Another night and again the Diamondbacks get an impressive performance from their starting pitcher. This time it was Patrick Corbin, a slinging lefty with a nice fastball and a nice slider. Phil Hughes was good too. He allowed two solo home runs and that put the Yanks in a 2-1 hole (they scored their run on a solo homer by Robbie Cano).

In the eighth, Eduardo Nunez was robbed of an extra base hit by Martin Prado to lead off and then Travis Hafner, pinch-hitting walked against reliever David Hernandez and Brett Gardner singled. It was only the third hit of the game for the Yanks.

Wells walked on four pitches, the crowd was alive, and for the first time this season, my pulse quickened. Cano took a fastball low for a ball and then fouled off a good fastball–oooooh, just missed it. Another fastball, this one upstairs, probably not a strike, but Cano swung at it anyhow and fouled it off. Next pitch was a wicked breaking ball, Cano, couldn’t check his swing even though the ball hit him in the left foot. The initial call was that Cano did not swing but the appeal–to the first base ump, not the third base ump who is responsible for the call–had Cano out. It was the correct call, too.

So it was up to Kevin Youkilis, who took a fastball for a strike–too low, Blue, too low–and then fouled off a breaking ball, waved at another slider, barely fouling it off, and took a fastball high. He got another fastball, this one just inside enough and Youkilis fouled it off. The next pitch was a slider up and Youk leaned his elbow out but it missed him (and you wonder why opponent’s don’t like him). He swung and missed at the next pitch, a breaking ball and the inning was over.

And for the first time this season I was irked.

That quickly changed to fuggin annoyed when Gardner overran a fly ball for a two-base error to start the ninth–he ran a long way to make an error. A bloop single over Cano’s head (did he mis-time his jump?) put runners on the corners with nobody out, Joba on the mound. He struck out Eric Chavez and then got a little tapper hit right to him, chased down the runner at third, got him in a run down, and Youkilis tagged the runner out. Youk spun, threw the ball to Nunez, who was covering third and they had Cody Ross out, but Ross slid in under the tag and was safe. Catcher’s interference on Frankie Cervelli loaded the bases and left our catcher smarting. But wouldn’t you know it a fly ball ended it. Lots of weirdness, but no runs.

And a good performance by Joba.

J.J. Putz–pronounced “Puts,” as only a Putz would do–hung a 1-2 splitter to Cervelli with one man out and the little guy planted one into the first row of the left field stands: tie game. It was no bomb but it had a nice ring to it. Sure sounded sweet.

We might as well leave there because soon enough the irritation I mentioned earlier returned when David Phelps worked out of a jam in the 11th. And resignation set in after Nunez ended the bottom of the 11th with a well-struck ball that almost took off on Cody Ross in right field. Yeah, the winning run was on second and would have scored easily. Cervelli had another catcher’s interference in the 12th and Ross came up with the go-ahead RBI; our old friend Eric Chavez collected three RBI with a long double.

Final Score: Diamondbacks 6, Yanks 2.

Two-of-three was good but the Yanks should have swept ’em.

Rain in the Bronx on a glum night.

Meanwhile, there’s a game to be played. Phil Hughes looks to pitch well…

1. Gardner CF
2. Wells LF
3. Cano 2B
4. Youkilis 1B
5. Francisco DH
6. Cervelli C
7. Suzuki RF
8. Nunez SS
9. Nix 3B

Never mind the hankies:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: Zero]

Uh-oh. 

Here’s me talking Yankees with Will Leitch on his new podcast for Sports on Earth.

Jerry Izenberg remembers Pat Summerall.

I’ve started a blog over at Deadspin called The Stacks, devoted to archiving memorable newspaper and magazine writing.  The Stacks will simulcast our Banter Gold Standard re-print series as well as include posts with links to classic material already available on-line.

Diggum.

If you’ve never read John O’Hara’s first novel, do yourself a favor. Penguin Classics has published a new edition of the book with an introduction by Charles McGrath, excerpted over at The New York Review of Books:

Originally published in 1934, John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra is still the only American novel I know that begins with a scene of a married couple—Luther and Irma Fliegler—having sex and on Christmas morning, no less. Later in the book, another married couple—Julian English, the novel’s protagonist, and his wife, Caroline—make love in the middle of Christmas afternoon. Julian has been dispatched on a disagreeable errand, and Caroline rewards him by waiting in their bedroom in a black lace negligee she calls her “whoring gown.” About their lovemaking, the novel says, “she was as passionate and as curious, as experimental and joyful as ever he was.”

Before O’Hara, sex in American novels—polite novels, anyway—was mostly adulterous, not something that proper married women engaged in, or if they did, they weren’t known to enjoy it. Appointment is a genuine love story, charged with eros but stripped of sentimentality, and the relationship between the Englishes is more convincing and more satisfying than that of, say, Gatsby and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, or Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. Though unfaithful to her, Julian can’t stop loving Caroline, and after O’Hara devotes a whole chapter to her intimate thoughts and sexual explorations before marriage, the reader can’t help falling a little in love with her, too. Caroline, for her part, reflects at the end of the book: “He was drunk, but he was Julian, drunk or not, and that was more than anyone else was.”

The speed with which the book was written may account for the urgency of its storytelling. O’Hara began it in December 1933, when he was just twenty-eight, and wrote it in something like white heat, finishing in a little under four months. Set in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a lightly disguised version of Pottsville, where O’Hara grew up, the entire action of Appointment in Samarra—Julian English’s whirlwind of self-destruction—takes place in just thirty-six hours, and its breakneck pace is startling and exciting. Even on a second reading, when you know what’s going to happen, you tear through it still not quite believing in what’s just ahead and what’s already been established by the novel’s epigraph, taken from W. Somerset Maugham’s play Sheppey (in which Death speaks of meeting a merchant in Samarra): an appointment in Samarra, we know from the beginning, is an appointment with death itself.

