→ February 24, 2009
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Links.

Most of you have probably caught this, but we have a new blog going at ESPN.com covering the MLB Draft. The blog will (I’m told) be entirely Insider and will include scouting reports from me as I see players as well as daily updates from Jason Churchill on what went on the night before and what’s coming up, as well as scuttlebutt he and I pick up from industry people with whom we speak.

I did a Q&A with Nats Farm Authority. As you might imagine, the comments are a mix of good feedback and whining. By the way, the Nats blogosphere has been going nuts the last week or so; Fire Jim Bowden is all over the Bowden scandal, and Kristen at We’ve Got Heart has been providing roundups.

Several people have asked what I’m doing for spring training. I’m going to Arizona next week and will be there for most of the month, mixing pro coverage (mostly prospects) with amateurs (including, at some point, a trip to see Strasburg). If anyone has any new food rec’s for the greater Phoenix area, I’m all ears.

Filed Under: Chat, News Tagged With:
→ February 21, 2009
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Ballad of the Whiskey Robber.

In a comment on my October 2007 post listing my 25 favorite nonfiction books, reader Dennis suggested Julian Rubenstein’s Ballad of the Whiskey Robber. Win.

The book tells the true story of a Transylvanian man who escapes Ceaucescu’s regime and ends up in Budapest, where he becomes a pelt smuggler, pen salesman, Zamboni driver, backup hockey goalie, and, in the end, the most successful bank robber in Eastern Europe, all while Hungary is undergoing the painful transition from communist rule to democracy and a market economy. It is a non-fiction novel of the highest order – by all accounts, completely true, and yet built around a character so rich and fascinating that he seems like he had to have come from someone’s imagination.

The “Whiskey Robber,” Attila Ambrus, was so named because he would get hammered on whiskey before each bank job, but was also a meticulous planner and athletic enough that his hockey teammates referred to him as the “Chicky Panther.” He’s the protagonist and hero, but isn’t entirely sympathetic; aside from the whole stealing thing, he’s a spendthrift, a gambling addict, and an alcoholic, and he becomes reckless with his gun in the last few robberies before he’s captured. He’s struggling to overcome a lousy start in life – his mother walked out when he was one, and his father was cold, distant, and would beat Attila when drunk – but also has strong powers of rationalization. He’s clever and charming – many tellers whose employers he had robbed wouldn’t testify against him or testified that he was kind and courteous during the robberies – but, of course, he’s a thief.

Rubenstein balances Attila’s story with that of the Budapest police force, which chased Attila for six years, during almost all of which time they had little idea of who the Whiskey Robber was. Rubenstein depicts the police force as undermanned and underfunded, a popular second-guessing target for politicians in Hungary’s ever-unstable governments, asking for help from above and from the FBI’s office in Budapest but never receiving it. Attila became a particular thorn in the police’s side thanks to Kriminalis, a popular TV show in the mid-1990s that discussed major criminal cases of the day, a sort of Hungary’s Most Wanted but with a more tabloid feel; the show made Attila into a folk hero, as did Hungarian rapper Ganxsta Zolee*, who (without realizing he was already friends with the Whiskey Robber) recorded a popular song that proclaimed “The Whiskey Robber is the king!”

*The video in that link isn’t for the song about the Whiskey Robber, which I couldn’t find, but Zolee’s entire look in that video is just priceless. I’m sure Cypress Hill would be flattered.

The book’s greatest strength is Rubenstein’s apparent thoroughness. To construct this narrative, covering six years of robberies plus Attila’s life before his first bank job (which was actually in a post office), he would have had to talk to an inordinate number of people involved in the saga, from Ambrus himself to his ex-girlfriends to his hockey teammates to the detectives who came and went while Attila kept on robbing. The level of detail gives the story a rich, novelesque feel and that plus its scoundrel hero are probably what has given the book such a strong cult following.

I listened to the audio version of Ballad, which was the subject of a story in the New York Times a a few years ago because it was a DIY project: The publisher of Ballad didn’t want to pay to produce an audiobook, so the author cobbled together a cast of famous fans of the book and some studio time and did it himself. In some ways, it’s a blast: The characters, particularly Attila, develop more personality over the course of the book because they’re voiced individually.

