I know I threw a ton of stuff at you today, so here’s a quick linkorama to a feast of New York Giant goodies:

Giants for a Day: Dreaming of the old Penn Station and the Polo Grounds:

Lookit Here: A video piece with accompanying article on the New York Giants Nostalgia Society for SNY.TV.

So Long, Farewell: Arnold Hano and Roger Angell bid farewell to the Polo Grounds.

Bronx Banter Video Bites:

Number One: An Introduction.

Number Two: The Truth Hurts.  Tales from the dugout in the ’54 World Serious.

Giants Fan in my Soul: A guest article by Greg Prince.

Bronx Banter Bite Number Three: The Candy Man Can (aka, The Del Crandel Story).

Number Four: Spahnie, How I Luv Ya.

Number Five: The Lady is…An Ump. 

Number Six: Showtime.

And finally, here’s one last morsel, a New York Giants reading list from Greg Prince:

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Perry Barber has umped fantasy camps and spring training games for years.  This past winter, she worked home plate for a Mets-Cards exhibition, part of the first all-female umpiring crew to work a big league game. 

Dig: 

Here’s a bit from one of the Koolest Kets I’ve ever had the chance to meet, the one and only Perry Lee Barber: a Jepoardy champion at age 19, a nightclub singer who opened for Springsteen, Billy Joel and Hall and Oates in her twenties, and a huge baseball fan who has been a professional umpire for the better part of the last thirty years:

I Kid, I’m a Kidder…

What’s a matta, kid?  Can’t take a joke?

Richie talks about how hard it was not to root for the Giants when he was working the visiting team dugout at the Polo Grounds: 

By Greg W. Prince

Fifteen years after the New York Giants played their last game.

In an All in the Family episode called "Edith Finds an Old Man," Edith does exactly as the title describes. She brings home an elderly loner she found wandering through the supermarket, Archie blusters, we learn some valuable lessons about how society should treat senior citizens and Gloria declares toward the end that since she didn’t know her own grandparents, we can adopt Mr. Quigley (and his girlfriend, no less) as honorary Bunkers.

I recall that sitcom moment here because I suppose I did the same thing as Gloria Stivic. I adopted the displaced New York Giants as my own grandpa: my own baseball grandpa.

Never mind that I never saw the New York Giants play. Never mind that the New York Giants ceased to exist five years before I began to commence. Never mind that there is no trace of Giants fandom in my biological lineage. Never mind that I don’t care a whit for the San Francisco Giants. To me as a real-time New York Mets fan, the San Francisco Giants are just some windy stopover on the way to getting swept in San Diego.

I’m a New York Mets fan in my heart and a New York Giants fan in my soul. Those are my teams. Earlier this season, I prematurely wrote off the 2008 Mets as dead. But the Giants, they’re actually deceased since 1957.

Your team being dead at the present time, however, is no excuse for not remaining loyal to it.

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Richie McCabe was the bat boy in the Indians dugout at the Polo Grounds during the ’54 Serious.  Here’s a little story about an encounter with Bobby Avila:

I’ve souped-up a series of exclusive Bronx Banter takes on the summer gathering of the New York Giants Nostalgia Society.  They are intended to be little nuggets of Noo Yawk Lovliness.

Here’s the first of six short clips that will be posted over the course of the day.

Dig ‘Em:

In the coming weeks, we’ll see more than our fair share of tributes to Yankee Stadium. Here are a couple of excellent farewells to the old Polo Grounds…  

Arnold Hano, who wrote the terrific account of Game One of the 1954 World Serious, A Day in the Bleachers, was on hand for the Giants last game at the Polo Grounds. He wrote about the experience for Sports Illustrated:

It was a few minutes before one o’clock in the afternoon, and Willie Mays and Valmy Thomas were socializing in center field of the Polo Grounds with Pittsburgh Pirate Outfielder Jim Pendleton, against all the rules of the game. It was obviously going to be that sort of day.

