Category Archives: Baseball

Cooperstown

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My kids have grown up. I know this because I’m banging away on a keyboard in Haverstraw, NY, right now, when I should be on the way home from Cooperstown.

Pull up a chair, kids, and I’ll tell you all about a grand tradition that began in October of 1987, when Josh was 8 and Ben was 2 and Josh and I decided to have a baseball weekend, just us guys, no mom, no baby brother.

The plan was simple:

We’d drive to Cooperstown on Friday night, when I got home from work, and check into a motel for a couple of nights. We’d spend all day Saturday at the Hall of Fame, then head to Brooks’ Diner in Oneonta for some chicken and ribs, and then return to our motel room to watch Game Six of the World Series. Just the two of us.

And there would be a brief but essential stop at a convenience store on the way back to motel from Brooks’, so we could pick up some essentials for watching the game. All involving excessive amounts of sugar and salt.

There was one ground rule: Anything goes. You want it, we’ll buy it. Chips, candy, soda, Twinkies, whatever. We’re guys. We snack till we’re sick.

The next morning, we’d have breakfast somewhere, then doughnuts at Snyder’s Bakery, and then we’d head back home, stopping en route to pick up a Halloween pumpkin or two.

Perfect. Continue reading →

Exit Sandman

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Willie Mays, the greatest player ever to lace up a pair of cleats, was a shell of himself when he said goodbye to America. He was wearing a Mets uniform by then, and all you could do was celebrate the career of a man whose time had long since passed.

No so Mariano Rivera.

It’s so rare to see an athlete go out on top, especially a star baseball player, who will play until he’s 40-something and won’t take off the uniform until his final team tells him he can’t wear it anymore. Time’s up. You’re done.

Dodgers_Sandy_Koufax_2013-300x237The only other ballplayer I can remember leaving at the top was Sandy Koufax, who won 27 games for the Dodgers in 1966 and led the league in everything (his ERA was a ridiculous 1.73 and he struck out 317). Sandy collected his unprecedented third Cy Young Award that fall and walked away from the game. He was 30-years-old.

But Sandy retired because his doctors told him his gifted left arm was seriously arthritic, and it would become essentially useless if he continued pitching.

I reckon these days he’d have Tommy John surgery, or something, and come back and win 30 games two years later. But that wasn’t possible in 1966.

So Sandy called it quits.

But Sandy was the only one. All the other greats saw their skills erode before they retired.

All but Mo.

I’m a Mets fan, so I’m genetically wired to root for the Yankees lose 162 games every season.

But when Mo took the mound, even I had to root for him. You have to admire greatness.

The greatest closer in history — and one of the greatest pitchers ever — threw his last pitch in Yankee Stadium yesterday. And he did it in a Yankee uniform, the only one he ever wore. And his teammates through all those years, Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte, took him out of the game.

The Yanks have three more games to play, and they will be meaningless — the Pinstripes are gloriously out of the postseason. So I hope they don’t use Mo in any of them, unless they want to let him play centerfield for an inning.

He went out last night on top, where he belongs. Click the picture below and see for yourself.

— 30 —

Say it ain’t so, dad

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This is back in 1995, when my younger son, Ben, was 10 years old, and we sent him down to Florida to visit his grandparents.

His grandpa took him to a spring training game in Fort Myers — either the Twins or Red Sox vs. the visiting Yankees — and Ben did what all 10-year-olds do in those circumstances. He got as close as he could and begged for autographs.

One player in a Yankees uniform complied.

Ben came home with the autographed ball a week later and showed it to me.

I regarded the signature and said:

“Ben, I’ve never heard of him. He’s a minor leaguer. The ball isn’t worth anything.

And Ben sighed, and he decided the ball WAS worth something. It was worth what all baseballs are worth.

And he took it outside and played with it. And played with it. And we played catch and we hit it and it scuffed in the grass and it went in the mud and it scraped the pavement and before you knew it, the stitches were ripping and the signature was gone.

And that’s why Ben no longer has a baseball autographed by Andy Pettitte in his rookie year.

Today, 18 years later, Andy Pettitte announced his retirement.

My friend Zach swears he’s a future Hall of Famer. I don’t agree, but I’ll concede he comes close.

And Ben has no autographed baseball.

Sorry, son. My fault.