I hate to criticize Rubenstein, since he read the book himself out of necessity rather than choice, but his oral style is not ideal. He reads the book in a drab, descending tone, even during chase scenes or other exciting sequences. He also mispronounces a lot of English words, like victuals (he says it as it’s written), closeted (“cl?-ZEHT-t?d”), and the old Italian currency lire (“leer”), which had me wondering whether he’d mispronounced any of the Hungarian words and names as well. These things bug me. YMMV.

Incidentally, Attila now has a myspace page. He can’t use a computer or receive mail in prison, but he apparently updates this during his allotted phone time by telling whoever’s updating the page what to write. There’s not that much of interest on there other than a video allowing you to see what a Chicky Panther looks like. I do like that he lists I, Claudius as his favorite book; I wondered if the prison library also has the sequel, Claudius the God.

I don’t read enough nonfiction to update that top-25 list often, but if I was to redo it today, I’d slot Ballad second, behind only Barbarians at the Gate.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ February 20, 2009
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Catch-22.

I’m going to bet that of all the books on the Klaw 100, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the five most-read among dish readers. The book, which appears on several greatest-books lists (it’s #7 on the Modern Library 100, #15 on the Radcliffe 100, #74 on the Guardian 100, and on the TIME 100) certainly seems like a book that many of us read during our high school or college years, whether or not it was assigned reading, simply because it was so damn funny and its status as one of the “it” books of its era never fully went away, the same way Catcher in the Rye has maintained its cachet after forty years*.

*I’m going to steal a page from JoePo today and insert some asides. I was accused in chat in a question I didn’t post of being “anti-cliché” because I didn’t like Catcher. I don’t really know how those two things are connected – neither Salinger nor his novel seem clichéd to me – but, more to the point, is anyone actually pro-cliché? Romance-novel publishers? Slasher-film producers? Actually, a few mainstream sportswriters come to mind so I’ll stop here.

Catch-22 is now one of only a handful of novels I’ve read twice, a list that also includes Pride and Prejudice (didn’t like it in high school, read Emma as an adult and loved it, re-read P&P and realized I’d missed all the wit the first time), Things Fall Apart (first read it at 13, didn’t get the point at all), and The Great Gatsby (just because). I think Catch-22 earns the prize for the longest gap between readings – I first read it in the fall of 1989*, which means it’s been an almost-unthinkable almost twenty years since my first trip through the dystopian anti-war masterpiece.

*I can tell I’m going to beat this gimmick into the ground. I first read Catch-22 by choice, but as it turned out, it was an assigned book during that same school year in AP Lit. We actually had a choice of three novels – this one, Slaughterhouse-Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next – and while I eventually read all three, I took the easy route and wrote my paper on Catch-22.

The funny part of this story is that that class, taught by Mrs. Glynn, was a substantial learning experience for me beyond the books we were supposed to read. I skipped several of the books assigned in that class, including Tess of the d’Urbervilles (rented the movie, then read the book in 2005 and loved it) and An American Tragedy (800+ pages of tiny print and I know the SOB gets it in the end, I’m all set with that, used the Cliffs Notes), and consistently scored 5’s on the papers, which Mrs. Glynn graded on the AP scale. Catch-22 was one of only two books I really read word for word and cover to cover in that class, the other being Ellison’s Invisible Man. Unfortunately, while the paper was in Mrs. Glynn’s hands, she overheard me bragging to a classmate that I hadn’t read the majority of books in her class, and sure enough, on that paper, I got a 3. The lesson I took was that it doesn’t actually matter whether you do the work as long as you act like you did and present it well. I sleepwalked through college on this newfound confidence, only really working hard in math and foreign-language classes. There may also have been a lesson in my AP Lit experience in the value of keeping my mouth shut, a lesson I have never learned and promise you all that I never will.

