Sparkle like a Diamond.

[Picture by Teva]

So the Yanks played this afternoon at Wrigley and I missed the whole damn thing cause I was at work. No, that’s wrong, I caught the 9th inning when the Yanks put the tying run on base. But they only had five hits all afternoon and couldn’t do anything against Carlos Marmol. It was a quick, seemingly uneventful 3-1 loss. One game. That’s okay. But if they lose again this weekend, hard feelings, man, I don’t care how endearing the Cubs are. That team is horseshit.

For one week starting today, Film Forum is screening a new 35 mm print of Howard Hawks’ great 1938 comedy Bringing Up Baby.  Sheila O’Malley, who writes the terrific blog, The Sheila Variations, has a fun piece about the flick and it’s racy subtext at Capital New York.

Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Howard Hawks – what more can a movie lover ask for? This is one of the great screen comedies, folks, don’t miss it.

Yanks at Wrigley. Cliff’s got the preview.

Nick Swisher RF
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Russell Martin C
Eduardo Nunez SS
Brett Gardner LF
Freddy Garcia RHP

We do the rootin’:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: The Paupered Chef]

Thanks to Jay Jaffe for pointing out this cool breakdown of the Yankee pitchers who’ll be going in Chicago this weekend.

Nice job by Cubs f/x.

Derek Jeter’s calf injury and ensuing DL trip definitely threw a wrench into his reaching the 3,000-hit milestone in the near future. Given Jeter’s flair for the dramatic and the way the Yankees hit Rangers pitching during the first two games, it would have been fun to see what could have been, especially at home.

Jeter’s two most recent milestones occurred at home. he benefited from home scoring when got his 2,000th on May 26, 2006 against the Kansas City Royals, and he broke Lou Gehrig’s franchise record for hits at home on September 11, 2009 against the Orioles.

Another thing that would have been cool: watching Jeter vie for history against the Cubs. Jeter has the most hits of anyone in interleague play, so in a way, it would have been fitting for him to reach 3K over the next batch of games. In addition, Saturday will mark six years to the day that Jeter launched the first and only grand slam of his career to date, a sixth inning shot off of Joe Borowski.

And there is precedent for the Yankees making history during interleague play. A banner year for this was 2003, when first, the Yankees were no-hit by six Houston Astros pitchers in the Bronx. Two nights later, Roger Clemens registered his 4,000th strikeout and 300th win against the Cardinals.

Clemens’ previous start, however, took place in Chicago, against Kerry Wood. It was Clemens’ third chance at 300. It was the marquee game in a series that marked the Yankees’ first visit to Wrigley Field since the 1932 World Series and Babe Ruth’s “called shot”. The Yankees beat Carlos Zambrano in the Friday afternoon opener, and the stage was set for the power matchup on Saturday. Clemens had an upper respiratory infection and there was doubt as to whether he would even start. He did, and he left the game in the seventh inning with a lead and two men on base, giving way to the immortal Juan Acevedo. Acevedo is immortal for what happened next. He delivered a first-pitch fastball to Eric Karros that was promptly returned to Waveland Avenue, and a 2-1 lead was suddenly a 4-2 deficit. That was the final. The following night, the Cubs chased Andy Pettitte after 1 2/3 innings and despite a valiant comeback effort against Mark Prior, it wasn’t enough.

Fast forward to today, where the Yankees head to Chicago coming off a three-game sweep of the Texas Rangers. They’re currently riding their sixth three-game win streak of the season. Only once, though, have they carried that streak past three. They’re not facing Big Z, Wood and Prior in succession; rather, it’s Doug Davis, Ryan Dempster, and Randy “Please don’t call me Boomer or Kip” Wells. With the Cubs struggling as badly as they are, this could be a weekend where the Yankees add to their winning percentage.

Sadly, no history to watch out for in this series. Only the moments to reflect upon. While the feeling of the games might be empty, at least the stands at Wrigley will be full.

I like to think I follow the Yankees very closely. I know all their prospects and most of their minor leaguers.  That’s not uncommon around here, but I wonder if any of you found yourselves in the same spot I did when checking the box score today. The game was started and finished by two pitchers I had no idea were on the team. And I had never heard of Brian Gordon before he threw a pitch.

I did not get to see any of the game, but following along I hoped Cano’s and Granderson’s failures to get runners from third home with less than two out would not prove fatal. Granderson I felt especially bad for, since he could have won the game by just keeping the bat on his shoulder on ball four in the ninth.