— 30 —

Doc Gooden’s no-hitter, and how I became the World’s Greatest Dad

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Sooner or later, Matt Harvey or Zack Wheeler will throw a no-hitter, and one thing you can put your money on here and now is that either or both won’t be with the Mets when it happens. Or that, even if they’re still wearing orange and blue, I won’t be watching. Because that’s just how we roll.

That’s how it went with Seaver, that’s how it went with Cone. It’s the story of Scott and Nomo and Humber. And it’s the story of Ryan, Ryan, Ryan, Ryan, Ryan, Ryan and Ryan.

But, remarkably, it isn’t the story of Gooden.

Pull up a chair, kids, and I’ll tell you the tale about how I happened to be watching when Doc Gooden threw a no-hitter, and how it remains the only no-hitter I ever saw. And how, if I never see another, it was good enough.

And that’s because on the night Doc Gooden thew a no-hitter, I became The Greatest Dad in the World.

Flashback to May 14, 1996, and I’m sitting in the kitchen having dinner with Linda and our younger son, Ben, who is 11 years old. (Ben’s 17-year-old brother, Josh, is AWOL, out doing whatever high school juniors do in the middle of May.)

But Ben’s in the house, and I casually say to him over our meal . . .

Hey Ben! Dwight Gooden’s pitching for the Yanks tonight. Wanna watch? Maybe he’ll pitch a no-hitter.

Yeah, I said that.

But I didn’t really mean it, because by May 1996, Doc Gooden wasn’t half the pitcher he was with the Mets a decade earlier, when he went 24-4 with a ridiculous 1.53 ERA . . . when he won the Cy Young Award at the even more ridiculous age of 20 . . . when it was said you couldn’t hit him with an ironing board . . . when Mike Lupica speculated in the Daily News that he would easily win 400 games before his career ended . . . when Ron Cey, having struck out, stood in the batter’s box, took his helmet off his head, perched it on his bat and held it aloft as he walked back to the Cubs’ dugout, explaining that he had no chance to get a hit against this guy, so he might as well use the bat as a hat rack.

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Back then, I set my VCR to record every game Gooden pitched, because there was no doubt that he WOULD throw a no-hitter, or two or three, and I would have it on tape to watch over and over.

But that was in 1985, the year Ben was born. Back then, Doc was the best pitcher I ever saw. But injuries and drugs took their toll over the decade that followed, and on May 14, 1996, I had no reasonable expectation that Doc still had the stuff to throw a no-hitter.

But the chance to sit on the living room couch and watch a ballgame with my son . . . That was priceless.

So I said, hey Ben, Dwight Gooden’s pitching for the Yanks tonight. Wanna watch? Maybe he’ll pitch a no-hitter.

Ben had to go to school in the morning, but he was willing, and he sat down to watch a couple of innings, until bedtime.

And so it was somewhere around the third inning that Linda came into the living room and announced, BEDTIME!

Only Doc hadn’t given up a hit yet. And Ben looked at me, and I said to Linda . . . Give it another inning or two.

And Linda came back after another inning or two, and she pronounced BEDTIME!!!, and Ben looked me, his eyes pleading, and I told Linda, give it another inning or two.

And then somewhere around the seventh inning, around 10 p.m., wayyyyyy past our fifth-grader’s bedtime, Linda come in again and said, very firmly this time . . . BEN!!!!! BEDTIME!!!!!!!

And Ben looked at me again, his eyes begging for a reprieve, and he and I had both history and baseball juju on our side, and that’s when I turned to Linda and said . . .

Linda, don’t you know about the No-Hitter Rule? (I’m putting that in caps, because it’s a seriously important rule.)

And Linda looked at me all WTF, long before they invented the word WTF, and Ben looked at me like I’d told him a lot of baseball rules, like you don’t bunt with two strikes and you don’t try to steal third with two outs, but I’d never told him about a No-Hitter Rule.

And then I proclaimed, in all caps . . .

NOBODY GOES TO BED DURING A NO-HITTER!

And Ben looked at me like I was God!

And for that fleeting moment, I was.

Ben stayed till the very end. He didn’t leave the couch until we’d seen the Yankees carry Doc off the field on their shoulders. I may never quite get over the fact that he did it in pinstripes, but he did it just the same. And I was watching.

And to this day, I’m betting Ben can tell you where he was and how it came about that he saw Doc Gooden pitch a no-hitter.

