The great Mariano.
Notice the socks?
And the Mike Mussina-like dip?
And the fierceness?
A close call doesn’t go his way.
Really, Blue?
Don’t you know who I am?
The Great Rivera–In Living Color?
Then Alex Rodriguez makes a nice play.
And the game is over.
Another save for Mo. And once again, we are ever grateful.
Tonight’s game was very close, but lacked tension. Ah, April: The crispness of October without the dread. The Yankees jumped out to a four run lead and the Twins chipped away until the margin was a single run. The Yankees tried to pad the lead, but the Twins defied them with defense. Victory settled in the hands of the bullpen and Chamberlain, Soriano and Rivera escorted it home. Yankees 4, Twins 3.
Ivan Nova, in only eight Major League starts, has somehow developed a “typical” pattern. He excels early, spinning zeroes with ease and then he folds quickly and neatly in the middle allowing runs in bunches. We don’t know what might happen in the final third, because he’s never made it there. He’s a play in two acts so far, but the Bronx ain’t Broadway, and three runs in six innings will work just fine most of the time here. He controlled a mix of pitches and speeds and got grounders. He did a little dance when he whiffed Thome to end his night. He earned the win and maybe the dance, too.
He handed the one-run lead to the bullpen in the seventh and they were very good again. If you name something, does it give it power? Well Michael Kay sets forth to test the hypothesis with JoSoMo. It types as dumb as it sounds. I hope I’m never called upon to say it out loud. But the limited results are good for Kay and his monstrous creation. They’re blowing people away. I even watched Mariano’s inning live, with only a faintly quickened pulse. Ah April indeed.
Homers by Arod and Posada stood tall and I thought the Yankees were primed for a breakthrough a number of times. Most notably, Brett Gardner made a strong bid to extend the lead with a two-out slash down the left field line. Gardner might be living down that line too often however, because Delmon Young had set up base camp there and made a sliding catch to rob him, save two runs, and keep it close.
The early season is all about falling into familiar patterns and finding your way back to the game. And what better way to do that than to beat the Twins?
Artwork By 1coyote designs
The sky is clear now but it’s supposed to get wet later. Hopefully, they get the game in without incident. Ivan Nova goes for our Bombers.
You know the drill:
Let’s Go Yan-kees!
[Photo Credit: Sion Fullana]
Flipped:
David L. Ulin revisits James M. Cain’s novel, “Mildred Pierce” in the L.A. Times:
Of all the classic noir writers, perhaps none has been as tarnished by the brush of genre as James M. Cain. That’s because Cain — born in Baltimore in 1892, a protégé of H.L. Mencken and, briefly, managing editor of The New Yorker — was not a great hard-boiled novelist but a great novelist period, whose vision of 1930s Southern California is as acute and resonant as anything ever written about that time and place.
…“I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim,” Cain once noted of his own writing, “or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.”
George Kimball and Thomas Hauser headline this week’s Varsity Letters speaking series, brought to you by the good people at Gelf Magazine. If you are around on Thursday night, do yourself a favor and fall through, you are sure to be entertained and learn a thing or three. I’ll be there for sure.
Here is a recent interview with Kimball discussing “At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing”:
Arts Fuse: A. J. Liebling is generally considered by critics to be the best American writer on boxing. If he is at the top, who are the runners-up and why?
Kimball: Not Mailer and not Hemingway, although they’d probably think they were. Just off the top of my head, the worthy contenders would include Budd Schulberg and W.C. Heinz for certain, but also Mark Kram and Pat Putnam from SI, Ralph Wiley, all of whom really understood the sport in addition to being wonderful writers.
AF: There are some really rare finds here — for example, pieces by Richard Wright and Sherwood Anderson on Joe Louis. How difficult was the research for the anthology? What are some of your favorite pieces?
Kimball: I wouldn’t describe the research as “difficult,” because it was such a pleasure. We probably read a half-dozen really good pieces for every one that wound up in the anthology. We read some pretty awful ones, too, mostly when we’d been touted by someone who should have known better.
…I’ve been asked that question by several people over the past couple of months and usually manage to duck it by saying “Which of your children is your favorite?” But I will say that John Lardner’s masterpiece on Stanley Ketchel, “Down Great Purple Valleys,” is sort of the cornerstone of the whole book. With all the other changes we went through in compiling At the Fights, that was the one, indispensable story if only because it so exemplified what we wanted to do with the rest of the book –- and that was setting the bar pretty high.
