The first time I hit the wax it was the news of my block/Everybody in my neighborhood said “Puba don’t stop.”

“Mind Your Business” Grand Puba (unreleased remix)

[Picture by Bags]

What’s the last book you bought on the street? I can’t remember myself, but I know I picked something up this spring. My cousin found a copy of Pauline Kael’s State of the Art on a brownstone stoop near his home in Brooklyn earlier this year and sent it to me. Twenty minutes after he found it a thunder storm hit. Book would have been ruined. I’m glad it’s got a good home here in the Bronx.

[Picture by Bags]

Paintings by Melissa Haslam via My Modern Met.

Derek Jeter jumped the first pitch of the game like a spring-loaded mouse trap. It was a fastball, of the let’s-get-ahead-in-the-count variety from Francisco Liriano, and by the time Jeter’s bat sprung through the strike zone, all that was left was a bloody stump. The ball sliced through the twilight and cleared the fence with ease. I worried that the game had just yielded it’s marquee moment, making the prospect of the ensuing nine innings rather daunting.

Derek Jeter’s resurgence has been well noted around these parts and much of our focus as been on the future. How many more hits can he get? How many more contracts? It’s been the best part of the season. Well here’s something encouraging: In Derek Jeter’s career from 1998-2009, he slugged under .400 in two consecutive months just three times (September 2003-April 2004, May-June 2006, April-May 2008). From May 2010 to June 2011, Derek Jeter has slugged under .400 for eight consecutive months. In the last eight months of play, he’s been over .400 six times.

I don’t mean to say we should expect vintage Jeter for any extended period of time, but at least we can guess that the Ceti-eel that crawled into his aural canal, wrapped itself around his cerebellum and sapped his strength for 2010 and half of 2011 has died and been expelled. Probably through the nasal cavity with a mess of blood and pus. If Jeter stops hitting for power in 2013, we’ll know it laid eggs.

About the other nine innings… I don’t want to alarm you, but Ivan Nova let up a few extra base hits. A double and a triple. A solo homer. A grand slam. That’s another thing that’s so encouraging about Jeter’s re-found power, he’s slugging over .400 without the benefit of facing Ivan Nova. Nova has allowed the most extra base hits in the league and watching him pitch several times this year, I’m not going to bother fact-checking that statement. It just reeks of truthiness.

Francisco Liriano matched up with an umpire that wouldn’t give him a millimeter, let alone an inch. I figured the Yankees would recognize this and walk around the bases. But apart from Mark Teixeira and Andruw Jones, nobody was interested in that approach. Liriano made it through six innings. Almost any other Yankee team in the last fifteen years would have knocked him out in the fourth.

The Yankees lost 7-3 and were reduced to staring at the scoreboard and hoping the Royals would eke out a run against the Rays. The Royals came through and won 1-0 in ten innings. A sigh of relief for the Yanks, I guess. Four games seems a lot bigger than three, but it’s not really.

Photo via AP/Charles Rex Arbogast

Last night? Bad loss. Tonight? A new game.

Notes from Chad Jennings.

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Robinson Cano 2B
Mark Teixeira 1B
Andruw Jones LF
Curtis Granderson CF
Jayson Nix 3B
Casey McGehee DH
Russell Martin C

Never mind the preamble: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

A city scene circa the late 1920s, early 1930s from the great Walker Evans.

Man, you ever walk over an open grate or sewer with your keys in your hands and then get the Willies like, Whew, I could have just done something mad stupid there?

From the Times Literary Supplement, here’s Vladimir Nabokov on boxing.

Picture by Jesse Lenz.

I want this.

[Photo Via: Food Addict]

Sure, it’s Tuesday morning but you can never go wrong with this jam:

[Photo Via: Dollar Menu]

Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller Jaws is commonly regarded as the first summer blockbuster and as a result, the movie that lead to the death of the creative boom of “New Hollywood” in the late 60s and early 70s. Its influence on not just the movies that followed in its wake, but also the marketing, business and making of movies is incalculable. However, even among film fans who bemoan the changes that the massive success of Jaws brought on, it’s hard to find anyone who dislikes the movie itself. Unlike many sudden cinema phenomena, Jaws has had remarkable staying power, enchanting and scaring the wits out of audiences via cable TV and home video ever since owning the box-office in the summer of ’75.

What’s more is that instead of simply being a nostalgia trip that doesn’t really live up to the adoring affection of its hard core fans (I’m looking at you, Star Wars geeks), Jaws holds its own as a great movie. I know personally, the summer doesn’t feel complete without at least one evening spent watching Brody, Quint and Hooper aboard the Orca. All of this leads to the excitement surrounding the recent Blu-ray debut of Jaws earlier this month.  The good news is that the movie hasn’t looked or sounded this good since the summer of ’75. (See the excellent review and screen capture comparisons here at the invaluable website, DVD Beaver.)

