Chipper Jones said that this year will be his last. Over at SI.com, our man Cliff Corcoran appreciates the future Hall of Famer.

[Photo Credit: Pouya Dianat / AP]

Yanks Sox.

[Picture by Bags]

Here’s Pat Jordan’s piece on Geno Auriemma for Deadspin:

“I don’t coach women,” the coach says. “I coach basketball players.” He tells a story. He was practicing with his team before a game when the opposing team’s female coach came out on the floor. “I’m telling my players how to play man-to-man defense. The other coach says: ‘You can’t say that. It’s person-to-person defense.’ I said, ‘You’re shittin’ me.’ She says, ‘But it’s women playing it.’ I say: ‘Yeah, but it’s man-to-man. They’re just pawns, without gender. I’m a gender-neutral coach.'”

…Geno became a women’s coach by accident. He was 21, without a job. A friend asked him to help out coaching a girls’ high school team. Geno said, “Girls! No way.” Then he thought about it. “I realized it could be pretty cool,” he tells me. “So I gave it a shot. The girls listened to me. They appreciated what I taught them.” His high school job led to an assistant coaching job on the University of Virginia’s women’s team, which led, in 1985, to an interview for the head job at UConn. By then, Geno had decided that he “liked coaching women. But I didn’t view it as coaching women. I was just coaching the game the way it should be played.

When I ask him why UConn hired him, he says: “I have no fucking idea. They wanted a woman. But nobody wanted the job. UConn had had only one winning season in its history. The facilities were lousy, there was no money, the pay was $29,000 a year, but I didn’t give a shit. I wanted to coach. So I lied to them. I told them I’m gonna do this, and this, and this, and they believed me. So I took the job. I figured I’d win a few games then after four years I’d go someplace good, men or women, as long as I could coach on a high level.” Those plans never materialized. His teams became very good, very quickly, and then, as he puts it, “a funny thing happened. After those first winning seasons, nobody called. Nobody gave a shit because I was a guy. The women’s teams didn’t want a guy, and the men’s teams figured if I was coaching women, how good could I be?”

He smiles, the big smile of a guy who’s got the last laugh. “Now nobody wants me because I’m making too much fucking money.”

“463,” By Saul Leiter (1956)

“The tendency among spoilsport sportswriters is to make it all so so elegiac and bittersweet—to like us to see our own lives (easier for men, of course) in these [minor leaguers’] prospects; to make it all a gooey-nostalgic allegory for trying and failing while still young, an emblem for rum life lived well instead of just being an emblem for itself—is baloney and I’m not wrong about it. Believe me, I don’t see myself in those boys’ lives. They’re not my vicars, and I don’t fantasize—at least not about them. I go to the game to quit thinking about my life, to sit and stare at a pleasant field I know on which is played a game I also know by players whose lives, wives, drug and betting habits, childhood tragedies, and religious infatuations I don’t know and don’t want to. I’m just there to watch, to be pleased, maybe even thrilled, but not, God help me, to take moral instruction.”

Richard Ford, “A Minors Affair” [excerpt] (Harper’s, September 1992)

Thanks to the excellent site, It’s a Long Season, for the picture of Buster and the quote.

Dig this tasty-looking recipe for lemon, chicken and orzo soup over at the winning site Tartelette.

This tune never fails to crack me up.

[Photo Via Piccsy]

Check out this interview with Daniel Woodrell in the Oxford American:

THE OA: I’ve heard that early in your career, agents and publishers were trying to direct you toward a strict genre style.

DW: They were trying to. My first agent really felt that was the path for me. If you’re writing, and not excited by it, and getting some kind of interior pleasure out of it—that’s difficult to explain to people who haven’t experienced it—you really shouldn’t do it. In terms of a moneymaking profession, you can find faster ways of making money.

THE OA: Then you gravitated to writing about the great and mysterious Ozarks.

DW: This region is just not really well defined in most people’s minds. People don’t understand that you can go out in the woods and run into some stained-glass artist from Long Beach. Eureka Springs has got two or three classical artists who have chosen to live there for one reason or another. I mean, you don’t know what you’ll run into out here.