Brian Cashman had been on an insane gambling roll with the successes of Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia. But when Colon’s hammy crapped out, it looked like the luck had run dry. Instead of taking his chips to the cashier, he went right back to the table and put cast-offs Cory Wade and Brian Gordon onto the team and thrust them into prominent roles in today’s 3-2 extra inning victory over the Rangers.

Say what you will about his decisions, right now the man is on fire.

Brian Gordon is a converted outfielder who has spent 15 seasons in the minors. That’s a long time. Today, he makes his first big league start.

This is a cool thing.

Alex Rodriguez gets the day off:

1. Nick Swisher RF
2. Curtis Granderson CF
3. Mark Teixeira 1B
4. Robinson Cano 2B
5. Andruw Jones LF
6. Jorge Posada DH
7. Russell Martin C
8. Eduardo Nunez SS
9. Ramiro Pena 3B

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Nina Papiorek]

On Tuesday night, Scott Shields, Jeff Weaver and Justin Verlander all threw a complete game shutout, and then for good measure, the Pirates had six pitchers combine on a 1-0 whitewash. In the not too distant past, four shutouts in one day would have made headlines, but lately, goose eggs have becoming increasingly common. In fact, over the first 77 calendar days of the season, there has been at least one shutout in 66, including two days in May that featured six.

Run production has been down significantly in the major leagues over the past two seasons, so the increase in shutouts shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. However, the pace being set this year would not just turn the clock back to before the steroid era, but wind it in reverse by over 30 years.

Comparison of AL, NL Run Production and Number of Shutouts, 1901-Present

Note: All data as of June 14. 2011 shutout totals are pro-rated.
Source: Baseball-reference.com

If major league pitchers maintain the current pace, there will be 346 shutouts this season. On a per team basis, that would equate to approximately 11.5, a rate that would not only rank as the highest total in the big leagues since 1978, but also fit right into any period since the dead ball era. What’s more, this season, the American League has finally caught up to the National League. In 2010, the typical club in the senior circuit was involved in four more shutouts than their A.L. counterparts, but so far this year, that gap has been reduced to one-half game.

Only 67 games into the season on average, every team has already been shutout at least once. However, no team has taken the trend to the extreme more than the San Diego Padres. In the team’s first 70 games, the Padres’ lineup has been blanked 11 times, putting them on target for 25 shutouts. If the San Diego offense does achieve that ignominious feat, it would be tied for the 16th highest total in major league history (a ranking mitigated a little by the longer 162-game schedule) and represent the greatest single season tally since the 1972 Texas Rangers.

On the other end of the spectrum, every team’s pitching staff has also recorded a shutout. Leading the pack in this regard is the Tigers, who have shutout the opposition in nine ballgames. Although not as historically unique as the Padres’ futility, Detroit’s current pro-rated target of 22 shutouts would still rank among the top 3% in big league history and represent the highest total since the 1992 Atlanta Braves recorded 24.

2011 Shutout Breakdown by Team

Note: All data as of June 14, 2011.
Source: Baseball-reference.com

Why have there been so many shutouts over the past two seasons? I am ashamed to admit that I am completely drawing a blank. Perhaps, after years of marketing the home run, baseball has now adopted an entirely different strategy? In the past, there have been rumors of juiced balls, so maybe the sport has decided to surreptitiously shift the balance back in favor of the pitcher? Whatever the reason, you can bet Bud Selig is delighted to see a clean break from the stigmas of the steroid era. Whether the fans agree is another story, but if the shutout really has become the new home run, baseball is set for a banner year.

Last night at the Stadium: Exterior and Interior.

The wife and I had a fine time in the Todd Drew box seats. Highlights included a beautiful slide home by Alex Rodriguez, Francisco Cervelli’s tag at the plate (and Curtis Granderson’s throw), Mark Teixeira’s nifty, unassisted double play (oh, yeah, and two more homers), a long home run by Robbie Cano, a high homer by Eddie Nunez and the delightful surprise of the night–a line drive home run by Ramiro Pena.

The Yankees, coming off a 12-4 thumping of the Rangers Tuesday behind a good but not great CC Sabathia, took the field Wednesday night behind the inconsistent Ivan Nova, with a line-up that resembled one that Billy Martin would occasionally pull from a hat.

