Cause there ain’t no such thing as too much Sammy.

That’s Mark Teixeira, who has been playing–and will continue to play–with a broken toe. Mark Feinsand has the details.

So much happened in the 25-minute span from 10:30 p.m. ET to 10:55 p.m. ET, in Tuesday night’s Yankees-Rays game. Five plays, specifically, spread over seven outs. All with the specter of a fifth straight Yankees loss and 1 1/2-game deficit in the American League East. Thanks to Curtis Granderson, Jorge Posada, Carl Crawford and Greg Golson, the Yankees earned a split in the first two games of this three-game set in St. Petersburg and vaulted back into first place.

First, Granderson’s incredible diving catch robbed Ben Zobrist of an extra-base hit — possibly a three-bagger or even an inside-the-park homer — to end the ninth inning, bail out David Robertson and send the game into extras. Three pitches later, Jorge Posada repositioned a Dan Wheeler fastball into the restaurant above center field to give the Yankees the 8-7 lead. Posada’s bomb sent the Yankees’ Twitter universe into upheaval as beat writers, columnists and bloggers — myself included — attempted to describe the sudden turn of events in 146 characters.

Mark Feinsand of the Daily News called the shot “ridiculous.” Our friends at RiverAveBlues guessed that Posada’s blast “probably would have hit the restaurant glass in the Bronx.” I wonder if it would have been out at Yankee Stadium I?

Bottom 10, enter Mo to close it against Carl Crawford, Evan Longoria and Matt Joyce. Crawford reaches on a single. Longoria also unloads to center. “Holy cow, that looked gone. Instead, Granderson catches Longoria’s drive at the track in dead center,” read the tweet from the Ledger’s Marc Carig. Crawford, however, made the first of his two base running gaffes here. Instead of tagging and ending up on second base, Crawford went too far, and was forced to retreat to first. He proceeded to steal second. This set up the second Crawford gaffe: Joyce hit a high fly ball to shallow right field, and if you watched closely, you could see the play developing as Golson sped to circle the ball in order to catch it in optimal position for the throw to third base. Crawford sped toward third and Golson fired what Michael Kay called a “laser” to third. Alex Rodriguez picked the throw on a short hop and tagged Crawford on the shin.

Game over. Arms raised. Fist pumps abound.

Carig later reported via Twitter that Golson didn’t think Crawford was going. Granderson was yelling from center field to alert him. Watching the whole series of events, I can only think of my father’s assessment of Rickey Henderson, and how he used to scoff at broadcasters who lauded his base running skills. Dad was, and is, of the opinion that Rickey was a great hitter, great athlete, great base stealer, but a terrible base runner. He didn’t tag when he was supposed to, he didn’t run hard out of the batter’s box, etc. Crawford’s hiccups are more of the lack of instinct. The Yankees made Crawford pay for his hubris.

It was one of the wildest finishes to what may have been the best regular season game the Yankees played since A-Rod’s walk-off home run beat the Red Sox in 15 innings last year.

* * *

Lost amid the hubbub of the last two innings was how events progressed to that point. Storylines heading into the game were as follows: 1) Four straight losses, two of them coming in disappointing extra-inning fashion, to relinquish control of first place for the first time since August 3. 2) Bullpen question marks. The Meat Tray and Chad Gaudin prominently involved. (To this end, Michael Kay recited a quote during the My9 telecast from pitching coach Dave Eiland: “Sometimes you have to lose a battle to win the war,” a not-so-subtle metaphor for the Yankees’ long-term thinking and plans to get the main horses for the bullpen healthy in time for the playoffs. Those horses will likely not include the Meat Tray or Gaudin. Back to the recap.) 3) Swisher and Gardner out of the lineup. 4) Tex with a broken pinky toe on his right foot. 5) Perhaps most flagrant, manager Joe Girardi says he’s gunning for the division but acting like he’s gunning to open the playoffs in Minnesota to face Carl Pavano’s mustache.

To add even more reasons to drive fans into a questioning frenzy, Girardi trotted out a lineup that was essentially 5 1/2 deep to support Ivan Nova, who was opposing Matt Garza, ye of the no-hitter.

The way both offenses started the game, though, combining to strand seven runners in the first two innings (four in scoring position), it was only a matter of time before the dam broke and the numbers got crooked in a hurry.

For the Yankees, that time was the third inning, when they exploded for four runs, the rally capped by a frozen rope of a home run by Robinson Canóo. In the fifth, an A-Rod home run and another tack-on run had many Yankee fans feeling comfortable with a 6-0 lead.

That was, until Nova lost the strike zone and coughed up the lead in the fifth. Willy Aybar’s pinch-hit home run — off a good 1-2 pitch by Boone Logan that was just golfed into the seats — cemented the 7-run comeback. The Yankees got the tying run right away, and then both bullpens took over. Before the Posada home run, three Rays relievers combined to retire 11 consecutive Yankees.

