Grand Groove.

[Photo Credit: Joanne Leah via This Isn’t Happiness]

I had a friend over for dinner last night and we watched the game, rooted for the Yanks, and were happy when they beat the Red Sox, 6-4. But we talked and talked so the details of the game evaporated once it was over. I remember cursing Phil Hughes for giving us flashbacks of Clay Rapada’s botched 1-6-3 double play earlier this season, and then cursing some more when Hughes served up a meatball to Dustin Pedrioa.

Then there was fist pumps and “Oh Yeahs” for the five solo home runs hit by the Yanks, including the 250th homer of Derek Jeter’s career. Also, a long, impressive at bat by Curtis Granderson that resulted in a line drive single, and a “Fuck Yes” for the bloop base hit Jason Nix hit on an 0-2 pitch to put the Yanks ahead for good. Smiles all around when Pedrioa hit one to the wall in the eighth, and hopped in the air as he rounded first in frustration.

I don’t remember much just that the outcome was good.

For clarity see:

Pete Abraham in the Boston Globe; David Waldstein in the Times; Mark Feinsand in the News; and William Juliano at Pinstriped Alley.

[Photo Via: mOrtality]

Can you remember the last time a Yankee-Red Sox series felt this dull this late in the season?

That doesn’t mean we don’t want the Yanks to win the series of course, or that watching these games won’t angry up the blood some. But it ain’t Must-See-TV, that’s for sure.

It’s Hughes tonight, weather permitting. Supposed to rain all weekend.

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

Never mind those battlin’ BoSox: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: The Absolute Best Photography Posts]

Over at The New York Review of Books, here’s Larry McMurtry on his final book sale:

Calling it the Last Book Sale was a conceit based on the fact that my novel The Last Picture Show had been filmed on the same site. In fact, the reputable firm of Bonham’s is conducting a major literary auction on the West Coast right now. Our auction was probably the last on this scale I will be involved with.

I’ve been an active book dealer for fifty-five years, and one thing I learned to avoid is the adjective “rare.” Poe’s Tamerlane exists in twelve known copies. It’s rare and so are his stories; but most books aren’t rare. What I sold, over two days in August, were second-hand books—or antiquarian books, if you want to fancy it up. I’ve owned most of them more than once in my career, although many of them are now at least uncommon.

My firm, Booked Up Inc., owned about 400,000 books, spread among four large buildings in Archer City, a small oil patch town in the midwestern part of Texas. I also have a 28,000-volume personal library, in the same town. I’m getting old and so are my buildings. My heirs are literate but not bookish. Dealing with nearly half a million books would be a huge burden for them: thus the downsizing.

[Photo Credit: -circa]

I preferred James and the Giant Peach to Roald Dahl’s Willie Wonka books when I was a kid. There is a scene when James climbs through a tunnel in the peach and grabs a handful of the fruit off the walls. That always sounded like such wonderful thing.

While we’re at it, here’s a Food & Wine recipe for peach pie.

[Illustration by Nancy Ekholm Burkett]

[Picture by Cur3es!]

Yeah.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where the teams come from and what their lousy records are, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

I’ll tell you what bores the hell out of me, when a team has all of these good players on the roster, but then trots out a lineup made up of all the bad ones. Every team’s got bad players on it, I’m not saying they don’t. It’s just that when a team is really stacked, I mean when they’ve got hot-shots at just about every position, it’s really boring when those players just take a seat on the bench all afternoon. And the bad ones that play, you’d think they’d seize the opportunity and really show what they’ve got, but more often than not they just go out there and remind you of why they are on the bench in the first place.

Take Andruw Jones, the hot-shot in left field. He couldn’t catch the ball at all today, though I heard he used catch it like a madman. There used to be nobody better at catching the old pop-fly. I admit it. But not anymore. Now he’s the type of outfielder that looks up in the sky on a bright afternoon, gets confused and falls down. Goddamn house-money lineup. It always ends up making you blue as hell.