My memory of Catch-22 was that it was a hilarious, often absurd anti-war romp, almost like an angrier, funnier Vonnegut. I remembered anecdotes, like Nately’s whore, Milo the entrepreneur, and cracks about flies in someone’s eyes. What I didn’t remember – or perhaps didn’t realize the first time through – was that it is a profoundly cynical book, satirizing and savaging more than just war, with democracy, capitalism, government, religion, and often just plain ol’ humanity all taking it on the chin and ending up bleeding on the floor. The plot is pretty thin; the novel itself is more a meandering collecting of anecdotes told in a nonlinear fashion, an effective technique for humor that left me often confused as to the order of events*, although to read and enjoy this book you don’t really need to worry too much about sequence.

*Well, except for when someone was killed – that sort of cleared things up a bit.

In fact, I’d argue that even considering the book’s deft wordplay and ironic humor, the book’s greatest comedy comes from Heller’s scene-shifting gimmick: In the middle of dialogue between two people about a third person, Heller will jump to the third person discussing the same subject without any transition whatsoever. The quotes themselves are usually funny, but the momentary disorientation – hey, he wasn’t in the room a moment ago – increases the humor.

I’ve read one of Heller’s other novels, the unusual God Knows, a sort of deathbed memoir of King David of Israel. It too uses a nonlinear storytelling device, but lacks the humor of Catch-22, and I haven’t felt compelled to read anything else by Heller.*

*From Heller’s obituary in the New York Times: “When an interviewer told Mr. Heller that he had never written anything as good as Catch-22, the author shot back, ‘Who has?'”

Next up: A collection of Raymond Chandler’s short stories, The Simple Art of Murder.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ February 18, 2009
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Eyeless in Gaza.

I’ve been sitting on a writeup of Eyeless in Gaza for a week-plus because I’m not sure how to sum it up. It’s a strange book with one clever literary device but an odious protagonist and a philosophical vein that, frankly, bored me.

I’ve read two other Huxley books – the dystopian classic Brave New World and the social satire Antic Hay – but Eyeless bears no resemblance to either work. The protagonist, Anthony Beavis – no, no sign of Butthead, sorry – is a morally rudderless libertine who lost his mother at an early age and was raised by an emotionally distant father who rebounded into a second marriage. He goes to college where he befriends a shy, religious boy named Brian, only to betray him a few years later by seducing his intended. Some years later, Anthony has an existential crisis while trying to write a “sociological” book that is more of a philosophy of life.

The clever device was the weaving of multiple timelines together without destroying the feel of the narrative. You know from early in the book, for example, that Brian is dead, because it’s revealed in the latest timeline, but because Huxley has chopped up his story into four or five timelines and cycles among them as they converge towards the book’s end, the how and why comes out in stages. It’s not the only book to use this method of telling a story, but the separation among storylines is more severe than in any other book I can remember, I don’t believe I’ve read an earlier book that used this device.

Beavis, however, is indeed a butthead. His betrayal of Brian is really just the icing on the cake, although it certainly colors one’s opinion of him to know that he betrayed his best friend and in possibly the only genuinely good person in the book. Everyone else is rotten and/or broken, and when one character threw another overboard or under the bus, I just greeted it with a shrug.

Eyeless in Gaza is part of the Bloomsbury 100, but that seems like a questionable call given the more enduring influence and popularity of Brave New World; in fact, Eyeless seems to be out of print in the U.S.

—

I’m scheduled to be on the FAN 590 in Toronto on Wednesday at 6:05 pm, and we appear to be on for a 1 pm Klawchat on Thursday.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ February 16, 2009
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Some links.

I did a Q&A with Atlanta blog Talking Chop, on the heels of a Rangers Q&A last week at Baseball Time in Arlington.

Sandra Lee’s new publication – magazine or giant brochure for highly processed food products?

I don’t know if any of you have bought the Peter Reinhart books I recommended last month, but if so, I’ve noticed that the quantity of water required for the whole-grain breads seems to depend on the grind of your whole wheat flour. I buy the Whole Foods bagged flour, which is a fairly coarse grind, and have had to increase the water to get a proper dough. And, on an unrelated note, the pain a l’ancienne recipe in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice is incredibly easy and delicious, with a spongy interior that’s not too soft and a great earthy almost cracker-like taste.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , ,
→ February 16, 2009
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Cocoa-Guinness cupcakes.

