Over at Deadspin, here’s my guy Pat Jordan on Bo Belinsky:

No character in sports was more authentic than Robert “Bo” Belinsky, a left-handed pitcher in the ’60s. Bo personified “cool,” real cool that was intrinsic to his nature, not his public persona. As a rookie, Bo pitched the first no-hitter in California major league history for the Angels. It made him a star and an instant celebrity whose name became synonymous with a lifestyle that was cool and slick and dazzling. But that no-hitter was the high point of Bo’s career, which, after eight years, saw him leave baseball with a 28-51 record.

After his no-hitter in 1962, Bo said, “If music be the food of love, by all means let the band play on.” Bo instantly became the first original playboy-athlete. He f**ked Ann-Margret, Mamie Van Doren, Tina Louise, Connie Stevens, and he partied with Eddie Fisher, Dean Martin, and Henry Fonda. But in those days f**king Hollywood starlets and showing up at his team’s hotel at 5 a.m., “reeking of bitch and booze,” was not exactly what team owners, managers, sportswriters, and fans expected from their idols. Bo was suspended, arrested, banished to the minor leagues, traded, and traded again and again, which confused him. Bo never understood an essential fact of celebrity in those days. He never had that knack of later, more beloved playboy athletes like Joe Namath of cultivating his persona precisely up to, but not beyond, that point at which his public would become annoyed, bored, and eventually furious with him. By the time Bo left baseball his name had become synonymous with dissipated talent.

Aw, you know it….

One week til opening day, kids.

First of all: My dream last night involved Luis Castillo as a malevolent Warwick-Davis style Leprechaun. Should I be concerned? I think probably so.

The big news today is actually not quite news yet, but it does seem likely: reading the tea leaves, it looks as though the Yankees are going to go with Ivan Nova and Freddy Garcia as their fourth and fifth starters, with Colon possibly in the bullpen as a long reliever. While I’m annoyed because all those Colon jokes I had ready are less relevant now, if this is the way the team goes, I think it makes sense. Colon had a much better spring, but we’ve all seen over the years that spring training stats mean very little – and if you look back over the much-larger sample size of a few years, Garcia is clearly the safer, more reliable bet. From Girardi’s comments in that NY Post article, it sounds like he was the strong favorite before spring training even started. Keep in mind that nothing is official yet. But it’s almost like Colon didn’t have a clear… oh, never mind.

Meanwhile, via Hardball Talk, Buck Showalter got a bit catty towards the Yankees and Red Sox in an interview with Men’s Journal, which I presume is one of those “let’s fire up the team” efforts (although: Men’s Journal? Is that really the place?). I have to say, however, that his criticism of Derek Jeter, while uncalled for, was not inaccurate:

“The first time we went to Yankee Stadium, I screamed at Derek Jeter from the dugout. Our guys are thinking, ‘Wow, he’s screaming at Jeter.’ Well, he’s always jumping back from balls just off the plate. I know how many calls that team gets – and yes, he [ticks] me off.”

Well, yeah… Jeter TOTALLY does do that. It doesn’t bother me at all – he’s trying to get the call and get on base and more power to him. But, yes, I think we’ve all seen a ball cross over the inner corner of the plate as Jeter leaps back as though it were about to nail him in the hip. I can see where if you were an opposing pitcher or manager, this particular move from Captain Intangibles might drive you a little nuts. Personally I appreciate the effort.

Finally, Don Zimmer is extremely old. You knew that. I however did not know that now, in his 63rd consecutive year in professional baseball, Zim is likely just a year away from tying Connie Mack for what is – so far as anyone can figure –  the longer straight baseball career ever. Like so many other managers and coaches, Zimmer left the Yankees on bad terms thanks to clashes with George Steinbrenner, but I’ll always have fond memories of him perched next to Torre during all those World Series wins. What’s particularly nifty is that fans from seven different decades have their own fond memories of him.

Remember the helmet? That’s the first thing I always think of when I think of Don Zimmer.

Will Freddy Garcia make the Yankees’ rotation? Here’s our man Cliff over at PB:

For a while I was worried that Nova might get optioned to Triple-A because he’s the one candidate who can be safely stashed in the minors (Mitre is out of options and both Colon and Garcia can void their deals if they don’t make the 25-man roster), but after Mitre’s poor and, perhaps more importantly and tellingly, brief outing on Tuesday, the only remaining role for him seemed to be the long-relief job. However, if that job is Colon’s, Mitre is out and Nova is, rightfully, in.

Again, I might be reading a bit to much into this, but I’m willing to believe we have our answer on the Yankees rotation battle: Nova and Garia in the rotation, Colon in the bullpen, and Mitre off the roster. We’ll know for sure within a week’s time.

