Michael Pineda was impressive in his return and Dellin Betances was dynamite until he gave up a game-tying solo home run, but when Adam Jones hit a back-breaking 3-run home run off Shawn Kelly, all you could do is sit there and take it. The Yankees have been kicking the crap out of the Orioles–or at least getting the better of them–for 20 years. This season, the Orioles are enjoying some sweet revenge.

They’re due.

Final Score: Orioles 5, Yanks 3. 

Man, the Yanks are on the skids and the are O’s are rollin’ as Michael Pineda returns. Good to have his big ass back.

Let’s hope the boys can get the “W” on the road tonight for B-Girl Betty Bacall, born and raised in the Bronx.

I’m feelin’ this line-up.

Brett Gardner LF
Derek Jeter SS
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Carlos Beltran DH
Chase Headley 3B
Stephen Drew 2B
Martin Prado RF
Francisco Cervelli C

Never mind the Boids:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Betty.

Read this.

I remember my mother reading Bacall’s autobiography when I was a kid. It won a National Book Award and is one of the finest Hollywood memoirs, not only for her life with Bogart but for her life after him.

The picture on the back cover was something I looked at a lot. Man, she was so glamorous and I imaged that my mother and father were that romantic when they met. My mom was a beautiful young woman but her romance–and marriage–to my father did not last. Still, she pushed on, and was not defeated. I’ve always thought that Bacall’s book helped her out during the painful early days of her divorce.

Tonight’s game is rained out.

In the meantime, what if Robin Williams played Casey Stengel?

And more:

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]

The Yanks got pounded by the Orioles last night but it was hard to care after hearing the news that Robin Williams died.

From The Last Laugh By Phil Berger:

The idea that comic success did not equate strictly to laughs was a lesson [Larry] Brezner [the youngest partner in the Rollins/Joffe talent agency] had learned from Rollins several years before. “We were handling a comic in the 1970s who absolutely murdered an audience one night,” Brezner recalls. ” A standing ovation. Jack and I are walking over the party following the show. And I see a lock on Jack’s face. I say, ‘Jack, he got a standing ovation. You look disappointed.’ And he said: ‘Lad, it’s not what you do on the stage that counts, it’s what’s on the stage when you’ve left.’ Meaning, there are comics who make you laugh, and twenty-five minutes after, you’re left with nothing. Woody Allen didn’t give you huge laughs, but when he finished his last line, he’d taken on a persona over and above what he had done on stage.

“It was the most important thing Jack ever said to me. And a few years later with Robin, our ideas was he could be something better—that all he had to do is give himself a chance to do it. In those days, Robin had a character—and old man who’d feed the pigeons and talk about what had happened before World War III. He didn’t realize the potentially touching nature of the character. We convinced him at the end of his act to have the character say two or three funny things and then play the character for real. Told him not to worry if he gets laughs. Let the character talk about the foolishness of mankind. And then take the quiet moment walk offstage. We felt that after forty-five minutes of hysteria…do this and he’d elevate himself to an energetic freethinking comic, and one who could act as well….And I tell you, when he took the quiet moment and walked offstage without a laugh, the applause was deafening. You know, sitting in the audience, you’d just seen something special. He’d touched you. He left something on the stage for you.”

Robin Williams was one of my favorites when I was growing up. I remember him first as Mork. I saw Popeye in the theater when I was 9 years old then played the soundtrack album with my brother and sister until we wore it out. The World According to Garp was on heavy rotation on HBO not long after and I loved him in Moscow on the Hudson--which is still a favorite. His work in the PBS movie of Saul Bellow’s novella Seize the Day suggested he could go deep without the shtick.

Throughout the decade, I rooted for him to have a hit movie, which he eventually scored with Good Morning, Vietnam. Meanwhile, I memorized his second and third albums–Throbbing Python of Love (1983) and A Night at the Met (1986). They were such a part of the fabric of my teenage years I can’t even pinpoint a favorite routine–he was just always there.

During my senior year of high school Williams was in a short-lived production of ​Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center. Directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Steve Martin, F. Murray Abraham, and the great Bill Irwin (who stole the show with a mesmerizing rendition of Lucky’s monologue), it was almost impossible to get a seat. Tickets weren’t sold to the public and Lincoln Center subscribers entered a lottery to get a chance to see the show. My high school French teacher happened to be one of those lucky subscribers–and she had an extra ticket. I told her I’d read the play in French–which I didn’t–and even though I’d dropped her course the previous semester, she took me.

