Find two movie titles that share a common word – preferably the first word of one title and the last word of the other. Then create a new plot that combines both movies. Like: “Members of the Rebel Alliance escape an ice-covered planet in a time-traveling Delorian.” Have your friends guess the mashed up title.

Since you are beginners, that was an easy one (“Empire Strikes Back to Future,” with “Back” being the shared word). How about: Two hopeless alcoholics visit their boss for a four-day bender with his corpse? Or: A cocky, unhappy weatherman is forced to participate in the same NASCAR race day after day? Or: A secretary poses as a Wall Street executive and winds up being unfairly placed in an insane asylum? Or: Pouting teenage vampires take a road trip and get in touch with their feminine sides?

It’s a horrible, horrible game that I can’t stop playing. I hope it infects your mind in a similar fashion – I don’t want to be the only one. And I hope it distracts you from the way the Yankees are playing right now. They have lost 12 of 18 games and their grip on the best record in baseball and the home field advantage in any round of the postseason. They are hot, stale garbage. Since this game was such a mess, I want to take a quick peek back at what got them to this point.

The first cries that the Yankees stopped trying came too early for me. During that string of close losses at Texas and Tampa, I thought the bullpen was legitimately spent. Few of Girardi’s moves worked out in those games, but I thought he was taking a lot of heat for a dearth of sac flies and hits with runners in scoring position. But then came the “rain delay.”

On Wednesday, with a chance to take the most recent Tampa series, lock in at least a 2.5 game lead, and bring a four-game sweep into the equation, a wicked rain halted play with the Yankees trailing by a measly run after three innings. But the wind blew so hard that night that all of Girardi’s Major League pitchers were swept away. When the rain cleared, he gave Royce Ring his season debut, for some reason. He backed him up with Dustin Moseley, or as he’s known in my apartment, Bantha fodder. Moseley let up a run for Ring, and then one of his own. But the Yankees scored two themselves and were still squarely in the game.

Given the gift of a close contest after using the roster dregs, Girardi still refused to engage the game. Because the nasty weather cancelled Kyle Farnsworth’s flight to LaGuardia, Girardi had to turn to Chad Gaudin to put the game away. For Tampa. He let up two homers, but Girardi was scared to death it might get closer, so he left him in to let up another run. When Albaladejo let up the seventh run, Girardi finally breathed easily – there was no chance of extra innings. There was no chance someone might slip on the wet grass and get hurt. And there was no reason to use a good relief pitcher. He succeeded in putting all the eggs in CC’s basket. Then CC ate the friggin’ eggs.

(more…)

Hey, Yanks just need to win two games to reach the playoffs this weekend?

Things aren’t all that bad, after all.

Okay, so 1960 is a most horrid thought for most Yankee fans but this is too good not to share.

The Times does homemade potato chips.

Like pitch counts and innings limits, rest has become the new obsession in baseball. Or at least it has with the Yankees. “The Yankees need to rest up for the playoffs. The Yankees, an older team, need their rest. It’s more important for the Yankees to rest than go all-out for the division.” I hear these comments again and again, from the fans to the media to some members of the Yankees themselves.

Enough already. Rest? If this team has any more rest, I will be ready for a rest home come wintertime.

Frankly, I never heard so much about the notion of resting for the postseason prior to the advent of the wildcard in 1995. Prior to that, teams had to go all-out just to win the division and qualify for the postseason. They could rest come November. But for the past 15 seasons, teams like the Yankees have often had the wild card as a fallback option. And historically speaking, wild card teams fare just as well in terms of reaching the World Series as division winners, so there is some justification for the philosophy of rest. Just as it is important to set up your postseason rotation so that your two best starters are pitching the first two games of the ALDS.

Yet, like pitch counts and innings limits, the idea of resting players can go too far. Way too far. Joe Girardi has been extraordinarily guilty of this. On two occasions this year, he has given Alex Rodriguez days off on Sundays, despite the fact that the Yankees just had an off day the preceding Thursday. What, is A-Rod no longer capable of playing three consecutive games? Girardi is trying too hard to be the anti-Leo Durocher.

Then there is Jorge Posada, who has caught a grand total of 76 games this season. I understand that Posada is a 40-year-old catcher, but he does not have the body of Bengi Molina or, for us older folks, Smoky Burgess. Posada is well conditioned and strong enough to go behind the plate at least 90 to 95 times a season. Instead, we have had to endure all too often the non-hitting spectacle of Francisco Cervelli, who has made Jake Gibbs look like Yogi Berra by comparison.

