contributed by Music Man

Astros at Yankees, April 29 – May 1, 2013

Monday, 4/29, 6:05 CDT (TV: CSN Black Hole, NO! Network)
Lucas Harrell (2-2, 4.08) vs. Andy Pettitte (3-1, 2.22)

Tuesday, 4/30, 6:05 CDT (TV: ibid)
Philip Humber (0-5, 7.99) vs. Hiroki Kuroda (3-1, 2.79)

Wednesday, 5/1, 6:05 CDT (TV: ibid)
Erik Bedard (0-2, 7.98) vs. David Phelps (1-1, 5.29)

Let’s get the minor business of the Astros out of the way. Look at those last two pitchers for the Astros. Put them in your mind’s eye, and put them in your heart. They should be what you picture the next time some clown (sorry, Peter Gammons) tells you that the Astros should go after more veterans to remain “legitimate” in their rebuilding process.

As for Mr. Gammons – who has a long history of writing; who has experienced more in baseball than I likely ever will; who should be admired for his efforts in stroke recovery – well, he’s just flat out wrong here.

Peter Gammons ‏@pgammo25 Apr
How can any MLB team in the top 10 markets be allowed revenue-sharing money? Jim Crane’s business model–affront to integrity of game

Let’s get one thing straight: as long as Jeffrey Loria owns the Marlins, or any other team, Jim Crane could never, EVER mount a comparable affront to the integrity of the game.

THE YANKEES

Thus do we begin our first series sharing a league with the most storied franchise in the history of the game: The New York Yankees.

Yankee-hating is easy. It is understandable. I embrace it at times myself. But there is no way to dispute that the Yankees have been the biggest winners in the game’s history, and as they say, history is written by the victors.

My father grew up in upstate New York. His favorite player was Mickey Mantle – and so, of course, my first favorite player was the Mick. His was the first biography I ever read. Suffice it to say, the Yankees were a formative part of my youth – a youth spent in several locations, never developing any close ties to one team until we finally settled in Houston. All this is to say – I understand a little bit of the Yankees, at least from an outsider perspective. As Vince Vaughn said, “I flat out hate your guts. But damn, do I respect you.”

And then there was Yankee stadium. The House That Ruth Built. Not only the most iconic stadium in baseball, but one of the iconic stadia in all the world – and really, atop the list for much of the 20th century. This was the place where Lou Gehrig made his speech. This was the place where Marilyn Monroe’s husband patrolled center field. This was the place where Mr. October sent three different pitching sailing into the night.

This was the place that was. But it is not the place that is.

The degree to which the Yankees dropped the ball with New Yankee Stadium is astounding, and illustrative of all that went right for Houston. When replacing a legendary structure, you have two directions to go: a slavish homage to the original, or something completely new. There’s really no in between.

Minute Maid Park, nee Enron Field, opted for the latter. Gone was the Astrodome’s sense of grandeur; its cookie-cutter fences, the standard of their time; the Astroturf (of course); and the hokey charms of the Home Run Spectacular. In their place came nooks, crannies, hills, trains, Big Bamboos, and the like. You could argue with some of it – many argued with all of it – but there was no question that it was different than that which preceded it. And as such, it was embraced by the city, by the team, and if the national media never embraced it, well, that was typical of the team.

Yankee Stadium chose the other path. A path to copy the old grounds, down to the facades, field shaping, you name it. Which of course, begged the question:

Why bother?

Literally – why build the stadium? Why not just renovate the old park to bring it into the 21st century? There was never a good answer, other than “money”. I was always taught that decisions made with money as the sole driver will end up bad decisions. This one certainly did. There was a movie several years back called “Mutliplicity”, which tried to cash in on the “cloning” concept. The movie rode on the idea that, when you make a copy of a copy, each successive copy gets fuzzier and fuzzier. So, too, with Yankee Stadium. The initial copy, within the hallowed Bronx grounds, lost a little of the character – monuments in play, Death Valley, etc. – but at least it was still the same building.

Then they tried to copy it again, to a new piece of real estate – and the copy was fuzzier than they ever expected. Oh, it had all the latest bells and whistles, and it had premium seats galore, such that the moneyed elite could fall all over themselves for the status symbol of Yankee seating – or so the Steinbrenners thought. But the plan failed, and failed in impressive fashion. Seats were routinely empty, from the second game on. The word was quickly out – the new stadium was completely devoid of charm, overpriced, unwanted.