Wafted across the field, through the gravel-throated public-address system, sweet music entertained the early crowd. A fan sang softly, "Sweetheart, if you should stray/A million miles away/I’ll always be in love with you." It was that sort of day.

The sky was gray, and there was a ring around a hazy yellow sun. It was also that sort of day. A fan walked through the bleachers. "Wanna buy a crying towel?" he said. "Buy a set of crying towels." There were no other vendors. You couldn’t buy a scorecard in the bleachers. You couldn’t buy a hot dog or coffee. The vendors hadn’t showed up. The concession stand was open, though. You could get a beer. There are two big signs in the Polo Grounds that read: "Have a Knick." The concession man was selling Ballantine’s.

At 1:32 the public-address announcer said, "Will the guests of the Giants assemble at home plate?" A fan near the third-base boxes snarled, "We’re the guests, you jerks.

Six-and-a-half years later, Roger Angell said goodbye to the Polo Grounds in a short essay for The New Yorker:

What does depress me about the decease of the bony, misshapen old playground is the attendant irrevocable deprivation of habit–the amputation of so many private, and easily renewable small familiarities.  The things I liked best about the Polo Grounds were wights and emotions so inconsequential that they will surely slide out of my recollection.  A flight of pigeons flashing out of the barn-shadow of the upper stands, wheeling past the right-field foul pole, and disappearing above the inert, heat-heavy flags on the roof.  The steepness of the ramp descending from the Speedway toward the upper-stand gates, which pushed your toes into your shoe tips as you approached the park, tasting sweet anticipation and getting out your change to buy a program.  The unmistakable, final "Plock!" of a line drive hitting the green wooden barrier above the stands in deep left field.  The gentle, rockerlike swing of the tloop of rusty chain you rested your arm upon in a box seat, and the heat of the sun-warmed iron coming through your shirtsleeve under your elbow.  At a night game, the moon rising out of the scoreboard like a spongy, day-old orange balllon and when the whitening over the waves of noise and the slow, shifting clouds of floodlit cigarette smoke.  All these I mourn, for their loss constitutes the death of still another neighbhorhood–a small landscape of distinctive and reassuring familiarity.  Demolition and alteration are a painful city commonplace, but as our surroundings become more undistinguished and indistinguishable, we sense, at last, that we may not possess the scorecards and record books to help us remember who we are and what we have seen and loved.

Man, how I wish I could have seen that joint up close.

Earlier this summer I went to a meeting of the New York Giants Nostalgia Society up in the Bronx. Here is a piece I did for SNY on the meeting:

“For some reason the Giants didn’t get a love lock on the people of New York the way the Dodgers did on the people of Brooklyn,” says Roger Kahn, whose seminal book, “The Boys of Summer”, helped perpetuate the myth of the Brooklyn Dodgers. “The Giants were New York’s original team. The old New Yorkers rooted for the Giants. The Yankees were tourists.”

The Giants were New York’s first baseball dynasty under the helm of John McGraw and led by superstar pitcher Christy Mathewson. But they were soon eclipsed by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the Yankees. “You never could refer to the Giants as Dem Bums or as Fat Cats,” says Arnold Hano, author of the “A Day in the Bleachers,” the classic first-person account of Game One of the 1954 World Series in which Willie Mays made his famous over-the-shoulder catch.

“The Yankees were Fat Cats, the Dodgers were Bums, and the Giants were in somewhere in between. They were like the middle child. They didn’t have any gloried stars: Mel Ott and Bill Terry and Carl Hubbell were great but it was hard to have fan clubs for them. They were bland. Priests in Brooklyn were praying for Gil Hodges to break out of slump. Why didn’t that happen to the Giants? Maybe because Brooklyn is the land of churches.”

