FIFTY!

After hearing that our all-world rookie Aaron Judge had both broken McGwire's rookie record for homers and reached the heady plateau of 50 home runs---in the same game of course---I was going to come on here and make some smart remark about not having ever seen another Yankee player hit fifty in my lifetime.

And then I remembered A-Rod and how he 54 in one of his MVP years in the Bronx. And then the shame of bad memory came through, because that was when we lived there...and I think he got to 600 that same season. Whoops.

But really, that's a short list...

Yankees who have hit fifty home runs in a season:

1. Ruth (4 times)
2. Mantle (twice)
3. Maris (once)
4. A-Rod (once as a Yankee)
5. the Judge

Bring on the Twins for the play-in game! Can we catch Boston? We got young! Ahead of schedule, this is exciting!

Note for Dan

So, I was reading a list of the top 50 good-bad movies ever, complete with confusing and not-so-arbitrary research-driven points scheme. One movie they mentioned jogged my memory banks...HOLY SHIT! I said to myself, I haven't thought about that movie in decades.

Remember?

ALL RISE!

I'll stop posting random Aaron Judge stuff when they stop writing it.

Or I think of better stuff to write.

So here you go, another cool Aaron Judge piece.

One More Aaron Judge Thing

We have our first home-grown slugger since...Gary Sanchez(?)...but really, who? Shelby Miller? He didn't last beyond that week in September 2007 when Ruth was temporarily resurrected...

Was Donnie the last Yankee home-grown slugger? He doesn't quite fit that mold, though. Perennial MVP candidate (in his prime), sure, but not in the same category as, say, your Mantles or Thomes (who never played for the Yanks).

Anyway, a sports website I read often had a cool article called "The Majesty of Watching Aaron Judge Mash." It highlights five homers that show different facets of the kid's homer game, if such a thing exists.

they also had some cool links to photos, which I will shamelessly hijack and display here.

Like, here's a guy and his little brother, playing on opposite teams:

No wait, that's the (former) behemoth known as Ryan Howard, an otherwise huge human being who doesn't seem to be good at baseball anymore. In fact, he's retired, unless any contender wants an otherwise huge first baseman who used to be great at crushing baseballs.

I'd imagine it's rare when he's overshadowed.

How about: here's a guy and his son, dressed in matching baseball outfits:

No wait, that's Ronald Torreyes, utility infielder with the Yanks. He is small by MLB standards, but still...this picture looks out of place.

The video clips of the homers are pretty cool, and it's fresh to have youth that can ball...and I'm dutifully ignoring the small sample size of all this, but it pretty cool the Yanks are making these kinds of stories instead of this or this kind.

And I know those are both A-Rod articles, and I don't really mean to poop on his time as a Yankee, because it was rather fantastic, beyond the ugliness...just sayin' this a bit more fun and less full of baggage.

Heady Praise

All hail Aaron Judge!

Mash, mash, he shall mash! 10 homers in April---tied for the league lead---and Girardi compares him to Jeet...

In other news, Jeter and Jeb buying the Marlins? This is pretty cool, right? Being so far away and removed from most baseball matters, I'm not privy to the chatter...

Being removed from baseball is funny, since we have both Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw in our vicinity regularly. At least Dodger games have returned to free, broadcast random channel airings. Instead of Tuesday home games with Vin Scully on Channel 9, we get random day games on the weekend on Channel 5.

THIRTY YEARS AGO!

The first time that Matt Groening's family ended up animated and in a short on the Tracy Ullman Show was THIRTY YEARS AGO, April 19th, 1987.

!!!!!!!

If you have an hour or so, you can read through the little discussions on the following list of the 100 best episodes. It is excellent, brings back a ton of memories, doesn't omit as many as I thought (but still omits two of my favorites ("King Size Homer" and "The City of New York Versus Homer Simpson")), has an episode from 1997 as the newest on the list (S9:E5, "The Cartridge Family") and has the main episode I've seen multiple times before in the top spot as Numero Uno.

The make a good point before they got started with the lists, to wit (and to paraphrase): If you want to make a list of the 100 best Simpsons episodes ever, you could take every other episode starting from the first and going all the way to 200, and either 100 would be better than entire runs of plenty of television shows.

