* Bits and pieces: World Championship edition

• Dropped by the local Barnes and Noble at lunch today. Almost shocked to see only one “quicky” publication about the Yankees’ latest championship. The New York Post published The Best, a paperback volume. I never liked this type of publication. It seems like a money grab since the stuff for the most part is just culled from the newspaper archives. [Update: USA Today and Sports Illustrated are among a few others that have published similar publications.]
• There have been numerous references to the Yankees in places where you might not expect to see them. The Wall Street Journal posted this article about “Japanese Baseball’s Best Day Ever.” I always get a kick when the sports pages refer to an athlete as “Mr.” So bloody polite. Meanwhile, former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer contributed this “horns of a dilemma” piece for Sunday’s Week in Review section. (Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I faintly recall an economic indicator that predicts the stock market goes one way if an American League team wins the World Series and the other if its a National League team, but I forget which is which. A little help?)
• In the heat of the celebration on Friday, The Brian Lehrer Show featured this segment on the Yankees and the Series MVP, Hideki Matsui. “The ticker tape parade for the Bronx Bombers is today, and the star of the show is World Series MVP Hideki Matsui, who exemplifies a particular brand of baseball that’s different from the rest of his team. WNYC’s own baseball fanatic (and softball team co-captain) Rex Doane with Andrew Jenks, director and producer of the documentary “The Zen of Bobby V,” talk about the differences between the American and Japanese baseball.”

* Gut yom tov

Jewish for “Happy Holiday,”

As Jews around the world gather tonight to mark the holiest day on the calendar, George Vecsey offered this column in today’s Sunday Times.

Instead of putting the game at 8 p.m. — prime time, as the networks call it — ESPN and Major League Baseball are accommodating thousands of fans who at sundown will be observing Yom Kippur, the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar.

What Vecsey leaves out is that according to the schedule in the Red Sox media guide issued at the beginning of the season, the games was originally scheduled for one o’clock. But that’s just the cynic in me talking.

He notes,

Baseball cannot avoid conflicts. Games are played on Good Friday, the most solemn day on the Christian calendar. On Oct. 2, 1978, they played on Rosh Hashana, and Bucky Dent hit one into the screen at Fenway Park. Supply your own moral.

One year, baseball did get a message from on high. In 1986, the geniuses scheduled two Mets-Astros postseason games, for the night and next afternoon of Yom Kippur. Yours truly predicted a downpour of Biblical proportions, which in fact occurred, postponing the afternoon game. They got what they deserved.

Vecsey also pointed out that last year’s world Series featured a team led by Jewish ownership.

Last year, the Tampa Bay Rays made it into the postseason for the first time, but a potential fifth and deciding game was scheduled for Yom Kippur.

“The way I run my life, there was no decision to be made,” the team owner, Stuart Sternberg, said the other day. He was prepared to attend services, but the Rays won in four games, on their sweet run to the World Series.

“We’re not going to be able to do this all the time,” Sternberg said the other day, acknowledging that baseball may accommodate Jewish fans in the Northeast but not Jewish fans in Chicago or Los Angeles.

For fans who may have to miss a game because of religious conflicts, Sternberg offered some advice, “It’s not the end of the world.”

There is only one word to add to that: Amen.

* Is it over yet?

You know the season is over for your team when the newspapers publish a feature article…and conclude with a brief graph of two about the game. Like today. The New York Times printed this piece on Daniel Murphy approaching a club record for doubles (stop the presses!) and winding up with a “and, oh, by the way the Braves beat the Mets” wrap-up.

