Alex Rodriguez got a couple of base hits last night and was sitting on career hit 2,999. He got two final at bats. Lined out to right in the first one, and then, in the bottom of the 8th–when the Yanks broke open what had been a tight game–he walked on four pitches. The reliever, Sam Dyson, had already walked Chase Headley and didn’t have much control. Neither did the crowd, who leveled the reliever with boos. And they didn’t let up. (They were irked because they knew their chance at seeing Rodriguez get hit number 3,000 was lost.) It was poor form, I’d say, but also amusing. Nice to hear that the old obnoxious Bronx Cheer loud and clear.

Anyhow, it was Brett Gardner and Carlos Beltran with the big hits–each hitting a two-run homer. Gardner was fired up like a wrestler when he returned to the dugout after hitting his dinger. Don’t recall ever seeing him so animated. And Beltran took a 3-1 pitch for a called strike, didn’t like the call, stepped back in the box, and then hit his home run.

C.C. pitched pretty well–Mike Stanton hit a low line drive home run that brought back memories of Dave Winfield–and the Yanks won, 9-4.

[Photo Credit: Kathy Willens/AP]

It’s the Big Fella on the hill on a gray, chilly evening in the BX. The Old Fella, the Relic, the Good Fella.

C’mon, C.C., we love ya, dude.

Brett Gardner LF

Chase Headley 3B

Alex Rodriguez DH

Mark Teixeira 1B

Brian McCann C

Carlos Beltran RF

Didi Gregorius SS

Stephen Drew 2B

Mason Williams CF

Never mind Giancarlo:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Picture by Bags

Thiebaud. 

Now, that’s more like it.

Yeah, Michael Pineda had a no-hitter going into the 7th inning and that was cool. Then he gave up his first hit, a solo home run. No big deal, right? ‘Cept the Yanks only had 2 runs of their own and with Pineda’s pitch-count nearing the magic number (100), he didn’t make it through the inning.

Then in the 8th, trouble: first and third, one out. Enter, Mr. Betances. A ground ball to first, Garrett Jones–who’d been robbed of a run-scoring hit to end the 7th–fields, hesitates, throws high to the plate, runner called safe, tie game. The Yanks have the umps review it, call’s overturned, the lead safe. Betances handles the rest and preserves the 2-1 lead for a much-needed win.

Alex Rodriguez got a couple of hits and is now just three away from Mr. 3,000; Carlos Beltran also had two hits.

Picture by Bags

Back at home, Big Mike looks to rebound from an ass-kicking.

Brett Gardner LF

Chase Headley 3B

Brian McCann C

Alex Rodriguez DH

Garrett Jones 1B

Carlos Beltran RF

Didi Gregorius SS

Stephen Drew 2B

Mason Williams CF

Never mind this losing:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Just listen, don’t do it, pay attention…

Picture by Bags

“Gloucester Beach, Bass Rocks” By Edward Hopper (1924)

The on-again, off-again Yankees are in off-again mode.

Last night, Nathan Eovaldi gave up 8 runs in the first inning and that was that. The final was 12-2. Man, oh, man, it was ugly.

Always did like that David Phelps though I’ll be rooting against him tonight. Course, he’s pitching against the dude he was traded for. How odd is that?

Brett Gardner CF

Didi Gregorius SS

Mark Texieria 1B

Brian McCann C

Chase Headley 3B

Carlos Beltran RF

Chris Young LF

Brendan Ryan 2B

Never mind the fish:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Good Lord, yes.

This New York Minute is brought to you by the great Charles Simic. 

Painting by David Larson Evans.

Jazz Wax, thank you, once again. 

Picture via Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. 

The Yanks were down 2-1 with a man on and two men out in the 9th inning when Alex Rodriguez came to the plate as a pinch-hitter. And he got a standing ovation. I’m not sure he’s ever been received so warmly at Yankee Stadium. It was like being in some kind of alternate universe for a moment. The love didn’t translate into a hit–he popped out to right field to end the game, just missed, too–but the drama was there. Even as an old man, Rodriguez is boffo.