This recipe is adapted from one at smitten kitchen, which is the best-looking food blog I’ve ever seen. The photographs are simply amazing. The recipes are nearly all taken from well-known magazines and cookbooks, slightly modified and rewritten. (This, by the way, is completely legal; you can’t copyright a recipe, although you can copyright the specific text used to describe a recipe.) She does do some things that make me nuts, like measuring baking ingredients by volume rather than weight or “discovering” something that’s not that new (as with the rebrowning step in her short ribs recipe, describing a technique that’s been in Joy of Cooking for at least ten years), but it’s one of only four or five food blogs in my RSS reader because the photos inspire me and every once in a while there’s a recipe I want to make. Like these cupcakes.

I made the cupcakes for company this weekend, skipping the ganache filling step because of time constraints and using a Kahlua/cream blend in lieu of Bailey’s in the frosting (which isn’t actually buttercream since it lacks eggs). The results were very, very good – dark, moist chocolate cakes with that intense flavor you only really get from cocoa, cut nicely by the coolness of the frosting. I’m probably going to experiment with this further, but for those who saw my twitter about these cupcakes and asked for the recipe, here you go. I’ve rewritten this to measure the dry ingredients by weight, added vanilla extract to the cupcakes, and made the aforementioned change to the frosting. Oh, and I don’t use cupcake-pan liners. Who the hell uses liners? It’s 2009. Buy a nonstick pan and some baking spray.

For the cupcakes:

1 cup stout (such as Guinness)
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 cup neutral-flavored oil (such as canola)
80 g (about 3/4 cup) unsweetened Dutch-processed cocoa powder
300 g (about 2 cups) all purpose flour
400 g (about 2 cups) sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
2/3 cup sour cream
1 tsp vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 350° F (about 175 C). Prepare two 12-slot cupcake pans with baking spray or with nonstick spray and cocoa powder*.
2. Combine the butter and stout in a medium saucepan and bring to a bare simmer over medium heat. The goal is to melt the butter, work the carbonation out of the stout (we’ll add lift chemically), and combine the two. Remove from the heat and whisk in the cocoa powder and oil until smooth. Set aside to cool until just warm to the touch.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk the flour, baking soda, and salt together.
4. In the work bowl of your stand mixer (or in a large bowl suitable for a hand mixer), combine the eggs and sour cream and beat with the whisk attachment until more or less blended. Add the vanilla and sugar and blend further.
5. With the beater(s) running on low speed, slowly pour in the warm cocoa-stout-butter mixture. Increase the speed and whisk for thirty to sixty seconds until combined.
6. Add the flour in two to three installments, beating thoroughly after each addition until the mixture is homogeneous.
7. Pour or scoop the mixture into the prepared pans, filling each compartment about ¾ full. A #20 disher gave me 20 cupcakes.
8. Bake 15-17 minutes, switching and rotating the trays at the eight-minute mark. Remove them from the oven when a toothpick inserted into the middle of a cupcake (not one on the edge of the oven) comes out just barely clean. A few crumbs clinging to the toothpick would be ideal. Cool thoroughly on a rack before frosting.

* Baking spray is regular spray oil with flour mixed into it. If you don’t have it, spray the pan with regular canola-oil or vegetable-oil spray, and put a little cocoa powder in each compartment, tilting the pan to cover the bottom and sides of each compartment. Yes, a nonstick pan should release the cupcakes anyway, but why take chances?