And I’m sure Ben was the yawniest kid in fifth grade on May 15, but I’ll also tell you there’s nothing he was too tired to learn in school that day that was more important than our time together the night before.

If I never see another no-hitter, that’s OK. The one Doc Gooden pitched was perfect.

— 30 —

From Bunning to Santana, 50 years of hard luck

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Pull up a chair, kids, and I’ll tell you about Father’s Day in 1964, and my 40th college reunion 48 years later, and how you have to be in the right place at the right time, and how the planets have to align just right, if you want to witness a no-hitter.

We start on Father’s Day, 1964, a miserably hot day in early June, and way back before the average joe was enjoying the luxury of central air conditioning. We lived in a small attached home — kitchen, dining room and living room downstairs; three small bedrooms upstairs – in Brooklyn.

My room was on the top floor, facing west. Let the sun shine in.

And it did. It shone unbearably hot, and the window fan was very effective at drawing in the furnace-level heat from outside.

But there was an air conditioner in the house – down the hall in my parents’ room – and it was calling to me. Come boy, come sit in this room. It’s cool in here.

I had a black-and-white TV in my room, and I had the Phillies-Mets game on. And Jim Bunning — great pitcher, lousy senator — was throwing bullets. And he mowed down the first nine Mets he faced. He was going to throw a perfect game, for sure. And I would be watching, if I could survive the heat.

But that AC down the hall kept calling. Come, boy. Come sit in this room. Why roast in a 100-plus-degree room when it’s cool over here on the other side of the hallway?

I was sweating more in my bedroom than Bunning was on the mound.

And I succumbed to the voice.

I walked into my parents’ room, where my dad, my mom and my 10-year-old sister were watching some godawful, sickly sweet, child-appropriate movie on TV, probably an old Shirley Temple film.

“DAD!!!” I announced, interrupting a snoring event from his side of the bed. “Jim Bunning’s pitching a perfect game!!!!” (I may have forgotten to mention that the game was only three innings old.)

I don’t remember if my dad opened his eyes, but my mom and my sister shot me a look that told me in an instant that there would be no changing the channel on THAT television. You have your own TV in your own bedroom, Stephen. We have permitted you to have one in your room so that you can watch your stupid baseball games there while we watch our child-appropriate fluff in here.

You want to watch the ballgame? Go to your room.

This was a true dilemma: I could suffer heat stroke in my room watching what inevitably would turn out to be just another Mets loss to a fine pitcher . . . or I could sit in a delightfully cool room bored out of my mind as my sister enjoyed some horrible child-friendly movie.

I chose poorly. I sat down and stewed in a cool room, and it wasn’t until a few hours later that I learned that Bunning had, in fact, pitched a perfect game.

Yeah, I missed it. And in so doing, because that’s how the baseball juju works, I also set a precedent. Little did I know at the time that Bunning’s perfect game was just batting practice for my lifetime of either missing no-hitters or watching intently until the last moment, when some nobody would break one up. Either way, I would never get to see one.

I was hosting a July 4 backyard barbecue in 1983 when the Yankees’ Dave Righetti no-hit the Red Sox. Missed it.

I wasn’t watching 10 years later when the Yanks’ Jim Abbott no-hit the Indians, an unbelievable feat considering that he had only one hand.

I wasn’t watching when David Wells, battling a hangover, threw a perfect game against the Twins in 1998.

I do remember that I was at work one year later when David Cone was perfect against the Expos, and I had to quickly re-design the front page of the Journal News. So, yeah, I missed that one, too.

I ignored a screaming bladder in 1969 for about five innings so as not to disturb the juju when Tom Seaver took a perfect game into the ninth inning against the Cubs, only to see my chances go down in flames when somebody named Jimmy Qualls — the immortal Jimmy Qualls — dunked a ball into the outfield to break it up.

Seaver finally pitched one for Cincinnati, but, of course, you couldn’t see it in New York.

Nolan Ryan threw seven no-nos. But he threw them all after he left the Mets, and I saw none of them.

Sandy Koufax had four, but he threw them all for the LA Dodgers, not the Brooklyn Dodgers, and I saw none of them.

I set my VCR to record every game Dwight Gooden pitched for a couple of years because Doc, in 1985, was the best pitcher I ever saw, and surely he would throw a no-hitter or three while I wasn’t watching.

