The Yanks are back home to face tough young Sonny Gray on a steamy night in the Bronx. Will Nathan Eovaldi have another good outing? I doubted he could put together back-to-back solid starts and I was wrong. The book is still out on Eovaldi but let’s hope the Yanks can end the first half of the season–six games, three against the A’s, three in Boston against the Red Sox–4-2, you heard?

Brett Gardner CF
Chase Headley 3B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Brian McCann C
Garrett Jones RF
Chris Young LF
Didi Gregorius SS
Stephen Drew 2B

Never mind the heat:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

What the hell? Let’s make it a week of beat boxing gems.

Picture by Richard Phillips via This Isn’t Happiness

It’s too hot to get worked up over All Star game snubs–Alex Rodriguez, Brett Gardner–but that’s just me. You guys might be irked about it. Much as I’d tune in to see Rodriguez I’d rather he get a few days off to rest. Gardy? Well, hopefully, he’ll get another chance. He’s had a really nice season so far.

Dellin Betances and Mark Teixeira will represent the Yanks.

Picture by Bags

Food 52 gives Spicy, Savory & Sweet Watermelon Rind Pickles.

Just writing my name and graffiti on the wall.

[Photo Credit: Jack Stewart]

Drypoint by Diebs. 

My latest reprint for The Daily Beast gives Nat Hentoff on Louis Armstrong:

Louis Armstrong, summoned by King Oliver, came up to Chicago in the summer of 1922, Buster Bailey reports that “Louis upset Chicago. All the musicians came to hear Louis. What made Louis upset Chicago so? His execution, for one thing, and his ideas, his drive. Well, they didn’t call it drive, they called it ‘attack’ at the time. Yes, that’s what it was, man. They got crazy for his feeling.”

His feeling. Even toward the end of his life, when many of the same tunes would be played night after night, month after month, Louis could still, as trombonist Trummy Young remembers, make a sideman cry.

His feeling. Billie Holiday, a young girl in Baltimore, listening to Louis’s recordings: “He didn’t say any words, but somehow it just moved me so. It sounded so sad and sweet, all at the same time. It sounded like he was making love to me. That’s how I wanted to sing.”

There has been no jazz musician so widely, deeply, durably influential as Louis. And no trumpet player who could do all he could do on the horn. Once, Louis told journalist Gilbert Millstein, “I’m playin’ a date in Florida, livin’ in the colored section and I’m playin’ my horn for myself one afternoon. A knock come on the door and there’s an old, gray-haired flute player from the Philadelphia Orchestra, down there for his health. Walking through that neighborhood, he heard this horn, playing Cavalleria Rusticana, which he said he never heard phrased like that before. To him it was as if an orchestra was behind it.” 

Collage by Louis Armstrong. 

Alexandra gives Whole Peach Bellini. Bottom’s up.

This here’s gone viral and that’s a good thing. It’s damn impressive plus a ton of fun. Love the look on the dad’s face as he gets schooled by his daughter.

The scare on Saturday came when Dellin Betances gave up a two-run, game-tying home run in the ninth inning. But in the bottom half of the inning, the Yanks scored the winning run when a throw got away from the first baseman for a moment and Jose Pirela skipped home like an errant bottle rocket shooting across the lawn.

Today wasn’t so tidy. The Yanks were behind all game but did mange to bring the tying run to the plate in the 7th. There was hope, and then there was none. Fifteen minutes later they were down for good. More horseshit fielding–man, this has turned out to be a weirdly bad half a season of defense for the Yanks.

8-1 was the “bad day” Final.

Picture by Bags

Happy 4th, you guys.

It’s Big Mike and the Gang this afternoon on a grey, overcast 4th in New York.

Brett Gardner CF

Chase Headley 3B

Alex Rodriguez DH

Mark Teixeira 1B

Garrett Jones RF

Ramon Flores LF

John Ryan Murphy C

Didi Gregorius SS

Stephen Drew 2B

Never mind the firecrackers:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via This Isn’t Happiness]

Update: Yanks with the nifty 3-2 win yesterday and looking for more this afternoon. Carry on with this thread and:

Let’s Go Yank-eyes!

Now, that was the way the start of the Fourth of July weekend.

Masahiro Tanaka got out-pitched by Chris Archer but the Yanks were able to chase Tampa’s ace from the game with two men out in the 7th. Trailing 3-0, Mark Teixeira had the big knock in the 8th, hitting a 3-run home home run.

Just felt like the Yanks were going to win the game, never mind the double plays they hit into to end the 8th and 9th innings. When Evan Longoria was called out at second after a replay review in the 11th, the good vibes continued. Longoria slid into second and for a fraction of a moment came off the bag. Nice catch by the Yankees to even review it. Strangely, for my glass-half-empty-ass-self, I still felt hopeful even after the Rays scored a couple of runs in the top of the 12th.

The bottom of the inning went like this: Brett Gardner walked–oh, those lead-off walks–and after Chase Headley whiffed, Alex Rodriguez hit an excuse-me single to right. It was a slow ground ball, squibbed off the end of his bat, but since the Rays were positioned for him to pull, a sure fire double play turned into a single, with Gardner taking third. Rodriguez smiled on his way to first, and could have been singing “With a little bit of luck” if he was a musical theater kind of guy.

