Down the Stretch We Come

Some housekeeping up top. I return to CrimeReads with a feature story reviewing the directorial career of beloved actor Danny DeVito. The survey was prompted by the arrival in theaters of The Roses, an adaptation of the Warren Adler novel The War of the Roses which DeVito made into a memorable black comedy in 1989. The main takeaway: watch Death to Smoochy (2002).

Next, a recap of the middle third of the year at my newsletter Cocktails and Crime:

Trying to regain my fiction writing mojo by serving as an Edgars judge and reading a trio of novels that spawned some classic movie thrillers

Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), part one: documentaries on food, drink, and film

SIFF, part two: vintage 3D noir and crime films

I run a 5K, see some big-screen Kurosawa, and report on recent reading

Class as treated in a pair of current crime novels, and French mushroom noir

A pair of baseball books

The Facebook memoir Careless People prompts a social media report card

I make my documentary debut, and see even more big-screen Kurosawa

A quartet of new crime movies

Background on my DeVito article for CrimeReads 

Summer Summary

I’m popping in again to remind you that the action these days is at Cocktails and Crime, my Substack newsletter. A recap of the last few months of entries—

The Netflix documentary How to Rob a Bank, and how I was hired to tell the same story decades ago.

Reviews of two new jazz histories.

I marked the one-year anniversary of C&C by going to a book signing for Baseball: The Movie.

I try to figure out why everyone keeps asking me if I’m retired, and why that means staying connected. Also, a related few words on one of the year’s best films, the documentary Flipside.

A pair of books on vintage spirits puts me on a birthday quest to drink Howard Hughes’s whiskey.

A memoir and a raucous comedy set in the ancestral homeland of the Keenans, plus Martin Scorsese’s heartfelt tribute to Powell & Pressburger.

You should subscribe now. I’m always yammering about something.

Elaine May into June

The main news in this post: my new story at CrimeReads on the crime films of Elaine May went live late last month. Swing on over and check it out.

My Substack experiment continues, and is looking more and more like a success. Exhibit A: Cocktails and Crime was singled out in a Drawing Media interview at Kottke.org with polymath Michael Sharp, the man behind Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle, the pulp fiction blog Pop Sensation, and the Twitter account The Lamps of Film Noir. Drawing Media’s Edith Zimmerman even transformed the C&C welcome screen into a gorgeous illustration. If you’re at all interested in my ramblings, subscribing to C&C is your best bet. I give you my solemn oath that I won’t spam you. You’ll receive a newsletter approximately every seven to ten days, with rare exceptions like my coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival. A look at those stories and what else you may have missed—

On murder clubs, death cleaning, and reaching the age of not bouncing back.

I finally read Steven Bach’s Final Cut, which meant finally watching Heaven’s Gate.

I rant about baseball, but actually about something even larger that has nothing to do with sports.

A history of Blaxploitation, Michael Keaton’s second hit-man movie, and more recommendations.

SIFF crime films, including an early look at Thelma, a terrific heist movie, and a questionable Hitchcock doc.

SIFF serves up food and drink fare, like documentaries on Spanish wine and Seattle beer.

Background on the Elaine May piece for CrimeReads, including the story of how I didn’t meet her.

Another round-up of recs, among them a history of the Village Voice.

The infamous Tinseltown P.I. Fred Otash in a biography, a novel, and his own words.

Demented and Sad, but Social

Last week, the thought came to me unbidden: Holy shit, I have a Post account!

It’s true. Back when Twitter first went into convulsions, Post seemed the most viable alternative. I set up shop, made the rounds, then promptly forgot about it. I’ll probably forget about it again soon enough.

Yesterday I nosed around Notes, Substack’s answer to Twitter. Could this be the future of social media? I have to say, it looks pretty good. It underscored how many writers I follow are already on Substack. And it has me pondering questions I have long put off: should I start a Substack of my own? Would anybody read it?

Anyway, that’s our first topic this morning. Give us a call. Our lines are open.

What I’m Reading

Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, by Michael Schulman (2023). I wrote a little about this book while disguised as Renee Patrick, mild-mannered crime novelist. (Subscribe to Renee’s occasional newsletter here.) Schulman, a New Yorker correspondent, analyzes the role that the Academy Awards have played during pivotal Hollywood moments. One of the best chapters reconsiders the 1989 ceremony, widely regarded as the worst Oscars ever. You know, the one featuring the opening number with Snow White and Rob Lowe, which is even longer than I remembered it being. (There was also a stupefying “Stars of Tomorrow” number, which is far worse.) Producer Allan Carr (Grease) bore the brunt of the nuclear-level negative reaction, which essentially ended his career. Schulman makes it plain that Carr, who had long dreamed of running the Oscars, sealed his fate by making the show partly about him. But he also highlights how much Carr got right, including several innovations that are now mainstays, and how tacky the telecast was before Carr got his hands on it. Although those two numbers are a lot to forgive.

Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess, by Evan Drellich (2023). If you’re a baseball fan you’re already aware of this book, the definitive chronicle of the Houston Astros’ legacy of cheating, particularly during 2017 when the team won the World Series. (Recent admissions from then-Astros player Evan Gattis aren’t helping the bad blood go away, as any Yankee or Dodger fan will attest.) But I’d also recommend it as an incisive case study about how cultures are built, and how toxic ones can eat away at institutions that appear not only healthy but successful. It’s also about the financialization of every aspect of public life. One Astros player described the team’s mentality—perhaps best exemplified by owner Jim Crane bringing in McKinsey to improve operations, because playing nine innings is exactly like selling widgets—this way: “They just take the human element out of baseball. It’s hard to play for a GM who just sees you as a number instead of a person.” Another choice quote: “The closer I get to the world of the thirty owners, many of them are among the worst people in the world.” Testify, unnamed baseball executive. What makes it all harder to swallow is that the Astros never stopped winning. They’re baseball’s current defending champions—yet in true McKinsey fashion, they parted ways with the GM brought in specifically to right the ship after he’d won them a second title. Sometimes the bastards don’t lose. They don’t even learn.

What I’m Watching

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (2022). When I finished reading Caro’s The Power Broker last year, I posted a photograph to mark the occasion. Caro’s four-and-hopefully-five volume biography of LBJ awaits, and this engaging documentary about his life’s work and his enduring relationship with his editor Gottlieb (made by Lizzie Gottlieb, his daughter) has me eager to read them. I was struck by the deep modesty of both men, and by Gottlieb’s belief that having unexpected and intense interests—he collects plastic handbags and consults with ballet companies—contributes to his acuity and the longevity of his career. Above all, it’s a portrait of a genteel literary life out of a bygone era. Every day Caro dons a suit and tie to walk to his office, where he puts in the hours at a typewriter and backs up his work using carbon paper. All I could think as I watched him was Who still makes carbon paper?

What I’m Drinking

Talk to bartenders and you’ll hear tell of the Great Chartreuse Shortage of 2023. This week, a friend told me that in the Seattle area, the price for a bottle has hit three figures. Jason Wilson has a nice overview of chartreuse and what brought its recent scarcity about. I’ve been rationing my own supply, recently dipping into my stash to make a Diamondback after Punch called for this boozy beauty to make a comeback. It’s always been a staple at the Chez K bar—it’s included in my cocktail book Down the Hatch, which I just realized is coming up on its tenth anniversary—but I make it with green, not yellow chartreuse, the way bartending legend Murray Stenson taught me when he was behind the stick at the Zig Zag Café.

1 ½ oz. rye whiskey
¾ oz. bonded applejack
¾ oz. green chartreuse

Stir. Strain. No garnish.

The Rundown

Hang on, let me blow the dust off the—there we go. That’s better.

Things have been hectic lately, what with the launch of the second Lillian Frost & Edith Head novel from Renee Patrick Dangerous to Know. My co-alter ego has the scoop, and believe me when I say there’s more in the works. All kinds of fun and games are coming, including a few things I can’t believe. I’m popping in amidst the promo push to recommend a few items for your delectation.

Under the Midnight Sun, Keigo Higashino (2016). Here’s how busy it’s been: a new Chinese adaptation of Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X—easily my favorite mystery novel of the past 20 years—was playing two blocks for me and I missed my chance to see it. Higashino’s latest is also his most ambitious, at least of the novels that have been published in the United States. It’s a sprawling crime story-cum-social novel, spanning decades and touching on, among other things, the growth of the Japanese computer industry. In 1973, a man is murdered and a woman identified as the likely killer. Each has a child. Higashino tracks this pair through the years, but never as the viewpoint characters. Instead, they’re at a remove, always seen through the prism of others who fall into their orbits. It’s a daring structural choice that for the most part deepens the intrigue. As is so often the case with Higashino, any reservations are swept away by a climax at once elegant and charged with emotion. It’s not Suspect X, but then nothing is.

Five Came Back, Netflix. I raved about Mark Harris’s book, which cast a clear eye on a long-overlooked piece of Hollywood history. The three-part documentary based on it has the added advantage of film clips, and pairs contemporary filmmakers with some surprisingly simpatico predecessors (Guillermo del Toro and Frank Capra make an inspired match) who walked away from their Hollywood careers during World War II to make propaganda films.

Cork Dork, Bianca Bosker (2017). I was occasionally frustrated, frequently spellbound, and always fascinated by this memoir from a reporter-turned-sommelier. I remain a cocktail fanatic, but this opened my eyes (and nose) to vino in a way few books have.

Brockmire, IFC. What threatened to be a one-joke character is the centerpiece of a soulful if deeply, deeply profane comedy, thanks to Hank Azaria’s performance and a low-rent atmosphere out of Slap Shot. Granted, it helps knowing that lifelong Mets fan Azaria based Jim Brockmire in part on the team’s original announcers, specifically Lindsey Nelson’s wardrobe and Bob Murphy’s cadences. Hearing him wax rhapsodic about rye whiskey in that home run call voice is all my worlds colliding. And pontifidrinking is real. Not that I’ve done it or anything.

Books: Three for the Road

Thanks to a Design for Dying book tour that lasted much of May, I almost broke my Showgirls oath to post at least once a month. Here I am under the wire to recommend a troika of titles that kept me company while I was on the road.

Underground Airlines, Ben H. Winters. Late last year I devoured the entirety of Winters’ Last Policeman trilogy, genre-bending marvels that claimed both Edgar and Philip K. Dick awards. Even those books didn’t prepare me for Winters’ latest, due out on July 5 and destined to be a hot button topic for the rest of the summer. Airlines takes place in an alternate America where the Civil War never occurred, a twenty-first century where slavery remains legal in four states. Victor is a young black man who has made a devil’s bargain with a shadowy government agency to act as bounty hunter, tracking down fugitives from the South. Winters’ world-building is astonishing, creating a wholly believable society mere degrees from our own. But it’s Victor’s raw and potent story that carries us through this distorted and disturbing mirror image.