For the pseudo-buttercream frosting:

About 3 cups confectioners’ sugar
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperatue
1 Tbsp heavy cream
2 Tbsp Kahlúa® or other coffee-flavored liqueur

1. Combine the cream and liqueur in a small measuring cup and set aside.
2. Using the paddle attachment on your stand mixer, beat the butter for about two minutes or until thoroughly broken down into a smooth paste.
3. Add the sugar one heaping tablespoon at a time, allowing each to be mostly integrated before adding the next spoonful.
4. When the mixture starts to stiffen, add about half of the liqueur/cream mixture and beat in on low speed. If the frosting is still too stiff to spread or pipe, add the remaining liquid until you reach the desired consistency. Use immediately, because it gets stiff quickly even at room temperature.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ February 13, 2009
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TV today.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS today just after 5 pm EST, and I’m taping a brief hit for the 6 pm Sportscenter as well.

Filed Under: Appearances
→ February 13, 2009
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Los Angeles eats.

Versailles, recommended to me by Joe Sheehan, is a local mini-chain serving authentic Cuban food and I ate at their location on Venice Blvd in Culver City. The menu is extensive, so I asked the waiter for suggestions, and without hesitating, he pointed to three. Figuring that was a good sign, I went with his pick from the list of pork dishes, lechon asado, pork shoulder marinated in a citrus-based mojo and then roasted for several hours at a low temperature. The meat should pull apart easily with a fork, which it did, and it had been largely trimmed of exterior fat. The sauce was too tart for me to just eat the pork on its own, but the buttery white rice that came with the dish was a perfect complement that cut the acidity of the meat. (I admit I followed the example of the young Cuban kid sitting next to me, who was inhaling a roast chicken dish by mixing everything together on his fork. His meal didn’t stand a chance.) The maduros were insanely good – who needs dessert when you have maduros? They are dessert – and the meal also came with a small cup of black bean soup that was a little bit thin but also not as heavy as most black bean soups I’ve had. I actually went to Versailles with an hour or so to kill before heading to LAX for my redeye and ended up in and out of the restaurant inside of a half-hour. You order, and in a few minutes, the dish is in front of you. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, though.

The rain on Sunday morning meant I could have a regular lunch before going to the MLB complex in Compton. The Waffle, on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood, was hopping at noon on Sunday, and as you might imagine, they serve … waffles. They’re Belgian-style in shape, although they’re not as light as true Belgian waffles, which are made by folding beaten egg whites into a waffle batter that contains an absurd amount of butter. These were closer to traditional waffles that had been baked on a Belgian-style waffle iron, so they were on the dense side, and the plain waffle had a subtle taste of vanilla but otherwise tasted a little plain. The “house sausage” was good, not too greasy or too spicy, just solid-average.

The issue of Los Angeles magazine in my room had an article on the area’s twenty top bakeries, which was as clear a call to action as I’ve ever seen. One of the things I dislike most about living in Boston, aside from the permafrost, is the lack of decent bakeries. Aside from a very small number of good shops in Back Bay, we don’t have good ethnic bakeries or good high-end bakeries around here. I do a lot of baking, but there’s a difference between wanting a cookie and making an entire batch. I only made it to two of the twenty shops recommended, in part because one of the options, Amandine in West L.A., is still in business but apparently never open.

La Provence Patisserie, tucked into a strip mall on the south side of West Olympic in Beverly Hills, was more style than substance. Their almond croissant was very good, flaky, not dry, with real (possibly homemade?) almond paste inside, but their big seller, their macaroons, were insanely overpriced ($2 apiece for a tiny sandwich in any of a half-dozen fluorescent colors) and tasted like sugar rather than coconut. There was a clear see-and-be-seen vibe to the place, and since I have no particular need to be seen and no desire to see, that didn’t add anything to the experience.

The Vanilla Bake Shop in Santa Monica was a better bet. They do cupcakes, and despite the name, they do a lot of chocolate cupcakes. I went with the sampler, three mini-cupcakes for $5, so I could try three flavors – mint chocolate chip, black and white, and chocolate raspberry. The first two were just chocolate cupcakes with different kinds of buttercream frosting, while the third cupcake was filled with raspberry preserves and topped with chocolate ganache and a fresh raspberry. The bottom line here is the cupcakes: moist and very dark with a strong cocoa flavor, while not too sweet. You get enough sugar in the frosting, so backing off the sweetness in the cake is the right call. They do have non-chocolate flavors, and their specific varieties depend on the day, but I didn’t see any point in wasting time on something that wasn’t chocolate.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ February 12, 2009
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Chat today.