Death of a legend.

Liz Taylor is dead at 79.

She was one of the greatest, most famous stars to ever grace the silver screen.

Bow down.

The original “Mildred Pierce” is one of my wife’s favorite movies. If she’s ever feeling blue, that’s a go-to flick of cherce. I have to admit, it’s so stylish-looking and so juicy and melodramatic that it is hard to resist. Now, there is a new HBO mini-series based on James M. Cain’s novel. In the New Yorker, Hilton Als, breaks it all down:

By the late thirties, when Cain began to think about writing “Mildred Pierce,” his fourth novel—his third, the underappreciated “Serenade” (1937), was another first-person account of male alienation—life was dictating a new reality. (A five-part miniseries adapted from the book, and directed by Todd Haynes, will première on HBO on March 27th.) Cain had recently befriended a woman named Kate Cummings, who did perhaps more than anyone else to urge him toward a more sympathetic and complex view of women’s need for both conventionality and freedom. Cummings, the single mother of the actress Constance Cummings, had sacrificed her own prospects as a singer to get her daughter the training and the exposure she needed to become a star. What Cain saw of Kate’s life—and the nearly selfless love with which she made Constance’s career happen—may have jump-started his imagination. After creating two antiheroines, probably inspired by Hemingway’s view of woman-as-death, Cain paid homage to his friend’s indomitable spirit. He set out to explore what one of his characters would call “the great American institution that never gets mentioned on the Fourth of July, a grass widow with two small children to support.” As he was writing, employing the third person and creating a female protagonist for the first time, Cummings stood over him, prodding him to revise whenever she felt that his perceptions of a working mother did not ring true. When “Mildred Pierce” was finally published, in 1941, Cain’s alternately stilted and full-bodied portrait of a striving woman was well received, but few reviewers noted the fact that the novel was also a study of a woman who, time after time, subjugates her own needs to those of her child.

I’m curious to see the HBO show but it’s not likely to replace the original in my heart.

Phil Hughes pitched well last night. Here’s Chad Jennings with more:

Hughes threw a slider when he was younger, including his early years in the Yankees minor league system, but he eventually dumped the pitch and picked up the cutter. When the cutter disappointed him again last week, Hughes had Larry Rothschild work with him on finding a new cutter/slider grip. He tried a few slight modifications, found one he liked and used the pitched 25 to 30 times tonight. He threw it more than either his curveball or changeup.

“It’s bigger so I assume it has to lose a little velocity to get that,” he said. “I don’t think it’s something that’s slow enough that they recognize it… I have to give it my fastball arm speed and not get lazy with it. If I do that, I don’t think it will fall in the same mode I was when I was 16 years old throwing my slider, because I didn’t really know what I was doing (back then).”

Man, it sure would be nice to see Hughes improve on his 2010 performance. I don’t think it’s asking too much, though he had a decent year, and won a bunch of games.

Think he’ll do it?

Over at ESPN, David Schoenfield looks at what we can expect from from Derek Jeter this year:

Yes, the eyes of the baseball world are always on Derek Jeter. But as he approaches his 3,000th career hit, he’ll face more scrutiny than ever. Jeter has been tweaking his swing during spring training, working with hitting coach Kevin Long to fix the stride on his front foot, which too often was moving toward the plate instead of the pitcher. Jeter says all this has been overanalyzed, and that making adjustments is something he’s done throughout his career.

You may not be a Yankees fan, but I’m guessing all this means you’re paying attention to Derek Jeter in 2011.

History does not suggest that Jeter will have a great year. But, stranger things have happened…right?

“Woman Crouching,” By Egon Schiele (1918)

This past Sunday marked the 30th anniversary of the New York premiere of one of the great films of the 1980s, the far too seldom seen Cutter’s Way a/k/a Cutter and Bone. Over at Edward Copeland’s film blog, J.D. offers a terrific account of how the film was made, essentially dumped by the studio and then luckily “saved from obscurity.” For fans of the film or just those interested in the machinations of the Hollywood machine, it’s a must-read.

Cutter’s Way is a movie I find myself liking more and more each time I see it. Bridges does great work here and he and John Heard (as Cutter) play exceptionally well off of each other. As J.D. puts it, “Heard plays Cutter like a character straight out of a Tom Waits song.” His need for action, for something other than liquor and self-pity, creates a terrific dynamic with Bridges’ do-nothing yacht rat gigolo. Between the two male leads is a remarkable performance by Lisa Eichhorn as Cutter’s depressed alcoholic wife, who plays one of the saddest love scenes ever put on film.