* Keeping up with the Times

A few germane baseball items over the week that I overlooked:

• In today’s edition, John Klima, author of the recently relased Willie’s Boys: The 1948 Birmingham Black Barons, the Last Negro League World Series, and the Making of a Baseball Legend (Wiley), published this item on how the Yankees blew their chance to sign Willie Mays.
• Just before Derek Jeter broke Lou Gehrig’s franchise record for base hits, the Times referred to a 1929 article in The New Yorker on the legendary Yankees first baseman. Unfortunately, the New Yorker website doesn’t carry the archives for free, but if you’re a subscriber to the magazine, you can access the story by Niven Busch titled “The Little Heinie.” Yeah, that would go over well today.
• And in honor of Jeter’s achievement, here are a few “base hit oddities,” courtesy of the Times‘ Bats blog.
• And while it’s not the Times, the New York Daily News carried a special supplement honoring Jeter. I must be losing my touch; I didn’t buy it.

* Gray Lady Down

(to borrow a film title).

We all know the difficulties the newspaper industry are going through. I look at the sports section for the Star-Ledger and find stories take from the NY Daily News. Reporters and columnists are being bought out.

So I guess it should come as no surprise to learn that the “Sport of the Times” column in The New York Times is being phased out.

In the Aug. 18 issue of The New York Observer, an article by John Koblin heads, “For the Old-Fashioned Sports Columnist, It’s Game Over.”

“The Sports of the Times is a great brand, and I hate to see that brand disappear, but it clearly is changing,” Mr. Jolly said. [Tom Jolly is editor of the Times' sports section.]

He explained that The Times’ sports page will use fewer general-interest writers to generate columns, and will instead rely more on beat writers to provide expertise. He wants them to blog, he wants them to use Twitter and he wants them to write analysis pieces.

I wonder what kind of studies were done to determine that 140 characters was the optimum amount for Twitter? And what is the poinbt of that if users are going to write six or seven consecutive Tweets?

The article continues:

“That thoughtful, reflective, reported opinion that we used to see has basically vanished,” said Selena Roberts, a writer with Sports Illustrated and a Times columnist from 2002 to 2007. “This leaves the reader, especially since the reader is going to the Web for the analysts’ point of view, with a shallower perspective of what’s going on.”

Ms. Roberts foresaw another, more practical problem with The Times’ plan to ask their access-dependent beat writers to be more authoritative and opinionated.

“Here they are covering a team on a daily basis,” said Ms. Roberts. “What if they blog something or tweet something that comes off as an opinion and it’s very much taken as an opinion by that organization? Do they run into problems because they make a joke about the GM?”

Either way, it’s clear that The Times has rendered its verdict. Now it’s just a matter of time until the end.

Former Times’ baseball columnist Murray Chass obviously has an opinion on this.

In his. Aug 26 post, Chass writes

…a eulogy for a column that is dying after 82 years…. The Times seems intent on killing the column before the newspaper itself dies. It’s like parents, knowing they are going to die, killing their children because they won’t be able to live on without them.

The problem with this warped thinking in the case of the newspaper is the demise of the column and the thinking behind the act will help hasten the newspaper’s demise.

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For the Old-Fashioned Sports Columnist, It’s Game Over

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By John Koblin

August 18, 2009 | 7:58 p.m

Murray Chass.

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More on Media >>

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• The Week in Interviews: Plaxico Burress Cries on Camera
• Booked!
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• Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree Has Book Proposal on Gates Arrest, Which Suggests Skip Will Skip His

Sports columnist Harvey Araton packed his pens and notebooks and moved from the sports desk to a features desk, a once proud species ambled closer to extinction.

Two years ago, The Times had five sports columnists. With Mr. Araton gone, there are two. One of them is 70.

There will be no replacements.

The Times’ sports editor, Tom Jolly, explained to The Observer that in many ways, the general-interest sports columnist—at The Times, the Sports of the Times columnist, a designation that has existed since the 1930s—is part of a bygone era.

“The Sports of the Times is a great brand, and I hate to see that brand disappear, but it clearly is changing,” Mr. Jolly said.

He explained that The Times’ sports page will use fewer general-interest writers to generate columns, and will instead rely more on beat writers to provide expertise. He wants them to blog, he wants them to use Twitter and he wants them to write analysis pieces.

