Over at Lo Hud, Chad Jennings examines places where they Yanks look to save money this winter.

At River Ave, Mike Axisa checks out the pros and cons of Torii Hunter.

[Picture Via: Comic Book Artwork]

This 1997 Atlantic magazine story by Ian Frazier is terrific:

Mr. Tytell goes to his shop two or three days a week, depending on how he’s feeling. Customers who want to see him call his answering machine, and he calls back and sets up appointments. A sign on the wall that says

PSYCHOANALYSIS FOR YOUR TYPEWRITER
WHETHER IT’S FRUSTRATED, INHIBITED, SCHIZOID
OR WHAT HAVE YOU

contributes to the doctor-patient quality of the visits. Plus he’s wearing a white lab coat and you’re not. Some customers arrive in limousines, which wait nearby until the sessions are through. Mr. Tytell has fixed typewriters for such people as Perle Mesta and the Archbishop of Lebanon and Charles Kuralt. Some customers climb sweating from the subway station and stop for a moment in the daylight of Fulton Street to switch the case containing the heavy machine from one hand to the other. Because of a mishap involving a romance novelist, a treasured typewriter, and the wreck of a parcel-service truck, Mr. Tytell now refuses to ship typewriters under any circumstances. Getting a typewriter repaired by him is a hands-on, person-to-person deal.

Several afternoons last spring I sat on a swiveling typing chair by the clear space on the table where Mr. Tytell lets people test their typewriters before taking them home, and he and Mrs. Tytell and I talked. “People get very emotionally involved with their typewriters,” Mr. Tytell said. “I understand it — I talk to typewriters myself sometimes. On the one hand, you have people who love a machine for whatever reason. On the other, sometimes you find a person with an extreme dislike, almost a hatred, for a particular machine. It’s funny how the two go together. Recently I got a call from a lady and she had a portable typewriter, like new, and she wanted it out of her apartment right away. It’s from a divorce or something; I didn’t ask. She’s not selling it, she says she’ll pay me if I’ll just come and take it away. Well, three hours earlier I had gotten a call from another lady; her husband had just lost a typewriter he loved, somebody stole it, and it was the exact same make and model this other lady described. So I went and picked up the machine, and when I got back, I called the other lady, and she rushed right down and bought it and carried it out the door. She was overjoyed.

“People hug and kiss me when I fix their typewriters sometimes. That call just now was from a lady I did a Latvian typewriter for — she was so happy I could hardly get her off the phone. I don’t know why, a typewriter touches something inside. A couple — she’s the secretary to the Episcopal Church in Manhattan — brought in an old Underwood for an overhaul, and I made it sing, and they came by the shop with coffee and cake to thank me, and the husband wrote me a poem in iambic pentameter. It’s called ‘Tytell, the Wizard King of Fulton Street.’ You see, people get carried away. They write me letters, they send me fruit baskets, they give me miniature typewriters made out of porcelain. Almost everybody I deal with is an interesting person of some kind. Here’s an invoice for a job I did for the only harp mechanic in the New York area, a guy who tunes and repairs harps, and he’s decided he wants to translate Homer from the original Greek, and he wants me to make a typewriter in Homeric Greek for him. That’s no problem — I’ve done ancient-Greek typewriters before. I even did a typewriter in hieroglyphics one time, for a curator at the Brooklyn Museum.”

Over man Cliff with a good piece over at SB Nation–The Conscience of a Lapsed Yankee Fan:

My favorite baseball books are about losers, oddballs, and failures, and what draws me back to every new baseball season isn’t whether or not the Yankees are going to win 95 or 100 games (they’ve won fewer than 94 just twice in the last 16 seasons), it’s seeing how the teams on the fringes perform. Is that rebuild working? Will this be the year that talented young team coalesces into a contender? Will that big trade acquisition or free agent signing take his new team to the next level? Can his previous team compensate for his loss? Can that talented but star-crossed team can stay healthy enough to contend? Did that perennial playoff loser miss its window for a championship? With that managerial change have any impact? How will that new stadium play? How ugly will those new uniforms really be? How will the new playoff or scheduling format impact the pennant races?

As for the Yankees, I don’t worry about them, and that’s what worries me. I want my daughter to love baseball, in part because I’ve dedicated part of my life to it and don’t want her to feel shut out of that. Baseball is a novel that unfolds over years, individual teams are puzzles that take years to solve. The Yankees, however, are more of a long-running television procedural. They hit all the same beats and catch phrases, the credits roll, and then they do it all over again. I spent my childhood hoping I’d see the Yankees win the World Series during my lifetime (yes, really). I suspect I’m now going to spend my daughter’s childhood hoping she’ll see them have a losing season.

