while carving out its own distinct cinematic territory in its own time. It’s also a very entertaining and truly creepy movie that blends horror with a genre that’s always been a personal favorite: the 1970s paranoia thriller.

Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland, still with the shaggy curls and mustache you all loved in “Don’t Look Now” and “National Lampoon’s Animal House”) is a city health inspector and Brooke Adams pays Elizabeth, the co-worker and friend he’s clearly pining over. Together, they begin to piece together something strange going on. Soon after the appearance of a strange new plant no one can identify, a flowering pod, people start to behave strangely. Elizabeth’s boyfriend and Matthew’s dry cleaner, among others, just don’t seem like normal anymore.  Matthew’s friends Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright, both excellent) find something even more disturbing at their mud bath spa. As fans of any of the film versions of Body Snatchers know, and our heroes soon discover, the pods are from “deep space” and are creating perfect, soulless replicas of everyone in sight as they sleep.

They attempt to enlist the help of Matthew’s good friend David Kibler (Leonard Nimoy) a noted psychiatrist and best-selling self-help author. Nimoy’s performance is crucial – he’s having so much fun playing Kibler, with such aloofness and measure, that the audience can’t help but keep wondering, “Is he or isn’t he?” He manages to seem both warm and friendly and cold and calculating, whether trying to reunite a concerned wife to her pod person husband, or assessing the validity of his friends’ story.

While Siegel’s film was set in a small town in California, Kaufman’s (scripted by W.D. Richter) transplants it to a big city: San Francisco. The crowds and architecture of the city serve the story well, amping up the sense of dread and paranoia. What if that cold stranger who just passed you on the street wasn’t just a cold stranger? Why is that janitor staring at you like that? Why is that mob chasing that man down the street?  (The man being chased through the streets is played by the star of the 1956 film, Kevin McCarthy, in a witty and smart cameo. Kafuman even gives Siegel himself a part as a cab driver.) Just who, really, do you trust?

Siegel’s film is widely read as an allegory about the Cold War hysteria of the 1950s. (But from which side? The fear that evil, soulless beings that look just like us could be infiltrating our happy society or that McCarthyism had turned us into unthinking, uncaring, sleeping drones?)  Kaufman and Richter set their film in the then present, the late 1970s and seem to be spoofing the near fascistic groupthink and narcissism of the “me generation.”  Once overtaken by the space pods, people claim to be happy and relaxed, but show no emotion or individuality. They’re told that it will be easier if they just relent, fall asleep and join them, where they’ll no longer feel hate or love.  It’s a future Matthew wants no part of.

However, this is no bloated, didactic lecture – the film is a hell of a lot of fun. Kaufman’s compositions and pacing keep the film taut and also give it a persistent undercurrent of dread. We know something’s wrong, even if the characters haven’t figured it out yet.

Kaufman’s remake was a critical and box-office success. (I can recall going to see it back in the winter of ’79 with a group of neighborhood kids led by my friend Will’s dad, an actor, who told us all about the original version and Kevin McCarthy on the walk home.) Pauline Kael was one of the film’s critical champions and called the film “undiluted pleasure and excitement.” She also wrote,

“…the director, Phil Kaufman, provides such confident professionalism that you sit back in the assurance that every spooky nuance you’re catching is just what was intended.”

Writing in New York magazine, David Denby said that he found Kaufman’s film even more entertaining than Siegel’s and offered this:

“Like all great horror films, is an insinuatingly sensual experience: Our morbid curiosity is engaged and then exploited. We are drawn into complicity with the dark, oozy terrors of nature run riot and human beings deformed and mutated.”

If the pod people ever do land on Earth, just make sure to throw in a copy of this movie – you’re sure not to fall asleep.

Used to be that no baseball season felt complete until Roger Angell’s piece appeared in the New Yorker. Mr. Angell just turned 90 but he’s still writing. However, I don’t know if we’ll get the usual piece, as Angell was blogging for the New Yorker during the post-season. My favorite bit came his final post–because he dug up a quote from one of his old pieces that I’ve been looking for, unsuccessfully, for years now:

Players have little awareness of fan angst, but I’ve not forgotten an amazing late-summer conversation I had with the iconic, forty-year-old Willie McCovey at Candlestick Park, in 1978, at a time when his contending Giants had just dropped five out of six games and were beginning a customary September slide toward oblivion.

“The fans sitting up there are helpless,” he said. “They can’t pick up a bat and come down and do something. Their only involvement is in how well you do. If you strike out or mess up out there, they feel they’ve done something wrong. You’re all they’ve got. The professional athlete knows there’s always another game or another year coming up. If he loses he swallows that bitter pill and comes back. It’s much harder for the fans.”

Baseball is over for the year. Now comes the talk, lots of talk, accompanied by speculation and rumors and all that Hot Stove goodness.

Hal Steinbrenner took to the airwaves yesterday (giving interviews to ESPN and WFAN, respectively). Chad Jennings has the wrap up:

“I can safely say we’re going to stay within the same level, but I’m obviously not going to get into details,” [Steinbrenner] said during The Michael Kay Show. “We know we’re expected to field a championship caliber team and we’re going to do what it takes to do that. If we have to get creative in a trade, or we have to go after a big free agent, we’re going to do that. We do have some money coming off.”

