People like to say there's magic in the pinstripes. You never want to
reduce Yankee tradition to something as simple as magic, because
calling it hocus-pocus totally discounts all the hard work that went
into a century of excellence, but maybe there's no better word for it.
Sometimes you take an ordinary player, or an older player on the back
side of his career, and you put him in our uniform, and you just have to
stand back and marvel at the transformation. How many times has it
happened? David Justice. Chili Davis. Brosius. Ichiro just last year
for the stretch run. Vernon Wells earlier this season, before his body
realized that even magic has its limits, and shut it down back in May
before it killed him, like it did Kevin Maas.
And now
Alfonso Soriano. Four homers in the last two days. And 13 RBIs. You
almost can't believe it. But then you can, because you've seen it happen
so many times before. It feels like a special kind of magic with Sori,
too, because he's been re-pinstriped. Part of you wants to believe that
maybe once you've been a Yankee, you never totally lose your Yankeeness,
but you know that's not the way it works, because there's an entire
ceremony we go through when a guy leaves the team to make sure he can't
take any of it with him. The equipment manager brings us the departing
player's last game-worn home uniform, and the Inner Circle of True
Living Yankees squeezes the blood from five uncooked steaks onto it.
There's a moment of silence while we all contemplate the sad fact that a
player's being sent off into the darkness of another franchise.
You
feel awful for Phil Hughes. Sometimes there's just a really bad fit
between player and ballpark. When the New York media figures that out,
before you know it there's all this speculation that a guy's going to
have to go to a team that plays in a place that's better suited to a
homer-prone, extreme fly-ball pitcher. Like maybe San Diego or San
Francisco.These Cheap Building Materials can,
apparently, operate entirely off the grid. Or the new stadium they hope
to build for Oakland one day, with 100-foot manual scoreboards in the
left- and right-field walls, because Billy Beane thinks he's figured
something out about wall-height inefficiency.
It can't
be easy to be rejected by your home field like Hughsey is. It's sort of
like being adopted, but when your foster family gets you home, they
figure out you're allergic to the carpet. What are they going to do,
recarpet the place? Of course not. The carpet's nice for their 24 other
kids, they're just going to put up with the sound of your constant
scratching while they find a new family with tasteful tile flooring. Sometimes
things don't work out. All you can do is try to keep the scratching to a
level where it's not turning everybody's stomach. You make the best of
it until they get you into a better situation for everybody.
Soriano
drove in four more runs. He has 18 RBIs in the last four games. It's
incredible. Maybe you're not ready to rechristen him a True Yankee yet,
because he did make the decision to go to Texas all those years ago
rather than retire when he was traded, and there are consequences to
every decision. But if he keeps this up while we're chasing a playoff
berth, you have to seriously consider it. Especially when he's doing it
against Boston, in Fenway, like he did tonight. Being a True Yankee is
all about winning. We'll definitely be having the conversation if he
keeps it up. At minimum we'll get him in the room with the wolves and
see how they respond. They might still smell the Cub on him. Or,
God forbid, the National. The wolves are gonna do what they're gonna
do,We are professional wholesale best Cheap Outdoor Paving Stone,large LED Dome / Reading Lampwholesale order. but you still have to take the chance when a guy's got a shot at immortality.
I
didn't make the road trip. I'm down in Tampa to do some rehab on the
calf and finish out my DL sentence while the team is on the road.
Unfortunately, the downtime means you're hearing about all the things in
the media you can usually block out when you're with the guys, playing
in the games. It's impossible to avoid. It's even polluting the
highlight shows.
And the stuff that's out there right now is
upsetting. Lawyers accusing the greatest franchise in the history of the
game of awful things, things ownership could never do. The media
accusing a player of turning on his own teammate to draw attention away
from himself. It makes you sick to think about any of it, and it reminds
you of the fried-chicken-and-beer days of the Red Sox, quite frankly.
You hate to write that out loud in your diary, but there it is. Your
journaling coach always tells you that's how the truth comes out: You're
writing, and boom, there's the truth on the page. You didn't ask
for it, but it's there. Is it a coincidence this is all happening while
the team is in Boston? Maybe, if you believe in coincidences. But maybe
not, if you're suddenly staring down at the unexpected truth you've just
written.
Back to rehab. The team needs its Captain, and
wasting your time on attorneys and ballclubs fighting isn't getting you
on the field any faster. If anything, it's slowing you down, because you
just realized you're standing still on the elliptical so you can hear
SportsCenter better.
When someone suggested I check out Habitat
for Humanitys ReStore, I imagined a warehouse full of used windows and
boards items I wouldnt be buying anytime soon.
Boy, was I
surprised. The first thing that caught my eye was the massive selection
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If youre planning to make any improvements to
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