I didn’t see any of it and from the sounds of it, I didn’t miss a thing.

Sure, there was some impressive relief pitching, and Alex Rodriguez heard some cheers, but Masahiro Tanaka wasn’t great and the Yanks only got 3 hits.

Final Score: Jays 6, Yanks 1.

Picture by Bags.

Opening Day in the Bronx. The winter’s finally over.

Jacoby Ellsbury CF

Brett Gardner LF

Carlos Beltran RF

Mark Teixeira 1B

Brian McCann C

Chase Headley 3B

Alex Rodriguez DH

Stephen Drew 2B

Didi Gregorius SS

RHP Masahiro Tanaka

Never mind the chill in the air, folks:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Arthur Tress via MPD]

Play ball.

Picture by Bags. 

Hot dogs and peanuts and popcorn, that’s baseball food. But what’s more American than a burger? So, head on over to Food 52 for how to make the perfect cheeseburger. 

What to eat at Yankee Stadium according to Eater. 

[Photo Credit: Eat a Duck]

Picture by Arixxx via This Isn’t Happiness.

Opening Day Delight.

Here’s a classic portrait of Oscar Charleston by our pal John Schulian:

There were some hard miles on that bus, and harder ones on the man behind the wheel. His name was Oscar Charleston, which probably means nothing to you, as wrong as that is. He was managing the Philadelphia Stars then, trying to sustain the dignity of the Negro Leagues in the late 1940s as black ballplayers left daily for the moneyed embrace of the white teams that had disdained them for so long. Part of his job was hard-nosing the kids who remained into playing the game right, and part of it was passing down the lore of the line drives he’d bashed, the catches he’d made, and the night he’d spent rattling the cell door in a Cuban jail. His players called him Charlie, and when it was his turn to drive the team’s red, white, and blue bus, it was like having Ty Cobb at the wheel. Of course the players never said so, because sportswriters and white folks were always calling him the black Ty Cobb and Charlie hated it.

While Cobb counted the millions he’d made on Coca-Cola stock, Charlie bounced around on cramped, stinking buses until he, like their engines, burned out. The Stars would play in Chicago on Sunday afternoon, then hightail it back to Philly so they could use Shibe Park on Monday, when the big leaguers were off. So they drove through the long night, with Charlie peering at the rain and lightning, wondering which was louder, the thunder or the racket his players were making.

When he could take no more, he glanced back at Wilmer Harris and Stanley Glenn, a pitcher and a catcher, earnest young men who always stayed close to him, eager to absorb whatever lessons he dispensed. “Watch this,” he said, yanking the lever that opened the bus door. Then he leaned as far as he could toward the cacophonous darkness, one hand barely on the wheel, and glowered the way only he could glower.

“Hey, you up there!” he shouted. “Quit making so damn much noise!”

The bus turned as quiet as a tomb. “I bet there wasn’t one player hardly breathing,” Glenn says. The Stars were a strait-laced bunch—“the Saints,” some called them with a sneer—and they weren’t inclined to test whatever higher power might be in charge. But Charlie was different from them, and everybody else for that matter. And when the thunder boomed louder still in response to his demand, he proclaimed his defiance with a laugh. If it didn’t kill him, it couldn’t stop him.

[Painting by the most-talented Bernie Fuchs]

Spanning the World of Sport: Tough loss for Coach Cal and Kentucky last night, huh?

(Hey, Frank: Yeah, you get props over here.)

Now we turn to baseball. Tonight gives the Cubs, Cardinals for the season opener on ESPN. Tomorrow afternoon at the Stadium, life after Jeter begins with our man Tanaka on the hill against Russell Martin and those douchy Blue Jays.

The sun’s been out the past few days and though it’s still brisk at times, in the sun it’s lovely.

Spring’s here. Happy Pesach, Happy Easter.

Let’s Go Base-ball!

[Photo Credit: Emil Heilborn]

Painting by Seth Armstrong.

Friday Funk.

[Photo Credit: Sarah Lee]

S’long Streit’s…

Happy Pesach, y’all.

[Photo Credit: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images]

Duncan Schiedt’s history lesson. 

Kid on the train this morning.

Yes, please. 

The Yankees starting and back-up shortstops are hurt. So they picked up a futility infielder.

As usual, the intrepid Chad Jennings has the skinny. 

[Photo Via: Lo Hud]

It wasn’t my fault…you made me love you.

“Portrait of Mme. Matisse” by Henri Matisse (1913)

Over at the Stacks I’ve got a fun one fuh ya–Myron Cope’s 1968 SI profile of Harry Caray:

Even before the World Series got under way Wednesday, it was shudderingly clear that one result was as predictable as bunting on the commissioner’s box: Millions of television and radio listeners, whose eardrums may have healed in the year since the Cardinals-Red Sox Series, are once again going to be exposed to a feverish clamor coming from a Cardinals delegate to the NBC broadcasting team. It was equally certain that across America the baseball public would then divide into two camps—those who exclaimed that by God! Harry Caray was almost as exciting as being at the park, and those who prayed he would be silenced by an immediate attack of laryngitis. Caray, should you be among the few who still have not heard him, is an announcer who can be heard shrieking above the roar of the crowd when a hitter puts the ultimate in wood to the ball: “There she goes…! Line drive…! It might be…it could be…it is! Home run…! Ho-lee cow!” You may not know that with a second home run his more dignified colleagues have preferred to flee the broadcasting booth before the ball has cleared the fence.

In the past decade the trend of play-by-play broadcasting has been decidedly in the direction of mellow, impassive reporting, a technique that strikes Harry Caray as being about as appropriate as having Walter Cronkite broadcast a heavyweight championship fight. “This blasé era of broadcasting!” Caray grumbles. “‘Strike one. Ball one. Strike two.’ It probably hurts the game more than anything, and this at a time when baseball is being so roundly criticized.” Never one to burden himself with restraint, Caray more or less began hoisting the 1968 pennant over Busch Stadium clear back in early July when, following a Cardinals victory, he bellowed, “The magic number is 92!”

The fact is that Harry Caray’s 24 years of broadcasting St. Louis baseball have been one long crusade for pennants, a stance that might be expected to have endeared him to all Cardinals past and present, but which, on the contrary, has left a scattered trail of athletes who would have enjoyed seeing him transferred to Ping-Pong broadcasts in Yokohama.

“What’s Caray got against you anyway, Meat?” asks Mrs. Jim Brosnan in a passage from The Long Season, a reminiscence her pitcher-husband wrote in 1960.

“To hell with Tomato-Face,” answers Brosnan. “He’s one of those emotional radio guys. All from the heart, y’know? I guess he thinks I’m letting the Cardinals down, and he’s taking it as a personal insult.”

“Well, you ought to spit tobacco juice on his shoe, or something. It’s awful the way he blames you for everything.”

[Photo Credit: The Sporting News]

Royal Flush.

All City. Still one of my favorite movies.

[Photo Via: Mass Appeal]