I remember seeing Mary Tyler Moore and Mikhail Baryshnikov and Candice Bergen at the small Mitzi Newhouse theater. What the hell did I know but I thought the production was terrific, even though the critics panned it.

The following year, I had a job working as a messenger for a post production company in the Brill Building when Williams was in Awakenings with Robert De Niro. We transferred De Niro’s footage to videotape and when I wasn’t out on an errand I could sit in the machine room and watch. Penny Marshall, the film’s director, shot a ton of film, and although the movie is somber, Williams consistently broke De Niro up during takes.

I didn’t follow him as much in the Nineties after he became a huge movie star. Too many of his choices just seemed uninteresting, though he did have a few more moments left in him.

When I heard the news of his death today, I went to my bookshelf and pulled down a few Pauline Kael collections. Dig…

Popeye:

Robin Williams, who plays Popeye, has been given Popeye’s bulging forearms, and he has mastered the cartoon figure: the one-eyed squint that comes from talking with a corncob pipe in the mouth; the gruff, raspy voice; the personal patois, with “t” and “k” transposed; the shoulder-first swagger walk; the dancing acrobatics; the speedy round-the-world punch that requires winding up the wrist. He’s wonderful at all this mimicry. His cropped carrot-colored hair makes him look like a little kid, and his one blue eye is startlingly bright. He does prodigious work. But he never gets beyond the cartoon, never gives it anything of himself. And so he recedes, is swallowed up in the crowded background.

The Survivors:

The movie flits about, and there are spots where a viewer might nod off, but I enjoyed a surprising amount of it, and I think that Robin Williams’ work in it transcends the films’ flaws.

Williams plays Donald, a junior executive who gets fired on the same day that Matthau, as Sonny Paulso, the owner of a service station, loses his business. They meet at a lunch counter, where each man is trying to drown his sorrow in a cup of coffee. Being fired seems to have thrown a switch in Donald’s skull, wand when a masked holdup man (Jerry Reed) tries to rob the coffee shop he puts up such a squawk that Paluso goes to his aid, and together they disarm the bandit and, briefly, become media heroes. The whole experience of being fired and feeling helpless in front of the armed robber and getting on television turns Donald’s head. He becomes gun-crazy, buys an arsenal, and goes off for a course of training in survival tactics at a camp in New England; he wants to learn how to be violent, so he can live in the wild and protect himself when the social order collapses. The comedy is in the contrasting natures of Donald and Paluso. Everything surprises Donald. He’s a sweet-natured hysteric who over responds to every stimulus. He has the nervous system of an infant; the transitions between mood changes aren’t visible—he doesn’t consider, he reacts. Paluso is the opposite. Nothing surprises him; he gives the impression of having learned all there is to know about survival (in the big city) long ago. He’s cautious and jaundiced, with the kind of cynicism that used to be ascribed to Manhattan cabbies. And when the would-be-robber (a sociopath with delusions of being a big-time hit man and of having killed Jimmy Hoffa) is released from custody and goes after the two men, Paluso tries to get Donald to behave rationally—i.e., cravenly—so they won’t both be killed.

The best thing about this framework is that it permits Robin Williams to be himself and yet to be Donald. He acts with an emotional purity that I can’t pretend to understand. Williams expostulates all through the movie; he sputters out his short-circuited thoughts. He seems to be free-associating twenty-four hours a day; you know that his mind is racing even when he sleeps. And this spritzing never seems false or prepared. He spritzes in character.  It’s like a child’s stream-of-consciousness: you see him making mad comparisons and landing from mental leaps, but you never see him take off. A lot of the comedy comes from him being a grownup with this ranting little kid inside him…He uses his hairy, broad-chested, no-neck body for the naked “universal” emotions that mimes strive for, and he achieves them (in a speeded-up form) without attaching big labels to them. He may be that rarity, a fearless actor.

Moscow on the Hudson​:

Mazursky’s instinct was really working for him when he paired Robins Williams with Maria Conchita Alonso, a Venezuelan beauty who’s an unself-conscious cutup, like the young Sophia Loren, and has a glorious, full-choppered grin. Her Lucia is outgoing, independent, shunshiny; she has come to this country to make something of herself—she would like to be a newscaster. Robin Williams’ Vlad is an anonymous Soviet man hoping for the creature comforts of a home and a family—a supplicant always. The bathtub scene, in which Lucia leans back against his furry chest while his furry arms enclose her, is physical in a way that disposes of the steam-house contortions of the lovers in Against All Odds. These two suggest real people.

