A few weeks ago I bet my old pal Johnny Red Sox that his team would make the playoffs. He said they were going to blow it. Here’s the bet: If the Sox won, he takes me out to dinner. If they lost, I take him out.

Figured it was a win-win for me. Now, let’s just hope his tastes are reasonable. That doesn’t mean Gray’s Papaya, but let’s hope it doesn’t mean Del Posto either.

A favorite Bronx battle rhyme from the Teacher and Mr. Foxxx.

From Glenn Stout: “Hangovers were instantaneous, severe and violent.”

I wondered about being hungover as I passed this guy today and felt the ground vibrate.

More from Stout:

Mike Torrez screamed “I’m off the hook!” Darrell Johnson was sprayed with champagne in the Met clubhouse. Bill Buckner danced a jig on his ranch in Idaho, while Carl Crawford, Jonathan Papelbon and a cast of thousands not named Jacoby Ellsbury pushed Pesky aside, their careers distilled into a single moment, the lead of their obituaries already written. The whole 2011 roster elbowed their way past Stanley and Schiraldi and Galehouse and Willoughby. Don Zimmer, Joe McCarthy, Joe Cronin, John McNamara and Grady Little welcomed Terry Francona to the brotherhood while Joe Maddon looked on in sympathy, Buck Showalter grinned and pushed the pin into the voodoo doll a little deeper and Theo Epstein felt the pain and tried to peel the target off his forehead. Robert Andino joined Aaron Boone and Mookie and Bucky as an improbable villain and regional epithet. The dark corner deep in the heart of all Red Sox fans everywhere, the one that appeared to have healed got ripped open and suddenly seemed a little darker, a lot more crowded, and a whole lot more unpleasant.

More than one Boston fan woke the next morning and either logged on or turned on the television or clicked on the radio to confirm that the ultimate nightmare had indeed taken place. It had.

Early this morning I got this e-mail from a Red Sox pal of mine:

You’ll get the whole season recap from me tomorrow, but the short story is that I really did stop caring about this team about three weeks ago. In fact, I hate that I actually gave a shit again tonight, for about forty-five minutes. (Great baseball story, though.)

What happened is they stopped being any fun to watch sometime in late August, but I have to say, they weren’t that great to watch in the first place. (Something like 3-57 when trailing in the 8th inning this year.)

They were kind of like the loud guy at the party who’s having a great time, and you sort of keep your distance from him as the night goes on, and suddenly he gets WAY too drunk…a little funny, sure, but mostly pathetic.

Or think of those hammered guys on “Cops” that just got pulled over by the cute little PO-lice lady from Tennessee.

So what you do about it? If you’re at the party, you just get the hell away from that guy, maybe take off. But when it’s on TV? All you have to do is reach for the remote and change the channel…

The Yanks jumped all over David Price last night. Slapped him silly. Mark Teixeira hit two dingers, including a grand slam and the Bombers led 7-0 and were cruising. You could practically hear a pin drop at the Trop. The Rays had nothing, they were done, even though the Yankees trotted out thirty-six pitchers. Then in the eighth, the Rays scored six runs, capped by a three-run shot by Evan Longoria. A final, noble gasp, right?

Cory Wade retired the first two men in the ninth, had pinch-hitter Dan Johnson down to his last strike, and then the sombitch hit a line drive home run to tie it. And that’s the truth.

Enter Scott Proctor. Now, it’s not what you think. Proctor got the final out in the ninth and made it through the tenth and eleventh. The Yanks had runners on first and third with one out in the top of the twelfth and couldn’t score. Then, at 11:59 p.m., after he’d struck out the first two men in the ninth and given up a double, Jonathan Paplebon, one strike away from a win, gave up a game-tying double. That was followed two minutes later by another hit from the man whose name will be burned into Red Sox Nation’s collective memories forever–Robert Andino. Little fly ball to left, Carl Crawford charged, had it, and then it popped out of his glove. And the winning run scored.

The crowd at the Trop went nuts when they heard the news. Proctor had to step off the mound. No matter what happened, there was something noble about the way Proctor performed. He was the last guy out there. Maybe if the Yanks got the lead, someone else would come in but so long as the game remained tied, it was Proctor’s game, Proctor–there to lose it. And he toughed it out. It was his best performance since rejoining the team.

He got the first out and had two strikes on Longoria before the best player on the Rays hit a low line drive down the left field line. Was it fair? It was. And just over the wall. The times was 12:06 a.m.

My goodness. The art of fiction, dead, for sure.

What a finish.

The Tigers won and so did the Rangers so the Yanks will play the ALDS against the Tigers. Tough match-up. Should be fun.

[Photo Credit: Fur Affinity]

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano DH
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Nick Swisher RF
Andruw Jones LF
Jesus Montero C
Eduardo Nunez 2B

Sit back, relax, enjoy the show.

Let’s Go Base-Ball!

Hell, yes.

Dellin Betances will start his first big league game tonight.

