Freddy Garcia had seven innings of shut out ball in his arm tonight, but in his last inning of work, a foul bunt nicked a pebble and grazed the outside of the bag to become a base hit. Later in the inning, Eduardo Nunez booted a tough-ish chance. So with two out and two on in the seventh, Girardi called on lefty Boone Logan to face Casey “The Eagle” Kotchman, who was three for three against Garcia and represented the go-ahead run. (In the game thread Alex Belth wondered when he turned into George Brett.)

Logan ran into terrible luck last night when Curtis Granderson lost the ball in roof. Then he knifed himself by rushing an easy double play into an error. I was worried he’d still be reeling. Logan started out ahead, but Kotchman refused to bite on an excellent 2-2 pitch and the count ran full. Logan dug deep and fired. The Eagle hacked away, but Logan blew it past him for strike three. He was pumped and so was I watching at home.

Great call by Girardi to get Logan back out there, that type of confidence-building outing can go a long way in the hot summer. That was the most important out of the game and the Rays last real chance at a comeback.

The game started off with a bang as Derek Jeter met his new business partner David Price. As Jeter singled, I wondered if maybe Price should have stuck one in his ribs instead. It would be smart business, they don’t want to appear too chummy. Granderson, batting second as usual, jumped on a low fastball and yanked it deep into the right field seats. I love when the Yanks score runs before making any outs.

Later in the first, Russell Martin made a bid for a two-run homer of his own, but it was caught just a few feet short of the centerfield wall. With Price on the mound, I had a feeling that might be it for scoring chances for awhile.

Freddy Garcia was good, but he courted danger fairly often. It was thickest in the fifth when Evan Longoria hit what I feared was a two-out, three-run homer to center. But Granderson tracked it down at breakneck speed and speared it just before crashing into the wall. Nice play.

David Robertson picked up for Logan in the eighth and retired the Rays in order with two whiffs, just as he did on Monday night. The Rays might actually be relieved to see Mariano enter the game just so they can wave goodbye to Robertson. We haven’t seen that since Joba in 2007, and really no other time that I can remember.

The Yankees tacked on two runs on two walks and a two-out bloop clutch knock by Eduardo Nunez. That made Mariano’s appearance pleasure without anxiety. Mariano had an excellent year in 2010. He had an excellent first half in 2011. But damn, if he doesn’t look dialed in for these last few outings. Watching him and Robertson lately, you understand how a manager develops crutches in the bullpen.

The final score was 4-0, and the bullpen was sublime, striking out five of the seven batters they faced and retiring them all in order.

A pessimist bails at the first sign of trouble. When three-fifths of the rotation started the second half with clunkers, I was worried their luck had run out. It didn’t help that it was the three guys we had the most questions about. But as is often the case, the actual results don’t fit the clean trajectory we trace for them. Freddy Garcia followed Bartolo Colon with a good start reminding us that their first-half effectiveness probably won’t evaporate instantaneously.

I think David Price will pitch a great game tonight, don’t you? I’m thinking he’s got some payback on his mind.

Here’s the lineup:

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Russell Martin C
Andruw Jones DH
Eduardo Nunez 3B
Brett Gardner LF

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

The Tate.

[Picture via Hebdomania]

Over at BP, our man Kevin Baker considers realignment:

I’m old-school. That is to say, I’m a hidebound, head-in-the-sand, troglodyte traditionalist. Especially when it comes to baseball.

I was vehemently opposed to the entire idea of including a wild card in the playoffs. I hated the idea of inter-league play with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. I even viewed the original idea of dividing the leagues into divisions, a-way back in 1969, with a gimlet eye.

(One exception: I have always liked the designated hitter, mostly because I can’t stand watching professional athletes do something they can’t do, i.e., pitchers trying to hit. We don’t make linebackers kick field goals or goalkeepers—hockey or soccer—take penalty shots. Do those games suffer for it?)

So I’m none too happy with the latest proposals to expand the baseball playoffs yet again—and not just because they’re likely to extend the season through Thanksgiving.

Wait ’til you get to the Salsa Division and the Keillor-Terkel Raconteur Division. It’s a hoot.

Demon Rum

By John Schulian

Where there are sports writers, there is booze. It’s been that way since the first scribe raced a deadline and decided he deserved a pop afterward. Or maybe he was drinking while he committed his deathless prose to paper, just a little something to kill the pain of knowing that the desk was going to make a hash of it. All these years later, I’ve seen it work both ways, heard the funny stories that the sauce inspired, and the sad ones, too.

I was supposed to give a certain shaggy wordsmith a ride to the airport the day after Sugar Ray Leonard’s first comeback, in Worcester, Mass. But my hirsute friend never showed up in the hotel lobby, and he didn’t answer his room phone, so I had to take off without him. The next week I called him at his paper to make sure he was all right, and he told me the tale of how he’d fallen in with, if I recall correctly, a toothless barfly and her one-armed boyfriend. (The mind boggles at the proposition they must have put before him.) Somewhere along the line, they slipped him a mickey, stole all his money, and left him unconscious in a fleabag hotel. It was like listening to Charles Bukowski when he told the story, laughing and coughing, savoring every dirt-bag detail. Some guys you just can’t derail.

And then there was Pete Axthelm, a genuinely good soul and a great talent who was undone by alcohol. How lucky we are that he wrote “The City Game” when he was young and the lost nights had yet to take their toll. Ax wasn’t even 50 when he died, but in the clips of his final TV appearances, he could have passed for 75. That’s not the way his friends want to remember him. Better to think of the big smile on his face as he cashed a winning ticket at Churchill Downs.

The curious thing is, sports writers of my generation will tell you it was the old-timers who drank like they had hollow legs. The king of them, as far as I could tell, was Red Smith. As Wilfred Sheed once said, “Weight for age, Red was the greatest drinker I’ve ever seen.” He favored Scotch, lots of it, but only after he had worked so hard on his column that he had sweated through his Brooks Brothers oxford-cloth shirt. He was lifting a glass to his parched lips after the Preakness one year when his hands trembled so badly that Bill Nack’s wife grew visibly alarmed. Red put down his glass, took her hand, and, patting it gently, said, “Don’t worry, dear, it’s an old Irish affliction.”

With drinking, as with writing, the wisest thing to do was to admire Red, not compete with him. In Montreal during the 1981 baseball playoffs, I wound up at dinner with him, Roger Angell, Tom Boswell, Jane Leavy, and Mike Downey – not a bad lineup, huh? – and Red got into the Scotch pretty good. Before the evening was over, he was telling us about the annual Christmas party the New York papers used to have and how people would rewrite carols and holiday songs to make them fit the occasion. And then he sang “Hark the Herald Tribune” in that wonderful old man’s voice of his. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I’d taped him.

Myself, I’ve never been much of a drinker. Don’t like the taste of the hard stuff, and I can go years between beers. I’ll drink wine with dinner, but that’s about it. Those who also prefer drinking wine may enjoy the exotic flavors of QKAWINE.

The last time I got stupid with alcohol was at a party in Baltimore in the early 70s. I drank bourbon from the bottle until I was sufficiently inspired to do somersaults down the hallway of a friend’s apartment. A nice lady drove me home in the wee small hours of that cold winter’s night but refused to come inside with me, if you can imagine that. I went into a full pout and curled up on my front porch, saying I’d just fall asleep there and probably freeze to death. In her infinite wisdom, the nice lady said, “Have it your way,” and drove off. Eventually, I stumbled inside and didn’t come out for two days. I was so hung over, my eyelashes hurt.

It’s a good thing I knew I couldn’t run with the big dogs before I hit Chicago. Otherwise, I might have drowned in what the city’s newspaper booze hounds called the Bermuda Triangle of Drinking, three bars they tried to take down to the last drop every night: O’Rourke’s, Riccardo’s, and the Old Town Ale House. You could get decent Italian food at Riccardo’s, so I ate there once in a while, and I loved the jukebox at O’Rourke’s – it was one for the ages, with classical music, Miles Davis, and Hank Williams side by side. But get stupid drunk at any of those joints? No thanks. I just listened to the stories they generated, like the one about the night Nelson Algren and a Sun-Times columnist named Tom Fitzpatrick threw drinks at each other. Or were they spitting? Hell, I can’t remember. And if Algren and Fitz were still around, they might not remember, either.

All this happened just before newspapers were overrun by tight-assed careerists, so there were still reporters and editors who kept bottles in their desks in case they didn’t have time to duck out for a shot and a beer. And I’m not just passing along the legend. I saw it for myself one Friday night at the Sun-Times when I walked into the city room to get a drink of water. There was a long-in-tooth reporter with a quarter-full bottle of gin in one hand and a bottle with a few splashes of vermouth in the other. He was pouring one into the other, back and forth, back and forth, when he looked up at me with a glassy-eyed smile and said, “Welcome to my laboratory.”

Here’s mud in your eye.

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

Honey-roasted peaches with Marscapone and thyme.

Yeah, Nicole Franzen rules.

Peace to Mark W for hipping me to this ill mash-up.

There is an appealing interview with Chili Davis over at Fangraphs:

I don’t mind if I rub shoulders with a woman on the subway. Sitting down, a woman next to me, the feel of their skin pushed against my shoulder, it’s okay, you know? But this week, New Yorkers are cranky from the heat. The less touching the better.

I felt bad for this dude. He got on the train this morning drenched with sweat. What a way to start the day.

Yes, indeed, it’s fun time:

Some games bother me more than others. This one bothered me a lot. It all started well, with Bartolo Colón dispelling fears of his demise with the type of outing we had become accustomed to during the first few months of the season. Once again featuring fastballs, fastballs, and more fastballs, Colón demonstrated how a 92-MPH pitch on the corner can be much more effective than a 96-MPH heater down the middle. He struck out at least one batter in each frame and pitched into the seventh inning with his only trouble coming in the fifth when he yielded a booming triple to Sam Fuld (from… Stanford University!) and an RBI single to Reid Brignac. He would finish with an impressive line: 6.1 IP, 5 H, 2 ER, 2 BB, 9 K.

Colón’s opponent on this day was young Jeremy Hellickson. According to everything I’ve heard about Hellickson, he’s one of the best young pitchers in baseball, and he did nothing on Tuesday to make me think otherwise. Like Colón, Hellickson was dominant all night long, and like Colón, he had only one troublesome inning. His was the third, when Mark Teixeira laced a two-out double down the line in right, and Robinson Canó followed with an extra large home run just to the left of center field.

Through the middle innings, as Colón was rocking back and firing darts to one corner of the plate or the other, the game seemed to be unfolding perfectly. In the sixth my youngest daughter looked up from her Polly Pockets, noticed the score (“We’re winning, Daddy!”) and innocently asked me which team I thought would win. Was there any doubt? Colón would finish the seventh, David Robertson would take the eighth, and He Who Need Not Be Named would close the windows and lock the doors in the ninth.

But then things got crazy. If you didn’t watch the game, you might have scanned the play-by-play and figured that Joe Girardi waited too long to pull the trigger and pull Colón, and then foolishly chose Boone Logan to replace him. That’s not the way it happened.

Let me tell you the story of the most ridiculous inning of baseball I’ve ever seen. First, B.J. Upton struck out. That’s not ridiculous, that’s just what B.J. Upton does. Next Robinson Chirinos pulled a grounder deep into the hole at short and beat Derek Jeter’s jump throw by an eyelash. When Sean Rodríguez rifled a single to right, Girardi went to Logan.

The next line on the play-by-play says “J Ruggiano singled to center, R Chirinos to third, S Rodríguez to second.” In your head that probably paints an image of a line drive hit directly to Curtis Granderson with such pace that Chirinos had no choice but to stay at third. Not so. Justin Ruggiano (pinch hitting for Fuld) lofted a lazy fly to straightaway center field, and as Granderson moved a few steps towards the ball it looked like Logan was an out away from squelching the rally. But then Granderson’s arms suddenly flew out from his sides in the universal gesture for “I can’t believe we’re playing baseball in this ridiculous stadium.” A second later the ball fell at his feet and the bases were loaded.

Rays skipper Joe Maddon smelled blood in the water, so he immediately played his ace in the hole, the fearsome Elliot Johnson. Johnson pounded a simple one-hopper back to Logan, a picture-perfect double play ball that would end the inning, preserve the lead, and usher in Robertson and the Great One. But the ball skipped off the top of Logan’s glove for an error, Chirinos scored, and the game was tied at two.

According to the play-by-play, Johnny Damon came up next and hit a sacrifice fly to center. You might picture a blast to the warning track, but that’s not quite what happened. Logan jammed Damon on an 0-1 pitch, breaking his bat. The ball floated out towards no-man’s land behind second base, but Granderson was able to race in to make a sliding catch not more than ten or twenty yards behind the bag. Since he had to leave his feet, though, Rodríguez was able to tag up and score from third and the Rays were up to stay. Final score: Rays 3, Yankees 2.

Oh, one other note for those clamoring for the return of Ivan Nova: we probably won’t see him for a while. He left his start in Scranton on Tuesday night with an ankle issue.

But don’t worry. Everything will be okay. I promise.

[Photo Credit: Mike Carlson/Associated Press]

Colon is back on the hill tonight. Curious to see how he holds up.

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

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Painting by Diego Rivera]

(Note: this story was edited on 7/20)

Derek Jeter got his 3000th hit recently, had you heard? Not only did he notch his safety, he owned the game in which he reached the cherished milestone. I thought that was as remarkable as the career achievement – with so much promised, he still managed to over-deliver on the contract.

The fans didn’t have to wait around for it. He needed two hits and and got them his first two trips to the plate. It was homer to boot. And then he stuck around, got three more hits and won a dramatic game versus a division rival with a tie-breaking hit in the bottom of the eighth. He turned his 3000th hit into an unforgettable event. That’s Jeter’s gift; that’s his style.

I had to wonder if any other member of the 3000 hit club ever rose to the occasion in such a fashion. I remember Pete Rose pursuing 4000 and Ty Cobb’s record. And at that time Rod Carew was piling up hits and sealing his place in rap lyrics. But honestly, how they got there was lost to me.