In addition, I shot and produced a short video for SNY.  Here it is.  Hope you enjoy (and thanks go to Dave, Jonah, Fred and Jay for helping me put it all together):

My grand father was a circumspect, bookish man who believed that actively rooting for a sporting team was an essentially foolish activity, a waste of time.  At least the impression I always got.  He was the most passive fan you could imagine but he was a Giant fan because the Giants were New York’s team when he was growing up.  My father, hot-tempered and emotional, took after his mom’s side of the family and rooted for the Dodgers, even though he was raised in Washington Heights.  He was ten when Jackie Robinson joined the team, and liked to tell me that he was "second to none" as a Jackie Robinson fan.  I heard the names Pee Wee and Pete Reiser and Cookie Wookie Lavagetto as a kid but I never heard about any of the Giants, other than Willie Mays.

Of course, we all know about the Dodger’s enduring legacy in Brooklyn, but I’ve always found it curious that the Giants are all but forgotten.  After all if I could go back in time, I’d go to the Old Penn Station:

…and the Polo Grounds:

That said, I’m going to make today all about the old New York Giants who started playing ball in San Francisco fifty years ago. Much more to come shortly…

The Yankees jumped out to an early lead on Edwin Jackson and the Rays last night. After four innings, the score stood at 6-3 Yankees, but the next four frames went by without another tally. With two outs in the top of the ninth, Bobby Abreu worked Troy Percival for a 12-pitch walk, fouling of six full-count offerings before taking ball four. Abreu then stole second on Percival’s 0-2 pitch to Alex Rodriguez, which was a ball. Rodriguez fouled off the 1-2 pitch, took ball two, then crushed a pitch down the left-field line that sailed over the foul pole.

The ball was ruled a home run, but Rays catcher Dioner Navarro animatedly disagreed, and his manager, Joe Maddon, convinced the umpires to use instant replay for the first time in major league history. Three of the four umpires, including crew chief Charlie Reliford retreated through the visitor’s dugout to the replay area and emerged two minutes and 15 seconds later to uphold their call. Reliford emerged first from the dugout and twirled his left index finger over his head to affirm third-base umpire Brian Runge’s original call on the field.

Watching the replays shown on YES, the ball appeared to sail over the left-field foul pole, then hook foul behind hit, clanging off a catwalk near the back wall of the stadium. Still, there remained some confusion due to the fact that there was a yellow foul pole extension attached to that catwalk, despite the fact that it was set significantly back beyond the outfield wall. The ball clearly hit the catwalk to the left (foul) of that yellow indicator, but only after sailing over the actual foul pole when leaving the field of play, which is exactly how all four umpires saw it both live and in the replays.

Said Reliford after the game, “We all believed it was a home run, but since the technology is in place we made the decision to use the technology and go look at the replays. . . . If there had been no argument, obviously we wouldn’t have because all four of us believed the call was correct on the field. Because [Maddon] disputed it, and it was very close, and now the technology is in place, we used it.”

Rodriguez’s double-checked homer gave the Yankees an 8-3 lead, bounced Percival from the game, and pushed Rodriguez past Mike Schmidt on the career home runs list. The Rays picked up run in the bottom of the inning off Jose Veras to set the final score at 8-4 Yanks.

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Joe Girardi got some heat for taking Carl Pavano out of his last start after just 72 pitches despite the fact that Pavano had allowed just one run on three hits through six innings. I had no problem with it. The Yankees had a slim one-run lead, the one run Pavano gave up came in the sixth, he’d only struck out one batter, and the Blue Jays had been hitting the ball hard but right at the Yankee fielders all night. The Yankees won the game 2-1, but that didn’t seem to take much heat off the Yankee manager.

Pavano was actually better in his first start, when he struck out five and got nine ground balls (as opposed to the three he got against the Jays). In his two starts, Pavano has walked just two and allowed no home runs. It’s tempting to argue that letting Pavano audition for a contract for 2009 is against the Yankees’ best interests right now, but he’s actually been the Yankees second-best starter the last two times through the rotation.