Usual time, 1 pm EST.

And yes, I completely forgot the Bonifacio/Willingham trade. Inexcusable error on my part – working on getting it fixed.

UPDATE: I found Angry Dan the Nats Fan and some of his little friends on this message board. None of them realized the Salmon line was a joke. Pretty sure they all owe $5 fines now.

Filed Under: Chat Tagged With:
→ February 12, 2009
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Rabbit, Run.

I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.

Rabbit, Run, (#97 on the Radcliffe 100 and part of the TIME 100) has been on my to-be-read shelf for a few months, but in light of the recent death of author John Updike, I decided to move it up in the queue. I originally started this book about ten years ago, got through three or four pages, realized it was going to be depressing, and sold it at a used book store. I was more successful in a second attempt.

“Rabbit” is Harry Angstrom, a 26-year-old former high school basketball star who is now married to a twenty-year-old woman who has already born him a son and is pregnant again. Their marriage is crumbling, or has crumbled, to a point where any conversation degenerates into sniping and insults and where Janice is just withdrawn into alcohol and the television. Rabbit has a job demonstrating the MagiPeeler, a vegetable peeler for sale at the local five and dime store, a career roughly as fulfilling as his marriage. Faced with nothing rewarding in his life, Rabbit runs off, walking away from wife and job and falling into an affair with a slattern from the other side of town.

The fundamental problem with Rabbit, Run from my perspective is that Updike seems to be trying to present Rabbit as a sympathetic character: A young man suddenly realizing that he is trapped into a life of mediocrity and unhappiness, both in stark contrast to the small-world stardom he had in high school, who decides that the best option is to run, both physically and metaphorically. The truth is that Rabbit is a grade-A Asshole who mistreats his wife and then his mistress, refuses to take responsibility for his actions or to live up to the obligations of commitments he’s made (like, say, knocking up two women), or to just generally behave like an adult. Yes, his wife is a train-wreck, an alcoholic with hints of depression, but Rabbit at one point puts alcohol back in her hands when she is trying to give it up, because he can’t adjust to a reality of her sober and the commitment that that implies. But not only is his wife never depicted as “bad” enough for him to leave her, he has an innocent son, Nelson, who adores him as two-year-olds adore their parents, and on whom Rabbit runs out without any apparent pangs of remorse. I have a two-year-old, and I can’t imagine any situation in my marriage that would make me leave the house and not even try to see my daughter for over two months. Janice (Rabbit’s wife) tells her husband at one point after he has returned from his lost weekend about Nelson:

“Oh. Every day, ‘Daddy home day?’ until I could belt him, the poor saint. Don’t make me talk about it, it’s too depressing.”

It’s heartbreaking, and it makes Updike’s attempts to show some affection on Rabbit’s part towards the boy ring totally hollow. You have a clear two-way bond with your child by that age; if you can walk away from that for two months without making any attempt to see the kid, in all likelihood, you have no soul.

The craft of Rabbit, Run is strong. Updike’s prose is wonderful, as anyone familiar with his article on Ted Williams’ retirement knows. He’s also telling, or trying to tell, a larger story of the fears a person faces upon realizing that he has inextricably left his youth behind and has even made irreversible choices that dictate the path of the rest of his life. Rabbit is surrounded by people who symbolize hopes and fears and responsibilities, from the minister and his wife who represent faith and doubt, to the declining high school basketball coach who represents the past and ages and fades like memories, to the baby Janice bears, a metaphor for their marriage, briefly reborn as that, for whatever reason, is the event who finally brings Harry back home. But the fact that it’s well-written only made it an easier read, not a more compelling one, as my dislike for Rabbit only grew as the book went on and he failed to show any sign of maturity or simple recognition of the consequences his actions have on those around him.

Next up: A re-read of Catch-22. I have crab apples in my cheeks and flies in my eyes already.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,