Cutter’s Way takes its time introducing the cast of characters and the world they inhabit. The film gradually lets you get to know them and their daily routine. Jeff Bridges proves once again that he is one of the best American actors working in film today. He portrays Bone as a man afraid of commitment, content to do little but fall back on his pretty boy looks to bed any woman who crosses his path. As one character tells him, “Sooner or later you’re going to have to make a decision about something.” This could be the underlying thesis of the whole film: making decisions and taking a stand about something.

The film (directed by Czech emigre Ivan Passer) has a lot in common with the great paranoia thrillers of the 1970s (e.g. Chinatown, The Parallax View, The Conversation) and it feels now as if it served as the parting shot for that cycle, as the 70s drifted into the 80s.

sss

Daphne Merkin had a long piece on Iron Mike Tyson in the Times Magazine over the weekend.

In preparation for my visit to Las Vegas at the beginning of March, I communicated through e-mail with Kiki, who manages Tyson’s affairs, and the plan was kept loose: we were to meet at his house for several days of conversation, with no definite times fixed. I called the film director James Toback, who made an acclaimed 2009 documentary about Tyson and has known him since they met on the set of Toback’s “Pick-Up Artist” in 1986, to find out what I could about a man who came across in the film as both very present and elusive, weepy one minute and matter-of-fact the next, capable of self-insight but also hidden to himself. Toback told me that Tyson was unpredictable, given to sudden psychological disconnections that Toback referred to as “click-outs.” It was entirely possible, Toback said, that Tyson would back out of the interviews altogether. “Everything is contingent on the state of mind he’s in at the moment,” the director observed. According to Toback, he and Tyson shared experiences of temporary insanity — of “losing the I” — and “people who don’t understand madness can’t understand him. He’s quicker, smarter, sharper than almost anyone he’s talking to.”

…As befits someone who has been alternately idolized and demonized by the press, Tyson is leery of the public’s continuing interest in his saga. He says he believes that celebrity made him “delusional” and that it has taken nothing less than a “paradigm shift” for him to come down to earth: “We have to stick to what we are. I always stay in my slot. I know my place.” He asked me outright, “Why do you want to know about me as a person?” and at one point, anxious that he might be boring me, he got up to show me photographs from the glory days in which he is posing with other boxers (Ali, Rocky Graziano, Jake LaMotta) and with big names like Frank Sinatra, Tom Cruise and Barbra Streisand. Underneath his deliberate calmness and considerable charm, there is something bewildered and lost-seeming about Tyson. Indeed, he refers to himself as a “little boy” who “never had a chance to develop,” and it is in part this conception of himself as missing out on a crucial period of maturation that fuels his present focus. “This is what the deal is,” he said. “People just wait for you to grow up and do the right thing. They’re just waiting for you to participate in the improvement of your life as a human being. When are you going to do it?”

Yeah, they can be intimidating, especially for a klutz like me, but it’s hard to imagine life in the kitchen without a mandoline.

Don’t be stupid, be a schmarty…

Photo from The Star-Ledger

After all the playing time he got this spring, I figured Jesus Montero was likely to start the season with the Yankees while Francisco Cervelli (you remember him) was on the DL. But the Daily News talked to Brian Cashman and, well, it doesn’t sound like that’s the case:

“He hasn’t played well recently,” Cashman said after watching Montero catch in Tuesday’s 6-2 loss to the Orioles. “He’s better than what he’s shown recently, catching-wise.

“He’s been struggling with the bat, and I don’t know if it’s cause-and-effect. I just know that last year he didn’t start catching well (in Triple-A) until he started hitting. And from June on, both went through the roof.”

I’d say this continues Cashman’s offseason pattern of being just a liiiiiittle bit too honest with the media; but if the Yankees were planning on having Montero start with the major league team, this wouldn’t seem to be a particularly helpful thing to say. Austin Romine may be better defensively but he has even less experience than Montero, and Gustavo Molina was an afterthought to even Cervelli, so to me this says that Montero must REALLY not be able to catch, at least not yet. Which is what most non-Yankee scouts and prospect experts have been saying all along, after all.

The team now has a few more eggs in the Russell Martin basket than I would personally be comfortable with. And while I have to assume they have reasons for not having Posada catch even a single game this spring, I don’t feel like I really know what those reasons are. Not that Jorge is any defensive whiz himself, of course, but after all he was their catcher as recently as October. (Concussion concerns would be an absolutely valid justification, but the Yankees haven’t confirmed that as their reasoning).

No easy answers here, apparently. What would you do? What Would Jesus (Montero) Do?