And that lineup’s not too gorgeous for this pitcher the Yankees have, a pitcher named Ivan Nova. He’s good and all, I’m not saying he’s bad. I’m really not.  But the thing about Nova is that he’s not good all the time. In fact, when you get right down to it, he’s only been very good a few times, but for some reason everybody thinks that’s the norm. If you ask me, I’d say he’s much more the mediocre type, not necessarily bad, but not as good as the phonies tend to give him credit for. All I know is he was lousy today, so mediocre would have been a substantial improvement. It really would.

Old Nova started things off with a bang. He really did. The Rangers had two runs on the board and the ice cubes in my drink hadn’t even started to melt yet. And I hate it when ice cubes melt too quickly. It’s quite a problem during day games. You’ve got this perfectly good drink in front of you, and then you look away for a second, just a quick look at the scoreboard, and sure enough the ice cubes are sweating. It doesn’t totally ruin the drink, I’m not saying that. But it certainly doesn’t do it any good.

Derek Holland, the pitcher for the Texas Rangers, must have been thrilled to see all those Yankee hot-shots sitting on the bench. Old Holland is the type of pitcher that’s actually quite talented but you’d never know it because he sucks so much. He really does. He’s the kind of guy that wears a phony mustache to make you think he’s a sophisticated Ivy League gentleman but what it winds up doing, you see, is making him look like a goddamn pervert. But if you actually watch him pitch, if you sit down and take the time to really watch him sling the old ball at the dish, you’d see he throws it in there quite hard. I have to admit.

I see a guy like Old Holland with all the talent in the world and a five-something ERA and it depresses the hell out of me. I get so down in the dumps I bust out crying right there at the goddamn computer.  It makes me think of these boys I know from the Yankees named Philip Hughes and Joba Chamberlain. You never saw pitchers come up for the Yankees with talent like that, talent so obvious it was practically coming out of their socks. And it’s not like the Yankees never brought up any other pitchers. They did, all the time. But those pitchers, each one was the type of pitcher that’s always allowing first inning homers and then leaving you sitting in the can. What’s all that Yankee dough good for if you’re always bringing up pitchers that give up first-inning homers? Nothing, that’s what.

There he was, Old Holland, wearing that phony mustache in the middle of goddamn Yankee Stadium of all places and trying to sneak a fastball by Mark Teixeira in the sixth inning. And Mark Teixeira, mind you, he just wears Old Holland out like the back seat of a New York City taxi cab. He really does. Old Holland couldn’t get Teixeira out in a big spot if his life depended on him getting that out. But this time in the sixth inning, when Teixeira represented the tying run, what he did was he threw this slider in the dirt to a spot where Teixeira couldn’t get it – it damn near killed me when he threw it in that spot. It was actually quite tricky.

Old Holland must have been feeling pretty good about that slider in the dirt, maybe too good. Because you see what he did on the next pitch to that Andruw Jones, the hot-shot that fell down earlier, he laid one right down the middle. I mean right down goddamn Broadway. And Old Jones, you know he wasn’t feeling too good about falling down, so he must have been so relieved to just see this pitch coming right down the middle. He didn’t look confused on that pitch as he tied up the game at four. He really didn’t.

The goddamn game would have ended right there if it had any sense. But, of course it didn’t. It went on for three more innings. It went on long enough for all the bad feelings the Yankees erased in the sixth to become bad feelings again in the seventh. The worst part, the very worst part of the whole collapse is that pitcher I was telling you about before, Joba Chamberlain, came out with the game on the line and they needed him to be his old self, his old hot-shot self. The thing of it is, that guy is gone. This other guy that looks like the same guy but isn’t as good, he’s here to stay. And about the only way you can tell the difference is by looking at that scoreboard. That goddamn scoreboard just about kills me. It’s just depressing as hell.

See that’s what I don’t like about baseball. It’s depressing as hell. You’ve got a guy falling down in the outfield feeling down in the dumps about it. You’ve got the same guy tying the game with a homerun and feeling all warm and fuzzy. And then you’ve got the same guy coming up with a chance to re-take the lead and striking out and going down in the dumps again. Who wants to play a game that can rip you up like that? Nobody with any sense, that’s who.

A lot of people here, especially this one accountant, are asking me if the Yankees are going to win tomorrow when they start their series with the goddamn Red Sox. It’s such a stupid question. How are you supposed to know if they’re going to win a game before they play it? The answer is, you don’t.