“In a world filled with blogs and opinion on talk radio and on cable television, there does seem to be a pretty good craving for expert analysis—the real insight of someone who is there,” he said.

This may not sound like a radical departure, but it is.

Sports desks have traditionally been defined by their big-foot generalists: Mike Lupica at the Daily News, Mitch Albom at the Detroit Free Press, Bill Plaschke at the L.A. Times, Johnette Howard at Newsday, Red Smith at The Times.

While The Times is proposing to do without all that, the alumni are not at all convinced that it’s a good idea.

“That thoughtful, reflective, reported opinion that we used to see has basically vanished,” said Selena Roberts, a writer with Sports Illustrated and a Times columnist from 2002 to 2007. “This leaves the reader, especially since the reader is going to the Web for the analysts’ point of view, with a shallower perspective of what’s going on.”

Ms. Roberts foresaw another, more practical problem with The Times’ plan to ask their access-dependent beat writers to be more authoritative and opinionated.

“Here they are covering a team on a daily basis,” said Ms. Roberts. “What if they blog something or tweet something that comes off as an opinion and it’s very much taken as an opinion by that organization? Do they run into problems because they make a joke about the GM?”

Either way, it’s clear that The Times has rendered its verdict. Now it’s just a matter of time until the end.

* It gets late early this time of year

To paraphrase that eminent philsopher Berra.

You know your team is doing poorly when its home town newspaper starts giving them a box with just a few paragraphs, as The New York Times print edition did for last night’s 10-1 Mets loss to the Giants. Haven’t done a line-by-line comparison, but here’s the Web version, which is similarly skimpy.

The Times put the squeeze play on the Mets.

It’s probably the Mets fan in me, but I used to get quite annoyed if the Yankees, in defeat, got more ink than the Mets in victory. I’m just sayin’…

* Meet the Mets

A joint review of two new books by former Mets graces the pages of the Sunday Times Book Review Section.

Under the general headline “The Boys of Bummer,” Bruce Handy, a writer and deputy editor of Vantiy Fair, critiques Ron Darling’s The Perfect Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound, and Darryl Strawberry’s Straw: Finding My Way.

Of the former, Handy says he likes it a lot; of the latter,

Thankfully, perhaps, “Straw: Finding My Way” isn’t much of a baseball book. It’s a recovery memoir, detailing Strawberry’s journey to self-acceptance and Christian sobriety via multiple arrests, trips to rehab, marriages, divorces, cancers and ­bottomings-out that never quite were, with his Mets career, and subsequent stints with the Dodgers, Giants and championship Yankees of the ’90s, as background music, or maybe bait.

He also believes Darling’s book, described as “a pitcher’s answer to Ted Williams’s classic, The Science of Hitting, will enjoy more popularity and a longer shelf life, than Strawberry’s.

He also calls to attention the new baseball standard quote.

Use to be, it was Jacques Barzun’s “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” which I believe should be banned from all further books. It’s a sure sign that the author is either a) a newcomer to the game, or b) writing to an audience for whom baseball is not a passion.

But of late, the standard epigraph, which Darling employs in his book, comes from the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, former president of Yale and Commissioner of Baseball:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

… this quotation really annoyed me. For one thing, the manly but melancholy, elegiac view of baseball — the unforgiving verities of its geometry, the fleeting beauty of its playing, blah blah blah — is one of our hoariest sports clichés, the default setting whenever anyone who read Hemingway or Robert Stone or Cormac McCarthy in college sits down to write about the game.

The Times‘ website offers first chapters for each book:

Straw

The Perfect Game

* Another reason why people hate the media

In today’s NY Times, Joshua Robinson has a little piece, “Piazza Leaves Quickly, and Quietly, After Ceremony.” He writes  about the ceremonial first pitch battery of Tom Seaver and the former Mets catcher. While Tom Terrific hung out afterwards to shmooze,

Piazza, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. Escorted by security, he went from the field to the stadium tunnel. His plan was to acoid the news media was only briefly interrupted, by two questions from a television enws reporter about the new stadium.