Another example of “overresting” (there actually is no such word, though Girardi is trying hard to change that) can be found in the bullpen. Over the last two weeks, Girardi has repeatedly bypassed Joba Chamberlain, David Robertson, and Kerry Wood for the dubious likes of Chad Gaudin, Sergio Mitre, and Dustin Moseley–this despite the fact that none of the “big three” has pitched in as many as 70 games this season.

Of all the Yankee players, only two can possibly be considered fatigued at this juncture of the season. They are Robinson Cano and Derek Jeter, who have missed a combined six games this summer. No one else should have any reason to be tired. All of the other position players have missed a sufficient number of games, whether because of nagging injuries, a stint on the disabled list, or just plain rest. Not even CC Sabathia has been overworked; he is on pace to finish with only the fourth highest innings total of his career.

Simply put, the Yankees have no reason to rely on the crutch of being tired this October. If they fall short against the Twins, the Rangers, or the Rays, I don’t want to hear anyone say that it happened because they were “tired.” I just don’t want to hear it…

***

“The Grandy Man can! The Grandy Man can!” Believe it or not, I heard John Sterling’s vaudeville home run call for Curtis Granderson for the first time this week. Where have I been all season long? Well, I usually follow the Yankees on YES, and not over the radio waves. And often, when I’m trying to tune in to the Yankees in the car, the AM radio signal doesn’t make it to these parts in central New York.

How is any of this relevant? Well, it really isn’t, but ever since Granderson retooled his stance and swing with the help of Kevin Long, while learning to keep both hands on the bat during his follow-through, he has become an offensive force. Don’t look now, but Granderson has a better OPS (.780 to .763) than Austin “Action” Jackson, the man for whom he was traded. Granderson has drawn unfavorable comparisons to Jackson all summer long, but those comparisons don’t add up. Given his power, his ability to draw walks, and the very fine defense that he has played in center field, the Yankees are actually better off with Grandy in 2010 than they would have been with Jackson.

An excellent defender himself, Jackson may end up winning the American League Rookie of the Year, but that’s in large part because of the weak competition in the league’s freshman class. Jackson has hit with little power, strikes out way too much for a singles hitter, and lacks the patience of an ideal leadoff man. If he were still playing for the Yankees, we would hear no end to these faults.

Let’s face it, The Grandy Man has been the better player.

Bruce Markusen writes “Cooperstown Confidential” for The Hardball Times.

For you skeptics out there, last night’s loss is proof that this is not a magical year, that this Yankee team will get bounced from the playoffs in early October. We’re always looking for signs and the Yanks have not played well over the past month. This morning, the papers took notice.

In the Post, George King begins his recap:

Joe Girardi and CC Sabathia better be correct. Because if they are wrong, the Yankees’ October experience is going to be a short one.

The manager and ace both said the max-effort pitching duel between David Price and Sabathia less than two weeks ago in St. Petersburg, Fla., didn’t bankrupt the Yankees ace’s tank.

In the News, Mark Feinsand writes, “The standings still show the Yankees in sole possession of first place in the American League East, so why does it feel like they lost the division Thursday night?”

Nobody was happy in the comments section here at Banter last night, either. So? What does it all mean? Can this team turn it on and go back to the Whirled Serious? Or is this 2006 and a first round bump?

I don’t think the Yanks will repeat but also would be surprised if they don’t at least make it to the ALCS.

The last time Sabathia and Price faced each other, I compared it to Dinocroc vs. Supergator. This time around I’m afraid it was more like Sharktopus vs. a blonde in a bikini; the Rays creamed the Yankees 10-1 in a game that saw Sabathia uncharacteristically implode, and Javy Vazquez not entirely uncharacteristically implode.

Neither starter was as sharp tonight as they were in their last matchup, but Price and Sabathia hung in there well enough to keep things close for the first five innings. The Yanks took an early lead when Marcus Thames (“Glenallen Hill Historical Re-Enactment Society Chairman Marcus Thames,” as Jay Jaffe dubbed him) hit a big ol’ homer to left, scoring Robinson Cano. The Rays came right back in the third, as a series of singles allowed Ben Zobrist to score Jason Bartlett; but in the bottom of the fifth, Greg Golson reached home on a gentle Nick Swisher single, and with Sabathia on the mound guarding a 3-1 lead it looked like the Yankees might get the best of this series.