Club Paradise:

As the club’s social director, Robin Williams is the picture’s m.c., and his role is largely reactive. He doesn’t have a chance to do the kind of acting he did in The Best of Times or Moscow on the Hudson, but it’s surprisingly enjoyable to see him when he isn’t charged up. He gives the movie a sane, low-key center. His lines are mostly asides or are given the sound of asides, and he’s congenial—he has a graceful style that he adapts to each of his several partners. In the early sequences, he persuades Twiggy to leave the yachting party she arrived with and stay with him, and he does it without coming on strong. That’s why she’s attracted to him; he’s honest and, in some unfathomable way, winning. Twiggy doesn’t have running gags or terrific lines, but she does radiant double takes on Robin Williams’ good lines—she’s charming. In Williams’ friendship and business partnership with Jimmy Cliff, it’s taken for granted that we’ll perceive what makes them trust each other, and we do. Perhaps most surprising is Williams’ nifty teamwork with Peter O’Toole, who plays the governor-general of this flyspeck British island. When Robin Williams and the dulcet-voiced, eloquent O’Toole talk together, their two styles of acting mesh almost conspiratorially.

Good Morning, Vietnam:

The only fresh element in American movies in the eighties may be what Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Bette Midler, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, and other comedians have brought to them. They’ve stirred things up even when they’ve been in squalid excuses for movies (such as Martin’s current hit, Planes, Trains and Automobiles). The one with the best record is Robin Williams…he hasn’t had many hits, but his films weren’t smarm—not until now. His new picture, Good Morning, Vietnam, makes him out to be a vulnerable, compassionate, respectful-of-the-Vietnamese, wonderful guy, and the director, Barry Levinson, has a numbing sense of rhythm: he labors the jokes.

…The role makes it possible for Williams to do his own manic riffs, but they’re chopped shorts—they don’t get a chance to build. And we might as well be listening to a laugh track; we’re told Adrian is funny, instead of being allowed to discover it….This movie has the bad judgment to turn Robin Williams into a role model. Good Morning, Vietnam takes a real culture hero and turns him into a false one.

Dead Poets Society:

Robin Williams’ performance is more graceful than anything he’s done before. He’s more restrained, yet he’s brisk, enlivening, a perky, wiry fellow.

Williams stays in character, but he understands that a teacher who wakes kids up is likely to be a standup performer, maybe even a comic, and certainly quick on his feet. Williams reads his lines stunningly (he’s playing a bright man), and when he mimics various actors reciting Shakespeare there’s no undue clowning in it; he’s a gifted teacher demonstrating his skills. That’s what he’s doing when he hops around the classroom and makes the kids laugh.

Awakenings:

This is another one of Robin Williams’ benevolent-eunuch roles. He’s the good man here, as he was in Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society, and he does a fine job of it: he shows warmth and reticence and empathy that Dr. Sayer needs. Sayer needs something else, though, in order to be a real character: some ruthlessness, perhaps, or more egotism—something to keep him from being a noble fud. And Williams shouldn’t have to hold himself in like this. He’d better move on, before he turns into the movies’ permanent winsome messiah.

And from a 1992 interview in the Oxford-American with Marc Smirnoff:

I love what Robin Williams did in The Fisher King which came out after the period I reviewed in [Movie Love]. Have you seen it? The acting in it is really extraordinary…Williams may be playing the holy fool, which he’s played before and which I found tiresome in Awakenings, but in the Fisher King I thought he was really great.

I had the Yankee game on when my friend Alan called to commiserate. In the top of the second the Yankees scored a couple of runs on a play where the Orioles committed two errors and looked like something spun out of a Mack Sennett production. All that was missing was a pie in the face and a bottle of seltzer. For that moment we stopped being sad and thought of Robin Williams and laughed.

[Featured image by Annie Leibovitz]

Nah, just feels that way is all. The Yanks are in Baltimore for 3 games and this has one of those nail in the coffin vibes about it for the Yanks. Yet even if they do get swept our boys aren’t out of contention for that second wild card. Still, for the first time in a long time the locals might cheer louder than the out of towners.

Good news is that Michael Pineda returns to the team to start on Wednesday.

Hey, anything can happen.