The Yankees’ relief arms were equally good. Logan, to his credit, retired four in a row after the Aybar home run and Joba Chamberlain, Kerry Wood and Robertson combined to allow just one base runner. Until he arrived for the ninth, Robertson had warmed up on three separate occasions.

The Yankees needed this win badly. Any shot of confidence will help, the way they’ve literally limped through the last week and a half. And if these two teams meet in the ALCS, we can only hope, as Ian O’Connor tweeted, that it goes seven games and each one resembles the first two games of this series.

The Yanks have lost four straight, seven of their last eight. They’ve been back-and-forth with the Rays for first place all season, a steady give-and-take, a dance. Now, the Rays are up by a half-game. But unless something horrible happens (the Red Sox trail the Yanks by seven games for the wildcard), they are both making the playoffs.

Tonight gives Matt Garza against the kid Nova, in his biggest test yet. Should be fun. I see the Bombers scoring some runs–don’t know if they’ll haul in the Score Truck, but more than enough to win.

Time to get back to the business of being in business.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

Nice piece by Joe Lemire over at SI.com on umps.

[Picture by Norman Rockwell]

Banana bread gets no respect.

Dig this found treasure from Mon Appetit.

Dig Jonah Keri’s exhaustive profile on Nolan Ryan and the Rangers’ new/old approach to pitching.

Mmm, Mmm, Good.

Jose Antonio Vargas profiles Facebook co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg in the New Yorker:

Zuckerberg may seem like an over-sharer in the age of over-sharing. But that’s kind of the point. Zuckerberg’s business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertisers. Happily for him, and the prospects of his eventual fortune, his business interests align perfectly with his personal philosophy. In the bio section of his page, Zuckerberg writes simply, “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.”

The world, it seems, is responding. The site is now the biggest social network in countries ranging from Indonesia to Colombia. Today, at least one out of every fourteen people in the world has a Facebook account. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is becoming the boy king of Silicon Valley. If and when Facebook decides to go public, Zuckerberg will become one of the richest men on the planet, and one of the youngest billionaires. In the October issue of Vanity Fair, Zuckerberg is named No. 1 in the magazine’s power ranking of the New Establishment, just ahead of Steve Jobs, the leadership of Google, and Rupert Murdoch. The magazine declared him “our new Caesar.”

Despite his goal of global openness, however, Zuckerberg remains a wary and private person. He doesn’t like to speak to the press, and he does so rarely. He also doesn’t seem to enjoy the public appearances that are increasingly requested of him. Backstage at an event at the Computer History Museum, in Silicon Valley, this summer, one of his interlocutors turned to Zuckerberg, minutes before they were to appear onstage, and said, “You don’t like doing these kinds of events very much, do you?” Zuckerberg replied with a terse “No,” then took a sip from his water bottle and looked off into the distance.

Congrats to Rafa on winning the US Open. He’s not got the career Grand Slam.

Here’s more tennis from the New York Review of Books.

What’s with Nick Swisher? The Yankee outfielder with have an MRI–his second in ten days–today. According to the Times:

“Short term, I’m worried about it because I don’t know how long it’s going to take,” Manager Joe Girardi said of Swisher. “But I don’t perceive it to be two weeks or anything like that.”

It has been almost two weeks since Swisher fouled a ball off his knee on Aug. 24 in Toronto, and after a period of slight improvement, he said Sunday in Texas that the pain had started affecting other parts of his body. It grew noticeably worse Wednesday, when he fell after taking a swing, and he ran with a limp his first two games against the Rangers. Swisher, receiving treatment before Monday’s game, was not available to comment.

Did last night happen? It sure am did. It was damp and chilly in the Bronx this morning but the sun was out and today is a new day. The city is sparklin’, and a win tonight puts the Yanks back in first place.

Hope is the thing called Nova. Today will be a better day, ya hear?

[Picture by Iyasu Nagata]

Because today we need to laugh.

I can get you a cheeseburger.

Tonight’s pitching matchup proved equal to the hype: it was Sabathia vs. Price, and neither ace gave an inch. Both went eight innings and walked two; I guess Sabathia gets a bit of an edge for allowing 2 hits – as opposed to Price’s whopping 3 – and striking out 9 men, compared to Price’s 4. But basically, for most of the game, nobody was hitting anything. Sabathia changed speeds and spotted his pitches precisely; Price’s fastball blew away the Yankee hitters, who for the last week or so (if not, in many cases, a bit longer) have looked old and tired and tonight looked even more so, although to be fair, most people look that way when facing David Price.

So why, after the game, did Joe Girardi say of the two aces, “both of them were tremendous” in the same flat, soul-crushed tones one might normally use to say, “my girl ran off with my best friend and took my dog with her”? Well, the Yankee hitters didn’t do any better against the Rays’ relievers than they had against Price, and with the score tied 0-0 and the game heading into extra innings, Girardi inserted Chad “Abandon Hope” Gaudin and Sergio “Pushing Your Luck” Mitre to pitch the 10th and 11th innings, respectively. The many viewers who pessimistically assumed that Gaudin would lose the game, particularly after he loaded the bases, were proved wrong when instead it was Mitre who allowed the big game-winning homer — to Reid Brignac, the first batter he faced.

Well, according to Joe Girardi’s testy and dispirited post-game press conference, David Robertson and Joba Chamberlain weren’t available (though why Joba wasn’t, having not pitched since Friday, I don’t know), and Mo (possibly because he looked so dreadfully un-Mo-like in his last outing?) was only going to be used in a save situation. Still, that doesn’t necessarily explain why Kerry Wood was pulled after one quick and easy ninth inning, or why Boone Logan only faced one batter, or why Curtis Granderson bunted against a righty to bring up… Collin Curtis. Coming on the heels of a series of brutal Yankee losses, this latest fiasco dunked New York into second place and left Girardi open to plenty of criticism.

Of course, the Yankees haven’t been making Girardi’s job any easier lately – questionable managerial moves are prone to be noticed and leaped upon much more often when the team of the manager in question isn’t hitting worth a good goddamn. And I’m quite sure Girardi didn’t call for two of his team’s most boneheaded plays: Jorge Posada getting thrown out trying to steal second in the fifth inning and, far worse, Brett Gardner getting thrown out trying to steal THIRD with two outs in the tenth. After the game Gardner apologized to his teammates, and in postgame interviews he looked like he wished desperately for the ability to melt into a guilty puddle of shame on the locker room floor, but even he could not really explain what he’d been thinking.

I’m not somebody who feels strongly about winning the division rather than going in through the Wild Card; I just want playoffs. But if the Yankees don’t start playing better, on both sides of the ball, it’s pretty hard to imagine them lasting long in October no matter how they get there. So here’s hoping they rouse themselves from their slump soon, because a beautifully kickass performance like the one C.C. Sabathia gave us tonight should not go to waste. And also because Joe Girardi sounds like he’s maybe three more bad losses away from taking a fungo bat and going after the next reporter who asks him about his pitching choices.

AP Photo

CC Sabathia meets David Price tonight. First place is on the line. Man, this should be good.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

[Picture Credit: Craig Robinson, 2009. Drawn with the iPhone application Brushes.]

Is Bill James losing it? Check out this rambling essay for Slate and you tell me.

Saturday Night Fever was based on a New York Magazine story by Nik Cohn called Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night (It appeared in July, 1976):

Within the closed circuits of rock & roll fashion, it is assumed that New York means Manhattan. The center is everything, all the rest irrelevant. If the other boroughs exist at all, it is merely as a camp joke—Bronx-Brooklyn-Queens, monstrous urban limbo, filled with everyone who is no one.

In reality, however, almost the reverse is true. While Manhattan remains firmly rooted in the sixties, still caught up in faction and fad and the dreary games of decadence, a whole new generation has been growing up around it, virtually unrecognized. Kids of sixteen to twenty, full of energy, urgency, hunger. All the things, in fact, that the Manhattan circuit, in its smugness, has lost.

They are not so chic, these kids. They don’t haunt press receptions or opening nights; they don’t pose as street punks in the style of Bruce Springsteen, or prate of rock & Rimbaud. Indeed, the cults of recent years seem to have passed them by entirely. They know nothing of flower power or meditation, pansexuality, or mind expansion. No waterbeds or Moroccan cushions, no hand-thrown pottery, for them. No hep jargon either, and no Pepsi revolutions. In many cases, they genuinely can’t remember who Bob Dylan was, let alone Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary. Haight Ashbury, Woodstock, Altamont—all of them draw a blank. Instead, this generation’s real roots lie further back, in the fifties, the golden age of Saturday nights.

The cause of this reversion is not hard to spot. The sixties, unlike previous decades, seemed full of teenage money. No recession, no sense of danger. The young could run free, indulge themselves in whatever treats they wished. But now there is shortage once more, just as there was in the fifties. Attrition, continual pressure. So the new generation takes few risks. It goes through high school, obedient; graduates, looks for a job, saves and plans. Endures. And once a week, on Saturday night, its one great moment of release, it explodes.

I don’t know from his best, but The Conformist is far and away my favorite Bertolucci movie. If you’ve got a big TV, do yourself a favor and rent it. If not, wait for it to play at a revival house. It’ll be so worth your time.

Movie is gorgeous to watch in more ways than one:

Jay Jaffe presents a reason to be cheerful, forget what happened down in Texas…

About Last Night…

This girl is the Vanessa Del Rio of food pern.