West of Eden: An American Place, by Jean Stein. Given the Lillian Frost/Edith Head series any book on Old Hollywood is going to command my attention, but this one-of-a-kind oral history is told from the inside. Stein recounts the sagas of five different Los Angeles families, including the Dohenys, who inspired There Will Be Blood and haunted Raymond Chandler; the Warners; and Jennifer Jones and David O. Selznick. The section on Jane Garland, the troubled daughter of a fortune-hunting mother who paid assorted California dreamers to keep her company, is like a real-life Ross Macdonald tale. Stein then turns her gaze toward her own clan; her father Jules founded MCA and played a pivotal role in building modern show business. A compulsively readable book about the price of privilege under the sun.

The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller. It’s a dream come true for a pair of hardcore baseball statheads: the chance to operate an actual team, albeit one in the independent leagues several rickety rungs below the minors. But in order to apply sabermetrics to the Sonoma Stompers, Lindbergh and Miller will have to win over rookies and lifers alike, plus learn some things about themselves and their beliefs. I heartily recommend this book to any baseball fan – it goes down much easier if you already know what wRC+ means – but don’t go in expecting a dry treatise heavy on objective analytics. This is powerful, moving stuff about theory and practice, dreams and reality, and the struggle to make tomorrow different from today.

Books: Some Summer Reading

Don’t let the blog go all cocktails all the time. I told myself that more than once. But a summer full of deadlines and other pressing business later, that’s exactly what happened. To make it up to you, here’s a quick roundup of books I’ve read in recent weeks worth your time.

Middle Men, by Jim Gavin (2013). Confession #1: I never read the fiction in the New Yorker. I don’t know why. Confession #2: I made an exception for Jim Gavin’s ‘Costello’ only because the illustration featured a Dodgers cap and I thought it was about baseball. (I’m really a very simple man.) Love of the game is part of the background in the finest short story I’ve read in years, about a widowed plumbing supplies salesman making the adjustment to living the good life in California alone. ‘Costello’ is the closing entry in this aptly-named, terrific collection of stories about men of varying ages accepting their limitations in the Golden State. ‘The Luau’ is a companion piece to ‘Costello’ about Costello fils. ‘Elephant Doors’ follows an aspiring stand-up comic who works as a production assistant on a game show that is nothing like Jeopardy! The uproarious, shaggy-dog ‘Illuminati’ includes a brilliant bit of show business lunacy, while ‘Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror’ contains as lethal a dissection of the modern workplace as you’ll see. (A sales team consists of “a pack of hyenas from third-tier MBA programs who spent their days quoting Old School and refreshing ESPN.com.”)

The Legends of Last Place, by Abe Streep (2013). In this brief ebook, the editor of Outside magazine (and former college baseball player) spends a season following the Santa Fe Fuego, the worst professional team in these United States. ‘Professional’ is used advisedly here; Fuego players earn fifty bucks a week, crash with local families, and double as the grounds crew. Streep dives deep into what keeps players and fans committed to the game at its lowest level. FYI: Roswell, New Mexico’s club is called the Invaders.

Big Maria, by Johnny Shaw (2012). If it’s been too long since you’ve read something heartwarming yet filthy – or filthy yet heartwarming, your choice – have I got the book for you. Three outcasts in the high desert, a place fabled for outcasts, decide to turn their sorry lives around by joining forces to find a forgotten gold mine. That the mine is now part of a government artillery range is the least of their problems, given what bone-deep screw-ups they are. It’s a scatological Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or a Donald E. Westlake Dortmunder novel where the heisters are cursed-by-God unlucky. Shaw balances a willingness to rush headlong into grim (and gross) comic terrain with genuine affection for his misfits, and damned if you’re not rooting for these sad bastards come the end.

Cocktail of the Week: The Harvey Wheelbanger

We’re changing the rules around here this week. The spotlight falls on a brand new drink, one I have yet to make myself but had a hand in inventing.

Ask friend and foe alike for a précis on my character and at some point, friend/foe’s voice will drop to the whispered tone reserved for the names of afflictions. “You know he’s ... a Mets fan,” friend/foe will say with commingled pity and wonder, both emotions apt.

It’s true. I remain stubbornly, stupidly loyal to the baseball team of my youth. There have been highs. There have been many, many, many more lows. Especially of late. But there is also hope. For the New York Metropolitans now have Matt Harvey, second year pitching phenom, possible starter of this year’s All-Star Game in Flushing, repository of all my dreams for the future. (No pressure.)

Ask friend and foe alike, etc., etc., and friend/foe will say, “Guy likes drinking.” So little wonder that more than one person suggested in the wake of Harvey’s dazzling first half that I should concoct a cocktail in his honor. It’s nice when a man’s hobbies overlap. I brought in a consultant: Ben Perri, estimable bartender at the Zig Zag Café, fellow New York ex-pat and baseball aficionado. We discussed parameters. No Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey, in part because it’s too easy but mostly because I don’t care for the stuff. Sports Illustrated dubbed Harvey “The Dark Knight of Gotham” and he pitched for the University of North Carolina, so clearly the base spirit has to be brown.