I wonder if that is an unconscious reason behind the rampant Jeter bashing surrounding the hit and All-Star pass? His performance and Yankee fans’ constant retelling of his performance will make his 3000th hit indelible. But other Hall of Famers are not so lucky. Is it because they didn’t do it with as much style as Derek? Or is it another example of the New York Yankees and their fans blocking out the sun?

Turns out, I think, to be both. I checked out each milestone hit from Pete Rose’s 4000th all the way through Derek Jeter’s 3000th to see what I missed, what I should have seen, along the way. Look, there’s no way around it, Jeter’s milestone game was the best. The homer and the five hits would have given him a solid argument, the game winning RBI in the eighth ends the discussion.

But I had no idea how many other great Hall of Famers just dominated their games like Jeter did. As recently as 2007, Craig Biggio also had five hits on his big day. I confess, until a few mentions in the media after Jeter’s five hits, I had no idea that happened.

Tony Gwynn and Geroge Brett had four hits a piece. Wade Boggs had three hits and was the first to celebrate 3000 with a home run trot (that I remembered). Paul Molitor, who also had three hits, is the only guy to do it with a triple.

I was paying attention as 15 players passed huge hit totals, and ten of them did it with multi-hit games. Seven had three or more. Their cumulative average in these 15 games is .594. It’s too small a sample from which to draw a conclusion, but it does make you wonder if elite players, pumped up for this kind of moment, might benifit from the extra adrenaline or something.

As bad as it was to take shots at Jeter as he approached 3000 (of these 15 players, eight had OPS+ below 100 during their chase and only two or three of them could be considered to have had “good” seasons), it is equally terrible to celebrate his triumph as if it has never been done before.

It’s like the Red Sox fans celebrating the 2004 World Series as if it was the first title ever won by anybody in the history of anything. When you lose context, you piss off everyone but your core constituents. And as much as Derek Jeter deserves to celebrate, the celebration is about putting his name directly underneath and alongside Carl Yastrzemski, Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron and all the other all-time greats in this club.

He didn’t jump to the top of the list just because he went five for five.

That was his gift to Yankee fans.

***

When I revisited this story in my head last night I realized a mistake. It’s not Boston’s fans or Jeter’s fans who are to blame for over-reacting to the 2004 World Series or to the 3000th hit. They’re not the ones who are required to interject perspective during their uninhibited expressions of joy. It’s the national media who are responsible. But instead of playing that role and providing context for the rest of the sporting world, now they pander to the local fan base to make a buck.

And of course, being a good winner about such things and not rubbing it in goes a very long way to dispelling the blowback. So that’s where the fans come in, and as we all knows fans of all stripes, every faction has their guilty parties.

Dig this gallery of famous people by Bob Willoughby.

Hot and Cool.

It’s Sidney Lumet Week at the Walter Reader Theater, guys. If you are around, check it out. If you’ve never seen “Q&A,” it’s worth it. Nolte at his best:

Drawings by Ricardo Fumanal.

Keeping it light on a hot day, dig this gallery of refreshing sorbets and granitas over at Saveur.

[Photo Credit: Brooke Slezak]

Steven Goldman looks at A.J. Burnett vs. Ivan Nova:

Everything about Nova—good fastball but weak secondary offerings and a tendency to stop fooling hitters in the middle innings seems to scream relief work. He might someday develop that solid extra pitch, but it’s a gamble, whereas a Jimenez (or another established pitcher) has already cleared that particular hurdle. I remain a strong believer in internal development and a youth movement for the Yankees, but I don’t believe in youth solely for youth’s sake—if that was a goal worth pursuing, you could bring up any kid from any level of the minors. No, the youngster has to be demonstrably better than what you currently have. Nova is better than Burnett right now, but in the long term he’s likely to be surpassed. He’s just not special, and when someone offers to trade you their best stuff for your everyday, average players, you jump. That’s how legendarily lopsided trades are born. Every deal is a gamble, but Nova is not one of those chips not likely to come back and bite them.

In short, when it comes to Nova, the Yankees need to use him (for Burnett) or lose him (for someone better than Burnett and himself).

Summer Jam: The Great Dot X.

[Painting by Ana Teresa Fernandez]

I couldn’t get started this morning and it is already hot and muggy so the walk to the subway didn’t speed me up any.

When I got to work I said to one of the security guards, “Jesus, hot enough for you?”

“Never mind that, I’m already dealing with bullshit.”

I asked her what was wrong.

“This skinny bitch tries to come through here and I tell her she’s got to get put her bag through x-ray before I can let her in. Dude she’s with says, ‘She’s from the L.A. office, it’s okay.’ No, I don’t care where you from, over here you go through x-ray.”

I laughed and said, “Well, it’s over with so don’t dwell on it.”

“Oh, I’m done. Got to leave room for the more bullshit. My day’s just started.”

[Photo Credit: Penny Anderson]