Man at work. Seen on 231st Street in the Bronx.

How’d they get my name and number?

[Photo Credit Anthony Gerace via MPD]

David Lebovitz visits the Le Creuset factory. This is just an incredibly dope post.

Et tu, Dellin?

Another tough night for a Yankee starter, and an even rougher one for the Yankees’ closer as the Phillies beat the Yanks again, 11-6. Dellin Betances had given up one run all season. Last night he gave up four.

Alex Rodriguez had a couple of hits, including a solo home run, but with runners on second and third, one man out in the bottom of the sixth, he could not drive a run home. Brian McCann followed and grounded out to end the inning and that was the last real threat posed by the Bombers (Brett Gardner hit another dinger too because that’s, apparently, what Brett Gardner does).

So this is what it is–another losing streak. Today won’t get any easier despite the return of Ivan Nova as Cole Hamels is pitching for the Phils.

We can only hope, true to form, that this losing streak will be followed by a winning streak.

Picture by Bags

Brett Gardner CF

Chase Headley 3B

Alex Rodriguez DH

Brian McCann C

Carlos Beltran RF

Garrett Jones 1B

Chris Young LF

Didi Gregorius SS

Jose Pirela 2B

It’s CC and get your head-out-of-your-ass boys.

Never mind last night:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Picture by Bags

Chica Who? Chica Boo.

Photo Via Back Then.

Over at The New York Review of Books, check out this essay by Mark Strand on Edward Hopper:

Recent major exhibitions in London, Paris, Rome, and Madrid testify to the universality of his appeal. It couldn’t be just the way New York looked in the first half of the twentieth century or the dated look of hotel rooms, of people in offices, staring blankly or dreamily into space, that accounts for such interest. Something lifts the paintings beyond the representational registers of realism into the suggestive, quasi-mystical realm of meditation. Moments of the real world, the one we all experience, seem mysteriously taken out of time. The way the world glimpsed in passing from a train, say, or a car, will reveal a piece of a narrative whose completion we may or may not attempt, but whose suggestiveness will move us, making us conscious of the fragmentary, even fugitive nature of our own lives. This may account for the emotional weight that so many Hopper paintings possess. And why we lapse lazily into triteness when trying to explain their particular power. Again and again, words like “loneliness” or “alienation” are used to describe the emotional character of his paintings.

My own encounters with this elusive element in Hopper’s work began when I would commute from Croton-on-Hudson to New York each Saturday to take a children’s art class in one of those buildings on the south side of Washington Square that were eventually torn down to make room for NYU’s law school. This was in 1947. Just a year after Hopper painted Approaching a City (1946), I would look out from the train window onto the rows of tenements whose windows I could look into and try to imagine what living in one of those apartments would be like. And then at 99th Street we would enter the tunnel that would take us to Grand Central. It was thrilling to suddenly go underground, travel in the dark, and be delivered to the masses of people milling about in the cavernous terminal. Years later, when I saw Approaching a City for the first time, I instantly recalled those trips into Manhattan and have ever since. And Hopper, for me, has always been associated with New York, a New York glimpsed in passing, sweetened with nostalgia, a city lodged in memory.

Alexandra gives Blueberry Cobbler.  Diggum, smack.

Picture by Rosalyn Drexler via This Isn’t Happiness. 

If you happen to be in Paris this summer this sure looks like a lovely show.

Big Mike, what’s doing on, Dude?

The Yanks pitching was horseshit for the most part last night and got their tits lit by the lowly Phillies.

The hitters put in work, scored 8 runs but it wasn’t enough.

Final Score: Phillies 11,  Yanks 8. 

Phooey.

[Photo Credit: Jim McIsaac/Getty Images]

Nova’s coming back this week. Tonight gives Big Mike.

Brett Gardner CF

Chase Headley 3B

Alex Rodriguez DH

Brian McCann C

Carlos Beltran RF

Garrett Jones 1B

Didi Gregorius SS

Chris Young LF

Stephen Drew 2B

Never mind playing down to the competition:

Picture by Bags

R.I.P. Jack Rollins: showbiz legend.

[Photo Via: Bob Weide]

File Sunday’s game under the Every-beating-deserves-another file.

Masahiro Tanaka had an off-day, J.D. Martinez hit three home runs, and the Tigers pounded the Yanks, 12-4.

Peter Richmond is a good man, loyal friend, and a gifted writer. Here he is at his best, writing about his father for GQ in December of 1993. The article was the genesis of Richmond’s beautiful memoir, My Father’s War: A Son’s Journey.

To celebrate Father’s Day—and much respect and love to all the dad’s out there—I can think of no finer piece to share with you. Head on over to the Beast and check out–“My Father’s War”:

He survived Guadalcanal, and then New Britain, and then Peleliu, and came home in 1944 to take over the family business, manufacturing paper bags in a gray factory next to the railroad tracks in Long Island City. He married the woman who would become my mother and moved to Westchester County, and died in 1960, at the age of 44, when I was 7, so I never had much of a chance to ask him about his war.