But it wasn’t to be. Not with the Mets.

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I suffered 50 years waiting for somebody on the Mets, to throw a no-hitter. And when they got Johan Santana, I figured it just might happen. So, of course, when it finally did, I couldn’t watch. It came on June 1, 2012, and I was in Geneva, N.Y., at my 40th college reunion, hoisting a beer with old friends at an official reception when I got a text message from my son, Ben, informing me that Santana had a no-hitter going after eight innings.

There was not a TV to be found. I waited 50 years to “watch” the last three outs on my iPhone, pitch-by-pitch. It’s an interesting way to watch a game, but it’s just not the same.

And that’s the way it has gone. If you want to throw a no-hitter, make sure Bromberg isn’t watching.

With one exception. Stay tuned.

The All-Star Game and Linda and me

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Figured I could do this on an iPad for a week. Figured wrong.

Can’t copy/paste photos. Or at least I don’t think I can. We’ll find out when I publish this baby whether that code above becomes a picture . . . or whether it’s a bunch of code.

But a piece in today’s New York Times . . .

All-Stars of 1964 Recall a Wild Show at Shea

. . . got me to remembering that game, and many others.

The 1964 All-Star Game was the first one I can recall watching from start to finish. I was at summer camp, and one of the rules at Camp Robinson Crusoe was that you don’t watch television. You’re here to get away from television. But a coterie of young lads, 13-year-old me included, were not going to make it through to the next day if we didn’t watch the All-Star Game. It was at that new ballpark, Shea, and many of us were New Yorkers.

So Bob Hill, camp director, decided that for this time only, all the boys who wanted to watch the game (sorry, girls, but this one was for the boys, now go make a wallet or something at arts & crafts) could cram into an upstairs room at the main building and watch the game on a small TV.

One thing I remember was that it was unbearably hot up there. Upstairs, no air conditioning, middle of the summer, a hundred boys in a room that should seat maybe 10 . . . But we stuck it out till the very end. And when Johnny Callison hit that home run, we all went nuts.

Read the voices in the Times piece. They tell a wonderful story. And how’d you like to have Mays, Aaron and Clemente on your team, in their prime? With Drysdale on the mound and Koufax on the bench? Damn.

Worth noting here that Roy Kardon, Philadelphia boy, thought the Phillies of 1964 were the greatest team since the 1927 Yankees, and spent an entire summer reminding us of it. When Callison hit that home run, he became nothing short of insufferable. When the Phils pulled their classic folderoo in September, I couldn’t wait for the next summer, so I could go back to camp and remind him of it every 15 seconds or so for eight weeks.

Only Kardon didn’t return to camp the following year. He knew what was coming.

Memo to Roy Kardon: Art Mahaffey was not Sandy Koufax.

__________

The next All-Star Game I remember was 10 years later, in 1974. Amazing what a difference 10 years can make when you’re young.

In 1964 I was a 13-year-old kid. In 1974, I was a 23-year-old adult and traveling for two weeks in my Ford Maverick through Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island with the love of my life.

We’re camping, in a tent for two in Camp Kejimkujuk (I’d look the spelling up if I weren’t writing this on an iPad), and romance is in the air.

And they’re playing the All-Star Game.

Linda, I tell the young woman sharing my sleeping bag, I never miss an All-Star Game.

So there we are, the two of us, in that tent, in that sleeping bag, and I’m doing what any red-blooded American boy would be doing . . .

I’m fiddling with the dial on a transistor radio, looking for a broadcast of the All-Star Game. I finally find it, on Armed Forces Radio, and we stay up listening to the game.

Linda put up with it. And me. This woman is a keeper.

A day or two later, over a twin lobster dinner in a restaurant in Nova Scotia, I asked her to marry me.

— 30 —

Here comes Ugly Cap Day!!!

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Per Major League Baseball . . .

I wish they’d just announce that a couple of bucks from each July 4 ticket will go to the vets, and spare us from having to look at these butt-ugly things. My god those caps are hideous.

Memo to MLB:

This is a cap:

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So is this:

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And it pains me to say it, but so is this:

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But these are not caps:

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These are a sacrilege.

Feh!

Billy, Reggie, George, Rupert and me

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My once-upon-a-time colleague Harvey Araton wrote a piece in the New York Times last week in which he mused . . .