…THE OA: You wrote for quite a few years before garnering any recognition.

DW: I wrote for ten years for nothing. And I wrote almost every day. I kept going because I liked doing it. If you really don’t like doing it, it’ll show up pretty soon. I filled up boxes of stuff that didn’t go anywhere. But I needed to do that. And I don’t think of myself as an incredibly fast learner. I learned at the pace that I learned at. But I’m told that ten years is about right. I had to emotionally develop. It’s an emotional thing as well as a technical thing. And I had technique before I had the other. The emotional honesty is what really takes you further and further. It’s an evolving thing.

…THE OA: Did it take you some time to find your writing voice? Did it evolve or was there a moment when you felt like you achieved it?

DW: At Iowa, a friend of mine and writer, Leigh Allison Wilson, was sitting around with Katie one day, laughing at a story I was telling them, and Leigh said, “How come you never do that in your fiction? Your fiction is cold and hard and stone-faced and chiseled. That isn’t even who you are in your private life, you’re so different from that.” And Katie said, “You know what, that’s true.” That’s a comment from a friend that ended up being very influential. I don’t even think she knows how influential that ended up being.

[Illustration by Kate Oberg]

Here’s some random notes on a rainy but warm day in New York.

Chad Jennings on Phil Hughes.

Bill James on fan behavior.

Charlie Pierce on Manny Ramirez.

Richard Sandomir and Ken Belson on the Mets.

[Photo Credit: Meyrem]

All this warm weather is good for us though I’m sure it isn’t great for Mom’s Nature, messing up the normal cycle of things.

Anyhow, the buds are on the trees in New York and that is always a welcome sight.

Knicks in Philly tonight. Gritty first half. Here’s hoping Los Knicks have enough to get the win.

The SI baseball preview is out and it features Jane Leavy’s essay “Sully and the Mick” from Rob Fleder’s “Damn Yankees” collection:

The inquiry arrived via e-mail with a note of urgency from my publisher: You might want to take a look at this. Mrs. Frank Sullivan had just received a condolence call from a dear friend who had learned of her husband’s death on page 162 of The Last Boy, my 2010 biography of Mickey Mantle. Mrs. Frank Sullivan was upset. She was also surprised because her husband, an All-Star pitcher for the 1950s Red Sox, was sitting beside her on their porch in Kauai watching the sunset and sipping his favorite wine from a box. Mrs. Frank Sullivan wished to know how soon I might declare him undead.

I was appropriately mortified. Mickey murdered the ball, sure, but I had killed Frank. My apology was prompt and profuse. I had tried to find Frank Sullivan, honest. Two former teammates (at least!) and one heretofore unimpeachable online source had reported that Frank was putting on his pants one leg at a time in a better world.

I had grieved for him and, truth to tell, for myself because Frank wasn’t just another dead ballplayer. He was responsible for the best line ever uttered about Mantle, maybe the best line ever uttered by a major league pitcher. Asked how he pitched to the Mick, Frank answered on behalf of the 548 menaced hurlers who faced Mantle over 18 years: “With tears in my eyes.”

I had to use it. So I put Frank in the past tense.

The “late” Frank Sullivan e-mailed the next day:

Dear Jane, it would distress me big time if you were to lose a minute’s sleep over this. I know I haven’t. And besides, you’re probably not off by much.

Check it out.

Saul Leiter. 1958

Just writin’ my name and graffiti on the wall.

[Photo Credit: Graffiti and Girls]

…the Jets get dumber. Saddle up, bitches.

The Essential Mexico according to good people at Saveur. Dig in.

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]

Andy Pettitte is back. Peter Kerastis has the report in the Times.  Here’s more from Mark Feinsand in the News.

Meanwhile, Chad Jennings has the recap of last night’s game (Swisher hurt; Pineda improves).

The old perfessor, Mr. Goldman, has a new address. Bookmark it, baby.

Course you can still find him at Pinstriped Bible as well.