But it was always there. I could hold it to my face. My father’s war was tucked into the trunk that sat in the darkest corner of the cellar: a Japanese flag, stained with Rorschach blotches of blood, the red circle still bright, the field of white crowded with the Japanese characters that identified the man whose blood graced it.

As a child, I spent a lot of time with the flag, running it through my hands, marveling at the liquid feel of the silk, at how different it was from the rest of my father’s memorabilia: the .30-caliber Japanese machine gun, the Japanese hand grenade, the rifles–all of them so inconceivably heavy and redolent of good grease and iron that I knew they carried the real weight of war.

Picture by Bags

The Yankees enjoyed Old Timer’s Day yesterday–has Willie finished his speech yet?–and then went ahead and pounded the crap out of the Tigers to the tune of 14-3. Big night for a lot of guys–notably Carlos Beltran, Brett Gardner, Nathan Eovaldi, Alex Rodriguez, Didi Gregorious, and Chris Young.

Picture by Bags; Frank Franklin II/AP

He’ll be at the Stadium today for Old Timer’s Day. Tonight gives Yanks, Tigers.

Enjoy, everyone:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Why wait? Alex Rodriguez swung at the first pitch he saw from Justin Verlander last night–a fastball on the outside part of the plate–and popped it over the wall in right field. Hit number 3,000 was a home run.

It was a sweet moment and Rodriguez seemed to soak it in. Got big hugs from C. C. Sabathia and Brian McCann and Joe Girardi, pats, slaps, and daps from the rest of his team. Pointed and blew kisses to his daughters, Natasha and Elia, sitting in the stands behind the Yankee dugout.

A quick look at the articles around the web this morning and I see most of them hone-in on what this moment could have been–should have been–if only Rodriguez hadn’t botched it all up. Stain, shame, tarnished, asterisk, you’ve heard it all before.

John Flaherty was less than sanguine on the YES broadcast last night, noting that none of the Tigers applauded as Rodriguez rounded the bases. It was a fair observation but incomplete as the replays didn’t show if any of the Tigers clapped or saluted while Rodriguez was hugged by his teammates and cheered by the crowd. When Sabathia hugged Rodriguez, they turned, smiled and pointed to someone on the other side of the field, presumably in the Tigers dugout. Perhaps the Tigers didn’t cheer–this was no lovefest like the one Jeter got the day he hit 3,000–but it was misleading of Flaherty and YES to suggest the Tigers apathy and not give a full account of their actions–Miguel Cabrera, for one, gave Rodriguez a hug after the game.

Rodriguez told reporters after the game, “The thing that I’ll take away from a day like today is, after the last out is made, Miguel Cabrera comes over and gives me a hug,” Rodriguez said. “Twenty years from now, that’s really what I’ll take away — the fans’ reaction, sharing it with my teammates and seeing their reaction.

“Everything about this year has been a surprise. I’ve never enjoyed the game as much as I have this year.”

This gray area is of Rodriguez’s making and some of us don’t like to have the innocence of the prize-in-the-crackerjack moment sullied by anything as sticky as reality. But Rodriguez has always been a challenge, even before 2009, hasn’t he?’

Leave it to Ken Davidoff to make sense:

You don’t view this as a redemption tale? Good. Me neither. A-Rod had nothing from which to redeem himself; he served his year’s suspension in 2014 and returned as a player with the same rights as all of the others. For me, it’s a tale of perseverance — the guy just won’t go away, even with two surgically repaired hips and his extensive rap sheet — and of comeuppance for the blinders-wearing moralists who thought, just with the force of their consternation, they could will A-Rod into oblivion.

You’re expending energy trying to determine whether A-Rod is using something right now? Ay yi yi.

You’re searching for a level of truth that is virtually unobtainable — if not necessarily about A-Rod, than it is about the player population in general. What a shame to lose sleep wondering who uses illegal PEDs and who doesn’t. The drug tests, to repeat a line, are IQ tests. The same goes for baseball’s investigative department, which capitalized on the stupidity of A-Rod and his fellow Biogenesis guys to rely on the unreliable Anthony Bosch for their stuff.

A-Rod is great for the game because he gets people to care, one way or the other. The game needs its villains just as badly as its protagonists, and in this age of social media, can we really hope to find a worthy successor to this guy?

Anyhow, never mind the angst–or the professional putz who caught the ball and won’t fork it over–it was a lovely moment. Even better, was Adam Warren, who pitched 8 innings (the longest outing of his career), held the Tigers to a couple of runs, and got home runs from Didi Gregorious and Brett Gardner as the Yanks beat the Tigers, 7-2.

[Photo Credit: Bill Kostroun; Frank Franklin II/AP]

Brett Gardner LF

Chase Headley 3B

Alex Rodriguez DH

Mark Teixeira 1B

Carlos Beltran RF

Didi Gregorius SS

Stephen Drew 2B

John Ryan Murphy C

Mason Williams CF

It’s the Warren Report, and, of course, all eyes on Alex as he looks to get hit #3,000.

Never mind the flashbulbs:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Manara.