The Yankees used to occupy a palace, worthy of their monarchy, lording over all of baseball with their (insert current number here) championships. They abandoned their palace in search of a McMansion. And their place atop the sport threatens to crumble with it.

For lately has gone relatively unnoticed an item concerning baseball’s CBA: the Yankees are looking seriously at remaining below the new luxury tax threshold. No big deal for the Yankees, one would think – except that they are already on the hook for over $103M in guaranteed contracts, none of whom are named Derek Jeter, and which does not include free agents-to-be like Robinson Cano and Curtis Granderson, both of whom will seek raises from their current $15M pay. Oh, and those 5 guaranteed contracts include a 39 year old (A-Rod), a 40-year old (Ichiro), a 34 year old who will be 4 seasons removed from his last meaningful production (Teixeira), an outfielder who has been paid by two different teams to go away (Wells), and an aging, overweight starting pitcher (Sabathia).

Following a 2009 World Series win, the Yankees have increasingly depended on splashy free agent signings (Sabathia) and big trades (Granderson) to keep afloat – but all for naught, with playoff losses the last three seasons, and most predictions for this season having them fall further in an increasingly competitive AL East. Meanwhile, the trades and lack of success in the draft have left the farm system increasingly depleted, with their best prospects a catcher who can’t catch, and a center fielder who was just arrested.

If all this sounds vaguely familiar, it should.

I come to bury the Yankees, not to praise them. They may well make another run this year. They may certainly sweep the Astros in the process.

But their house in now built upon sand.

“You interested in making some extra cash?”

It was 1985, and I’d been back in town for a little more than a year and had hooked up with a guy to do some freelance production work as an irregular second job. Grip work, camera work, some editing. He had an endless stream of odd gigs, shooting a series of infomercials, a series of how-to productions for a big telemarketer, some packages for CNN, ESPN – a real variety. None of these were what you’d call first-class productions, but the money was good and so was the experience.

This one was a little bit different. Same sort of work, but we’d go to Los Angeles for a week or two to help out a buddy of his and if things broke right, we’d be able to do this on a regular basis. His buddy was some director who had a production company and my guy had somehow finagled this deal to get a little steady work. I took some vacation time and off we went, my first trip to LA.

We landed and his buddy picked us and the gear up from LAX in a van that he said we could use, although we’d be staying and working in his house most of the time. My friend – let’s call him Jim – had the then-amusing habit of promising luxe accomodations that ended up being a motel at best and a spare bedroom in some shady guy’s place at worst. Think Bowfinger. This was a little different, because his friend Howard was living in someone else’s mansion while they were away and it was stunning. Up in the hills, plenty of room, really pretty and a great view. It was an amazing introduction to LA.

That first week we were set up in two different rooms with editing equipment, cutting commercials and infomercials, the occasional industrial thing. Easy stuff, and my take was pretty good. Howard threw a couple of dinner parties that we avoided, but he had a big one on the weekend and we popped out to be dazzled and see if we might get lucky. That was my first experience with the LA party scene and the deep layers of bullshit they contained. Everybody’s ‘in the business,’ everybody’s got something at a studio or in turnaround or in development or they’re talking with so-and-so about this part or that deal and it’s a neverending circle jerk of making themselves appear to be successful while teasing the possibility that you could be involved too, because they really, really like you a lot and do you have any more of that coke? I’m just looking for a bump…

Every cab driver, every waitress, every parking lot guy, every furniture mover, they’re all so close, you can feel the pulse and hear the roar, they’re so close…and if they get in, you can get in too, it’s a great party…

All of these people moved to LA from somewhere else, some place where they were Most Likely To or King & Queen, or Talent Show Winner or Local Star or whatever, and now they’re in an impossibly big Shark Tank with nothing but waves around them. Waves, and fish, and sharks, and darkness. A very large population of people who are the least able to deal with where they are and what they’re in the middle of.

***

In my car, tracing the streets with the window down, my arm bare to the cool wind and listening to the city. Sirens float between the buildings and flow down the boulevards, coursing like water, or time, or blood.

All we have to do now, is take these lies and make them true somehow
All we have to see, is that I don’t belong to you and you don’t belong to me

And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah.