Earlier this week I caught up with Ben, who commented on the impressive debut outing of the Mets’ other touted pitching prospect Zack Wheeler. “We need a drink that pays tribute to them both,” Ben said. That’s when it hit me.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mets fans of all ages, Ben and I give you ... the Harvey Wheelbanger.

Sometimes it really is that easy.

The Harvey Wallbanger – vodka, orange juice, and the sweet, vanilla-heavy liqueur Galliano – is one of those cocktails that only could have achieved popularity in the 1970s. Esteem’d tippler Kingsley Amis branded the drink “famous or infamous,” dismissing it as “a Screwdriver with trimmings ... named after some reeling idiot in California.” That last bit comes from a treasured bit of lore claiming that the cocktail’s original advocate was a surfer (go on, guess his name!) who downed so many of them he’d bang off the walls trying to leave the bar. While Gary Regan cites an article crediting the cocktail’s invention to Newport Beach sportswriter Bill Doner, most experts lay blame or credit at the feet of barman Donato “Duke” Antone, who also claimed to have bequeathed unto the world the Rusty Nail.

New York Times writer Robert O. Simonson dove further into the Wallbanger’s history in this piece, discovering that its origins may have been considerably more corporate. Dale DeGroff adds the tantalizing tidbit that the apocryphal surfer downed so many of these drinks solely to collect the distinctive tapered bottles of Galliano. (The liqueur may be slowly making a comeback, but the cocktail that served as its primary introduction is more a liability at this point.)

The drink already has a baseball provenance; the 1982 American League champion Milwaukee Brewers were known as “Harvey’s Wallbangers” thanks to the team’s offensive prowess under the stewardship of manager Harvey Kuenn. The Harvey/Wheeler connection made it a no-brainer.

So what’s in a Harvey Wheelbanger? Galliano, obviously, a tip of the baseball cap to the cocktail’s forebear. Triple sec to complement it. Rye whiskey, as discussed. Not just any rye but Rittenhouse 100 proof, bringing the high heat. Ben then added Root liqueur as “the curveball, the off-speed stuff.” For the long, hot months of baseball season you want a tall drink, a cooler, so serve it over ice with club soda (“the gas”).

I drank the first-ever Harvey Wheelbanger at the Zig Zag on Monday night, and pronounced it good. It’s refreshing with a snap courtesy of the sneaky sarsaparilla finish. Before I left another customer had ordered one, because change is in the wind. The balance of power in the National League East is shifting to Queens, thanks to the presence of Harvey and Wheeler. Together, they are the joint Moses who will lead us to the Promised Land, or at least within hailing distance of a 2015 wild card bid. I’ve been a Mets fan too long to get completely carried away.

The Harvey Wheelbanger^*

1 ¼ oz. Rittenhouse 100 proof rye
½ oz. Galliano
½ oz. triple sec
¼ oz. Root liqueur
3 oz. club soda

Combine the first four ingredients with ice. Stir. Strain into a Collins glass filled with ice. Top with club soda. Garnish with an orange slice and a cherry.

^*Known as the Starting Rotation in Yankees/Braves/Nationals/Phillies/Marlins bars. Like there are any Marlins bars.

Movies: Day and Date Theater

Once more into darkest cable box, armed only with blog and remote, to spotlight a pair of movies released to theaters and on demand simultaneously.

Arbitrage. There are heroes, and then there are protagonists. Richard Gere clearly plays the latter here. His Robert Miller is a respected financier, an oracle of Wall Street. Only he’s shorted himself on magic. Having taken a multimillion dollar bath on Russian copper, he’s borrowed a fortune to make his firm seem solvent in order to hoodwink a competitor into buying it. The papers haven’t been signed yet, and his CIO daughter is on the trail of his skullduggery. What he needs is a relaxing night upstate with his French mistress. But Miller dozes off behind the wheel, wrecking the car and killing her. He flees the scene with the aid of his late driver’s son, unintentionally putting the young man’s future in jeopardy.

Astonishingly, you end up rooting for Gere’s master of the universe to get away with, if not murder, then massive fraud and manslaughter. As writer/director Nicholas Jarecki provides a behind-the-velvet-ropes-and-curtains tour of Manhattan’s tonier precincts, the film plays like a particularly luxe episode of Law & Order with no order and precious little law. (You do get Tim Roth as an outer borough Columbo who knows Miller is guilty and will cut corners to prove it.) A terrific Gere is ably supported by several actors portraying the celestial objects drawn into Miller’s orbit, like Susan Sarandon as the wife who has learned a thing or two about negotiating and Stuart Margolin as his cagey attorney. A sleek, suspenseful look at how the other 53% lives.
 
Knuckleball! In some sense, this engaging documentary came out a year early. It focuses on the 2011 baseball season as Tim Wakefield prepares to close out a lengthy career based on the fluttery pitch of the title, leaving the Mets’ R.A. Dickey as the game’s last such hurler. One season later, Dickey is an All-Star and a factor in the Cy Young conversation, having notched 19 wins and counting, leading the league in ERA and innings pitched, and ranked second in strikeouts. In perfecting an 80 mph version of the knuckler, Dickey has come as close as anyone to doing the unthinkable: inventing a new pitch. A brief primer on mechanics would have been welcome, but otherwise the film does an admirable job explaining the commitment required to master a pitch that, in the words of Jim Bouton, demands “the fingertips of a safecracker and the heart of a Zen Buddhist,” as well as profiling the handful of members of the brotherhood.

Book: Wherever I Wind Up, by R.A. Dickey (2012)

Robert Allen Dickey is the kind of player you want on your roster, and I don’t say that just because he currently has a 4-1 record for my New York Mets. The last active knuckleball pitcher in Major League Baseball is good copy. He’s a character, obsessed with Star Wars (see his Twitter feed), eloquent in postgame interviews, talking up William Faulkner in the clubhouse. He also has character; inspired by his love of Hemingway, he spent part of the last off-season climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro to raise money for at-risk women and youth in Mumbai. And now he’s written a book.

Wherever I Wind Up, co-authored by New York Daily News reporter Wayne Coffey, is a plain-spoken memoir about a life spent in “a game of managing regrets.” Dickey writes honestly about growing up in a broken home in Tennessee, his mother’s alcoholism (“I got my share of yellow stars (for success in Little League), but they never made it onto my uniform. My mom had a lot going on.”), incidents of childhood sexual abuse. Sports was a way out, until a routine physical revealed that the Olympic athlete lacked a crucial ligament in his elbow. He instantly went from first-round draft pick to cast-off, scuffling for years in the minor leagues. Dickey is blunt about the psychological, emotional and financial hardships of a career spent largely at the margins of what “can be a brutal, bottom-line business” which at its best affords “a life that can make you a perennial adolescent, where your needs are catered to, and narcissism is as prevalent as sunflower seeds.”

What saved him was religion, the love of a good woman, and the knuckleball, the fluttery pitch that maddens hitters and maims catchers. It’s certainly the only weapon in a hurler’s arsenal that requires emergency trips to the nail salon. The best stretches of the book are about the curious fraternity of knuckleballers, members of which – Charlie Hough, Phil Niekro, Tim Wakefield – provide Dickey with insight and pointers. (“I’m part of a brotherhood, and the only prerequisite for admission is a passion for the pitch.”) It’s an unlikely tale of an unorthodox triumph, told by an amiable narrator.

R.A. is also featured in the upcoming documentary Knuckleball! Here’s a clip. And it’s worth remembering that former Mets ace and current Mets announcer Ron Darling also wrote a book. The New York Metropolitans: the most literary team in the league.

Movies: In Theaters Now!

Illness, new projects and a surfeit of pennant race baseball have kept me from my rounds. (Allow me to pause at this point and say that this past Wednesday was one of the greatest nights I’ve ever experienced as a sports fan. I’d also like to extend my congratulations to your 2011 National League batting champion, Jose Reyes of the New York Mets.) I have, however, been to the movies a few times.

Drive. This adaptation of James Sallis’ brief, brilliant novel, written by Hossein Amini and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, begins as a lost Michael Mann movie circa 1982, right down to the pink title font. But it soon develops a hypnotic, doomy rhythm all its own. Ryan Gosling is a wheelman of few words but eloquent, minimalist gestures. It’s a great film about Los Angeles as a capital of both self-invention and self-abnegation. (Future double bill: this and The Lincoln Lawyer, two movies set in L.A.’s less showier precincts featuring terrific Cliff Martinez soundtracks.) It’s a dream-like fantasia about vanishing into the bloodstream of a city punctuated by nightmarish bursts of graphic violence. For all the stylization and bravura performances – who knew Albert Brooks could be scary? – my favorite moment is a quiet conversation between Gosling and Oscar Isaac in an Echo Park hallway.

Moneyball. As referenced above, I am a baseball fan. And as I’ve stated more than once, Michael Lewis’ look at the rise of sabermetrics is one of the three greatest books of all time. (The others, if you’re interested, are Nick Tosches’ Dean Martin biography Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, and The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook.) I was rooting for the movie before the lights dimmed, so you won’t be surprised to hear I thoroughly enjoyed it. Lewis’ sprawling story is smartly condensed to focus on Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and his (then) unconventional approach to running the Oakland A’s. I apologize to everyone at the screening I attended for laughing hysterically whenever Philip Seymour Hoffman turned up as A’s manager Art Howe, but Hoffman absolutely nails the face Art regularly made during his two dismal seasons as skipper of the Mets.

Also still in a handful of theaters, the excellent and sorely neglected Warrior, which I reviewed for Crimespree.

Want more? Fine. At the work blog I write about Electronic Detective, a treasured game of my youth. Or you could just watch this commercial featuring paid endorser Don Adams.

On The Web: Bill James

Once again I am temporarily hanging my hat at the Abbott/Gran Medicine Show, the fabulous blog co-hosted by Megan Abbott and Sara Gran. My post this time around is about Popular Crime, an obsessive and compelling overview of true crime stories from a somewhat unlikely author: baseball stats guru Bill James. I call it “one of the strangest books I’ve ever loved.” Read the post to find out why.

Movie: The Last Play at Shea (2010)

It’s only February and I’m prepared to call this movie the DVD of the year. Just bear in mind who’s telling you that.

The Last Play at Shea is a history of the now-demolished Shea Stadium as both home of the New York Mets and a music venue. Which means it’s a franchise highlight reel, a beautifully animated short about urban planning, a concert film depicting the final blowout show at the stadium, a biography of that evening’s headliner Billy Joel, and an exploration of the dictum voiced by Noah Cross in Chinatown: “Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

Mets fans said it for years: Shea’s a dump, but it’s our dump. When magic happened within its confines, it lasted. The Mets may have only won two world championships, but the finales of 1969 and 1986 remain among the most dramatic in baseball history. Shea was no cathedral of the game, but it was hallowed ground. I made a special pilgrimage back home in 2008 to see the Mets there one last time. That ticket stub, autographed by Tom Seaver, is framed and on my desk.