A trip to the SI Vault brings us this gem on David Cone by my man John Ed Bradley. From the 1993 Baseball Preview issue:

In Kansas City they make a top-notch steak and some fine barbecue. And first-rate music if you go for jazz. And maybe a decent sportswriter or two—they make that. Or used to. Wasn’t it Hemingway who had a start there, long, long time ago? But hot young baseball talent…they just don’t make much. And, no sir, they never have.

When David Cone was a kid living in a blue-collar neighborhood on the northeast side of Kansas City, he never imagined he would grow up to be the best-paid pitcher the game has ever known. He told people he wanted to be a scribe, like Oscar Madison, the irascible slob in The Odd Couple. Have a beat and lots of dizzy dames. Have an apartment and keep it ear-deep in filth. Have a drink and a smoke before getting out of bed in the morning. Have whatever, since Oscar Madison didn’t seem to give a hoot.

Have a ball, in other words.

Love the nutzo picture of Coney on the cover. Man, it’ll be refreshing to have him back in the YES booth this season, huh?

Dictionary.com lists 13 definitions for the adjective form of the word oblique. As it pertains to anatomy, oblique muscles are those that run at an angle, as opposed to transversely (horizontally) or longitudinally (vertically). In the abdominal wall, the obliques are the muscles that form the side cut of a six-pack. They’re the love handles.

Synonyms, as listed within the aforementioned link, include “indirect,” “covert,” or “veiled.” But oblique strains have directly, overtly and obviously affected the Yankees this Spring, with Greg Golson, Sergio Mitre, Joba Chamberlain and now Curtis Granderson all falling victim to the injury. Granderson’s injury may put his Opening Day availability in question. This is no surprise, given that recovery time ranges from 10 days up to 3 weeks, depending on the severity of the strain.

Chamberlain missed 10 days. He returned to action Tuesday and was throwing 95 miles per hour. Golson also returned Tuesday, after missing 15 days of action. Mitre, meanwhile, was making his first appearance since March 14. MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch, in a mid-afternoon post Tuesday, reported that Mitre thought he had a roster spot secured when he arrived in Tampa 6 weeks ago. Tuesday’s start, Mitre’s first since he suffered his oblique strain, may be giving the Yankees pause about adding him to the 25-man roster. The following quotes are priceless.

First, Mitre is confidently unsure:

“I don’t look at it as a setback. I’m hoping they don’t base everything off of one spring start. If that’s the case, then we’ll see what happens, but I don’t think that’s the case — at least toward me. They know I can get people out and they know they can rely on me, I hope.”

Let’s examine this: two home runs yielded, a sinker that didn’t sink, Nova and Colon basically acting in full carpe diem mode. But this wasn’t a setback. Fans have little to no confidence that he can get anyone out. The numbers over the past two seasons prove as much. Plus, he wears the accursed No. 45. From Steve Balboni to Cecil Fielder to Chili Davis to (gulp) Carl Pavano, that number never helped anyone in a Yankee uniform over the last 25 years. And yet I digress …

More from Mitre:

“I don’t think there should be any reason why not. If I still have to worry about that, then I’m probably not doing something right.”

(Insert laugh track here)

(more…)

As spring training winds down the Yanks face uncertainty in the outfield.

[Picture by Ted Barron]

Ella or Sarah?

Over at The American Scholar, Douglas Goetsch has a piece on Ring Lardner and the Black Sox Scandal:

At the height of his fame in the 1920s, humorist and short-story writer Ring Lardner was listed among the 10 best-known people in America. He wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column, short stories for mass-circulation magazines, skits and songs for the Ziegfeld Follies, and the text of a daily comic strip. To the bulk of his readers, Lardner was the regular guy who had made it, the man who golfed with the president but was still friends with the train conductors. The only writer in the country who could get away with the salutation, “Well, friends,” he addressed the average American, the man he repeatedly called “Joe,” and he did this in a natural, unassuming style—a veritable idiom nicknamed “Lardner Ringlish”—removed from the formal conventions of correct prose.

…But earlier in his career, Lardner was best known as a baseball writer, and much of his enduring reputation is tied to the national pastime. He covered baseball in what’s been called the Silver Age of the game—from 1900 to 1919—an era that ended with the infamous Black Sox scandal, ushering in, as irony would have it, the Golden Age of baseball. Lardner’s infatuation and eventual disillusionment with baseball offer a number of lessons about how we should think about the scandals in today’s game, and his writing illuminates our own love-hate relationship with baseball.

Serious Eats talks shakes and Adam Reid.

Thoroughly Modern Milkshakes, y’all.