It’s a new season, a new world after all. The ghosts of change moving all the furniture, sliding familiarity so slightly askew. A table is still a table, a chair is still a chair, but they’re not in quite the same place, are they? Clouds push back where they used to part. Pitcher’s ballpark, and no pitching anywhere to be found. Power seen in relative relief and then in stark contrast, the models dwarfed in front of the skyscrapers.

New time zones, new league, new players, new announcers, everything’s new but without an eye for us to see much and get some sort of grounding before this ship sets sail. The clouds never hung so low before.

In the early evening they begin to appear just before the stars. A few at first, in their clean but ill-fitting clothes, often mismatched. New, but fashions you either haven’t seen in years or ones you never did see. Bright red boots with chrome-colored plastic studs, red pant legs overfilled and slotted inside. Snap shirts with rainbow arches across the shoulders. Altered tops of what once were bridesmaid’s dresses, pastel and shiny and broad.

Their hair and the plastic bags they carry betray the ruse. They are all moving in the same direction, vaguely toward the shelter for food, storage and some connection that they hope will make the night less dark. The odds are not good. This is the edge of the knife. This is where the blade of society makes the cut.

***

Thursday, April 25, 6:35 PM EDT, Fenway Park
Philip Humber 0-4, 6.63
Clay Buchholz 4-0, 0.90

Friday, April 26, 7:10 PM EDT, Fenway Park
Erik Bedard 0-1, 6.17
Ryan Dempster 0-2, 3.38

Saturday, April 27, 7:10 PM EDT, Fenway Park
Brad Peacock 1-2, 7.50
Felix Doubront 2-0, 4.32

Sunday, April 28, 1:35 PM EDT, Fenway Park
Bud Norris 3-2, 4.13
John Lackey 0-1, 4.15

I don’t know what channel it’ll be on. Doesn’t matter, most of us can’t see it anyway. The rest of us wouldn’t want to if we could.

***

We did this back-and-forth thing again, and the third time we did it our work shifted to…adult films. Exotic pictures. Looking back, it really was a matter of time. I guess we had to prove ourselves first, before we got thrown the real meat. And meat it was.

When you’re young, you don’t really consider consequences in the same way you do when you’re older – kinda like when you start counting how many times you didn’t die for some unknown reason, or how many catastrophes you dodged mostly from a convergence of lucky breaks and not some crafty swimming on your part. In the beginning I was cutting video. Hour after hour of logging shots, cutting them in different versions for different markets, skin and body parts become exercises in finding an eyelash of artistic expression in a blur of formulaic equations. Establishing shot, two shot, pan, closeup, cover, reverse angle, closeup, then to pan? Another reverse? Back to the two? Ah, shit, that shot’s out of focus, that one ends in a bump, that one’s shaky, that one’s got shadows, crap…

All day. Whether you like it or not, the only way to work is to distance yourself, reduce it to numbers or abstracts and plug in shots from categories and move on to the next one. Rinse, lather, repeat. I’d get a break every so often and work second camera, doing the shots where the pizza delivery guy shows up, or the actors get in a car or out of a car, that sort of thing. And that’s where I met Kelly.

Let me be very clear. The people you meet on those sets, regardless of their role there – they aren’t people you want to know. They aren’t people you want in your life. If you’ve ever, say, dated a ‘dancer’ you know what I’m talking about, except these people have more money and they’re ‘stars.’ They get recognized when they show up somewhere, and like every other point of sparks these people are the least able to deal with the fire that threatens to consume them. They travel in packs wherever they go, they have too much money, they have no idea what to do with it other than spend it on drugs, and they’ve learned to do anything – anything at all – to get what they want. The problem with that is they have no real idea what it is they want, because they are so damaged inside they have psychological craters that nothing and no one will ever begin to fill. And they’re convinced that they’re stars, so not only do you owe them, but they can do anything with impunity.

Kelly wasn’t the usual actress. Most of them looked like cheerleaders or beach bunnies, very thin, and it was clear from the beginning that if any of them decided to have anything to do with you at all, it was either because they thought you had drugs you’d give them or that you could get them a better part or more money or another picture. There are no real personal interactions on those sets and the ones that do occur really are centered around the availability or the effect of drugs and have nothing to do with reality. When you’re 25 and surrounded by hot girls, even those of no better than dubious hygiene, that kind of thing doesn’t matter much.