A few minutes later, Steinbrenner was asked a similar question by Mike Francesa.

“I’m not going to get into specifics, but yes we’ve got a good idea of where we’re going to try to end up,” he said. “We have some money coming off the payroll. Obviously re-signing Derek and Mo is going to be a priority to try to do that, but we’re still going to have money leftover. These meetings are pretty initial at this point, but it’s all about prioritizing what we need to do and looking at the free agent market and eventually looking at possible trades to try to improve.”

Because what’s scarier than having your body taken over against your will by an alien being? Or, as it’s more commonly known: pregnancy.

Of course, in most cases, when a woman is pregnant it’s not because her husband has arranged for some neighborly witches to have her raped by Satan in exchange for a boost to his acting career. The premise is ludicrous, but Rosemary’s Baby unfolds slowly and, by focusing on the mundane details of Rosemary’s life as well as the subtle horror, quite believably.

Lovely yuppie couple Rosemary and Guy Woodehouse, played by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, move into an old New York City apartment building (played by the Dakota) with a disconcerting history of violence and witchcraft, which they of course ignore. Their next door neighbors, who they can occasionally hear through the walls in certain rooms, are the pushy and snooping though seemingly well-meaning Castavets (Sidney Blackmer and the fabulously irritating Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar)– though to be fair, their pushiness only makes itself felt after their young female house guest kills herself, and they realize Rosemary is… fertile.

Mia Farrow gives a great performance, from glowing, beautiful, pliant young wife to a ghostly, half-mad, desperate soon-to-be mother. The character’s passivity can be frustrating – she lets herself be pushed into doing all kinds of things she doesn’t want to do by her husband, her neighbors, and the doctor they corral her into seeing – but it’s also understandable; Rosemary doesn’t want to make a fuss, doesn’t want to be rude, doesn’t want people to be upset with her, isn’t even sure she’s right. It’s in those scenes that Rosemary’s Baby becomes something of a feminist parable, not something I expected from Roman Polanski (maybe the ultimate “love the art, hate the artist” example, for me). The real horror of Rosemary’s situation comes not from being raped by the devil and impregnated with his spawn but from feeling cut off and powerless, used as a vessel for childbirth and not much else, ignored, told not to read or do or think anything for herself. By the time she gets up enough panicked courage to take action, for the sake of her unborn baby if not herself, it’s too late.

That’s another credit to the movie: it takes Rosemary nearly the entire running time to figure out what’s happening, whereas the audience is clued in from the start – to the fact that something sinister’s afoot, at least, if not precisely what. And the somewhat surprising ending is widely known, at this point (“What have you done to his eyes?!“). But while it’s frustrating to watch Rosemary become entangled in this sinister conspiracy over the course of hours, Polanski uses that frustration to invest the audience further, to deepen the viewer’s discomfort and tension. There are few movie characters I’d like to eviscerate more than the Castavets and their friends, especially that Laura-Louise. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review,

When the conclusion comes, it works not because it is a surprise but because it is horrifyingly inevitable. Rosemary makes her dreadful discovery, and we are wrenched because we knew what was going to happen –and couldn’t help her.

For all its horror, Rosemary’s baby is often wryly funny, and the movie keeps its sense of humor til the very end (when Rosemary drops her kitchen knife in horror near her baby’s bassinet, Mrs. Castevet picks it up and quickly rubs at the mark it left in her nice wood floors). Still, that end comprises the complete triumph of evil – the banality of evil, in fact.

Use protection, kids. Beware of too-good-to-be-true New York City real estate deals. And never, ever marry an actor.

The great Solomon Burke passed away recently. Sorry I didn’t mention it. The Beat of the Day will be dedicated to Burke for the rest of the week:

[Photo Credit: Ted Barron]

Sad news from the world of basketball: Maurice Lucas is dead.

Charles Pierce remembers Lucas in the Boston Globe:

Thirty-nine years ago this fall, I moved into the 11th floor of a 12-story dormitory at the corner of 16th Street and Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was a freshman at Marquette University. (The dorm, McCormick Hall, is round and shaped like a beer can, which is remarkably appropriate in more than the metaphorical sense, and the building has been rumored for almost 40 years to be sinking into middle Earth.) Not long after I moved in, I found myself intrigued by the music coming out from under the door of the room next to mine — music which I now know to have been “Eurydice,” the closing track from Weather Report’s astounding debut album. (Mmmmmm. Wayne Shorter!) As I was listening, an extremely large man came out of the room and introduced himself. “Pretty cool, isn’t it?’ he said.

And that was how I met Maurice Lucas.

For the next couple of years, we talked about music, at least as much as Luke talked to anyone, him being what you call your campus celebrity and all during the glory days of Warrior basketball and the high-sun period of Al McGuire Era. Whatever I know about any jazz recorded after the big band records to which my father listened — Mmmmmmm. Basie! — I learned from Luke, with whom I don’t believe I ever exchanged four words about basketball.