Man, Ralph Wiley is overlooked these days, isn’t he? And since George mentioned “Down Great Purple Valleys,” here again, is one of the greatest openings in the history of American journalism:
“Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.”
Here’s a 1969 piece by Jimmy Breslin from New York Magazine:
“Norman, let’s run.”
“I know, they spoke to me. But I have to clean up some business first. I think we could make a great team. Now here’s what I’m doing. I’m going to Provincetown for a week to think this over. Maybe we can get together for a night before I go. Then when I come back, we can make up our minds.”
“All right,” I said.
So two nights later there were about 40 people in the top floor of Mailer’s house in Brooklyn Heights. They were talking about the terrible condition the city was in, and of the incredible group of candidates the Democrats had in the mayoralty primary, which is on June 17. Norman Mailer began to talk about the right and the left mixing their flames together and forming a great coalition of orange flame with a hot center and I looked out the window at the harbor, down at a brightly lit freighter sitting in the black water under the window, and I was uneasy about Mailer’s political theories. I was uncertain of the vibrations. Then I turned around and said something about there being nine candidates for mayor and if New York tradition was upheld, the one who got in front in the race would be indicted. When I saw Norman Mailer laughing at what I said. I decided that he was very smart at politics. When I saw the others laugh, I felt my nerves purring.
Then he began to talk casually, as if everybody knew it and had been discussing it for weeks, about there being no such thing as integration and that the only way things could improve would be with a black community governing itself. “We need a black mayor,” Mailer said. “I’ll be the white mayor and they have to elect a black mayor for themselves. Just give them the money and the power and let them run themselves. We have no right to talk to these people anymore. We lost that a long time ago. They don’t want us. The only thing white people have done for the blacks is betray them.”
There hasn’t been a person with the ability to say this in my time in this city. I began to think a little harder about the prospects of Mailer and me running the city.
A different time, eh?
Our good pal Josh Wilker is interviewed in the New Yorker’s book blog:
At one point in the book, you write, “I have spent most of my adult life imagining and reimagining the past and now I never know beyond a shadow of a doubt what actually happened.” Could you elaborate a little on that? Did that make it easier or harder to write “Cardboard Gods”?
I’ve written incessantly about the past for over two decades in any form I could manage—in notebook rantings, in poems, in letters, in essays, most recently in blog posts, and most extensively in fictional form. I am trying to get at certain emotional truths, I guess, and after a while any certainty I once had about how things actually occurred eroded. One thing I do remember for sure is that when I was a kid, I made a vow to myself to remember everything. But in trying to keep this vow I actually broke it, going over the same ground again and again until the ground had changed. It didn’t make it any easier or harder to write “Cardboard Gods.” The challenge of the writing of the book was the same challenge I’d always faced, which was to try to get the thing to feel true. I wanted the details to be honest, as honest as I could manage, and I certainly didn’t fabricate anything that I know didn’t happen, if that makes any sense, but I know my memory is faulty and that it long ago became subservient to my ruinous and sustaining need to narrate.
Hot dog.
If you haven’t read Josh’s book, Cardboard Gods, well, it is now available in paperback. Get goin’, now, git.
Phil Hughes had no life on his pitches yesterday–Jon DeRosa called it “weak sauce” in an e-mail to me last night–and he couldn’t locate either.
Here’s Bill Madden in the News:
“He was up in the zone … he left some sliders up,” [Joe] Girardi said after his team’s 10-7 loss. “I was more concerned about his locating the baseball and the fact that he didn’t do it today. Sometimes guys who throw harder take a while longer (to get their velocity up). The big concern is not locating.”
…My velocity is not where I would like it to be at this stage,” [Hughes] conceded, “and so when I’m not hitting my spots that’s what happens.”
“I think he’s trying to generate velocity and losing location because of it,” reasoned Rothschild, who later added: “There’s going to be concern until you see it.”
In the Post, Joel Sherman reports the troubling news:
…That this has been going on for weeks. That pitching coach Larry Rothschild and Hughes already have tried a bunch of remedies throughout spring training and — as of this moment — have unearthed neither a reason why the righty has lost fastball life nor a way to solve the deficiency.