[Alex] Rodriguez is fairly new to Twitter but, like Cashman, has long been a friend to old media in the muckraking tradition of George Steinbrenner. Somewhere, the pinstriped spirits of the Boss and Billy Martin must have had a good laugh this week, raised a glass to old times and wished they had had such immediate digital access to the masses….

@BillyTheKid @BossGeorge @ReggieTheStraw “The two of them deserve each other. One’s a born liar; the other’s convicted.” (1978)

And oh did that bring back some memories. The best of times, the worst of times. One of the most exhilarating nights of my career, and the horribleawfulterrible day that followed. It’s a tale of triumph and anxiety, an untold story of baseball’s notorious Bronx Zoo, and a terrifying meeting with a boss against whom The Boss himself paled in comparison.

Pull up a chair, kids, and I’ll tell you a story. It’s a long one. Grab a beer.

It’s July of 1978, and I’m the night sports editor at The New York Post, a dream job if I ever would have one. I’m all of 27 years old — TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD!!! — and I’ve been entrusted to design and lay out and manage a team of editors in producing the newspaper’s celebrated sports section. Yeah, I love. This. Job.

The Yankees are the talk of the town, and Reggie Jackson, the straw that stirs the drink, is coming off a five-game suspension for bunting despite knowing full well that the dugout had taken back the bunt sign and he was to swing away in the 10th inning of an 11-inning loss. His refusal to follow orders has infuriated Billy Martin, the manager, who has succeeded in getting Reggie suspended. And George Steinbrenner, the owner, is blowing his top roughly every five minutes. The Yankees own the back page of New York’s warring tabloids, The Post and the Daily News. They own the sports section of the New York Times, as well. Newsday, too, not that you can find one in the city.

It’s a hot summer, and Billy, George and Reggie are fanning the flames. You can’t send the paper to press without checking first to find out whether Billy has sneezed, Reggie has coughed or George has passed gas.

So it’s around one in the morning when I get a call from The Post’s Yankees beat writer, Henry Hecht, who is at O’Hare Airport waiting to fly from Chicago to Kansas City.

Clear out the back page, Henry tells me. The Yanks are going to fire Billy Martin.

Huh?

Can’t tell you now, I have to catch a plane.

Yeah, I love a mystery.

A couple of hours later, Henry is in Kansas City and he calls me again.

Billy had a few drinks too many at the airport, he tells me — well, that’s hardly news — and he has said of Reggie and George  . . .

“One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted.”

Now, this is just not the sort of thing you’re supposed to say. Not about a future Hall of Famer who happens to be your star player, and not about the guy who pays you to manage his team — a guy who just so happens to have been CONVICTED a few years ago of illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign.

Henry tells me he’s already spoken with Steinbrenner, and Steinbrenner has told him Billy is toast. Stick a fork in him. Bye Bye Billy.

Henry says he asked Steinbrenner if he’d fire Billy in the morning, and Steinbrenner replied:

“If it takes that long.”

But there’s a slight problem. Henry and the Times’ beat reporter (I believe it was Murray Chass) were both with Billy when he said it, and they have agreed on the exact quote. But the Daily News’ reporter (I think it was Phil Pepe) was very inconveniently visiting the men’s room when it happened. And Billy is already telling Pepe he didn’t say it, which means that in the grand New York tabloid tradition, The Post is now saying that Billy said “One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted,” and The News is saying nope, never happened, nothing to see here.

But Henry says it happened, and the Times is in agreement, and George has told Henry he’ll be firing Billy in the morning, and that’s good enough for me.

But this is bigger than back page. This is front-page stuff at The New York Post. So now it’s around 4 in the morning and I get out of my chair and walk over to the paper’s managing editor on duty, an affable fellow named Phil Bunton, to tell him what we’ve got.

I tell Phil about Billy and Reggie and George and one’s a born liar and the other’s convicted and George says he’ll be firing Billy in the morning and Phil says:

“Let’s tell the editor.”

And he gets up and walks me over to the executive editor’s office, in which I’m expecting to find a red-faced man named Ted Bolwell, a bombastic man from Australia or England or somewhere where they don’t speak English, don’t understand baseball, and who in his short tenure has struck fear in a New York tabloid newsroom.

Did I mention that I’m 27?

Only it turns out once we walk into the office, that Bolwell is on vacation, and sitting in his chair is this guy:

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Yeah, that guy. Maybe you’ve seen his face before.