Billy Joel was the perfect choice to sing the place down. He’s a lot like the Mets: working class, chip on the shoulder, full of unwarranted bravado, never respected by critics, outshined by brighter lights in the city proper, his flaws magnified and his genuine accomplishments ignored. Plus he’s from the neighborhood. Even at the height of his fame he wasn’t cool, but he has lasted. He hasn’t released an album of new material in almost twenty years, but he remains among the highest-grossing live acts in the country. And he still puts on a hell of a show. It’s something to hear “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)” knowing that Shea’s facing a date with the wrecking ball. Joel’s finest songs, several of which we hear, have a bittersweet quality, an acknowledgement of disappointment and the impermanence of things. Feelings Mets fan are all too familiar with. But we keep stepping up to the plate and taking our cuts. We’re just doing so on the other side of the parking lot now. You may not grow misty-eyed like I did – who am I kidding? I was bawling – but you’ll enjoy the movie.

Movie: Death on the Diamond (1934)

The Mets have played their last meaningful game in 2010 and are currently battling for a .500 finish and third place in the NL East. The Mariners, meanwhile, are on the verge of having the worst record in the American League. With no vested interest in the remaining pennant races, I had to get my baseball fix somewhere.

Death on the Diamond is based on a novel by Cortland Fitzsimmons, whose work as a screenwriter includes the gotta-see-it-to-believe-it The Devil with Hitler. Pop Clark is both owner and manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, a state of affairs that happens regularly in professional sports. He’s mortgaged the team to his eyeballs but is sure they’ll take the pennant thanks to fireballing phenom Robert Young, who immediately falls for Pop’s daughter (Madge Evans, a dead ringer for Kristen Bell). The Cards start winning in spite of Young’s deranged windmill throwing style, which is still better than Anthony Perkins’ form in Fear Strikes Out. A gambling syndicate does not like.

This is the sort of lighthearted comic mystery in which a baserunner is killed by a sniper as he rounds third and another player dies after slathering poisoned mustard on his hot dog. There’s time for things to get maudlin as an umpire tells the dead slugger he’s been feuding with for the entire movie that “you’re not out, you’re safe!” A character literally comes in from left field and is introduced with “As you know ...” dialogue so atrocious that it instantly identifies him as the killer. There’s no nationwide panic as one Redbird after another goes down swinging, just changes in the odds. The mystery is solved in the best Scooby Doo fashion, and the happy ending has a pitcher hitting a walkoff inside-the-park home run that sends the Cardinals to the World Series with most of their starting nine six feet under. The Gashouse Gang they are not.

It’s a terrible movie. It was still better than watching the Yankees clinch again. With Mickey Rooney.

TV: Roku Like A Hurricane

Never let it be said that I can’t see the writing on the wall. Netflix starts signing deals with studios to delay the rental of new DVDs in exchange for more streaming content. My only problem with this arrangement is I already spend enough hours in the day staring at my computer screen. Sometimes I want to stare at my TV.

So we got a Roku. Hundreds of titles in my Netflix queue are now instantly available on my TV.

We’re tooling around the new setup and see that additional channels are available for a nominal fee. One of them, Moonlight Movies, bills itself as offering classic films from the 1930s through the ‘70s.

It’s actually the noir channel, including several hard-to-find and unavailable on video titles. We christened the Roku with a double-bill featuring an unintentional theme: mental derangement and characters named Vince.

First up, 1949’s The Crooked Way. Eddie Rice (John Payne) is a decorated WWII veteran with amnesia thanks to a chunk of shrapnel lodged in his brain. He heads back to Los Angeles to learn about his past only to discover he was both a crook and a bastard.

The Crooked Way is conveniently plotted; Eddie starts running into people who know him the second he steps off the train at Union Station. And the villainous Vince is played by Sonny Tufts, living up to his billing as a lousy actor. But Payne as always is terrific, disappointed in the man he can’t remember being. And cinematographer John Alton does some of his most extraordinary work, shooting one scene in stark silhouette and later offering an astonishing close-up in which Payne’s face is completely obscured, his character’s character unknown to the audience as well as himself.

Next, Fear in the Night (1947), a low-budget Cornell Woolrich adaptation made with ingenuity. DeForest “Bones” Kelley has a vivid nightmare about killing a man – and then finds hints that perhaps it wasn’t a dream. Like Kelley’s Vince, I couldn’t shake the unnerving sense that I’d experienced all this before. I soon figured out why: writer/director Maxwell Shane remade the movie nine years later, and that one I’d seen.

Also available via Roku is an MLB.TV package that puts the coverage I get from my cable company to shame. I’d have made the switch already, but I do have to work sometime. Speaking of baseball ...

Baseball: Let’s Play Two and Then Some

Yesterday’s epic Mets/Cardinals tilt was not televised in Seattle. I ended up blowing off plans to see a movie and instead sat in my favorite bar tracking the (in)action on my phone. The battery almost died before the game finally ended after twenty innings – eighteen of them scoreless – and nearly seven hours with a 2-1 Mets victory.