It was at this point that the game got out its MetroCard and hopped on the 9:15 crosstown handbasket to Hell.

Carl Crawford singled, Evan Longoria doubled. Fine – these things happen. Rocco Baldelli singled, which is a bit more surprising but, given all he’s been through, hey – good for him, you know? 3-2 Yankees. Willy Aybar singled; Kelly Shoppach walked. It was at this point, with the game tied, that I began to suspect an evil alien force had possessed Sabathia, and when he then walked Sean Rodriguez, it was all the confirmation I needed. C.C. Sabathia just doesn’t do that sort of thing, and I only hope Gene Monahan and the Yankee trainers have some good exorcism strategies to get this demon out of the Yankee ace before the playoffs start.

Joe Girardi came to this realization around the same time I did, and yanked Sabathia in favor of Joba Chamberlain, who turned 25 today, and also gave up a ground-rule double to B.J. Upton and a single to Carl Crawford. This was probably Sabathia’s worst start of the year – it was the most runs he’s ever given up as a Yankee – and certainly his worst since May, when he scuffled for a few weeks. It was 8-3 Rays, but at this point it looked like a run-of-the-mill bad game, just one of those nights. It took Javier Vazquez to elevate things into Grand Guignol.

I don’t generally buy into the whole “he just can’t handle playing in New York” idea, but if anyone ever changes my mind on that point, it will be Javy Vazquez. I don’t know if he was merely having a very, very bad night or if we just witnessed a Steve Blass-style mental and physical breakdown live on television; Vazquez came into the game and walked Ben Zobrist, then hit the next three batters in a row. This tied the American League record, and was only the eighth time in all of Major League history that a pitcher has hit three in a row. Whether to conserve his pen or to allow Vazquez to reclaim a shred of dignity by letting him clean up his own mess, Girardi left him in the game. The worst was over, but it was one hell of a discouraging moment for a pitcher who’s had a number of them in the Bronx.

The inning finally bled out; it was 10-1 by then and not even the most die-hard fans could envision a comeback. By the end of “God Bless America”, most of the crowd had evaporated and Girardi had replaced his regulars with most of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre roster. Inspired by that choice, I’ve decided to do the same thing and remove myself from this recap.

Now typing for Emma Span: her dog Pearl.

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The Dummy leads, the dummy leads…

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

As William mentioned in the comments section earlier, there is always something to see when you are the ballpark that you can’t get on TV, even if the ballpark experience features an awful  lot of TV. For instance, last night, I noticed just how slowly the players took the field between innings. They were in no rush. It was hot and humid, and they’ve been playing all summer long. How many trips has this been from the dugout to their respective positions? They were pacing themselves, conserving energy.

Then, I think it was in the top of the third inning, one of the Rays hit a line drive that almost took off the head of their first base coach. The dude hit the deck, then, gingerly, stood up. The crowd gave him a cheer for surviving. A few minutes later, a ground ball up the middle took a late hop and Derek Jeter had to adjust his glove quickly to snare it. After he gloved the ball and flipped to Cano at second for the force, Jeter shook his head as if to say, “Dag, close call.”

And it struck me that even when baseball seems slow, boring and tedious, the action on the field happens lightening fast. The sense of  danger is always there.

P.S. I heard that Jeter is called a “bi-racial angel” in the new Will Ferrell movie. That’s a good line.

[Photo Credit: Andrew Burton/Getty Images]

It’s not about a salary it’s all about reality.

Hey, speaking of gangsters, remember this fargin corksucker?

Greasy…

From the New York Magazine archives, here’s a piece Pete Hamill once in 1969 about a Great White Hope:

Jerry Quarry was dressed in natty gray sharkskin trousers, a cobalt-blue shirt and white shoes, and he looked like all those young men in Southern California who don’t take drugs or wear their hair long or go off to Berkeley. The dark blond hair was combed straight back, with long sideburns, and you were sure that a few years ago he wore a ducktail. The face itself had that rugged blockiness you see a lot in California: straight short nose, good jaw, neat ears; only Quarry’s eyes had that peculiar maturity that comes with the acceptance of pain. He nodded and disappeared into the dressing room.

After awhile, Quarry returned and hopped into the ring. He was wearing green trunks and white boxing shoes, and he started to move briskly around the ring, flicking his bandaged hands at the air. The hard body was tanned and trim, and he twisted it and stretched it, the hands always moving, describing patterns of punches, the jab whipping straight out, the right hand jamming behind it, the short flat hook whipping horizontally across Quarry’s own chin-line. The audience seemed hypnotized.