Tough loss for the Yanks and Masahiro Tanaka who pitched a good game–and a Sergio Santos did a sweet job in relief getting out of a bases-loaded, nobody out jam in the 8th.

Picture by Bags

Yanks have an odd week–play two against the Marlins in Miami, then two against the Marlins in New York.

Tonight gives Tanaka and a close-up look at Mr. Stanton.

Brett Gardner LF

Chase Headley 3B

Brian McCann C

Mark Teixeira 1B

Garrett Jones RF

Stephen Drew 2B

Didi Gregorius SS

Mason Williams CF

Masahiro Tanaka RHP

Never mind the view:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Picture by Zachary Ayotte via Lover of Beauty. 

Call me. 

Dear Ira,

Gluten is good.

Love,

Phyllis.

I walked past Alice Tully Hall on Saturday and just had to take a picture, man.

The latest reprint over at the Beast is a rich piece of ’60’s pop culture criticism from the inimitable Seymour Krim. All about Jack Kerouac:

As an Outsider, then, French Canadian, Catholic (“I am a Canuck, I could not speak English till I was 5 or 6, at 16 I spoke with a halting accent and was a big blue baby in school though varsity basketball later and if not for that no one would have noticed I could cope in any way with the world and would have been put in the madhouse for some kind of inadequacy…”), but with the features and build of an all-American prototype growing up in a solid New England manufacturing town, much of Kerouac’s early life seems to have gone into fantasy and daydreams which he acted out. (“At the age of 11 I wrote whole little novels in nickel notebooks, also magazines in imitation of Liberty Magazine and kept extensive horse racing newspapers going.”) He invented complicated games for himself, using the Outsider’s solitude to create a world—many worlds, actually—modeled on the “real” one but extending it far beyond the dull-normal capacities of the other Lowell boys his own age. Games, daydreams, dreams themselves—his Book of Dreams (1961) is unique in our generation’s written expression—fantasies and imaginative speculations are rife throughout all of Kerouac’s grownup works; and the references all hearken back to his Lowell boyhood, to the characteristically American small-city details (Lowell had a population of 100,000 or less during Kerouac’s childhood), and to what we can unblushingly call the American Idea, which the young Jack cultivated as only a yearning and physically vigorous dreamer can.

That is, as a Stranger, a first-generation American who couldn’t speak the tongue until he was in knee pants, the history and raw beauty of the U.S. legend was more crucially important to his imagination than it was to the comparatively well-adjusted runny-noses who took their cokes and movies for granted and fatly basked in the taken-for-granted American customs and consumer goods that young Kerouac made into interior theatricals. It is impossible to forget that behind the 43-year-old Kerouac of today lies a wild total involvement in this country’s folkways, history, small talk, visual delights, music and literature—especially the latter; Twain, Emily Dickinson, Melville, Sherwood Anderson, Whitman, Emerson, Hemingway, Saroyan, Thomas Wolfe, they were all gobbled up or at least tasted by him before his teens were over (along with a biography of Jack London that made him want to be an “adventurer”); he identified with his newfound literary fathers and grandfathers and apparently read omnivorously. As you’ll see, this kind of immersion in the literature of his kinsmen—plunged into with the grateful passion that only the children of immigrants understand—was a necessity before he broke loose stylistically; he had to have sure knowledge and control of his medium after a long apprenticeship in order to chuck so much extraneous tradition in the basket when he finally found his own voice and risked its total rhythm and sound.

All-in effort from the Yanks today, especially the bullpen and Mr. John Ryan Murphy who came through with a couple of big hits as the Yanks beat the O’s, 5-3 to avoid being swept. Baltimore is hot but the Yanks did a nice job to get the “w” today.

Exhale.

[Photo Credit: Joel Zimmer]