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]

My mom was in town and came over for dinner last night. Ted Berg had given me some of the pulled pork he cooked over the weekend so I figured I’d make a couple of sandwiches, and as luck would have it, mom brought a loaf of challah. I’m not sure why, maybe in honor of the Jewish New Year that I don’t celebrate. She doesn’t celebrate it either, though she was once been coerced into “converting” to Judaism.That expired, at least in spirit, well before she divorced my dad. Still, maybe she brought the challah to remember the old days. Or just because she thinks it is delicious.

Anyhow, the bread was ideal for the pork, and we topped it with some homemade coleslaw and a vinegary bbq sauce.  I usually only think of challah for french toast but it’s more than lovely for a pulled pork sandwich too.

Happy New Year, indeed.

[Photo Credit: James Ransom for Food 52]

Crockett and Tubbs (Mostly Crockett)

By John Schulian

Even though it disappeared from prime time more than 20 years ago, “Miami Vice” still has a hold on people, whether it’s because they dressed like Crockett and Tubbs at a bar mitzvah or they’re looking for cocaine residue on those of us who helped make cultural icons of TV’s hippest cops. Myself, I’ve never looked good in white loafers without socks, and I’ve never done coke. But I didn’t realize I should have said so to Robert Wuhl before I went on his radio show last spring to promote “At the Fights,” the boxing anthology that the sainted George Kimball and I edited. I was primed to talk about everyone from Muhammad Ali and Roberto Duran to Norman Mailer and A.J. Liebling, but as soon as Wuhl saw “Miami Vice” on my resume, he wanted to know about all the coked-out shenanigans on South Beach. When I told him I didn’t know anything, he gave me the kind of look Hillary Clinton must have given Bill the first time she asked him about that Lewinsky woman and he lied his presidential ass off.

I was telling the truth, though. I really didn’t know anything beyond the same rumors everybody else seemed to have heard. When I was on “Vice,” the last thing on my mind was getting high. I wanted to establish myself in Hollywood, and this was my chance to do it. We wrote the scripts at Universal Studios and shot them in Miami, which gave everybody there plenty of chances to go native. The most outrageous behavior I heard of, however, was when Dick Wolf called Don Johnson only to be told that Don had gone skiing in Aspen. I suppose you could excuse him because he’d run off on a Friday when he didn’t have much work to do, just a couple of scenes in which we could shoot his double from behind. Of course his double had the world’s worst wig and looked the way Don would have on a diet of Krispy Kremes, but Don got away with it. It’s good to be the star.

If Don had been anything less, he wouldn’t have directed an episode I’d written called “By Hooker By Crook.” He lobbied for Melanie Griffith, his ex-wife, to play a socialite who moonlights as a madam, and, wonder of wonders, she got the part. In a cast that was magnificently goofy – Captain Lou Albano, the wrestler; Vanity, who had been Prince’s main squeeze; George Takei from “Star Trek” – Melanie was the main attraction. She and Don did a lot of rolling around in bed for the sake of the episode; in dailies she’d pull a sheet tight around her at the end of each take and laughingly tell the crew, “Quit looking at my tits.” Don and Melanie must have done some rolling around off-camera, too, because they wound up giving marriage a second try. That one didn’t work, either.

The fact that Don was directing didn’t mean much to me until I came home one night to my apartment in a complex crawling screenwriters, guys going through divorces (who may have been screenwriters too), stage mothers and their children, strippers, and hookers. The phone was ringing as I opened the door. It was Dick Wolf.

“Don wants you in Miami,” he said.

“I’ll catch the first thing smoking in the morning,” I said.

“No, you don’t understand. Don wants you there now.”

Apparently our star had developed a case of the yips as his first day of directing drew near. So I took the red-eye to Miami, where a driver picked me up and drove me to the art deco hotel where the company was quartered. I slept for a few hours and then went out to the set. The first person I saw coming out of Don’s trailer was Kerry McCluggage, the president of Universal TV. That’s when I knew how big a deal this was, and just how skittish Don was.

As it turned out, he asked very little of me. I expected a demand for major revisions, but all he wanted to do was look out for his character, Sonny Crokett. He combed the script looking for the few good lines I’d given Crockett’s partner, Ricardo Tubbs. Every time he found one, he’d say, “I think Crockett should say that,” and I would dutifully make the change. Poor Philip Michael Thomas. He wasn’t much of an actor, but he was a good enough Tubbs, and here was Don turning him into a nonentity in his one shot at glory. It was as if Phillip didn’t realize what was at stake. Don certainly did. He’d been the king of failed pilots until Kerry McCluggage talked him into doing what Brandon Tartikoff, the wizard who ran NBC, famously called “MTV Cops.” Now that Don had finally found success, he was biting down on it like a pit bull.

Because I was in Miami to aid and abet him, he invited me to dinner at his home on Star Island. It was just Don, his son, and me (and the hired help, of course). He kept calling the boy “son,” as if he couldn’t remember his name. It was all perfectly pleasant, though: a nice meal, a little light conversation. And then Don looked at me very seriously and said, “They tell me you used to be a sportswriter. That’s a strange way to make a living, isn’t it?”