I recently read Peter Benchley’s novel of the same name for the first time, and I was eager to watch the movie again, comparing and contrasting what was kept, what was changed and what was completely eliminated for the screenplay, written largely by Carl Gottlieb (who also appears in the film as Meadows, the editor of the Amity town newspaper), with help from Benchley and uncredited work by playwright Howard Sackler, John Milius and Jaws co-star Robert Shaw.  The novel Jaws was better than I’d expected it to be, but the screenplay and movie are a vast improvement.

It’s easy to jump on the obvious reasons the movie worked in ’75 and still works now – terrific performances by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Murray Hamilton and especially Robert Shaw, John Williams’ memorable score, Spielberg’s taut direction. Other reasons the film became a classic are less obvious, but no less important. The technological limits of the mid 70s meant that we didn’t see much of the shark. There was no CGI, and the mechanical shark was rarely functioning properly during the shoot.

The happy result is that the moments when we do actually see the shark make a huge impact and still make people jump in their seats. Spielberg has said that if he’d made the movie 30 years later, he would have used new technology, we would have seen a lot more of the shark and the resulting movie, by his own admission wouldn’t have been nearly as good.  The audience relies on Williams’ score, POV shots of swimmers and clever visual cues like the floating barrels to let us know that the shark has returned to wreak havoc.

Another element that keeps the movie from being a staid, formulaic monster movie is Spielberg’s insistence on shooting on Martha’s Vineyard and on the Atlantic Ocean instead of in Hollywood. The Jaws shoot took over the island for months and incorporated many locals into the cast, not only as extras, but in key speaking parts as well. The organic small-town America feel of Amity Island would have been lost on the Universal lot. The film plays upon primal human fears; not simply that there are beasts in the wild who can kill and maim us when we least expect it, but also more mundane fears about losing our businesses, losing our standing in a community or within our family. It’s also simply a hell of a lot of fun.

If you haven’t seen it in years, or if you’re like me and can quote random lines from the movie at will, or if for some strange quirk of fate you’ve never seen Jaws, the new Blu-ray edition comes highly recommended.

Some games are uglier than others and last night was a slow, boring game between the Yankees and White Sox. It was the kind of game that was going to feel painful for the losing team, more than usual. Not because it was dramatic, either. But because each pitcher threw 473 pitches to each hitter.

The Yanks had an early 3-0 lead and chased Gavin Floyd from the game in the third inning but only had a three run lead. Should have been more. It was no surprise when the White Sox scored five in the fifth, chasing Freddy Garcia, who’d been sharp in the early innings. At one point, with two men on base, and just one out, Garcia fell behind Paul Konerko 2-0. The YES camera showed Yankee pitching coach Larry Rothschild in the dugout. The man sighed and that expression summed up the game.

Yanks took the lead back in the sixth when they scored three runs–Jeter hit a dinger and oh yeah, went 4-5 on the night–but the bullpen gave it right back as the White Sox won, 9-6.

An unbecoming outing for the Yankee pitching staff.

And the Rays are now four back…Creepin’.

Due to a lapse in judgement by my dumb ass the site was out-of-service for a good portion of the day. I apologize. However, we’re back and what did we miss? The Rocket Rides Again; Michael Pineda picked-up for drunk driving.

Hell, at least Tex is back.

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher DH
Robinson Cano 2B
Mark Teixeira 1B
Curtis Granderson CF
Eric Chavez 3B
Raul Ibanez LF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Chris Stewart C

It’s Fab Five Freddy.

Never mind the moron behind this blog’s curtain: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Cuba Beisbol via It’s a Long Season]

Alex had some issues with the domain name this morning, so some of you may have had some issues accessing the site. The issue is fixed now, but it may take a number of hours for domain name caches out in the wild to clear. Alex is one of those still affected, so there may not be any posts from him this morning. Sorry for any inconvenience.

As crazy as it might sound, I don’t get as much pleasure out of watching the Yankees beat up on Josh Beckett anymore. He’s still the bad guy, but it simply isn’t as much fun when you expect him to get rocked, you know? Heck, even Red Sox fans are tired of him, so it’s hard for me to summon the energy to despise him. The cocky, young kid who silenced the Yankee bats to clinch a World Series almost a decade ago has somehow become just another pitcher, kind of like the neighborhood dog that chased you mercilessly when you were a kid, but years later couldn’t rise from his front porch.

And so it was on Sunday night.

Derek Jeter jumped on Beckett’s second pitch of the night and sent it deep over the head of Jacoby Ellsbury in center field for a double, and eventually came home on a two-out double from Curtis Granderson, and the Yanks were off and running. Beckett was stewing.

That one run almost looked like it would be enough. Hiroki Kuroda was on the mound for the Yankees, fresh off his two-hit shutout of the Texas Rangers, and he picked up right where he left off. He set down the first eight hitters without incident before Nick Punto singled, then cruised through the next three innings allowing just another harmless single. Suddenly it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine him starting Game 1 in October.