From the "Right Fielder or Tight End?" File

Player A: 6'6", 265 Pounds
Player B: 6'7", 275 Pounds

Player A: Rob Gronkowski

Gronk is a beast who has a difficult time staying healthy but has game-changing skills. Also, on a separate topic, if a black player acted like Gronk, that behavior wouldn't tolerated with as much amusement as meets the Patriots tight end.

Player B: Aaron Judge

Seriously, the Yankees ball mashing-or-whiffing newly minted starting right fielder is literally bigger then Rob Gronkowski, if only marginally, and answers the unasked age-old question: What would an NFL tight end look like playing right field?

See if you can find him in the next picture, a Where's Waldo of sorts:

Are you kidding me? His forearms are like other folks' thighs, and his thighs are like the foul poles. And, let's not forget, that the "other folks" from the previous sentence are professional major league baseball players.

Let's hope he mashes often enough to justify the whiffs.

Also, just purchased tickets for Cass' first baseball game: a day game in the Bronx in July during our New York visit, against the Blue Jays. Early enough to get front row loge seats just beyond the right field foul pole. Pretty sweet...

New Previously Unknown Whitman Novel Discovered

Can you believe that 165 years later a grad student with a hankering for SQL-query writing and access to the Library of Congress's digital database for newspapers was able to discover a serialized novel written under a pseudonym?

I may have misrepresented the details above, but not the essence, A grad student and Whitman scholar moved on to another one of his Whitman projects: searching various databases for anything that uses names from Whitman's unpublished notes.

A main character named Jack Engle? Go...

He got a series of hits from a currently defunct newspaper from the 1850s, had the pages microfiche sent over, and set about reading it.

Consensus: the world has been gifted previously unknown Whitman content.

It's Uncle Walt as a young man and young writer, but pieces of the foundation of Leaves of Grass are all over the place, like the nurse-centurion in Fiskadoro is really the heart of the story Johnson wants to write in Tree of Smoke.

Anyway, it's been described as "pre-modern Pynchon" for its naming shenanigans and plot twists.

Reports are that the ending is where Whitman lost interest more than a conclusion of the plots/story.

Check out an article about it here. For a PDF of the book itself before it goes up for sale on Amazon, click here.

Observations and Memories Collide

I was reading about Snagglepuss, the pink cartoon mountain lion, the other day, when I read that he was voiced by Daws Butler. Daws is the guy who voiced almost every other Hannah-Barbara character. I went to YouTube and found footage of a Butler interview; at one point he says: "...and here's Wally Gator..." and then he started doing a voice.

Wally Gator! I thought. I remember that name, if not the exact look. 

So I looked him up:

Huh, I thought. I guess it didn't really click with me as a kid that Wally Gator is just a gator-rip-off of Yogi Bear.

Yogi Bear is an animated American icon and is to Hannah-Barbara what Mickey Mouse is to Disney and Bugs Bunny is to Warner Brothers. His cartoon has been updated more than once and has even been the subject of a CG/live action film voiced by Dan Ackroyd (do you remember that Boo-Boo was voiced by Justin Timberlake?). His catchphrase of "Smarter than the average bear" is a cliche, and he's even the subject of plenty of tattoos, some even well executed:

It makes sense that Yogi would be copied by his parent company.

I just didn't realize how many knock-offs Hannah-Barbara made until I looked up Wally Gator.

The list was surprising: After Wally was Hokey Wolf, who I slightly remember, and his own little Boo-Boo (whose name I do not remember):

Almost exactly Yogi-as-a-wolf.

And then a different wolf (maybe a fox), whom I don't recall at all, Loopy de Loop:

And then they get kinda off track with Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har, a hyena, a pair I had never seen once in my life before that fateful Google search:

I have to say that an updated and re-imagined Lippy and Hardy Har Har could be pretty damn good.

Here's Snagglepuss, just because I should:

What I was reading about him is that DC Comics is bringing him back as a Tennessee Williams-styled southern gothic gay playwright fighting McCarthy-era politics, If Huckleberry Hound is Faulkner, then, apparently the thinking goes, Snagglepuss is Williams.

They're going with the fully gay aspect that is hinted at or joked about by fans. Here's a page from the first upcoming story, and it's pretty good, if a little serious:

DC Comics has been updating many of the Hannah-Barbara properties that it controls, like the Flintstones:

...and Scooby Doo: