Running for Your Life: Yankee Haters Dream Team

I was ten years old when the Yankees did the unthinkable – finished 26.5 games out of first place, with a 70-89 record. Ah, those were the days. Now, of course, the Yankees win. Pretty much every day and night. The season is winding down and they are in the playoffs, as per usual.

Time to dream a little. By offering up a Yankee Haters Dream Team. Let’s call them the lovable ones … Some unsung, some associated more with losing (think every other MLB club, with the exception of the Cardinals) than winning. Here’s my version of, yes, the Yankee Haters Dream Team.

Pitcher

Catfish Hunter

Color me nostalgic for the 1970s, and names like Catfish stedda letters

Catcher

Jake Gibbs

Because I’m a believer in strength of character down the middle … And Jake was a member of that losing 1966 Yankees squad that went 70-89. Losing builds character. Good times, times

First Baseman

Marv Thorneberry

Marv broke in with the Yanks in 1955, then proceeded to spur even the most humorless fan into uncontrollable laughter as the starting first baseman for the expansion 40-120 New York Mets, 60.5 games outta first place. Errors that year (1962): 17!

Second Baseman

Horace Clarke

How can you not find lovable someone by the name of Horace? Yes, 1966! Strength down the middle! (70-89!)

Third Baseman

Charlie Hayes

He WAS the unsung hero of the 1996 Yankees, the only iteration of pinstripes except for that unforgettable 1966 squad that actually didn’t/doesn't revolt me. Why? Because of Charlie Hayes, without whom the Yanks would not have won, yet all we heard (and still hear about) were/are Jeter, O’Neill, Williams, Strawberry …

Shortstop

Tony Kubek

Because he had a cool broadcast voice. And he seemed like a relatively nice guy.

Right Fielder

Jesse Barfield

Because he was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays. (One of the myriad reasons I identify as a Yankee Hater is that my folks at home in Canada cheer for the Blue Jays)

Left Fielder

Tim Raines

Because I am a die-hard Expos fan. (No, I don’t cheer for the Nationals  -- did true-blue Brooklyn Dodgers fans pick up and cheer for the LA team … I don’t think so)

Center Fielder

Roger Repoz

He didn’t patrol center field for long for the Yankees. But man, those were the days. (Yes, 1966 rules as the year of years for Yankee Haters … when they languished with that 70-89 record !

 Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Running for Your Life: Nonracial Politics Power

Sometimes you find inspiration in unlikely sources. Take “Citizen: American Lyric” by Claudia Rankine, winner of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle award for poetry. Rankine’s poetry sheds light on the great racial divide in America and is justly rewarded for her work by this country’s literary elites, who on a daily basis shudder with shame as yet another atrocity inflames this space and deepens the divide.

I say unlikely sources, not because I disagree with Rankine’s politics. Quite the contrary, in fact. Rather it is the lesson I learned about running for public life in YouTube America from those who feel persecuted by a society perversely conditioned to these atrocities that did come as a surprise to me. 

I’m referring to the following passage, in “Citizen,” page 23:

Hennessy Youngman aka Jayson Musson, whose Art Thoughtz take the form of tutorials on YouTube, educates viewers on contemporary art issues. In one of his many videos, he addresses how to become a successful black artist, wryly suggesting black people’s anger is marketable. He advises black artists to cultivate “an angry N exterior” by watching, among other things, the Rodney King video while working.

With respect Jayson, I’ve got a wry suggestion for both blacks and whites looking to be successful politicians. (I haven’t yet posted my videos on this …) Cultivate a simple, nonliterate exterior. For example, say you are running in a neighborhood with high dog ownership combined with a high percentage of porn consumers (when it comes to the latter, every ZIP in the country). Cultivate a simple, nonliterate exterior. Change your name to Dogget. Don’t campaign, don’t write anything down that could even remotely be defined as a position. Simply leaflet your district with the simple, nonliterate message. Do It Dogget Style. Vote Dogget.

