It’s Phil Hughes tonight and the schmuck needs all of our good vibes. Hang in there, Phil, dammit. (How’s that for positive?)

Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Vernon Wells RF
Travis Hafner DH
Lyle Overbay 1B
Curtis Granderson LF
David Adams 3B
Jayson Nix SS
Austin Romine C

Never mind the longball:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Illustration by Jaime Hernandez]

Man, it’s prematurely hot n humid out there. Summer’s comin’.

[Photograph by Fred De Casablanca]

Museumuseum gives us a huge treat:

Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th street

by Todd Webb (April 23, 1948)

On Sidney Lumet…over at A Shot in the Dark and Cinephilia and Beyond.

Over at SB Nation’s Longform page check out this profile of Hector Espino–The Unknown Slugger–by our man Eric Nusbaum:

There is a joke told by Mexican baseball fans about Espino arriving at the pearly gates of heaven with much less fanfare. St. Peter doesn’t recognize Espino and asks God what he should do. “Don’t be a coward,” God says. “Pitch to him.”

Most American baseball fans wouldn’t recognize Héctor Espino either, even though he was the greatest hitter in Mexican history and by many accounts one of the best hitters of all time. Espino played from 1960 to 1984. He had wrists like the barrels of baseball bats and a body like a 5’11, 185-pound vending machine. He also hit somewhere between 755 and 796 professional home runs.

The exact total, like much about Espino’s career, is a matter of perspective.

Food 52 gives Craig Claborne’s Pasta con Asparagi.

Oy-men. 

They are becoming a thing now. Time to start grabbing for “the narrative” (is there a more irritating contemporary term?). These grittsy, gutsy Yanks are the anti-Yankees. Just wait ’til the superstars return, then they’ll fall into the gutter. Give Vernon Wells 600 at bats! Start Overbay over Teixeria!

Beyond the silliness that accompanies this kind of run, there is the real satisfaction of watching these Yankees play above expectations (at least according to many of the pre-season predictions). Of course it’s early, and we’ll see how keen the Bandwagon is on the current Cinderellas when they inevitably turn back into pumpkins in the heat of summer, but also: we’ll take it. And there are reinforcements on the way.

Last night, the Yanks remained calm and kept themselves in the game despite C.C. Sabathia giving up a lead. Travis Hafner hit a game-tying solo home run in the 9th and Wells had the go-ahead double in the 10th (Hafner added an RBI single). The bullpen, which has been the team’s great weapon so far, nailed down a terrific 6-4 win over the Orioles.

Happy? You bet.

Chad Jennings has the notes.

[Photo Via: In His Grip]

Painting by Trevor Young.

It’s dem O’s again.

C.C.’s on the hill.

Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Travis Hafner DH
Lyle Overbay 1B
Curtis Granderson LF
David Adams 3B
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Reid Brignac SS
Austin Romine C

Never mind the dampness:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Illustration by Frank Miller via This Isn't Happiness]

Cool. 

[Illustration by Antonio Caparo]

Over at Deadspin, Barry Petchesky brings us back to this week in 1998:

Hungry Ghost gives this springtime Bucatini dish.

Beginning on Thursday and running through October 6th, the Whitney presents a show of Hopper’s drawings.

Sweet.

From P. Kael:

Personal Best is a celebration of modern American women’s long-legged bodies. It’s also a coming-of-age movie that shows what most us go through–the painful experiences that later on we like to see as comedy. The surprise of this film–written, produced, and directed by the celebrated screenwriter Robert Towne (The Last Detail, Chinatown, Shampoo)–is that most of the story is told non-verbally, and character is revealed in movement. This is perhaps the first directing debut by a writer that buries motivation and minimizes the importance of words. Towne may have had to cut a couple of strings off his fiddle, but he plays a great lush, romantic tune. He bears down only on sensory experience, and he uses the actors, who are in fact athletes, as dancers. He presents a physical world that few of us know much about–the world of women athletes–and when he shows the adolescent Chris Cahill (Mariel Hemingway) preparing for the start of a race by hammering a block into the ground it’s like Melville doing a how-to-chapter. This is a very smart and super-subtle movie, in which the authenticity of the details draws us in (as it does in Melville); Towne cares enough tot get them right, and he cares about the physical world in a reverent, fanatic way. When he shows Chris and the other heroine arm-wrestling, he concentrates on their throbbing veins and their sinews and how the muscles play off one another. He breaks down athletic events into specific details; you watch the athletes’ calves or some other part of them, and you get an exact sense of how their bodies work–it’s sensual and sexual, and it’s informative, too. This film celebrates women’s bodies without turning them into objects; it turns them into bodies. There’s an undercurrent of flabbergasted awe. Everything in the movie is physically charged…Watching this movie, you feel that you really can learn something essential about girls from looking at their thighs.

Feb 22, 1982

Photograph by Moa Karlberg.

A New York minute in pictures brought to you by the great Saul Leiter.

In the spring of 1996, my friend Mike took me to A-1, a record shop in the East Village. I looked through a couple of crates of records and then started a conversation with a blond-haired kid who was hanging out talking music. An hour later we were still talking.

Mike had been looking through the $2 dollar bins on the floor and he came up with two steals: Ice Cube’s Kill at Will ep and BDP’s By All Means Necessary.

Right there, I knew the difference between a dedicated beat digger and me. I liked the music but didn’t have the stamina to go through the entire store for a bargain.

That fall, the Yanks won the World Series and I went to Los Angeles for four months on a job. The next time I went to A-1 the blond-haired kid, Jared Boxx, was working there.

It wasn’t long before he left with two co-workers to open their own record store, The Sound Library. And when the partners there split up, Jared co-ran Big City Records.

Now, The Sound Library and Big City are history but A-1 is still around.

And wouldn’t you know it but my friend Mike works there. Seventeen years after he first brought me in I stopped by to say hello. Bags came along with me and took some pictures.

DJ’s aren’t buying vinyl like they used to. And now A-1 sells a lot of rock albums. Mike said they can’t keep records by Blondie, The Talking Heads of Led Zeppelin on the shelf. He blames the video game Guitar Hero.

It was great catching up, hearing some music, and seeing my old friend.

Perfect for a rainy Sunday night.

An appealing rainy spring day here in New York. Cool and breezy. Unless, of course, you are  at the Stadium to watch a baseball game. But if you’re home, it’s a fine day to make some food, sit back, relax, and cool out.

1. Granderson CF
2. Cano 2B
3. Wells LF
4. Hafner DH
5. Overbay 1B
6. Nix 3B
7. Suzuki RF
8. Brignac SS
9. Romine C

It’s our man C.C. against the knucklenerd R.A..

Never mind the drizzle:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[UPDATE: Never mind all that--this one is called. No Yankees today.]

[Photo Via: Think Different]