It was a strange way to follow a game, both old-fashioned and modern, like receiving a telegram on an iPad. Without the commentary, some nuances took a moment to register. “Wait, Felipe López is now on the mound for St. Louis? Isn’t he a shortstop? And he’s pitching to the reliever who gave up the grand slam to him on Friday night? Who the hell is Joe Mather?” The Mets couldn’t score runs off the Cardinals position players sent to the hill while their All-Star closer failed to nail down the save. But an ugly win is still a win. At the very least there’s something to put on the team’s 2010 highlight DVD.

Meaningless Milestone: Blog Out the Candles

Six years? I’ve been blogging for six years?!?

Book: Faith and Fear in Flushing, by Greg Prince (2009)

On a recent evening, Rosemarie and I were strolling around our Seattle neighborhood. A gent who’d gotten in his cups a little early stopped before us, turned to Rosemarie, and said, “What’s a good-looking woman like you doing with a Mets fan?”

(I was wearing a Mets cap. As is my wont.)

Rosemarie replied, “This man is my loving husband of almost twenty years. And I’m also a Mets fan.” Appropriately chastened, the interloper took his leave.

We walked on. “So, uh, thanks for sticking up for me,” I finally said.

“Forget it,” Rosemarie replied. “He did say I was good-looking, right?”

Random abuse is part of being a Mets fan. I don’t know how it works between Cubs and White Sox partisans, but in New York you always have to explain why you root for the orange and blue. That’s because the Yankees are the Yankees, and the Mets are the Mets.

But root for them I do. The Mets have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Before movies, before crime fiction, there was the Mets. Blame growing up in Queens, just a stone’s throw from Shea Stadium. They were my home team in every sense. (Rosemarie, a product of Flushing, would actually walk to games.) Being a Mets fan is an inextricable part of my identity. Ask anybody who knows me.

Greg Prince is one of the writers behind Faith and Fear in Flushing, a regular stop for me. He’s spun the blog into a book. Subtitled An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, that’s exactly what it is: a look at how supporting a team, through good times and bad, becomes a constant, a way of marking the years. It’s about the twinned joy of giving yourself over to something larger, and the agony of being at the mercy of that which you can’t control. Substitute the names and it could be about your team. But if the phrase Grand Slam Single produces chills in you as it does in me, you’ll love it.

So as Opening Day dawns on Monday, I will once again don my cap in support of the most dysfunctional team in professional sports. This in spite of the fact that they’re in a division with the Phillies, the National League equivalent of the Yankees and Red Sox: a perennial contender. That everyone expects them to flirt with .500 and place no better than third this season. That sportswriters have taken to calling for regime change as if the front office is part of the Axis of Evil, or comparing Citi Field to the hell of Dante’s Inferno.

Instead, I’ll focus on the good times. Cementing my bond with my friend Mike, whose blog Metsanity is well worth reading. The 1986 world championship; game six remains one of the high points of my life. Meeting Tom Seaver, the man to this day known as The Franchise. Want to see hero worship? Look at my face.

Or simply helping out another fan. It’s late 2007. Only a few weeks after the Mets’ storied collapse, blowing a seven-game lead with seventeen to play and missing the playoffs entirely.

Whoo. Hang on. I need a minute.

I have to run to the grocery store. It’s raining, so without thinking I put on my Mets inclement weather cap – yes, I have more than one – and head out. I’m in the express line when the guy behind me taps me on the shoulder.

“I have to tell you, I’m so glad to see you,” he says to me in a quiet voice. “I haven’t been able to put on my cap since it happened.”

“You’ve got to man up,” I told him. “Next year starts right now.”

I am way, way too proud of that moment.

Book: The Complete Game, by Ron Darling (2009)

Here’s how much I enjoyed this book. I would recommend it even if it weren’t written by a member of your 1986 World Series champion New York Mets.

Darling, who had a solid journeyman career, revisits nine innings he either pitched himself or observed closely as an Emmy-winning commentator for the Mets, plus an extraordinary bonus from his days at Yale. “Pitchers are considered the non-athletes of the game,” he notes, and as such are often the most isolated players. The book takes you inside their process as they face every conceivable situation – a must-win game, an injury, an inning in which the wheels come off, a session on the hill late in life’s season when the pitcher finds himself wearing a May hat in August. Casual baseball fans will like The Complete Game. Hardcore ones will devour it.

Here’s Ronnie promoting the book with my fellow Mets fan Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

Sports: And Welcome to Fantasy Baseball

One last note on the end of the 2008 season. I can now report the results of my first foray into the timesuck that is fantasy baseball. When I weighed in at the All-Star Break, I had finally muscled my way out of last place. At the time, I set three modest goals for myself. In the interests of completion, let’s see how I fared.

I fervently hope to stay out of the cellar. I think I have a shot.

Check.

I would accept finishing ahead of the person who dared me to play.

Mission accomplished. Take that, Karma! (For the record, I am not taunting the Eastern belief that our actions in this life have consequences in the next. My friend Karma dared me to join her league, in part by saying that if I was in it she wouldn’t come in last. As it happens, she didn’t come in last, either.)

Ideally, I’d like to make the top half of the field. I do not expect this to happen.

I was wrong. I finished fifth out of ten, closer in points to the top than to the bottom. I’m not saying that this is the equal of the Red Sox’s staggering comeback in the 2004 ALCS against the Yankees. I’m saying it’s comparable.