Next: Running for Your Life: Yankee Haters Dream Team

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Some time ago we were in Freebird Books, a gotta-check-it-out used bookstore on Columbia Street, not far from Brooklyn Bridge Park. While browsing there, I found and purchased a treasure: the “complete stories” by one of my favorite authors, Alistair MacLeod, published under the title “Island.”

A few months before I was saddened to read that MacLeod had passed away. It was at least fifteen years earlier that I’d first heard of MacLeod from my friend Ray Smith, who with his wife Joyce Carol Oates ran the powerfully good literary journal, Ontario Review, until his untimely death in 2008.

At that time I got a copy of “The Last Salt Gift of Blood” and was amazed with the quality of the stories. I am not alone in thinking this way. In fact, and Colm Toibin and Carmen Callil included MacLeod in their book “The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950. “Knowing that I could tell other readers about [MacLeod] was the high point of The Modern Library Project for me,” Toibin said.

What a gift MacLeod has at describing a boy’s regard of his father: the proud working man. Here’s a sample, from the story “The Vastness of the Dark” …

“As long as I can remember [Father] has finished dressing while walking, but he does not handle buttons or buckles so well since the dynamite stick at the little mine where he used to work ripped the first two fingers from his scarred right hand. Now the remaining fingers try to do what is expected of them: to hold, to button, to buckle, to adjust, but they do so with what seems a sort of groping uncertainty bordering on despair. As if they realized that there is now just too much for them to do, even though they try as best they can.”

Alastair MacLeod: definitely a great who is missed. Get thee to bookstore and find out for yourself.

Next: Running for Your Life: Back On the Beam

Running for Your Life: Endless Summer

Here it comes, a New York City-style heat wave: 94 degrees Tuesday; 94 Wednesday; 97 Thursday and 88 Friday.

What to do as a runner – Get out in the early morning? Or late at night when the temperatures dip into the low 70s?

Well this runner heads to a treadmill in my neighborhood gym, where the temperature is always in the 70s. From here, because the machines face picture windows that look out onto busy Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, I watch the foot traffic go by. The endless summer of young ladies in too-short shorts, children during their last days of no-school freedom on skateboards and scooters, my elders shuffling along in the punishing heat that is demonstrably too much for them, BFFs on their way to coffee or an early lunch.

If I’m to be in the city (and not at the beach!) during this early September heat wave, here’s what I do to cope (and keep up a semblance of training for that mid-November marathon in Brooklyn): treadmill-run, dine in AC comfort and if the spirit moves, put a little Beach Boys on the stereo !

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday  

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

 In the pages of the London Review of Books (August 27) is a thoroughly wonderful essay titled “The Sound of Cracking” by Pankaj Mishra in review of two books: “The Age of the Crisis of Man” by Mark Grief and “Moral Agents: Eight 20^th Century American Writers” by Edward Mendelson.

In the essay, Mishra quotes a third author, Tony Judt (1948-2010), the European historian and brilliant essayist. Yes, if only this great thinker were with us today!

Here’s the money shot as they say in my line of work:

“Though doused in Saigon in 1975, a retro 19th-century craving for universal mastery and control was rekindled in 1989 among many members of what Tony Judt called the ‘crappy generation’ – the one that ‘grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political’. Judt’s indictment extended beyond Bush, the Clintons, Blair and neocon publicists to intellectuals at the ‘traditional liberal center’ – the New Yorker, the New Republic, theWashington Post and the New York Times – who, he wrote, had turned into a ‘service class.’ Researching his book in 2003, Greif seems to have been troubled by this spectacle. Liberal intellectuals who might have been interested in his book about the crisis of man were, he writes, ‘busy preparing the justification of the US invasion of Iraq … on the basis of a renewed anthropological vision of “who we are” [in the West] against a new “they” figured as totalitarian.’ 

A chillingly great essay by Mishra. Something for those of you out there looking to be great. Check it out! http://bit.ly/1LyF0rk

Next: Running for Your Life: Endless Summer