With Derek Jeter “decalfinated” and lefty Derek Holland pitching for the Rangers, Joe Girardi chose to sit the hot Brett Gardner, and installed Nick Swisher as his leadoff man.  Swisher last led off back in 2008 as a member of the White Sox.  The line-up also featured Alex Rodriguez at DH, Ramiro Pena manning third, Eduardo Nunez at short and yet another start for the embattled Francisco Cervelli.  Fortunately for the Yanks, Mr. Holland’s opus when it comes to the Bombers is an atonal dirge.  Coming into the game, in 21.2 innings versus the Yanks, Holland had allowed 41 baserunners and an 8.31 ERA.

Neither starting pitcher distinguished himself.  They each had only one 1-2-3 inning before getting the hook.  Nova gave up two in the top of the first on two hits and a walk, and offered up one of the worst (highest) pitchouts seen in baseball in 2011, giving Cervelli no chance to cut down Ian Kinsler.

Mark Teixeira evened the score in the bottom of the frame with a long homer just to the left of the “State Farm” sign in left, and the Yanks could have had more if not for Holland deflecting a Nunez hot shot up the middle and turning it into a 1-6-3 DP.  They added a run in the second, but Nova promptly gave the lead back on a booming homer to Kinsler and an Adrian Beltre sac fly in the third.

Nunez, celebrating his 24th birthday, took Holland deep to tie the score at 4 in the 4th. After the Yanks took a 6-4 lead in the 5th, Curtis Granderson saved Nova’s night, thwarting a Ranger rally in the 6th, by cutting down Yorvit Torrealba at the plate on an Andrus single to center with two on and two out.  From there, the Yanks battered Mark Lowe, Darren Oliver and Neftali Feliz for six runs on five hits and three walks.  Included in the barrage was a bleacher shot by Ramiro Pena (!), another bomb by Teixeira (from the left side of the plate, marking the 11th time in his career he has homered from both sides in the same game), and a Robinson Cano three-run blast in the ninth.

Final score . . . just like before . . . 12-4.

Ready (or not) for prime time…

1. Swisher RF
2. Granderson CF
3. Teixeira 1B
4. Rodriguez DH
5. Cano 2B
6. Jones LF
7. Nunez SS
8. Cervelli C
9. Pena 3B

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: NYC 3 by Tubes]

HE’S BRESLIN AND YOU’RE NOT

By John Schulian

The Evening Sun didn’t have the biggest staff in the world, so a lot of us had to do double duty. For me, that frequently meant coming in at 6 or 7 in the morning to work re-write for the first edition before they turned me loose on the world. It was great experience because when I was under the gun, I had to force myself to write fast. You know, a news story 700 to 1,000 words long in 20 minutes or less, and you had to get the facts right from the reporters in the field who were calling them in.

Just as often, I’d be the one out on the street, hoping I’d be able to get back to the office in time to write the story myself. I’d get a call from an assistant city editor at 4:30 in the morning to get over to a rowhouse fire in West Baltimore that killed a couple of kids, and by the time I got there, I could hear their mother or grandmother screaming “My babies, my babies!” from two blocks away. Or it would be a shantytown fire in a speck on the map called Principio Furnace, with more dead babies. Or a bunch of volunteer firemen who drowned while trying to rescue somebody in a hellacious rainstorm. Or maybe just two motorcycle gangs that shot each other to pieces.

The story that still haunts me was about a town out in Western Maryland called Friendsville.  Population 600 and six of its boys had been killed in Vietnam. I went out there to talk to the families of the first five casualties and wait for the body of the sixth to come home. I got a number for what I guess is best described as Friendsville’s general store, talked with the woman who ran it, and she wound up saying she’d have everybody ready to talk to me. And she did. If you want an example of small-town trust and graciousness, there it was. But the story was still a painful one to report because I knew I was opening old wounds for everybody I interviewed. The people I remember best were a couple my parents’ age, which is to say well into their 60s. They lived in a stone house on a dirt road outside town, just the two of them and the photos of the boy they’d lost in the war, their only child. All I could think of was how I could have been that dead boy instead, and my parents the ones stumbling around under the weight of their loss. Somehow I made it through the interview without crying, but as soon as I got in my car, I bawled like a baby-–for them, for my folks and me, for all the dead soldiers in that godforsaken war.