Brett Gardner LF
Derek Jeter SS
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Carlos Beltran DH
Chase Headley 3B
Stephen Drew 2B
Martin Prado RF
Francisco Cervelli C

Never mind dem doity Boids:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Constantine Manos via This Isn’t Happiness]

This looks like fun.

The Yankees scored 10 runs on Friday night and didn’t score again until Jacoby Ellsbury hit a solo home run today in the 9th inning.

Right.

The up-and-down Yankees end the weekend on a down note, falling to the Indians, 4-1.

[Featured Image via]

It’s our man Hiroki as the Yanks look for the series win this afternoon at the Stadium against the Indians.

1. Brett Gardner LF

2. Derek Jeter SS

3. Jacoby Ellsbury CF

4. Mark Teixeira 1B

5. Carlos Beltran DH

6. Stephen Drew 2B

7. Martin Prado 3B

8. Ichiro Suzuki RF

9. Francisco Cervelli C

Never mind the heat:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: RGB to CMYK]

Summertime.

Painting by Joel Meyrowitz via Lover of Beauty.

Yanks had their chances but could not do anything with them as they fell to the Indians 3-0 after the organization honored Paul O’Neill.

[Photo Credit: Bruce Davidson]

It’s the Yanks and Indians again this afternoon at the Stadium.

Never mind the sun rays:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Martha Cooper]

And survive a comeback…Carlos Beltran with a grand slam.

Final score: Yanks 10, Indians 6. 

And more good news–Michael Pineda is on his way back.  The one note of concern–Brian McCann suffered a mild concussion. 

Drawing by Jack Kirby. 

Call me Esmil…

Brett Gardner LF
Derek Jeter SS
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Carlos Beltran DH
Brian McCann C
Chase Headley 1B
Stephen Drew 2B
Martin Prado 3B
Ichiro Suzuki RF

Never mind the Tribe:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: MPD]

The kid Shane Greene pitched into the 9th inning yesterday afternoon at the Stadium. He was removed from the game when he gave up a base hit to start the final inning, his team hanging on to a 1-0 lead. Greene walked off the field stoically, didn’t even tip his cap. Ah, the demeanor of a baseball redass.

David Robertson relieved him, walked Victor Martinez, and then had to contend with pinch-hitter, Miguel Cabrera, all of Greene’s fine work, hanging in the balance. Robertson got Cabrera to hit a ground ball up the middle. The second baseman Brendan Ryan fielded the ball, stepped on second and whipped the ball to first to complete the double play. Then Don Kelly hit a soft line drive to Stephen Drew at short, Yankees win: cue Sinatra.

Four close games and the Yanks took three of them against the Tigers.

Not bad, indeed.

[Picture by Bags]

Game Thread powers, activate!

Brett Gardner LF
Martin Prado 3B
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Carlos Beltran DH
Chase Headley 1B
Stephen Drew SS
Francisco Cervelli C
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Brendan Ryan 2B

RHP Shane Greene (2-1, 3.68)

Lineup via LoHud

[Photo Credit: Opdrie]

Justin Verlander is broken; that’s the word anyway. He had off-season surgery on his core muscles and he’s responded with possibly the worst season of his career. (It’s definitely due to my ignorance of the human anantomy, but when I hear “core muscles” I think of some heavily-fortified, organic power core, like the center of the Death Star.) We know something about this kind of stink – CC Sabathia fell off dramatically last year and instead of rebounding, looks like he’s crashed through floor and it’s an open question whether or not there’s a crane in existence equipped to lift him out.

Verlander is not Sabathia however. He’s younger, slimmer and still taking the ball every fifth day. His diminished velocity had him throwing in the 91-93 range last night with the power to kick it up to 95 mph when facing Carlos Beltran in a big spot in the fourth. Verlander owerpowered Beltran with the fastballs and then put him away with a baffling change-up.

With a curve ball bending mostly to his will, Verlander did not look broken last night. He didn’t look like the pitcher he was in 2011-2012, but he was good. The Yankees didn’t get to him at all until the fourth and they didn’t do any real damage until the fifth. 

Credit Paul O’Neill with the blueprint for how to beat him last night. After watching Verlander cruise through the early part of the game, O’Neill said he might only make a few mistakes tonight and that the Yankees better hope those mistakes end up in the seats. Chase Headley did the honors in the fifth, clubbing a less-than-baffling change into the second deck in right. And then Brian McCann did the same to one of those low 90s fastballs in the seventh. 