To give Kuroda a bit of a cushion, the Yankee hitters chipped in a run here and a run there. With one out in the third, Jeter replayed his first inning at bat and crushed another double over Ellsbury’s head, this one bouncing over the wall. Nick Swisher followed that with a walk, and then Jeter and Swisher pulled off a double steal without a throw. Beckett’s next pitch skipped away from Jarod Saltalamacchia, allowing Jeter to score, and it was 2-0.

In the fourth inning, Ichiro came up to the plate with two outs. I always liked watching Ichiro hit, so it hasn’t been hard for me to start rooting for him as a Yankee. You would always here people talk about how he would effortlessly put balls into the seats during batting practice and claim that he could hit twenty or thirty homers a season if he wanted to, and he gave proof in this at bat. Beckett left a pitch up in the zone, and Ichiro jumped all over it, rifling it into the seats in right for a 3-0 Yankee lead. Two innings later he shot another ball into the bleachers, just because he could. I know the Moneyball folks led an OPS-driven backlash against Ichiro early in his career, but as he stepped to the top of the dugout steps, lifting his helmet to reveal his greying hair as he acknowledged the cheering crowd, I could only think that this was one of the best hitters ever to play the game.

Kuroda was still on the mound in the top of the seventh when the revitalized Adrian González homered to right. Since González plays first base for my fantasy team (Mike Pagliarulo Fan Club), I couldn’t get too broken up over it, and neither did Kuroda, though perhaps for different reasons. He finished the seventh, then ended his night by setting down the Sox in order in the eighth. Rafael Soriano untucked the ninth, and the game was over. Yankees 4, Red Sox 1.

[Photo Credit: Jason Szenes/Getty Images]

With the Rays and O’s on their heels, this ain’t no time for the Yanks to let up.

It’s Hiroki vs that sombitch Beckett.

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Curtis Granderson CF
Eric Chavez 3B
Raul Ibanez LF
Russell Martin C
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Casey McGhee DH

Never mind the Worldwide Leader: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: The Summer Goddess]

Joshua Prager, author of The Echoing Green, has a feature on Derek Jeter and Pete Rose’s all-time hit record today in the New York Times:

“The toughest thing about baseball is you don’t know why you’re doing — or not doing — this or that,” the player, Ichiro Suzuki, said.

Suzuki, a Yankees outfielder, had at that point amassed a combined 3,830 hits in Japan and the United States, a remarkable if unofficial total. But his annual hit total was set to decline for the third straight season. Was age to blame?

“It’s not that your physical body gains weight, but that your thinking gains weight,” said Suzuki, 38. He tightened a belt about a waist that had been 31 inches all his career and explained that expectation was a burden that only grew. The outside world always let you know when a milestone was in reach.

I also like this appreciation:

“I don’t think very many people understand how unique he is, as a hitter,” Bill James, the father of advanced baseball statistics, wrote in an e-mail. “At-bat after at-bat, he is able to hit the ball to right field NOT by swinging late, but by just clipping the inside of the baseball, hitting the ball off-center so that it flares off his bat to right field. Other people do it once in a while by accident, but I’ve never seen anybody other than Jeter do it constantly.”

I don’t think Jeter will catch Rose. Don’t think he’s that single(s)-minded. But it’s fun to consider, isn’t it?

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]

A cool jam for a mild summer Sunday.

“Winter Meeting” By Eddie Harris

[Photo Credit: The Minimalisto]

Whadda ya gunna do? Our man Phelps pitched a solid game. Game up a two-run home run to Adrian Gonzalez in the first inning and it wasn’t even a bad pitch. Thing is, Jon Lester pitched like the old Jon Lester, one we’d come to fear. The Yanks couldn’t get a key hit but the credit goes to ol’ Lester.

Sox 4, Yanks 1. Moving on.

The only drag is that the Orioles and the Rays won. The Rays, man, huge win, and they is making a push now. They trail the Yanks by five.

[Photo Credit: Ben Pier]

The overnight rain cooled things off in New York. The sun is out and it is a lovely afternoon.

Here is worrisome bit of news, however, about Mark Teixeira, brought to us by Brian Heyman over at the Lo-Hud Yankee blog:

“He’s a little bit better today,” Girardi said. “He’s not a player for me today. I wouldn’t imagine so. We’ll see in the next couple of days if we can get him back.”

Girardi is wondering, though.

“Yeah, I’m a little bit concerned if it’s going to get to 100 percent,” Girardi said. “He was better after the few days off a couple of weeks ago. And it seemed to come back a little bit. That raises a little bit of a red flag. You do what you can. Tex is good at playing beat up. He’s used to it in his career. We’ll try to get him back as soon as we can.”

1. Jeter DH
2. Swisher 1B
3. Cano 2B
4. Jones RF
5. McGehee 3B
6. Granderson CF
7. Martin C
8. Nix SS
9. Suzuki LF

It’s Phelps vs. Lester.

Never mind the mercy rule: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Stfujeff]