I wish I could tell you I turned Friendsville into a great story, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the chops yet. I wrote it in, I think, 1971, and I was still trying on styles for size, still pretending I was somebody different every time I sat down at the typewriter. When David Israel and Mike Lupica burst onto the scene a few years later, I was struck by how fully-formed they were as writers, and they were kids. To read them was to think they never suffered from self-doubt or indecision. Tony Kornheiser was that way, too, an absolute joy to read seemingly from Day One. I had days when I was good, I suppose, but mostly I was a work in progress.

Throughout my time at the Evening Sun, Jimmy Breslin was my greatest influence, just as he had been since the day before I went in the Army. I’d ordered his classic collection “The World of Jimmy Breslin” as soon as I’d returned from grad school, but it didn’t show up until 36 hours before I became Uncle Sam’s property. I sat down and read the book from cover to cover, swept away by Breslin’s great characters–Marvin the Torch, Fat Thomas, Sam Silverware–and touched in a deeper, more profound way by his column about the man who dug JFK’s grave. When I put the book down, I told myself that if I lived through whatever the Army had in store for me, I wanted to come home and write just the way Breslin did. And I tried mightily when I worked in Baltimore. Of course I wasn’t the only young buck who worshipped Breslin. You could see his influence on hot young newspaper writers everywhere, whether they were on the city desk or in sports:  Lupica in New York, Israel in Washington, Bob Greene in Chicago. And the hell of it was, they were all better at imitating Breslin than I was.

Click here for the complete “From Ali to Xena” archives.

Drawing I did of my father, 1983

My father was an incorrigible name dropper. He called famous actors and directors by their first names, suggesting an intimacy that didn’t always exist. He had met a lot of celebrities when he worked as a unit production manager on The Tonight Show. One chance encounter with Richard Pryor and he was “Richie” forever. Dad reached the heights of chutzpah when he went to the theater with a friend one night and spotted the actress Gwen Verdon. He walked down to her, introduced himself, and kissed her on the cheek as if they’d known each other for years. Ms. Verdon was delighted. Dad’s friend was amazed.

I remember watching “12 Angry Men” with the old man when I was a kid. “It’s almost as good as the original,” he said, referring to the TV production. “You see how exciting a movie can be even if it takes place in one room?”

I was captivated and by the end, I felt intelligent, finally on the right side of the line that separates boys and men. It was directed by “Sidney,” Sidney Lumet. They had crossed paths once; Dad had wanted to turn “Fail Safe” into a movie, a project that Lumet eventually directed. The old man admired Lumet not just because he was a fellow New Yorker but also because they shared a similar aesthetic, a love of the theater and actors. Dad was an avid theatergoer starting in his early teens through his mid thirties when he became an independent documentary producer. He revered Lumet’s quick and efficient approach to shooting a movie.

“Sidney always comes in under budget and has it in his contract that he keeps the difference,” he told me, raising his eyebrows. “Now, that is a smart man.”

The Old Man with Senator Sam Ervin

Not long after my mother kicked him out, Dad saw “The Verdict” and raved about the performance Lumet got out of Paul Newman as a lawyer who became an alcoholic when he got screwed over, then sobered up when the chance for redemption arose. His clients got justice, he got back his self-respect, and I got squat because I was 11 and Dad said that was too young to watch the movie. The closest I got was the commercials on TV. Everything looked dark brown, courtrooms and bars alike, and Newman seemed so frail I didn’t even notice his famous blue eyes.

Dad holed up on his own in Weehawken, across the Hudson, after his next girlfriend gave him the boot as well. There were two things that he liked about New Jersey: the view of New York City from his bedroom window, and that the liquor store down the block opened before noon on Sundays.

I remember visiting him without my brother or sister one time in January 1983, shortly after “The Verdict” came out. It was a late Saturday afternoon, almost dark, and the sun reflected off the tall buildings overlooking 12th Avenue. The old man was lying on his bed in his underwear and t-shirt smoking a Pall Mall. The heating pipes clanged. The windows were sealed shut around the edges by duct tape but still rattled when it got windy. A glass of vodka sat next to the ashtray on his night table. I used to fantasize about emptying his Smirnoff bottle in the kitchen sink and filling it back up with water. But I never had the nerve.