Yanks go for an unlikely four-game sweep against the Rangers this afternoon on a beautiful day in the Bronx. Ivan Nova–will he deliver a solid performance or will the Rangers beat him about the face and neck?

Robbie sits for a second straight game…

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Andruw Jones LF
Casey McGehee 3B
Russell Martin C
Jayson Nix 2B
Ichiro Suzuki CF
Chris Stewart C

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

[Photo Credit: Luis Rodriguez via Zeroing]

Other people’s lives. My Modern Met via This Isn’t Happiness.

From Letters of Note comes this 1961 letter from Flannery O’Connor to a college English professor:

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

[Picture by Linden Frederick via Zeroing]

Ego Trip takes us back to them good ol’ days.

[Photo Credit: Martha Cooper]

This morning at the  Rockerfeller Center farmer’s market.

More peach recipes from Saveur. 

Lulu!

Louise Brooks.

This tune is more than half garbage but it’s stuck in my head dammit.

[Photo Credit: Puckbox]

One-run games haven’t been kind to the Yankees. So, when they failed to add an insurance run with two on and no outs in the bottom of the eighth, Joe Girardi may have developed a lump in his throat. Then, when an Eric Chavez throwing error, which was actually a missed call by the first base umpire, prolonged the game with two outs in the top of the ninth, the Yankees’ skipper probably swallowed hard once again. Instead of being bad omens, however, these unfortunate late game developments only delayed what turned out to be the Bronx Bombers’ eighth straight home victory against the Texas Rangers. Considering the almost two hours spent waiting for the rain to stop, it was a small price to pay.

The Yankees 3-2 victory not only pushed the team’s record in one-run games to 15-17, but also marked their second consecutive victory when scoring three or fewer runs. Before the series, the Yankees had the second lowest winning percentage in the A.L. when scoring three or fewer, while the Rangers had the best mark when allowing no more than that many, so maybe the team’s luck in low scoring games is starting to change? Or, maybe the Yankees are just getting outstanding starting pitching?

Following the lead of David Phelps and Hiroki Kuroda, Freddy Garcia kept the Rangers off the board until the fourth inning, extending a string of 19 consecutive innings in which Texas failed to score. However, that came to an immediate halt when Josh Hamilton hit a laser shot into the right field second deck. Ironically, it was the first regular season Yankee Stadium home run ever hit by the Rangers’ center fielder, whose home run derby performance in the Bronx remains legend. And, Hamilton must have enjoyed the trip around the bases because in the sixth inning he followed it up a 450-foot blast deep into the bleachers.

Hamilton’s two solo homers chipped away at the Yankees’ 3-0 advantage, which was built in the bottom of the third inning. For the third straight game, Nick Swisher gave the Yankees their first lead of the game, but instead of a home run, the first baseman dunked a double down the left field line that scored Jayson Nix. A sacrifice fly by Curtis Granderson and two-out RBI single by the white hot Eric Chavez, who went 3 for 3, capped the scoring in the inning and, as it turned out, the game.

Aside from the long balls, Garcia allowed only two other hits in 6 2/3 innings before giving way to the trio of Boone Logan, David Robertson and Rafael Soriano, who collectively retired all but one of the hitters (the aforementioned error/bad call) they faced. As a staff, the Yankees have only allowed four runs in three games to a team that entered the series averaging five, so, needless to say, the starters and bullpen have both been equal to the challenge presented by the reigning American League champs.

Will the struggling Ivan Nova be able to take the baton in tomorrow’s matinee? Either way, the Bronx Bombers have made an early statement and, perhaps, reasserted themselves as the team to beat in the American League.

The Yanks have won the first two games against the Rangers but their work is not done–they lose the next two and the series will feel like a missed opportunity. Fab Five Freddy “Chuck n Duck” Garcia is on the hill.

Rain is in the forecast.

Never mind those thunderclaps: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Coffeesforclosers]

From Errol Morris comes a short film about the life and death of sports fans.

[Photo Via N.Y. Daily News]

Melky, say it ain’t Sosa.

[Photo Credit: Kelley L Cox/US Presswire]

Don’t get it twisted.