Over at Poynter, Caitlin Johnston has the story of how Iwan Baan got the New York Magazine cover shot.

Yeah, that was the commute this morning. Most of the people in my vicinity had a sense of humor but there were still some cross words.

Ill.

John…

Well, what did you expect?

He’s coming back.

[Drawings by Jack Kirby and Moebius]

“Funky Miracle”–The Meters

[Photo Via: Daniela64]

Knicks season opener. Against the Heat, of course. Mr. Wade doesn’t think they should be playing.

[Photo Credit: Thomas Prior]

Here’s a real beauty of a story by Rachel Toor over at Longform:

It’s not like I really thought I was going to marry Frank Shorter. But when I found out that we would be staying at the same house during the weekend of the 2012 TD Bank Beach to Beacon 10K race in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, I thought, well, he’s smart and attractive and accomplished. Maybe I’ll marry Frank Shorter.

Okay, so probably not, but it’s like when you read a book by someone that you love and you want to be BFFs with the author. This may make me sound like, what’s it called? — oh, right, a groupie. For the record, I am not a groupie. It would be ridiculous for marathoners to have groupies. But still, I thought maybe I’d marry Frank Shorter.

Here’s the thing about running. Even the super-famous, the nationally recognized celebrities in the sport, aren’t all that famous. This was not like thinking I might maybe marry Michael Jordan or A-Rod. That would be crazy talk. Runners don’t get spotted at airports or stopped and asked for autographs. They aren’t protected from the public the way other professional athletes are, shielded by barricades and arena walls and large men. Even at the biggest races, we all stand on the starting line together. In a marathon, we cover the same ground. Sure, they run faster and may be showered and dressed in street clothes before the rest of us slog across the line, but we cross the same finish line.

Bringing back Hiroki, losing Sori? Shifting outfielders? Chasing Torii Hunter? Ah, yes, the Hot Stove is here.

[Photo Via: Nell’s Dish Du’Jour]

This looks like fun.

Real nice piece over at SB Nation’s Longform on the Branding of Brooklyn by Brandon K. Thorp:

Outside Modell’s on Oct. 3 stood an elderly black man almost entirely dressed up in precisely that blue and orange crap — a Knicks windbreaker over a Carmelo Anthony jersey over a white tee-shirt, and an old-timey New York Knicks cap that actually said “Knickerbockers.” This man’s name was, it happens, Oscar Modell. “No relation,” he said.

Modell lives in Bed Stuy, and always has. “I just took a walk to see [Barclays],” After he did a walk-around of the arena, Oscar said he’d go to Junior’s, in downtown Brooklyn, for a piece of cheesecake.

“This is looking real good here,” he said. “I never thought I’d see something like it. I look forward to seeing the Knicks beat the stuffing out of the Nets here.”

Asked why he, a lifelong Brooklynite, wouldn’t root for a Brooklyn basketball team, he laughed.

“Brooklyn doesn’t have a basketball team,” he said. “Brooklyn’s got an arena. But I read the boys on the Nets don’t even live in Brooklyn. They don’t even live in New York.”

This is true. The Nets mostly still live in Jersey, near their practice facility. Small forward Gerald Wallace remarked recently that he’d never move to Brooklyn; that he’s too frightened of New York City to ever live in it.

“The boys on the Knicks, maybe they’re not from New York, but at least they want to come here,” he said. “Just like people from all over the world want to come here. That makes it a hometown team. But the Nets? The Brooklyn Nets? The Brooklyn Nets is just a logo. Maybe one day it’ll be more than that, but not yet. Not for a long time.”

Here’s the Nets bandwagon: I ain’t on it.

Some disturbing Yankee-related news today.

First, this on Brien Taylor. And this report on the death of Pascual Perez.

The view from my apartment this morning.

Time to go back to work.

Here’s a slept-on classic:

As expected, Rafael Soriano has opted out of his contract and is now a free agent.

[Photo Credit: Mike Stobe/Getty Images]

I think we’re going to need a bigger boat.

Just had to share this Halloween outfit with you.

[Photo Via: Super Punch]

Man, it’s just been surreal the past few days here in New York. I didn’t have the energy or the inclination to blog about anything but the storm but today I’m going to try to get back to some kind of routine.

We’re safe here in the Bronx and we’re damn fortunate for that. So many others have suffered.

Hope you are all okay.

[Photo Via: Noah Kalina]

A good place for Sandy links: Kottke.