It was unclear if Piazza’s reluctance to walk was connected to allegations of steroid use in a recently published book, “The Rocket That Fell to Earth,” by Jeff Pearlman. (emphasis added)

If it was unclear, was it really necessary to bring it up? Maybe it’s just me, but that just seems uncalled for in a situation like this.

More notes on the game:

• After seeing Padres catcher Nick Hundley clock a fan while going after a foul ball, and seeing another one going through the netting, I gotta wonder if I’d want to see behind home plate. Wouldn’t you imagine the fans would be better protected?
• I don’t want to hear excuses about how strange the ballpark is for the outfielders (although it does look huge out there. Camera angles?). These are supposed to be professionals; they should (better) be able to adjust, otherwise it’s going to be a long season .
• How much does it cost to have those jets fly over sporting venues? Whatever it is, I’m sure the money can be better spent, especially these days.

* Baseball Preview Review: The New York Times

The best of the New York papers, it goes well beyond the predictions for the Mets and Yankees.

Veteran columnist George Vecsey compares special features at Citi Field to the Polo Grounds.

The main items consist of a profile of Blue Jays ace Roy Halladay with smaller items on Bobby Cox, who’s now in his 50th year in the pros, and how trades made later in a season are contemplated early on. The fun stuff: How pitchers and batters who get off to a fast start end up; approaching major statistical milestones.

And two features on how the baby boomer baseball card collector is adjusting to the 21st century. And John Smoltz, future pro golfer?

NY Times predictions, Division winners/wild card:

AL: Yankees, Royals (!), Angeles, Red Sox

NL: Mets, Cubs, Dodgers, Phillies

World series: Cubs over Yankees

* Bits and pieces

The back page of The New York Times Book Review features a full page advertisement from Bauman Rare Books. I usually don’t pay attention because as much as I lvoe ‘em, they’re out of my league, to borrow from a famous title.

But a photo of Joe DiMaggio caught my eye and sure enough there were several (expensive) books listed, including:

• A 1973 Old Timers’ Day program signed by “24 ’standout’ players, including DiMaggio, Rizzuto and Stengel.” $4200
• Whitey and Mickey, a “double biography” of the two Yankee legends, signed by both. $1600
• The DiMaggio Albums, a two-volume album of newspaper stories about the Yankee Clipper, signed by DiMaggio. $2200
• America’s National Game, by Albert Spaulding, A first edition from 1911. $2800
• The National Game, by Alfred Spink. A 1910 first edition. $2200
• Wait Till Next Year, by Jackie Robinson and Carl Rowan. A 1960 first edition, signed by Robinson. $4900.

Well, my birthday is coming up soon… I’m just sayin’.

* * *

Entertainment Weekly highlighted three new baseball titles in its April 10 issue, not all of them garnered favorable remarks. The controversial memoir Odd Man Out by Matt McCarthy received a B. Becoming Manny got a C-, and Alyssa Milano’s Safe at Home: Confessions of a Baseball Fanatic, a D.

A few things come to mind. One, did they just pick three titles at random? why these books and not others that might be a bit more likely to win a higher “grade,” like Bruce Weber’s treatise on umpires, As They See ‘Em? Two, does these guys just not like baseball? In that case, why bother? Three, as much as I don’t like Milano’s book — and my sentiments are echoed in many places — such “dog-piling” seems mean. Just let it die a natural death.

* * *

Meanwhile in the April 10 issue of The Week, Tome Werner, chair of the Boston Red Sox, picks his favorite titles on the game, including, among others, Bang the Drum Slowly (Mark Harris), The Teammates (David Halberstam), and Game Time (Roger Angell).

* * *

Finally, The New York Times Magazine printed a Q&A with former Met Darryl Strawberry, who — guess what — has a new book coming out.