Our man in Tokyo has a jazz radio show.

Dig it.

[Photo Via: Take the Coltrane]

Yanks down 3-0? No fuggin’ problem.

C.C. Sabathia gave up a couple of runs in the first but then toughed it out for eight innings. Meanwhile, Young Wade Miley dominated the Yankees until the seventh inning. That’s when he got shook and loaded the bases. Had two outs too when he walked Eduardo Nunez to load ’em up and you could see his frustration building. He followed that by walking Jayson Nix and that was it. His night, done. Then Brett Gardner singled to tie the game.

Bottom of the eighth, Travis Hafner hit a 95 mph fastball for a pinch hit home run and Mariano Rivera retired the side in order in the ninth for the save. Fell behind Cody Ross 3-0, but got him to pop out to Ichiro! in right. Our old pal Eric Chavez grounded a 2-2 pitch to short and Gerrado Parra rolled one over to Robbie Cano–cue Sinatra.

Yanks 4, Diamondbacks 3.

Hey, not bad for these suck-ass 1965 Yankees, huh?

[Picture by Grégoire Guillemin]

It’s the Big P-Funk Fella.

1. Gardner CF
2. Wells LF
3. Cano 2B
4. Youkilis 1B
5. Francisco DH
6. Cervelli C
7. Boesch RF
8. Nunez SS
9. Nix 3B

Never mind the Jeter Watch:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Here’s Allen Barra and Rob Neyer on 42.

Head on over to BBC Radio 4 to listen to old episodes of The Goon Show.

Over at Booooooom, check out 64 photographs by 64 photographers. 

“The Simpsons” writers reunion.  Diggum’ Smack.

Robbie Cano hit a three-run homer which was enough to give the Yanks a lead and on a night where every player wore the number 42. Mariano Rivera recorded the save and the final score was 4-2.

Works for me.

Rivera worked a perfect ninth and watching him perform like this is the thing of beauty that we’ve come to cherish, never more than now, this being Mo’s final season and all.

This is a time to appreciate.

[Photo Credit: Nick Laham/Getty Images]

The Diamondbacks? In April? Oh, very well.

Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkils 3B
Travis Hafner DH
Vernon Wells LF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Lyle Overbay 1B
Chris Stewart C

Never mind the weirdness:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Bags]

Tonight at 9 p.m. on PBS. Don’t miss it. 

Via The Atlantic.

For more on the Boston Marathon here is Charlie Pierce and Leigh Montville.

Guest Post

By Peter Richmond

I’m told that a photograph from The Boston Marathon bombings was quickly circulated to news sources depicting someone with a leg blown off. I was told of the photograph of the missing leg by a friend named Lamar Graham who, as editor-in-chief of nj.com, the state’s largest news disseminator, told me that he’d refused to run it, which confirms what I’ve known for a couple of decades now: that Lamar is a great journalist.

Disaster coverage, wherein the disaster has taken and maimed human life, is, for the responsible journalist, the most horned dilemma of all. Do I do my best at what I have been hired to do — be the neon lens onto the scene, wherein the more vivid the detail, the more compelling the tale? — or do I act as the best human being I can be, wherein that lens must have filters? (That was a loaded question. Next time Lamar gives a seminar on how to run a website, I’m going to be there.)

Because here’s the thing: bad news – whether its nature is disaster or gore or geek – is not to be defined as an event to be weighed by our ability to be transfixed by it. It happened independent of our need to be fascinated by it. It has a context. And, of course, disaster and death have the hugest context of all.

This is nothing more than an open plea to any journalist in Boston over the next few days, with her or his “boots on the ground,” entrusted to bring us facts: weigh your words and images very carefully. Please.

I know whereof I speak. In July of 1982, as a reporter for the San Diego Union, in New Orleans on a sports story, I covered the crash of a plane en route to San Diego, just after takeoff, killed everyone on board. Eager and carnivoristic reporter that I was, and schooled in the “Get the story first and best!” school, with half the gaping, wounded fuselage still on fire in a field I slipped through some police tape into the field, and hooked up with a couple of coroner’s deputies planting little plastic flags in the ground where they saw evidence, and, at their side, I catalogued the severed limbs I’d seen. It was easy; as anyone who has been close to stuff like that knows: You just go into shock, as if a plastic visor is descending over your sensibilities, and become The Reporter.

I was proud of my enterprise. I filed my gruesome story, only to discover the next day that the editor had taken out all the anatomical detail. “It was too gory, hunh?” I said, over the phone, from 2,000 miles away. “No,” he said. “You don’t get it. Relatives of the victims are going to read that, and it’s going to make their loss even harder to bear. ‘Did what he described belong my brother?’ Never forget that you’re not writing to be noticed. You’re writing for people to inform them about what has happened.” Then he invoked Hippocrates’ Oath, which pertains awfully particularly at times like these: “First, Do No Harm.”

Twenty-one-and-a-half years earlier, on Dec. 16, 1960, two airliners collided over Staten Island. The TWA Super Constellation plummeted straight to the ground. No survivors. The United DC-8 limped its way toward Prospect Park in Brooklyn, with half a right wing, but came up short, crashing in Park Slope, killing all on board except a 12-year-boy who was tossed into a snowbank, to survive another 24 hours, but only after having been devoured by media, who also took detailed note of the wrapped Christmas presents scattered around the site to never be opened. My dad was on that plane, and man, did I, a seven-year-old reader of newspapers, not want to read details.

Over at Lo-Hud I found a link to a two-hour BBC radio documentary on the Yankees.

Worth checking out.