Pavano takes a clean 2-0 record and a fine 3.27 ERA into tonight’s game against the Rays. He’ll be opposed by Edwin Jackson, who is one of the unsung heroes of the first-place Rays. A failed Dodger prospect acquired for relievers Danys Baez and Lance Carter prior to the 2006 season, Jackson entered this season with a 5.64 career ERA and a 5.02 career BB/9. This season, he’s boasting a 3.81 ERA and an improved 3.98 BB/9. Over his last seven starts, he’s 6-1 with a 2.59 ERA; over his last 12 starts, he’s 7-2 with a 3.07 ERA. In four starts against the Yankees this year, he has a 2.59 ERA, a 3.33 BB/9, and has allowed just one home run (to Hideki Matsui), though the Rays are just 2-2 in those games. One of those loses was by a score of 2-1 in a game started by Jackson and Sidney Ponson. Tonight’s game could prove to be a similarly unlikely pitchers duel.

Going, going…

Gelf’s Varsity Letters reading series is back in action tomorrow night downtown at the Happy End Lounge (302 Broome street, between Forsyth and Eldridge).  Harvey Frommer, who wrote the text for a gorgeous new over-sized book about Yankee Stadium, Remembering Yankee Stadium: An Oral and Narrative History of "The House that Ruth Built", will be there as a featured speaker as will Buster Olney, who wrote The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, and David Zirin, author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play.  If you are around, pop on over and check, check it out. 

Thanks to the tireless word machine better known as Joe Pos, I caught up with Nick Dawidoff’s recent feature on Johnny Mac for the New York Times Magazine.   

Mac is still a pill, after all these years. 

I caught some of Midnight Run on TV recently and was struck by how many cigarettes were smoked in that movie.  It didn’t faze me at the time, of course, but now…Man, it’s hard to imagine that the Smoking-is-Foo! Universe is still so relatively new, isn’t it?  In childhood photographs of anyone my age and older, you’ll see all forms of grown ups smoking, ashtrays on the coffee tables.  Smoking was replete.

I gave up smoking more than ten years ago.  But every once in awhile I’ll see an old movie that still makes smoking look, if not glamourous, then at least desirable.  What are some of your favorite smoking flicks? 

Alex Rodriguez is now tied for 12th on the all-time home run list with some dude named Michael Jack Schmidt.  Rodriguez has 1,588 RBI in his career.  He’s scored 1,591 runs.  He may in fact be the most frustrating great player we’ve ever watched but there is no denying that he’s great. 

Mazel props, dude.

Xavier Nady hit a ball to the moon in the fourth inning of last night’s game. Well, it would have gone to the moon, but the catwalk suspended from the Tropicana Dome roof got in the way. That bomb gave the Yankees a 3-1 lead they wouldn’t relinquish. The Bombers added two in the fifth, one in the sixth, and capped it off with Alex Rodriguez’s 30th homer of the year leading off the eighth. Meanwhile, Mike Mussina scattered ten hits, allowing just two runs over six-plus innings, struck out ten and picked up his 17th win of the season, leaving him with five chances to get the three more wins he needs to set a career-high in that category.

Joba Chamberlain and Dan Giese both made strong returns from shoulder tendonitis. Chamberlain needed one pitch to kill a Rays rally in the seventh and working around a walk and a single for a scoreless eighth. Giese worked a 1-2-3 ninth, striking out Carlos Peña to seal the 7-2 Yankee win. Chamberlian’s velocity was a bit down, but he said after the game that his mechanics were a bit out of whack from the time off and that he expected everything to fall into place in his subsequent outings. Most importantly, his shoulder felt just fine.

B.J. Upton made the play of the game on a drive by Rodriguez in the top of the second. Running full speed toward the wall in center, Upton snow-coned Rodriguez’s line drive in the webbing of his glove before taking one step up the wall to slow his momentum. In the bottom of the inning, Eric Hinske made the boner of the game (in a game that had its share) when he raced around the bases for a triple while watching Nady and Johnny Damon chase after the ball in left center. Hinske slid safely into third base head first. Only then did he discover that Willy Aybar, who had singled before him, had been held up at third. Forced to vacate the base, Aybar was throw out easily at home. Hinske then failed to score on a subsequent groundout by Jason Bartlett, leaving the game scoreless entering the third inning.

