ghost of miles

NYRB Classics is a great series in general—I’ve picked up a number of them over the years. Hoping to get to J.G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip soon.

Well, the Oakland A's discovered a nearly-foolproof way to defeat the 2018 Red Sox--throw a shutout no-hitter. Just a little matter of execution, that's all. That means Boston's now on pace to win only 138 games as opposed to 145, though they'll still finish 50 games ahead of the Yankees. Gleyber Torres, save us from this awful fate! Yankees call up top prospect Gleyber Torres What NY really needs, though, is more consistent starting pitching--and I don't see that being remedied any time soon.

Those Ellington and Artie Shaw Hindsight boxes are excellent, btw--someone should really jump on those.

PM sent on Krupa-Rich, Live Under The Sky, Mingus Town Hall, Lou Levy, Buck Clayton, Mingus/Hughes Weary Blues, Eddie Condon Town Hall 2, Gloria Lynne, and Johnny Griffin Live In Tokyo.

I realize this thread is now 12 years old, but if anybody’s still looking to track down Unknown Session, it’s included as an individual CD in the Ellington Columbia 1959-61 Studio Album Collection box. I picked it up new for about $28 off an eBay seller just to get Unknown Session and The Girls Suite, which is included as a bonus on the Nutcracker Suite CD. Halfway through Unknown Session and have to second all previous assessments of it as beautiful.

Second the cheers for the H.R.S. set. On right now:

We re-aired Nica's Tempo: More Hipsters, Flipsters And On-The-Scenesters last week, and it remains archived for online listening.

I've often thought that they might want to explore some sort of Kickstarter approach to developing certain sets. Bill Barron, say!

An advance copy of Ultimate Painting's aborted fourth album:

Better than Giancarlo Stanton! 1/10th of the way through the season and NY's already six back of Boston. Sanchez Stanton etc will eventually come around and I think the infield will stabilize, esp. if Torres gets called up soon and pans out, but the rotation's a mess--one ace (Severino) and four big question marks, and the bullpen remains an uncertainty as well. If Boston's Big Three stay healthy, I don't see how they don't win the AL East this year, and comfortably at that.

Good catch! 😊 I’d imagine that’s Scott Wenzel.

I like that one too!

So good: 👍

Thanks for the heads-up about this. 👍

Long-awaited, just arrived in the mail this morning, will start reading tonight after work: Berenice Abbott: A Life In Photography

When it comes to jazz museums, seems like the National Jazz Museum In Harlem does a pretty good job.

BFD is my take. Not a great slide from Austin, but even Alex Cora wouldn’t call it “dirty” afterwards. I’ve watched it a few times and it doesn’t look at all intentional. (Whether it should have ultimately been ruled a double play under the new rule is another matter.) Brock Holt said “I said something I probably shouldn’t have said,” and I don’t know what Austin said, but it probably wasn’t “Hey man, I’m sorry about my inept slide,” which is what he should have said. But for Joe Kelly to try to hit him twice is pretty punk by old-school standards in and of itself. (Even the moderator of Over The Monster can’t stand Kelly.) If Kelly’s going to throw at Austin twice, expect him to come after you. It’s freakin’ baseball, all the way around. The best part of it was seeing Judge and Stanton calmly martial a huge scrum of players all the way back to the Boston dugout. As for the overall game itself, very good to see Stanton and Sanchez’s bats finally come to life. (Stanton’s 1st inning triple would have been a HR in any other park... and what was up wjth J.D. Martinez’ “where is it?” take on Sanchez’s followup home run?) And every 9th inning with Aroldis Chapman is an adventure... geezus.

My grandfather saw Bartolo Colon make a similar play back in the early 1970s!

I've been to minor-league games much better-attended than that... better call the Ghost of Bill Veeck-as-in-Wreck! Also the worst name ever for an MLB stadium... sounds like a cheap motel chain or a shady used-car lot.

Actually, the 2017 NY bullpen, despite its vaunted ERA and strikeout rate, blew 23 saves and had a 61% save-conversion rate—both among the worst for all MLB teams. It’s one big reason why they were a 90-win team instead of a 100-win team. I agree with you about the rotation, though I think that Gray will turn out to be a decent third starter. But with Drury out indefinitely and Andujar not looking ready yet, with Bird in his usual injury hiatus and second still up in the air as well (Gleyber Torres, please accelerate your development!), this team looks nowhere near division championship caliber, let alone ALCS or World Series. We’ll see how things are shaking out by the ASB, but there are serious issues that don’t seem readily solvable to me. Btw all of the good things said about Alex Cora when the Sox were rumored to be pursuing him seem to be panning out so far... smart of Boston to nab him from Houston. And J.D. Martinez hasn’t even really started to hit yet.

The posters at PA aren’t really in panic mode—they’re a far more level-headed and baseball-savvy lot, in general, than, say, fans in Yankee Facebook groups, who tend to veer into Steinbrenner-ish straits of rage and desperation after bad or back-to-back losses. I think there’s a deeper concern, though, over the instability of the infield (Didi is the only regular starter right now), the consistency of the bullpen (a big problem last year), and how well the starting rotation’s going to hold up over the course of the season, what with CC knocking on the door of retirement and Montgomery still not a proven quantity yet. Stanton will surely start to hit better (good graph last night during the game on Tino Martinez, Jason Giambi, A-Rod and Mark Teixera’s first Aprils as Yankees—all about as abysmal as Giancarlo’s has been so far), and I think Sanchez will, too—his swing just looks off to me right now. Just a lot of hype and expectations around this team, as opposed to last year when nobody expected them to go anywhere. The 2009 Yankees had an awful April and still ended up winning 103 games, but that was the result of an insane post-ASB performance—and that team had a much more solid core than this one does. Anyway, AL East could again come down to a 1-2 game margin, in which case too many early losses can come back to haunt you. But right now NY’s looking like a team that will be lucky to win 90. Too many questions that don’t appear to have any solid answers yet.