Kelly was a northeasterner. She looked Italian, or Armenian, or something European. Olive skin, long brown hair, big hazel eyes, thick lips, prominent nose – just my type. To make her even more attractive to me, she had what no one else in this group had – a thick Boston accent. She seemed more real, I guess, plus she was young and small and so out of place. We made small talk and chitchat and I stepped over the line and wondered if she’d like to get together one night later in the week.

“Yah, I’d like dat.”

Shit, man. This girl was on box covers. And I was going to be hanging out with her.

***

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah

The raw and ugly wound in Boston could have happened anywhere. I started out writing this about ignorance, the willful denial of progress, intelligence and the openmindedness necessary to listen to experience and use that to work together for common good. There’s a direct line between loud, obnoxious and misanthropic people who use sporting events as a gathering place for the purpose of sparking conflict and those who would use the uneducated and inexperienced for their own terrible ends. It’s not a short journey, to be sure – something like the link between pteranodons and pelicans – but the threads are there if you look for them. The question is, how do you get people to value cooperation while maintaining independence and respect and to turn away from the simplicity of violence as a statement?

I can’t make fun of Boston. It’s a beautiful and historic city, and there are some wonderful people there. I could make light of their outsized inferiority complex, the troubled relationship they have with New York, and the fact that diminished success has darkened much of the bright lights they enjoyed just a few years ago. I could, but I won’t, at least not right now. They’ve got a time out, a temporary moratorium.

Now I can’t see you, I can’t see you at all
No I don’t know you, I don’t know you at all

It actually went better than I’d expected it to. We went to a bar and had a couple of drinks, got something to eat, walked around some, shot some pool, just hung out and tried to be relaxed. She didn’t draw a crowd or even stares, there weren’t any drugs involved, we just had a nice time and then i took her back to her apartment. I thought when we kissed goodnight that she expected more, but I was pretty convinced of my strong move of holding back. Sure enough, it worked, and we set up another date.

I was dating a porn star.

There were no pretenses here. I was only in town a couple of weeks at a crack and it would be weeks before I came back. I was blinded by her in the beginning, saw this really hot girl who would give me the time of day. It was a while before exactly what I was doing sank in. She was fun, definitely wild, but in her everyday life this girl would fuck – not sleep with, but fuck – multiple guys a couple of times a week, and do who knows what else that I had no idea about. And then I’m interested in this? I’m not going to be that guy who tries to change her, am I? I’m not going to get pulled into her world, am I?

***

The most difficult opponents Boston has had so far this season has been the weather and Baltimore. They’ve had two losses to the Orioles and two postponements. Otherwise, they’re 14-5, in front of their division, and generally they’re kicking ass. The Astros are going to run into a red-hot team that plays both sides of the field well. Buchholz is pitching like an ace with a .9 ERA, and the hitting is waking up too. This feels a lot like walking into a lion’s den. It’s just the beginning too, because there’s 26 games in 27 days, facing the likes of Boston, the Yankees, the Tigers, the Angels and the Rangers. A real meat grinder, especially for a team that’s shy on pitching.

Maybe there’s a God above
All I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
And it’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

Our second date went well. We had drinks and went to a club to see a band. She got recognized at the club and she acted like that was something she wasn’t used to yet, although I had my doubts. After, still racing from the coke buzz, we went to Canter’s and mixed in with the late night crowd of drunks, comics, musicians and ‘industry people.’ I got my first taste of being invisible then, in that LA way, mixing sudden abandonment with “Uh huh…yah…uh huh…Kelly, I want you to meet somebody…” It was early but I was wrestling with this relationship, if you could call it that. We clearly enjoyed being around each other, and whatever world she came from was nothing like the one she was in now, and the one she was in now was nothing like mine. I know now how to recognize people who are naturally adept at using sexual attraction to make their way and what that means about their past, but at the time I was oblivious, enjoying the attention when I got it and wondering why I deserved any at all.

I remember her eyes flickering in the lights, the green and brown playing off of each other and the frame of that thick brown hair. The impossible smoothness of her arms, so soft, and then I’d imagine the fingerprints of how many others, running up and down, entwining as her hair flew back in a laugh and I’d have to stop and look away. We finished up the last of the gram on the way back to her apartment, looking for the place where the last secrets would be hunted down and extinguished.

Now I can’t see you, I can’t see you at all
No I don’t know you, I don’t know you at all

It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.