Another solid contribution from the booth accompanied McCann’s blast as Michael Kay noted that Verlander’s late-game velocity was nothing like it used to be. Hard to imagine McCann turning on that high fastball on the outer edge if it was 97 instead of 91. (We get on the announcers a lot so it’s only fair to point out when they make a good point, no?)

But how to make two solo homers stand up against the division-leading Tigers? Chris Capuano dealing is one way I guess. Derek Jeter booted the first play of the game and that set-up the Tigers’ only run off Capuano. Thanks to change-up that did not deviate from baffling all night, he never really faced any trouble until the Tigers paired two-singles in the seventh. Adam Warren shut down that inning and then stuck around to help himself out of what could have been a back-breaking eighth.

After Stephen Drew made corned beef hash out of a grounder, the tying and go-ahead runs were on third with one out. Adam Warren fell behind the suddenly dangerous J.D. Martinez 3-0 and pumped three fastballs in there for the crucial whiff. Strikes two and three were of the giddy-up variety, challenging Martinez high in the zone and blowing him away.

The Yankees scored insurance runs in their part of the eighth, which are truly some of the best kinds of runs for my money. Warren’s heroics after Capuano’s heavy-lifitng gave both Betances and Robertson a much deserved night off and the Yankees won 5-1. The Yankees look to take a shocking-but-necessary three of four from the Tigers this afternoon. This typically would be a day for a house money lineup, but not this is not the season for one. All hands on deck please.

Image via moggyblog (Copyright by the owner)

Yeah, Chris Capuano. Perhaps he’s a good dude. I just don’t have a ton of faith in him holding down the Tigers’ offense, do you?

Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

Brett Gardner LF
Derek Jeter SS
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Carlos Beltran DH
Brian McCann C
Chase Headley 3B
Stephen Drew 2B
Martin Prado RF

Never mind those long fly balls:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Man, this review of Thomas Beller‘s slender new biography of J.D. Salinger, really speaks to me. Writing in the Times Book Review, here’s Cathleen Schine:

Salinger, Beller notes, writes about New York landmarks like Grand Central Terminal or the Museum of Natural History in an “offhanded way. . . . They are not monuments to be ogled, they are part of the landscape through which his characters move.” Beller writes about New York in the same easy, familiar way. He has also found a way to write about J. D. Salinger, surely a literary monument if ever there was one, without ogling. Salinger, like New York, becomes inevitable, a landscape.

…Because Beller gets New York with all its nuances of class and money, he understands the Salinger family’s triumphant rise from Upper Broadway to Park Avenue and what it must have meant not just to the proud parents, but also to a boy leaving the familiar Jewish West Side for the WASPy Upper East Side. Beller bestows on his insights an invigorating physicality. As he stands in Central Park one cold, blustery day facing the now defunct private school Salinger entered in 1932 (and was expelled from in 1934), he says, “A lot can happen in the interval between school and home, especially when school and home are two points at opposite corners of Central Park.” With that simple observation — that Salinger made his way across the park twice a day, five days a week, often getting home just in time for dinner — the park’s prominence in “The Catcher in the Rye” and other Salinger works takes on a new poignancy. But the park and the city are there, Beller says, “in all kinds of ways that are less quantifiable.” A writer’s influences can be “nonliterary and often unconscious. The street lamps in Central Park at dusk, or the gray hexagonal-block sidewalks that line the perimeter of the park, which look the same today as they did when J. D. Salinger was a kid, are present in his writing without ever being mentioned. The city is itself a worn and used thing, the stones smoothed by a million heels pounding on them like tidal waves on rocks, its landscape unforgiving but also a refuge to which one can adapt, and within which one can, at least for an afternoon, disappear.”

[Photo Credit: Ric Garrido via Loyalty Traveler]

As previously mentioned, happiness and frustration with these 2014 Yankees are never far apart. The Yanks had a 3-1 lead against the Tigers last night with David Price on the mound but couldn’t hold it and Alex Avila’s solo home run in the 12th inning was the difference.

Tiger 4, Yanks 3.

Tough game. What I’ll remember most is Dellin Betances facing the great Miguel Cabrera. He fell behind 2-0 and so you figure he’ll throw a fastball, right? Nah, nasty breaking ball, off the outside corner. Cabrera swung and missed. Then, fastball, just off the plate, but too tempting to lay off. One hundred miles per hour, and Cabrera swung through that too. He waved at the next one, another hundred mile an hour fastball. Nifty. And something tells me he’ll touch Mr. Betances one day as revenge.

[Photo Via: Forgotten New York]