This from a guy who played an undercover cop who wore pastel clothes and sockless white loafers, drove a Ferrari Testarossa, had a pet alligator named Elvis, ran around glorious mansions shooting bad guys, and spent more than a little time staring moodily into the distance while Phil Collins or Simply Red or some other hot music act played in the background.

And he wanted to know if writing sports is a strange way to make a living.

“Yeah,” I said. “I suppose it is.”

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

Read anything about “Moneyball” lately?

I haven’t seen the movie yet but I did read this article on Billy Beane in the New York Times Magazine.

And over at The Atlantic, Allen Barra has a critical essay on Michael Lewis’ book.

“Orestes,” By Willem de Kooning (1947)

In the elevator this morning with my neighbor, Bee. She’s a nurse and we sometimes meet on our way to work. She is a zaftig Puerto Rican with a big smile. Got an easy laugh. Bee’s also a huge movie fan so I mention the upcoming George Harrison documentary by Martin Scorsese.

“Oh, I love Rock n Roll,” Bee said. “I was one of the only Latina’s that did back then. You don’t believe me? Inagaddadavida, baby!”

The final day of the regular season. Sox and Rays are tied for the wildcard in the AL; Braves and Cards are tied for the wildcard in the NL.

It’s gunna hoit for someone.

…That the Red Sox and the Rays both won tonight? That Russell Martin hit into a triple play? That Rafael Soriano screwed the pooch and gave up the deciding three-run home run? How about that Boston’s third-string catcher, Ryan Lavarnway (and what a wonderful name that is), hit two home runs? Lavarnway also made a critical play to get the second out in the ninth inning too.

It all happened folks. And so there will be another night of channel-flipping, nail-biting, and general playoff mishegoss. Would you expect anything less at this pernt?

The good news is that Bartolo Colon pitched reasonably well for the Yanks in the 5-3 loss.

Otherwise, the Yankees were a footnote in this drama. Final game of the season. Dig ‘um, smack.

Bartolo Colon’s playoff spot might be determined by what he does tonight. He’s been like a balloon with a small tear in it. The air has been slowly escaping for more than a month now.

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

Never mind the nonsense:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Cortes 2]

I remember waiting for the subway once with my grandfather. 81st Street, Museum of Natural History stop.  He walked to the edge of the platform and leaned over to see if a train was coming. That image is frozen in my mind. He was not a physical man and I was convinced he would tip over and fall over, down to the tracks. He didn’t. When the train came, we got on and an older guy kept looking at me and I thought he was going to mug us.

Mug. That was a word that was always on my mind as a kid in New York. I don’t hear it so much anymore. Not “jack” or “rob.”  Mug. Whenever I was on the subway I’d try to guess who would mug me and how I could escape.

[Photo Credit: Bruce Davidson]

Here’s James Agee on our man Buster:

Very early in [Keaton’s] movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn’t realize he didn’t. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occurred to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.

Keaton’s face ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record. One can never forget Keaton wearing it, standing erect at the prow as his little boat is being launched. The boat goes grandly down the skids and, just as grandly, straight on to the bottom. Keaton never budges. The last you see of him, the water lifts the hat off the stoic head and it floats away.

…Much of the charm and edge of Keaton’s comedy, however, lay in the subtle leverages of expression he could work against his nominal dead pan. Trapped in the side-wheel of a ferryboat, saving himself from drowning only by walking, then desperately running, inside the accelerating wheel like a squirrel in a cage, his only real concern was, obviously, to keep his hat on. Confronted by Love, he was not as deadpan as he was cracked up to be, either; there was an odd, abrupt motion of his head which suggested a horse nipping after a sugar lump.

Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his feature-length comedies. (For plain hard laughter his nineteen short comedies — the negatives of which have been lost — were even better.) He was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights. Beneath his lack of emotion he was also uninsistently sardonic; deep below that, giving a disturbing tension and grandeur to the foolishness, for those who sensed it, there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia. With the humor, the craftsmanship and the action there was often, besides, a fine, still and sometimes dreamlike beauty. Much of his Civil War picture The General is within hailing distance of Mathew Brady. And there is a ghostly, unforgettable moment in The Navigator when, on a deserted, softly rolling ship, all the pale doors along a deck swing open as one behind Keaton and, as one, slam shut, in a hair-raising illusion of noise.

Perhaps because “dry’ comedy is so much more rare and odd than “dry” wit, there are people who never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.

Oh, yeah. And Buster loved baseball too.

Yeah, I know it’s only Tuesday but dig these apple pancakes over at Smitten Kitchen.

“Figure in Landscape, No. 2,” By Willem de Kooning (1951)

The de Kooning Retrospective at the Modern is a big show and it is fuggin’ gorgeous. It’s up through the middle of January. Don’t sleep.