Hughes thinks his arm swing is too long. Rothschild says that maybe more long tossing will provide a solution. Joe Girardi talks still about Hughes needing to build arm strength when we just finished that little thing called spring training which — above all else — is stretched to six weeks so pitchers can build arm strength.
“It’s a little disconcerting, right now,” Hughes said.
Of course, we Yankee fans are prone to panic and hysteria. Anyone ready to get nervous over this yet? Or would that be too un-Dude?
Sure, it was only the third game of the season and there was no lack of excitement–plenty of home runs, some nice fielding–but it was also a tedious affair, and for long stretches, boring. Phil Hughes struggled and threw 60 pitches before recording the seventh out of the game; Miguel Cabrera hit two long home runs against him. Max Scherzer wasn’t much better though a couple of the dingers he allowed were aided and abetted by the wind and a short right field porch.
Jorge Posada hit two home runs against Scherzer. Here’s the second…
Bartolo Colon ate innings and gave up runs. The Yanks kept scoring too, Russell Martin, Nick Swisher and Mark Teixeira (who hit another home run), all had good days at the plate. But they couldn’t manage more than a touchdown and came up empty in the 8th and 9th. Yup, there was plenty of bang at the Stadium on Sunday afternoon but the game itself was soporific.
Final score: Tigers 10, Yanks 7.
Billy Crystal stopped by the YES booth for half-an-inning and after the third out, just before they cut to commercial, he said to Kay, “You still married?”
“Seven weeks and one day,” said Kay. Ken Singleton laughed.
“Seven weeks and one day,” Crystal repeated, imitating Phil Rizzuto. “Holy cow…I’m on the Bridge.”
The sun is out and it feels good. It’s not exactly hot yet but it doesn’t feel like winter either. Yanks go for the sweep today but talented Max Scherzer starts for the Tigers. Phil Hughes goes for the Yanks.
Let’s hope it is a good one and let’s go Yank-ees!
[Photo Credit: Nick Laham/Getty Images]
Baseball is back, let us give thanks. The sermon today is from Annie Savoy:
“I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn’t work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there’s no guilt in baseball and it’s never boring … which make it like sex. There’s never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn’t have the best year of his career. Making love is like hitting a baseball: you gotta relax and concentrate. Besides I’d never sleep with a player hitting under .250 … not unless he had a lot of RBI’s and was a great glove up the middle.
You see, there’s a certain amount of life wisdom I give these boys. I can expand their minds. Sometimes when I’ve got a ballplayer alone, I’ll just read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to him, and the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen. ‘Course a guy’ll listen to anything if he thinks it’s foreplay. I make them feel confident and they make me feel safe and pretty. ‘Course, what I give them lasts a lifetime, what they give me lasts 142 games. Sometimes it seems like a bad trade. But bad trades are part of baseball – now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God’s sake? It’s a long season and you gotta trust. I’ve tried ’em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul is the Church of Baseball.”
A-a-a-men!
Anytime a pitcher has a season like A.J. Burnett did in 2010, you’re going to fret about him. Burnett’s performance tonight was somewhat reassuring, if short; but the guy’s recovering from a bad cold, and by the time he came out after five innings and 86 pitches (58 of them strikes), having allowed three earned runs and struck out six, the Yankees had already put nine runs on the board. It was something he could build on. The Tigers chipped away later on, but even Luis Ayala could not quite give this one away, and the Yanks went on to a 10-6 win.
The Opening Day game was crisper, but today’s bludgeoning got the job done too. Brad Penny was fooling no one today. This was clear from the first inning, when Derek Jeter singled and advanced on a wild pitch, Mark Teixeira walked, A-Rod doubled, Cano singled, and Nick Swisher hit a sac fly to make it 3-0. In fact, Swisher would go on to be the only Yankee starter without at least one hit. The next big blow came the very next inning, on Mark Teixeira’s three-run homer — his second in two games. Guess those extra swings he took this spring worked out okay for him. It’s always fun to project trends from the first few games ahead into ludicrously impossible season numbers, so hey: Teixeira is on pace for 162 home runs and 486 RBIs!
Penny left after 4.1 innings and what is, for now, a 16.62 ERA. He got pulled after a Cano double and a Posada walk, with one out, but Russel Martin’s subsequent three-run homer off of Brad Martin gave Penny his 6th, 7th and 8th earned runs. Martin is wasting no time ingratiating himself, is he? Given the generally low expectations people had for him and how quickly he’s started contributing, I imagine he’s storing up quite a bit of fan goodwill for the season.