Gardner scored when Mark Teixeira singled hard to right field. It was a relief too because Teix took the first pitch of the at bat, a fastball right down the middle, and I figured that’d be the best pitch he’d see. The one he singled on wasn’t as good, but fat enough.

So, Yanks down 5-4, first and second for Brian McCann. Oh, a double play loomed in our minds but McCann golfed a fastball over the fence in right field for a 3-run, game-ending home run instead.

Smiles, cheers, high-fives, first place. After the game, Brett Gardner called it “the biggest win of the year for us, by far.”

Yanks 7, Rays 5.

Illustration by Michael Sloan.

The Yanks are back home this weekend to face the Rays.

While management makes nice with Alex Rodriguez, our boy Masahiro looks to get on the good foot once again. Only trouble is he’s going against the formidable Chris Archer.

Brett Gardner CF
Chase Headley 3B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Brian McCann C
Garrett Jones RF
Chris Young LF
Didi Gregorius SS
Stephen Drew 2B

Never mind sweet charity:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Charles Harbutt via This Isn’t Happiness]

Welcome to the long holiday weekend.

Hope everyone’s got cooled-out plans ahead.

High fives all round.

Photo via Kateoplis.

“Cover Girl” by Helena Hauss (via This Isn’t Happiness)

Another sure shot from Scouting New York. 

You can say I’m sort of the boss so get lost.

Ah, now this looks like it’s worth your time. Nicholas Dawidoff’s New York Times Magazine profile of the great Robert Frank:

Sixty years ago, at the height of his powers, Frank left New York in a secondhand Ford and began the epic yearlong road trip that would become ‘‘The Americans,’’ a photographic survey of the inner life of the country that Peter Schjeldahl, art critic at The New Yorker, considers ‘‘one of the basic American masterpieces of any medium.’’ Frank hoped to express the emotional rhythms of the United States, to portray underlying realities and misgivings — how it felt to be wealthy, to be poor, to be in love, to be alone, to be young or old, to be black or white, to live along a country road or to walk a crowded sidewalk, to be overworked or sleeping in parks, to be a swaggering Southern couple or to be young and gay in New York, to be politicking or at prayer.

The book begins with a white woman at her window hidden behind a flag. That announcement — here are the American unseen — the Harvard photography historian Robin Kelsey likens to the splash of snare drum at the beginning of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”: ‘‘It flaps you right away.’’ The images that follow — a smoking industrial landscape in Butte, Mont.; a black nurse holding a porcelain-white baby or an unwatched black infant rolling off its blanket on the floor of a bar in South Carolina — were all different jolts of the same current. That is the miracle of great socially committed art: It addresses our sources of deepest unease, helps us to confront what we cannot organize or explain by making all of it unforgettable. ‘‘I think people like the book because it shows what people think about but don’t discuss,’’ Frank says. ‘‘It shows what’s on the edge of their mind.’’

…When Frank began his expedition upriver into the heart of American ambivalence, photography remained, as Walker Evans said, ‘‘a disdained medium.’’ Only a few American art museums collected photographs. Most of the published images portrayed figures of status. One notable exception was the work of Dorothea Lange. Frank respected her compassion but considered her Dust Bowl pictures maudlin — triumphalist takes on adversity. ‘‘I photographed people who were held back, who never could step over a certain line,’’ he says. ‘‘My mother asked me, ‘Why do you always take pictures of poor people?’ It wasn’t true, but my sympathies were with people who struggled. There was also my mistrust of people who made the rules.’’ That impulse seems particularly potent today, during our charged national moment — our time of belated reckoning with how violent, enraged, unbalanced and unjust the United States often still is. To look again at the photographs Frank made before Selma, Vietnam and Stonewall, before income inequality, iPhones and ‘‘I can’t breathe,’’ is to realize he recognized us before we recognized ourselves.

The Yanks didn’t score but 3 runs by Nathan Eovaldi pitched well, the bullpen was even better, and even though Dellin Betances walked a couple of batters in the 9th, struggling to locate his curve ball, eventually he got it to bend the way he wanted to, got a strike out to end the game and sent the Yankees home, 3-1 winners.

[Photo Credit: Jing Huang via MPD]

One last game for the Yanks in suburban L.A. Let’s hope they avoid getting swept but I’m not so sure about ol’ Nathan Eovaldi being good two starts in a row yet, you know? Either way, it’s a late afternoon game in Southern California in the beginning of July–I’m sure the light will be beautiful, so there’s always that to look forward to.

Also, Carlos is achin’ and they’ve brought a new kid up and his name is Taylor Dugas. C’mon, is that right? Taylor Dugas? What a name. It’s gonna fun to see what he’s about.

Brett Gardner CF
Chase Headley 3B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Brian McCann C
Garrett Jones RF
Chris Young LF
Didi Gregorius SS
Stephen Drew 2B

Never mind the red eye:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Cameron Gardner]