Most of the time he’d make me entertain myself on the other side of the apartment, in the room without a view of the city. He didn’t want me reading comic books but I did anyway. Or I’d trace the movie ads from the Sunday paper. “The Verdict” was nominated for five Oscars including best actor and best picture. The movie ad showed Newman in a rumpled white shirt, tie loosened, his eyes half closed looking down. The light from a window washed over his face. He looked defeated. The text above read: “Frank Galvin Has One Last Chance at a Big Case.” I traced the movie poster and then drew it freehand. I felt the seriousness of the title “The Verdict.” I didn’t know what that term meant and didn’t ask.

Now I was content to sit next to Dad on his bed and look out the window at the orange light bouncing off the New York skyline. The view reminded us of how far we were from where we wanted to be.

There was a small black-and-white TV on the chest at the foot of the bed. An episode of M*A*S*H, the old man’s favorite show, ended. The familiar and mournful theme song, “Suicide is Painless” filled the room. Dad was talking about his girlfriend. He didn’t seem too bothered by their breakup. Leaving Manhattan was the bigger issue. With Mom, he was devastated. He still believed she was foolish to divorce him and was convinced that one day she’d come to her senses and have him back

Soon enough Dad returned to the subject of Sidney  because Lumet directed the Saturday Afternoon Movie. “He always comes in under budget, do you know why? Because Sidney is not stupid, that’s why.”

“Dog Day Afternoon” was on TV: an Al Pacino movie for grown-ups, but Dad let me watch it with him anyway. Maybe the vodka he was drinking softened his resolve. I knew enough not to question why. Pacino—Dad called him “Al”—played Sonny, a little guy who robbed a bank in Brooklyn. The movie was about what happened in the inside of the bank with Sonny and the hostages. It was tense but parts were funny and I laughed when Dad laughed.

During a commercial break, I saw that his eyes were closed. I studied him. His stomach inflated and deflated in short, hard spurts. Dad was forty-five, almost six years removed from a heart attack, and his deep, uneven breathing worried me. He flexed his right foot and his big toe cracked so I knew he wasn’t asleep. Maybe he was meditating. He opened his eyes and smiled at me, put his hand over mine and looked back at the TV. When he took it away, it was to reach for another cigarette. I stared at the movie until I heard him start to snore. So I slipped out of bed, moving like a cat on the branch of a tree, and butted out his cigarette in the ashtray sitting on a table covered with burn marks. Then I climbed back into bed, careful not to rouse him. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to the old man. He didn’t have a job and wasn’t in show business anymore. If only he would quit drinking.

I checked to see the progress of the light on the skyscrapers during the commercials. The orange glow began to fade as the sun set, turning softer, then pink as the sky darkened to a purplish blue. I thought of what Dad said when Channel Five ran the same public service announcement every night: “It’s 10:00 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” He’d say, “No, I don’t know where they are. I know they are not with me and that makes me very sad.” He told me so himself.

In “Dog Day Afternoon,” things were only getting worse for Al. It was nighttime in Brooklyn in the middle of summer and the air conditioning in the bank was turned off. The cops brought his boyfriend, Leon, to speak with him on the phone. Al was robbing the bank so he could afford a sex-change operation for the guy. That made sense to me. It was the right thing to do.

At last, the cops agreed to give him an airplane to escape. I imagined what the inside of the plane looked like and where they were going to go. But when they got to the airport, the FBI nailed him, the hostages were freed, and the movie was over.

I put my hands behind my head, lay back and looked at a water stain on the ceiling. I thought about Al, pushed onto the hood of the car at the airport, the loud sounds of planes taking off and landing in the background. His eyes looked like they were going to bug out of his head and he was on his way to jail which didn’t seem fair even though he was a criminal. Then I imagined Paul Newman. I was happy the old man had let me be a grown-up with him for a little while.

The white lights of Manhattan were twinkling on the other side of the Hudson when he woke up and refreshed his drink. I didn’t want to say anything stupid so I kept my mouth shut. Another cigarette smoldered in the ashtray. He picked up the New York Times crossword puzzle and said,  “Good old Sidney. He never left New York.”

Jack Mann appreciation continues with three pieces by his colleagues. Please enjoy these memories of Mann from John Schulian, Tom Callahan and Dave McKenna.

Unvarnished Mann

By John Schulian

In the world according to Jack Mann, if a ballplayer dragged his private parts over the post-game spread while reaching for the mustard, a sports writer damn well better file it away for future use. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to re-create the scene for a family newspaper, but he could certainly offer some well-crafted hints. In fact Jack insisted on it when he was a visionary sports editor at Newsday because he would have done no less were he writing the story himself. He was, after all, a slave to the truth no matter how discomfiting.

