The good folks at River Ave Blues interviewed me about this year’s draft. Check it out.
Archives for May 2007
→ May 31, 2007
→ By
→ By
→ May 30, 2007
→ By
→ By
Roger Goodell won’t like this.
Someone mocked up a fake Myspace page for NFL commish. Very clever, especially the comments from his “friends.”
Also, I don’t follow the NBA much, but watching Lebron James stuff those last two wins down his critics’ throats has me giddy in a Bonds-just-homered sort of way. I suppose it’s nice to see that the mainstream media aren’t just tearing down the best players in MLB, though.
→ May 26, 2007
→ By
→ By
Otto Pizzeria.
So last Monday, my wife and I headed into Manhattan – I had a scheduled TV appearance and she wanted to hit a fabric store in Soho. We decided to have lunch and headed to Mario Batali’s Otto Pizzeria, which promised authentic, Italian-style pizzas, an enormous wine list (wasted on me, but I thought I’d mention it), and – according to at least two things I read on line – the best gelato in Manhattan. The pizza could be Velveeta served on cardboard for all I care, as long as there’s real gelato on the premises.
Unfortunately, the experience ended up reinforcing for me why I tend to avoid celebrity-chef restaurants. The food was a disappointment, and the menu was too heavily influenced by the chef’s whims, not by the food itself. It surprised me to run into this at a Batali restaurant; one reason I like his shows and his books is that his agenda seems to be a noble one: to celebrate regional Italian cuisine using authentic recipes and ingredients.
We ordered a funghi misti appetizer – mixed wild mushrooms marinated in herbs and garlic, delicious, earthy, and reasonable at $4 for close to a cup’s worth of ‘shrooms. I went with the pizza of the day, a pesto pizza with fresh mozzarella. Pesto genovese is made with basil, which doesn’t take heat very well, so pizzas made with pesto typically are cooked partway before a thin layer of pesto is added. Instead, I got a pizza with a thin crust (not as thin as the ones I’ve had in Italy) and a thick layer of bitter pesto that tasted like it contained spinach rather than basil (I asked – the waitress said there was no spinach in it). There was also very little cheese, so I was eating a cracker with bad pesto on it.
My wife’s entrée was better, as she ordered spaghetti carbonara. The pasta was really al dente – I’m all for some tooth to the pasta, but even I would have left this in the water another sixty seconds – and the sauce was done right. The one problem was that the dish was extremely salty, probably the result of the huge amount of pancetta in it.
As for the gelato … we didn’t have any. The dessert menu came – it took forever, now that I mention it, and the service in general was inattentive at best – and the list of flavors read something like this: olive oil, vanilla, pistachio, coconut, ginger, hazelnut straciatella, mint chocolate chip. I might have forgotten one, but you get the idea. Notice anything missing? That’s right – nothing chocolate or coffee. Not even tiramisu-flavored gelato, which was in every gelateria I visited on my trips to Italy. At $7 for three scoops, those flavors weren’t enough to get me to stick around.
→ May 25, 2007
→ By
→ By
Blood Meridian.
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
McCarthy’s prose is often compared to Faulkner’s, and while some of that is because they’re both from the South (just like every right-handed pitcher from Stanford is automatically compared to Mike Mussina), there are definite similarities in their styles. There’s a lilting quality to many of McCarthy’s sentences, even when he defies conventional sentence structure. He can be sparse with details when it suits his purpose (the novel’s protagonist is never identified beyond “the kid”), but can also fire off a stream of seemingly minute details that in the end paint a rich picture of a scene, a character, a moment. He never descends into the sheer inscrutability that scares so many readers away from Faulkner, who was an original in many ways but who’ll always be loved and reviled most strongly for his prose.
The story revolves around the aforementioned kid, a fourteen-year-old who runs away from his father (his mother died giving birth to him) to head out west and falls in with a group of mercenaries who are hunting an outlaw named Gómez while also collecting scalps of Apaches, all under the auspices of the Mexican government. And that’s where it gets violent – ruthlessly, sociopathically so. The violence isn’t disturbing because it’s graphic – it is, somewhat – but because it’s so effortless and is achieved on so grand a scale. It is genocide writ small, and it’s made all the worse by the fact that McCarthy based it loosely on the real-life Glanton gang, using Glanton’s top lieutenant, Judge Holden, as the primary villain.