Rupert Murdoch is the new owner of The Post and I am well aware that he has a reputation for eating editors for dinner. They go well with a nice Chianti. And that thing I said about Australians not speaking English . . . I was just kidding. Did I mention that I’m 27?

So I tell Mr. Murdoch (no, I do not call him Rupert) about Billy and George and Reggie and one’s a born liar and the other’s convicted and George says he’ll fire Billy in the morning if it takes that long and Mr. Murdoch says to me:

Do you believe the story?

And I tell him I do and he says:

Do you trust your reporter?

And I tell him I do, because yeah, I do, and he waves me out of Ted Bolwell’s office and I go back to putting out a sports section.

And a couple of hours later The New York Post comes off the presses, and the wood reads:

YANKS TO FIRE
BILLY TODAY

Not “expected to fire.” “To Fire.”

Not soon. TODAY.

And what’s more, we’re the only ones with the story. The Times won’t hit the streets for a few more hours and The News is saying it didn’t happen.

Which means I am KING OF THE WORLD! And I’m only 27.

And I grab several copies of the paper on my way out the door, and I get into my car and start driving home. And it isn’t until I’m nearing the end of the Harlem River Drive, on the ramp approaching the George Washington Bridge, when it hits me . . .

I believe the story.

I trust my reporter.

BUT I DON’T TRUST MY REPORTER’S SOURCE!

And I don’t trust the source because the source is George Steinbrenner, and there’s always one rule when talking to George Steinbrenner, and that is that you don’t quote George Steinbrenner. You may merely quote a “source close to George Steinbrenner.” Never mind that the “source close to George Steinbrenner” wears George Steinbrenner’s underwear and sleeps in his bed — he is always and forever will be merely a “source close to George Steinbrenner.”

Which means George Steinbrenner can wake up in the morning, change his mind and deny everything the source close to George Steinbrenner has told The New York Post.

And that’s when I break out into a cold sweat. Because George may be The Boss, but MY boss is bigger than The Boss — and he will be very unhappy if The New York Post’s wood turns out to be wrong.

I arrive home and tell my wife the whole story, and explain that we could be moving back to my parents’ house if Billy doesn’t get fired. Today.

And then I go to sleep. Or try to. I wake up in a panic every hour or so and walk out of the bedroom to ask my wife if Billy is still wearing pinstripes.

Finally, in mid-afternoon, my wife opens the bedroom door and announces that the Yankees have just fired Billy Martin.

I’ve never been so happy to see a man lose his job.

— 30 —

Been there, but not THERE

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Welcome, baseball fan. Go directly to jail. (Washington Post)

This poor guy from out of town had tickets to a game that got rained out. He couldn’t go to the scheduled replacement game, so he tried to sell the tickets — at face value or less — outside the ballpark.

For his efforts, he was given a free ride to the pokey. OK . . . it wasn’t free; it wound up costing him $50.

I understand laws against scalping, but . . .

Several years ago, I found myself about to head into Shea Stadium with an extra ticket. I don’t remember who punked out on the game, but I had pretty good seats and I figured someone would just as soon buy the ticket from me than get one at the ticket window. I would have loved to get the price I paid.

Then a cop came up behind me and told me I had to move something like 150 yards away from the stadium. Pretty much had to go to the other side of the Willets Points subway station, which I was not about to do. Ridiculous.

I guess I should be glad I didn’t get hauled off to jail.

Worth reading, 06/20/13

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Tom Sietsema: Just say ‘No, grazie’ to La Tagliatella (Washington Post)

La Tagliatella in Arlington makes a strong case for hazard pay for restaurant critics. The Italian concept, an unfortunate import from Europe that plays up 400 combinations of pasta and sauce, is so distasteful on so many different levels, I was tempted to dismiss it after just one visit. I changed my mind when I considered its prime corner real estate in Clarendon and the Poland-based chain’s intention to expand elsewhere in the United States.

Someone needs to put a stop to this threat to our nation….

The slick menus with their commercial-grade food shots suggest the sort of reading you might find on the desk of a budget hotel or the seat pocket of an airplane….

The wines by the glass will remind you of the stuff you left behind in college, but the drinks here are generous and strong. Cocktails, it turns out, are one way to get through a meal at La Tagliatella, a brand unleashed on America last year with two branches in Atlanta, poor thing.