Rodriguez’s homer tied him with Mike Schmidt for 12th in major league history. Barring injury, he’ll be chasing 600 this time next year.

Congratulations to the Rays on their first winning season, playoff berth, and division championship: You’ve come a long way, baby.

The Yankees are 7-5 against the Rays this year, which is a solid showing against a team that leads them by 12 games in the standings. Sadly, it’s done them little good. The Yankees could sweep their remaining six games against Tampa Bay, match their record against third-part opponents, and still finish six games out in the AL East.

We’re in an odd stage of the Yankees’ season. Best I can tell, just about all of the fanbase and most of the media have come to grips with the reality that the Yankees will miss the postseason for the first time since 1993, but because they’re still “just” seven games out of the Wild Card with 26 left to play, the team itself, as well at its broadcasters, need to at least pretend they’re still in it. It’s true that it ain’t over ’til it’s over, but the Yankees have to gain one game on the Red Sox over the course of each remaining series to arrive in Boston on September 26 in position to pass Boston with a series win, and even that doesn’t account for the second-place team in the AL Central, whom the Yankees also trail in the Wild Card race. It’s just not going to happen.

What’s left now is saying farewell to Yankee Stadium, preparing for next year–be it by giving Alfredo Aceves a start or two in place of Pavano or Ponson, letting Brett Gardner start in center field, or hoping Hideki Matsui gets on a hot streak to increase his trade value–and Mike Mussina’s pursuit of 20 wins, which continues tonight in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Mussina enters tonight’s game with 16 wins and will have five starts left afterwards (against the Mariners, Rays, White Sox, Orioles, Blue Jays, and Red Sox). The Yankees have won Mussina’s last six starts, but Moose earned the win in just three of them due to late-breaking run support. Still, Mussina’s been excellent over that stretch, posting 2.93 ERA and averaging 6 2/3 innings. In fact, over his last 17 starts, Mussina has a 2.92 ERA and has averaged nearly 6 2/3 innings per start. Only once over that stretch has he failed to complete six innings and only once has he allowed more than four runs (both coming in the same game against the Orioles). Still, he has just 9 wins in those 17 starts, due in part to losing scores such as 4-2 (twice), 3-2, and 2-1. That makes four wins in six starts a tall order, and four wins in five starts should he lose tonight extremely unlikely.

Moose’s mount opponent tonight is Matt Garza, who has displayed a Verlander-like inconsistency. Over his last nine starts, Garza has held the opposition scoreless four times, including two shutouts. In the other five games, he has allowed 24 runs in 27 1/3 innings. The trend: three of those four scoreless outings came against Toronto. The exception: one of the shutouts was a two-hit, nine-K performance against the Rangers in Arlington. Garza has faced the Yankees once this year, shutting them out over seven innings back on May 12. In his next start, he gave up seven runs in 4 1/3 innings. Such is Garza.

No Excuses

Both Garza and ace Scott Kazmir (who faces Darrell Rasner on Thursday) spent time on the DL early in the season. Carl Crawford and rookie sensation Evan Longoria are on the DL now, with Crawford likely out for the year. Rocco Baldelli missed most of the season, though he’s recently returned as Cliff Floyd’s platoon partner at DH. Floyd also spent time on the DL earlier in the season, as did Longoria’s predecessor/replacement Willy Aybar, All-Star catcher Dioner Navarro, infielder Ben Zobrist (who is currently platooning with Eric Hinske in left field), last year’s breakout star Carlos Peña, shortstop Jason Bartlett, and a handful of relievers, among them closer Troy Percival, who is due to return from his third DL stint tonight, and last year’s closer Al Reyes, who pitched himself off the team after returning from his DL stint. Beyond that, Crawford was below average when healthy, Bartlett’s been a huge disappointment on both sides of the ball, and B.J. Upton is slugging a mere .397 with just 8 homers after slugging .508 with 24 jacks in fewer plate appearances last year.

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