Baseball: Actually, I Do Care If I Never Get Back

For the second consecutive year, the New York Mets took their season down to the final game. And for the second consecutive year, the team fell short.

I can live with that. I am a Mets fan. I am inured to disappointment, conditioned to keep my expectations in check.

It does sadden me that for the second consecutive year, the Mets squandered a truly titanic performance from one of their pitchers in the season’s penultimate game, a Herculean effort that made the drama of #162 possible. And it kills me that they couldn’t win the last regular season match-up ever to be played in Shea Stadium. For old times’ sake.

A few days ago, when the Mets were in the thick of both the wild card and NL East hunts, sportswriter Tim Brown wrote, “say what you will, they do drama like no one else.” That attitude helps take the sting out of another almost-but-not-quite season: view it as a soap opera. It had all the ingredients. The lingering shadows of last season’s collapse, big personalities, late-night executions, sudden reversals, a heart-in-your-mouth ending. If it were a TV show, I’d set the DVR for it.

I’ll remember the 2008 Mets season with fondness, in large part because I got to see them play at Shea one final time. Yes, I know that if their patchwork bullpen, an Achilles heel all year that imploded down the stretch, had held onto a lead in just one game, today’s drama would have been unnecessary. I know if their spotty offense had advanced a runner in scoring position in just one game, a playoff berth would have been theirs.

But the end of the season always puts me in a philosophical mood. So here’s something else that I know. If the last game of the season counts, then all the games before it count. Every single one, no matter how insignificant it may seem at the time.

It’s a lesson that all baseball fans know. Even Yankee fans. It’s just that lately, Mets fan have been learning it the hard way.

All season long, I’ve followed my team at my friend Mike’s blog Mets Fan Club. Thanks also to the guys at Faith & Fear in Flushing. This wrap-up post is particularly fine. And here’s the New York Times’s George Vecsey saying goodbye to Shea.

New York Report: Medical Update

Rosemarie’s back from the doctor and hobbling around in one of those walking boots. Turns out she sprained her foot while racing to Sardi’s for a cocktail before curtain. Making her the first person to injure herself in such a fashion since Kitty Carlisle Hart.

New York Report: The Old Neighborhood

The entire reason for scheduling our trip at this time was to see one last New York Mets game at Shea Stadium before the exodus across the parking lot to Citi Field. It’s pointless to rehash a week-old sporting event, so let’s focus on the color commentary.



We headed to Flushing early, because it’s where Rosemarie grew up. She took me to her childhood haunts – the candy store turned cell phone shop, the former A&P. Her block, in her words, “is an inch long.” We took photos of her old house, alarming the contractors in the process of remodeling it. We also stopped by her school, not hard considering it’s across the street.

Flushing is renowned for inexpensive and delicious Chinese food. But where to go? We were still without internet access. After a scouting expedition we settled on a restaurant that still had customers late in the afternoon, taking that for a good sign. Plus it had “Gourmet” in the name, and who’d lie about a thing like that? They certainly didn’t. (Note what a later web search turned up.)

Next stop was Flushing Meadow Park. When I was a kid it was the only green area around. Not only did I have to take the subway there, I had to change trains at 74th Street. Never seemed out of the ordinary to me.



Then it was game time. We met up with our friends Mike and Paula. (Here are Mike’s pre- and post-game reports.)



It was merengue night. We didn’t stay for the show.

Call me a traditionalist, but I miss the old blue and orange panels that used to hang from Shea’s exterior. They gave the stadium what character it had.

A recent New York Times article on baseball cuisine reviewed the food at every major league ballpark. The verdict on Shea: eat the hot dogs and nothing else. New York law now requires fast-food outlets to post calorie information. This explains how I know that two Nathan’s hot dogs are roughly equal to a bag of peanuts. This made me feel better until I realized that no one consumes an entire bag of peanuts in one sitting. Even in extra innings.

For the record, I ate two hot dogs and no peanuts. Apparently those things’ll kill you.

Carvel ice cream is also sold at Shea. Talk about childhood haunts. Carvel soft serve would be my treat for getting good grades on my report card. Mike told me that the real prize dessert-wise was the lemon ice, which would last “a good three, four innings.” Only they weren’t available at any of the food outlets in the mezzanine. We’d have to wait for a vendor. By the seventh inning I gave up; “a good three, four innings” meant I’d be finishing it on the 7 train, not known for its dining ambiance. So we had Carvel instead. I didn’t bother to read the calorie information.

Halfway through the sundae I remembered something: Carvel ice cream isn’t that good.



There were a pair of homers in the game, a two-run shot from a reinvigorated Carlos Delgado and a career first for the Mets’ young second baseman Argenis Reyes. I was so excited to see the giant apple behind the center field wall light up twice that I forgot to take pictures each time.

I did the “Jose, Jose, Jose” chant, along with “Everybody Clap Your Hands!” Beats doing it at home all by yourself. But that’s true of so much in life.

Top of the ninth, one out with a six-run Mets lead, and who magically appears behind us? The lemon ice vendor. Thanks for nothing, guy.

The Mets win and we join the throng filing into the IRT station. The “super express” gets us back into Manhattan in no time flat. During the ride, we have a pleasant conversation with a Cardinals die-hard who flew in for the series. Mets fans, magnanimous in victory.

Barring a miracle, the next Mets game I see will be in Citi Field. Across the parking lot, but a world away.