Not everybody appreciated it. To this day, there are those who recoil at the sound of his name before recovering to rail profanely about his parentage, fondness for the grape, and well-worn mean streak. Jack was, in his time, the most complicated and divisive figure in sportswriting this side of Mark Kram and Dick Young. You either loved him or hated him, and if you loved him, there were still going to be times when you wondered why the hell he did some of the things he did.

Of course the legend occasionally got in the way of the facts. Jack may have thrown a tray of type out a window at the Washington Daily News, for instance, or it may have been his boss, Dave Burgin, who did the honors. God knows they were both capable of it in the days when they were making the sports section in that abysmal tabloid the liveliest reading in town. Or maybe the incident never happened at all.

What I can guarantee did happen was Jack’s constant and very public humiliation of Shirley Povich, the icon who anchored the Washington Post’s sports page for 70 years. Shirley was every bit as gracious and gentlemanly as Red Smith, and a fine writer, too, but by the early 1970s, his reportorial legs were gone and his column showed it. He covered more and more games by watching them on TV. Even the Redskins, who become more important than the White House during the NFL season, couldn’t get him off his couch. Jack smelled blood and went for the kill, parodying Shirley’s style (“The way it came across on Channel 9”) and sneeringly referring to the Post by its advertising slogan (“Over at ‘Quoted, Honored and Consulted’”).

It was not for nothing then that the Post never hired Jack full-time after the Daily News and his subsequent employer, the Washington Star, went belly up. To tell the truth, I was surprised he got so much as a freelance assignment at the Post, but when Casey Stengel died, there was that byline – Jack Mann – on the front of the next day’s sports page. I doubt the old Professor got a better sendoff. And there would be more pieces by Jack, not a lot of them but enough to keep his name alive. I still wonder how hard George Solomon, who was then settling into his job as the Post’s sports editor, had to fight for Jack. But they had worked together at the Daily News, and George understood just how good Jack was.

To read his prose was to get a sense of the man at the typewriter. It was blunt, no-nonsense, and it could, on certain occasions, feel like a punch in the mouth. And yet, while lyricism wasn’t his game, he wove enough literary allusions into his work to let readers in on the fact that he knew Hester Prynne wasn’t a baseball Annie from Boston.

(more…)

Eduardo Nunez plates the Yankees first run in the second inning (Photo: AP).

One of the charming things about baseball is the big spot always seems to find a player who is facing increased scrutiny. In the second inning of the Yankees’ series opener against the Texas Rangers, that’s exactly what happened when Eduardo Nunez strolled to the plate with the bases loaded.

Earlier in the day, Nunez was thrust into the spotlight when it was announced that the Captain’s Quest for 3,000 hits would be put on hold for at least 15 days. As a result, the rookie was given an invaluable gift just one day shy of his 24th birthday: a prolonged chance to prove he can play shortstop in the major leagues.

With six professional seasons and nearly 3,000 minor league plate appearances under his belt, Nunez has patiently bided his time for an opportunity to play regularly in the majors, and thanks to yet another rain delay in the Bronx, the eager rookie would have to wait an extra 45 minutes. Once the game started, however, Nunez took immediate advantage of his new found opportunity by lining a run scoring single to left field in his first at bat of the game. While the Yankees hope Nunez’ base hit bodes well for the next 15 games, the clutch hit proved invaluable in helping the team put last night’s bitter 1-0 defeat* behind them.

*According to Elias, the Yankees became the first team in the DH era to lose a game 1-0 after loading the bases with no outs in the first inning.

Alexi Ogando entered the game at 7-0 with a 2.10 ERA, so had the Yankees squandered another early opportunity, who knows if they would have had a chance to score again. As things turned out, the Bronx Bombers scored early and often, knocking Ogando out of the game after only 1 2/3 innings. In addition to marring his perfect record with a loss, Ogando also failed to go at least six innings for the first time all season.

Unlike in many games over the first third of the season, the Yankees didn’t rest on the laurels of their six-run second inning. Instead, the team doubled its run output over the next four innings, thanks in large part to home runs by Nick Swisher, Robinson Cano and Curtis Granderson, whose sixth inning homer tied Jose Bautista for the league lead with 21.