Later that same year, when I was practicing with the fencing team in the basement of the old gymnasium while the basketball team practiced upstairs, Luke came out of the shower wearing only a towel. “Hey,” he said, “show me how to do that.” I handed him a foil and we squared off, I in my full regalia with a mask and Luke in a towel. I touched him once, lightly, in the ribs. He slapped my blade out of my hand and about 20 feet back down the hallway, hitched up his towel, and went off chuckling.

Lucas was one of the memorable characters on the Blazers’ championship team in the ’70s. I remember him later in his career–he was a professional tough guy and a fine player.

If you’ve never read David Halberstam’s “The Breaks of the Game,” you should. There’s some good stuff on Lucas in there. Did I mention that he was tough?

Before the NBA, Lucas played with the infamous Marvin “Bad News” Barnes for the St. Louis Spirits in the ABA. Spirits announcer Bob Costas told Terry Pluto in Loose Balls:

It was interesting to watch Lucas develop. Early in his rookie year, he was coming off the bench. One night the Spirits were playing Kentucky in Freedom Hall and Lucas was trading elbows with Artis Gilmore. At 7-foot-2 and 240 pounds, Gilmore just towered over Maurice. Lucas’s only chance was to beat Gilmore to a spot on the floor and then try to hold off Artis. Despite his enormous size and strength, Gilmore was never known as a ferocious player and he seldom was in a fight. But all of a sudden, Artis just got sick of Lucas’s bodying him and you could see that the big guy was really hot. Gilmore took a swipe at Lucas and missed. Lucas put up his fists, but he was backpedaling like any sane man would when confronted by Gilmore. It was almost slow motion–Gilmore would take a step, then Lucas would take a step back. It was obvious that Lucas didn’t want to fight and was trying to figure out where he could go. Finally, he was trapped in the corner; he had run out of court. He didn’t know what else to do, so he planted his feet and threw this tremendous punch at Gilmore, and it caught Artis square on the jaw. It was a frightening sight. Artis hit the deck. Lucas was going crazy. Now he really wanted a piece of Artis. Guys were holding Lucas back and Artis was still down. For whatever reason, from that point on Lucas developed into a helluva player.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Lucas.

David Lebovitz gives us roasted pumkin.

Thanks, Hoss.

Dig this Elvis photo gallery by Alfred Wertheimer over at the New Yorker’s Photo Booth.

Rob Neyer thinks that the Giants are worthy champions:

It’s fair to be surprised that the Giants won in five games. Historically, most World Series have lasted longer than five games. It’s fair to be slightly surprised that the Giants won the World Series at all, because most of the numbers suggested that the Rangers were the slightly better team.

Anyone who is shocked by the 2010 World Series hasn’t been paying attention, over the years. The Giants were a very good team that played better than another very good team over the course of five games. If they play another five games next week, everything might be different.

They’re not going to play another five games. This one’s over. The great majority of Giants fans have never seen their team win a World Series. No Giants fan has seen their team win a World Series since moving to California more than a half-century ago.

Now they’ve got one. And as anyone who followed the Royals in ’85 or the Twins in ’87 or the Reds in ’90 or the Cardinals in ’06 will tell you, the only thing that matters is getting one. All the rest is details.

There is a new collection of love letters from famed Chicago columnist Mike Royko to his wife.

Steve Lopez reviews the book for the L.A. Times:

The job of writing newspaper columns doesn’t come with instructions, just deadlines that fly at you in your sleep. I used to read Royko and Jimmy Breslin and try to break down how they did what they did, but I couldn’t crack the code. How could they make a word stand up on the page, or a thought linger? How could they say so much with lines so spare?

They knew the places they wrote about, and that was part of it. But only years later would I learn their real secret: They knew who they were, and they knew why they wrote.

Royko was a man’s man, as they say, a guy who loved baseball and bars, believed in his city, backhanded its fools and celebrated its anonymous heroes, always with wit and tough-minded certainty.

…It’s an interesting thing, the way a famous city columnist — whose very public job was to make readers feel like they knew him — kept his family life private. Maybe Royko understood the better story was out there in the neighborhoods and in the hopes and fears of others. When you fall back on family for material, you sacrifice them to your selfish needs and cut off your own escape from the public glare.

Or maybe there’s a darker explanation as to why Royko did not write about the woman who had so consumed him as a young man. David Royko suggests his dad got caught up in the superstardom that came with decades of writing five columns a week in a city he owned, and his marriage to Carol Duckman was not “a rosy extension” of his heartfelt letters to her.

It could be that Royko discovered he adored nothing more than the pressure of filling empty space, on deadline, to the cheers of a city that adored him. Those were love letters, too, all those thousands of columns, the brilliant ones and the forgotten ones too.

The job is a thrill, but a wise man once advised me not to overdo it.

The Giants are Whirled Champs for the first time since 1954.

Congrats on what’s been a great run.

This is a money game for Cliff Lee, in more ways than one.

I say he comes up Aces and the Serious goes back to San Fran.