As for Burnett, he started strong with a one-two-three first, and got through the second scoreless despite a double (to Miguel Cabrera, so fair enough) and a wild pitch. In the third he allowed an Austin Jackson solo home run, then cruised through the fourth, but hit a wall and frayed in the fifth: three straight singles and a walk before he managed to get out of it, with two runs in. He said after the game that he’s been feeling lousy and ran out of stamina, so good for him for fighting through to the end of the inning. A respectable start, and I assume Girardi wanted to get him out of there on a positive note, in line for the win. I won’t argue with that.
Thursday we got the A-bullpen: Joba, Soriano, Mo. Today was more the JV squad. Dave Robertson got through an inning, and then Luis Ayala (who I predict is not long for this team) took care of two innings, but gave up two runs in the 8th (on a Victor Martinez home run) to make it 10-5 Yanks. Boone Logan [obligatory beard-link] was next up, and he got himself into a little bit of a scrape: a walk, a single, a groundout, and a run-scoring throwing error by Eduardo Nunez, which… Eduardo: do you think you’re on the team for your bat? C’mon kid. Anyway, the tying run still wasn’t on base, but at this point Girardi decided not to mess around even a little, and summoned Mariano Rivera to face Miguel Cabrera for the last out. One ground ball out later, and the Yanks are 2-0 in 2011.
I have many serious doubts about the Yankee rotation, but that offense is nothing to sneeze at, and I expect it’ll win them a healthy number of games no matter which sacrificial lamb of a fifth starter gets tied to the mound.
A.J. Burnett and Brad Penny are former teammates. Today, they start against each other in the Bronx. Which dude has the best stuff? Watch and learn and remember, Todd Drew never gave up on ol’ A.J., so neither should we.
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
Big sports day, Yanks later this afternoon, Final Four this evening. The sun has returned to the Bronx. Enjoy it and we’ll be back later for the game.
Oh, and in case you haven’t been following, The Yankee Analysts have been absolutely killin’ it lately. Check ’em out!
Here’s some Saturday Soul for your face:
This week, Gary Smith profiled the Phillies starting rotation in SI’s Baseball Preview issue.
And in the latest edition of the New York Times Magazine, Pat Jordan takes on Philadelphia’s four aces:
Mike Schmidt was standing behind a batting cage, still as trim as during his playing days. A handsome, middle-aged man with swept-back, silvery hair and a thick mustache. I asked him what he thought of the four Phillies pitchers.
“Well,” he said, “now when the Phillies come to town, the other team knows they’re being challenged by four No. 1 pitchers. They have to amp up their mental game. I used to see my at-bats the night before a game when I laid my head down on the pillow. Gibson, Seaver, Ryan. I had to have a plan. When I went to Houston, they had three good pitchers. The fourth was Nolan Ryan. I could go to sleep with the other three, but Ryan kept me awake. Ryan! Ryan! Ryan! My plan was, don’t miss his fastball if he threw it over the plate. If he got two strikes on me, I’d have to face his curveball.” He turned and looked at me with his small blue eyes, which had fear in them. “Ryan was scary!” he said. He shook his head, as if seeing Ryan on the mound. Ryan began his motion and fired the ball at his head. Schmidt had a split second to make a decision. Was it a 100 m.p.h. fastball that could kill him if it hit him in the head, or was it that wicked curveball? If he dove away from the plate and the pitch was a curveball that broke over the plate, he’d look like a fool and a coward. But if it wasn’t a curveball, if it was that 100 m.p.h. fastball, and he didn’t dive away from the plate . . . well, he didn’t even want to think about that.
“Ryan, Gibson, Seaver, they made you defensive,” he said. “Does that make sense? You were afraid of the ball. There’s no fear of the ball today with cutters, splitters and changeups.”
“What about the Phillies’ four pitchers?” I said.
“They’re not scary,” he said. “Even if they all win 20 games, the Phillies don’t have a pitcher who strikes fear in a hitter.”
Two very different takes on “the best rotation in baseball” from two very different writers.
And while we are talking pitching, here’s Steve Rushin’s piece on the Braves’ five aces from the 1993 SI Baseball Preview.
Opening Day, Part II, an open thread…
[Picture by Bags]