The plot didn’t pick up until I was about halfway through the book; the kid seems to take forever to fall in with Glanton/Holden’s gang, and it’s not until things start to go awry that the plot gets interesting, with the kid and Judge Holden gradually forming the central conflict that defines the last third of the book.
If you’ve got the stomach to get through several scenes of extreme – but, as TIME wrote in its summary of the book, never gratuitous – violence, then I would certainly recommend Blood Meridian to anyone who enjoys Faulkner, morality plays (even ones where the moral lines are blurred), or great American literature. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when the scalps start flying.
→ May 18, 2007
→ By
→ By
The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball
I’m often asked for suggestions for good baseball books, and I struggle to come up with good suggestions. Many are leaden; a lot are full of the sort of cliché-ridden garbage that has so thoroughly turned me off of newspapers; and a lot are just poorly written, too. So I’m pleased to be able to offer a very strong recommendation for a new, unusual entry in the pantheon of baseball books: Derek Zumsteg’s The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball
First, a disclaimer: I know Derek personally and have for something like seven years. We were both writers at BP around the same time, and while we definitely don’t agree on every topic, I have always enjoyed Derek’s writing. I still think if his book sucked, I’d say so, or at least I wouldn’t recommend it, but I thought the connection was something I should mention.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the book, ripping through it in two days despite the fact that I was coming down with a bad respiratory infection and read the last section while I had a fever of 102.5. Zumsteg splits his history of cheating into three sections, and unfortunately the first section – devoted to shady-but-not-really-cheating things, like groundskeepers’ tricks to help the home team – is the least interesting, although it’s certainly well-written, and does discuss John McGraw, one of my favorite historical baseball figures. But we want sordid details, like spitballs and gambling scandals, and sections two (the illegal) and three (the awful) deliver, which gave me the feeling that the book was accelerating as I read it. The section on Billy Martin, a manager I remember well from my Yankee-fan childhood, was a particular treat.
My one big criticism of the book is the lack of footnotes or endnotes, although Derek tells me that its omission was an editorial decision. It’s too bad, because the book clearly has a lot of research behind it, and I often find other interesting reads by checking out the notes or bibliography of a book I’ve enjoyed. My guess is that a lot of readers won’t mind the absence of the notes, certainly not if your primary interest is in a good, fast-moving baseball read.
→ May 10, 2007
→ By
→ By
The “other” chat questions…
So it looks like some other folks had questions for me.
Deadspin: 1 p.m. MLB Insider Keith Law: How come no firestorm when David Wells opens his big yap?
Because no one can understand a guy who always has two hot dogs in his mouth.
David Hume: Keith, do you resent being overshadowed by your omnipresent, nearly omnipotent brother Johnny Law?
No, but the way my cousin Acie Law IV was getting all the love the spring was really getting under my skin.
David Hume: Also, is “the long arm of the Law” really that long?
Depends on which arm we’re discussing…
Stev D: Are you just Keith if you enter international waters?
And most people just assume I’m afraid of the ocean.
Zlax45: Ask Keith what he thinks about College Baseball and how teams always screw up bunting. He says it happens every time he goes to a college game that someone hits a bunt back to the pitcher.
Bah, a serious question – no fun. But the big problem I have with college teams bunting is that it’s a high-scoring environment with horrendous relief pitching. What the hell are you doing having your #3 hitter bunt in the first inning? OK, enough seriousness.
Phony Gwynn: Keith, If I fought you, would you win?
No, you know how the song ends.
Spaceman Spiff: Keith, are you going to answer baseball related questions or is this chat only for pretentious assholes to discuss their favourite foreign language books and sushi?
PS. what’s your favourite Manuel Altolaguirre poem?
Hey, watch your mouth – there’s nothing pretentious about us. Fin de un amor.