The Yankees have scored at least 12 runs on five occasions, and each time Sabathia has been on the mound. Perhaps that’s why after being staked to a big lead, C.C. seemed to channel his inner Jack Morris by pitching to the score? After all, he’s certainly had enough practice. Whatever the reason, the Rangers did threaten in the middle innings, but each time they tried to truly climb back into the game, the Yankees’ ace slammed the door.

Despite turning in a solid seven innings, the most impressive part of Sabathia’s outing had nothing to do with his pitching. In the first inning, the big lefty and first baseman Jorge Posada combined on two 3-1 putouts. With the image of Bartolo Colon pulling up lame on a similar play still fresh in the Yankees’ consciousness, you can just image the thoughts running through Joe Girardi’s head as his ace pitcher sprinted at full speed across the wet infield grass.

All season, the Yankees’ offense has been difficult to figure out. On the one hand, it currently ranks among the league leaders in various categories, while on the other, it has exhibited maddening inconsistency. Although scoring 12 runs is a satisfying response to the previous day’s shutout, it would be better if the offense could avoid going to such extremes…or, at the very least, find a way to have their outbursts when a different pitcher is on the mound.

Yanks vs Rangers tonight in the Bronx.

Cliff has the preview and we root:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Andrew C Ko]

Is Derek Jeter headed for the disabled list? That’s a good possibility. Via Twitter, here’s Joel Sherman: “More hints Jeter to DL: My colleague, George King, says Ramiro Pena is at Stadium.” With the Yanks headed to the National League this weekend, makes sense, no?

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]

Check out this cool photo gallery of Brooklyn circa 1974.

Dig this wonderful piece by Jhumpa Lahiri from last week’s issue of The New Yorker:

Books, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to possess as a child. Even then, the possession was not literal; my father is a librarian, and perhaps because he believed in collective property, or perhaps because my parents considered buying books for me an extravagance, or perhaps because people generally acquired less then than they do now, I had almost no books to call my own. I remember coveting and eventually being permitted to own a book for the first time. I was five or six. The book was diminutive, about four inches square, and was called “You’ll Never Have to Look for Friends.” It lived among the penny candy and the Wacky Packs at the old-fashioned general store across the street from our first house in Rhode Island. The plot was trite, more an extended greeting card than a story. But I remember the excitement of watching my mother purchase it for me and of bringing it home. Inside the front cover, beneath the declaration “This book is especially for,” was a line on which to write my name. My mother did so, and also wrote the word “mother” to indicate that the book had been given to me by her, though I did not call her Mother but Ma. “Mother” was an alternate guardian. But she had given me a book that, nearly forty years later, still dwells on a bookcase in my childhood room.

Our house was not devoid of things to read, but the offerings felt scant, and were of little interest to me. There were books about China and Russia that my father read for his graduate studies in political science, and issues of Time that he read to relax. My mother owned novels and short stories and stacks of a literary magazine called Desh, but they were in Bengali, even the titles illegible to me. She kept her reading material on metal shelves in the basement, or off limits by her bedside. I remember a yellow volume of lyrics by the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, which seemed to be a holy text to her, and a thick, fraying English dictionary with a maroon cover that was pulled out for Scrabble games. At one point, we bought the first few volumes of a set of encyclopedias that the supermarket where we shopped was promoting, but we never got them all. There was an arbitrary, haphazard quality to the books in our house, as there was to certain other aspects of our material lives. I craved the opposite: a house where books were a solid presence, piled on every surface and cheerfully lining the walls. At times, my family’s effort to fill our house with books seemed thwarted; this was the case when my father mounted rods and brackets to hold a set of olive-green shelves. Within a few days the shelves collapsed, the Sheetrocked walls of our seventies-era Colonial unable to support them.

What I really sought was a better-marked trail of my parents’ intellectual lives: bound and printed evidence of what they’d read, what had inspired and shaped their minds. A connection, via books, between them and me. But my parents did not read to me or tell me stories; my father did not read any fiction, and the stories my mother may have loved as a young girl in Calcutta were not passed down. My first experience of hearing stories aloud occurred the only time I met my maternal grandfather, when I was two, during my first visit to India. He would lie back on a bed and prop me up on his chest and invent things to tell me. I am told that the two of us stayed up long after everyone else had gone to sleep, and that my grandfather kept extending these stories, because I insisted that they not end.