Then Quarry went over to the side of the ring, where his trainer Teddy Bentham smeared Vaseline on his face and laced on a pair of 10-ounce red boxing gloves. Boursse came into the ring, his face masked by headgear. Quarry did not wear headgear, and you could see the blanched look on the face of John Condon, the Garden public relations man. Quarry’s fight with Frazier is the hottest prizefight of the year; the Garden might be sold out, and if it is, the live gate alone could be $750,000, with another million coming from closed-circuit television. If Quarry were cut in training it would cost someone a lot of money. But Quarry is a fighter, and the real fighters don’t really care much for headgear.

An intriguing new book on Charlie Chan by Yunte Hang has received good reviews–from the L.A. Times and the New York Times and The New Yorker:

Chan’s Hollywood career was launched in 1926, with a film adaptation of “The House Without a Key,” starring the Japanese actor George Kuwa, after which Chan went on to appear in forty-six more movies; he was most memorably played, in the nineteen-thirties, by a Swede named Warner Oland. He also appeared in countless comic strips and, in the nineteen-seventies, in sixteen episodes of Hanna-Barbera’s “The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan,” which aired on CBS television on Saturday mornings and featured a dog named Chu Chu, Jodie Foster’s voice as one of Chan’s ten children, and the cri de coeur “Wham bam, we’re in a jam!”
Charlie Chan is also one of the most hated characters in American popular culture. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, distinguished American writers, including Frank Chin and Gish Jen, argued for laying Chan to rest, a yellow Uncle Tom, best buried. In trenchant essays, Chin condemned the Warner Oland movies as “parables of racial order”; Jen called Chan “the original Asian whiz kid.” In 1993, the literary scholar Elaine Kim bid Chan good riddance—“Gone for good his yellowface asexual bulk, his fortune-cookie English”—in an anthology of contemporary Asian-American fiction titled “Charlie Chan Is Dead,” which is not to be confused with the beautiful and fantastically clever 1982 Wayne Wang film, “Chan Is Missing,” and in which traces of a man named Chan are all over the place, it’s just that no one can find him anymore.
“Role of dead man require very little acting,” as Charlie Chan liked to say. (Don’t ask me what that means. Aphorisms, like tiger in zoo, all roar, no claw.) In “Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History” (Norton; $26.95), Yunte Huang, who grew up in China, went to graduate school in the United States, taught at Harvard for a while, and now teaches American literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, confesses, abashedly, to being a Chan fan: “Sometimes late at night, I turn on the TV and a Chinaman falls out. He is hilarious.” Most interesting.
(Jill Lepore, The New Yorker)

[Picture by Greg Kucera]

Derek Jeter put in some extra work with hitting coach Kevin Long and has some good results to show for it. Jeter has an 11-game hitting streak and is starting to drive the ball again. According to Ben Shpigel in the Times:

“Lately, what you’ve seen is a guy whose head is staying still,” Long said before Wednesday’s game against the Rays. “He’s much more direct to the baseball.”

The primary change involved shortening Jeter’s stride. Long noticed that Jeter’s left foot was moving toward the plate instead of toward the mound as he prepared to swing, a flaw that left him vulnerable to inside pitches and prevented him from making solid contact. “You’re going to see the ball a lot better, and your body’s more in control,” Long said. “Ultimately, everything’s going to be working in order.”

Yanks lookin’ to get greedy. AJ Burnett lookin’ to show and prove:

Go git ’em, fellas.

Future Hall of Famer and all-around Nice Guy Jim Thome is profiled by Joe Posnanski this week in SI. Dig in.

It’s been chilly the past few nights here in New York. October baseball is in the air for Yankee fans and I’m here to tell you that it feels good to be so spoiled. For years my sense memory informed me to get anxious in this weather which meant the start of school. Now, it’s been replaced by a luxurious feeling–the Yankees and the playoffs. It is a sensation that I cannot take for granted.

Now that autumn is fast approaching the summer bounty is running dry. No more corn, just a few precious tomatoes left. These here were grown on a rooftop in Manhattan. August is my favorite time of year for food and I’m always sorry to see it go, but take comfort in the fact that it’ll return next year. And when it arrives again, just like when the Yanks make the playoffs, I’ll appreciate every last moment.