Yeah, he didn’t like the place. And the Washington Post asks on its homepage if this may be its harshest food critique ever. But Sietsma’s review pales in comparison to the standard set last November in the New York Times, Pete Wells’ unforgettable review of Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen & Bar Restaurant in Times Square.

Bon appétit!

__________

Wait, Am I That Baseball Dad? (Slate)

Excessive behavior is embarrassing to your child, it’s embarrassing to yourself, and it teaches your child all the wrong lessons about sportsmanship, character and grace. But even if you’re not risking those outcomes, there is a challenge to finding the line between unconditional love and intensity. Even if you stop short of acting like the horrible parent, there’s a finer line to walk. You don’t want to smother the experience for them with too much engagement. It’s their game—just as it’s their life. Know when to butt out.

I’ve seen the worst of parents at Little League games. Smoking was not allowed on school grounds where my kids played Little League. One day, a mom lit up a cigarette from her seat on the grass berm behind the team I managed. One of the kids complained to me that she was smoking. I asked her nicely to put out her cigarette. She stood up, and loudly — so that everyone at the game could hear — told me she’d do whatever she want. Then she flipped me the bird, for added effect.

I once was umpiring a game at first base. A dad sat down in a chaise longue (yes, I spelled that correctly) with a six pack of beer and booed every call I made throughout the game.

I was umpiring behind the plate once when my second-base umpire made a bad call. But it was HIS call and I couldn’t reverse it. The fans from the team that got screwed spent the next inning booing loudly at every ball or strike I called. It got ugly. I told them if the abuse continued, I would have to stop the game, which would mean a forfeit. I was told that if I did, I wouldn’t make it to my car in the parking lot. They were serious. A kid I knew was on the team and he literally told his teammates, the umpire is OK. It’s Mr. Bromberg. I felt bad for him, because he felt bad for me.

Little League parents are the worst.

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‘Ex-gay’ group says it’s shutting down; leader apologizes for ‘pain and hurt’ (nbcnews.com)

A Christian ministry that led the so-called ex-gay movement, which professes to rid people of their homosexuality, has announced that it will shut down, and its leader apologized extensively to gays for causing “pain and hurt.” . . . .

The president of Exodus, Alan Chambers, said late Wednesday on the ministry’s website that he had “conveniently omitted my ongoing same-sex attractions” but now accepts them “as parts of my life that will like always be there.”

Addressing gays, Chambers, who is married to a woman, wrote: “You have never been my enemy. I am very sorry that I have been yours.”

“Sorry” doesn’t quite cut it here. The damage Exodus International has done for more than a third of a century is incalculable.

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Strategist Out of Closet and Into Fray, This Time for Gay Marriage (New York Times)

As the Supreme Court considers overturning California’s ban onsame-sex marriage, gay people await a ruling that could change their lives. But the case has already transformed one gay man: Ken Mehlman, the once-closeted Republican operative who orchestrated President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election on a platform that included opposition to same-sex marriage.

Now Mr. Mehlman, a private equity executive in Manhattan, is waging what could be his final campaign: to convince fellow Republicans that gay marriage is consistent with conservative values and good for their party. His about-face, sparked in part by the lawyer who filed the California lawsuit, has sent him on a personal journey to erase what one new friend in the gay rights movement calls his “incredibly destructive” Bush legacy.

To his credit, Mehlman is trying to undo much of the harm he helped inflict before he came out.

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Tea party scalds Marco Rubio (Dana Milbank in the Washington Post)

The tea party returned to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, but this time the don’t-tread-on-me crowd trod upon one of its own.

Much of the scene was familiar: the yellow flags, the banners protesting tyranny and socialism, the demands to impeach President Obama and to repeal Obamacare. But there was a new target of the conservatives’ ire: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and his “amnesty” plan for illegal immigrants. The loathing of this onetime darling of the movement — Rubio rode the tea party wave to office in 2010 — could be seen in the homemade signs on the East Lawn of the Capitol proclaiming, “Rubio RINO” (Republican In Name Only) and “Rubio Lies, Americans Die.” Rubio antagonism became a main theme of the event, held by Republican Reps. Steve King (Iowa), Louie Gohmert (Tex.), Michele Bachmann (Minn.) and other opponents of the bipartisan Senate immigration legislation that Rubio negotiated.

Et tu, Tea?