Billy Sunday in Ulysses

While tuned in to the Fox telecast of the Cardinals-Cubs game at Wrigley Field yesterday, they briefly displayed a beautiful camera shot from the Chicago River looking upon the surrounding architecture. Commentator Tim McCarver mentioned how he'd gone on the Chicago River Architecture Tour the day before and he brought up Billy Sunday, an ex-major league baseball player for the Chicago White Stockings from the 1880s who went on to become a famous evangelical Christian preacher, and how Sunday had been such a strong proponent of Prohibition and played a major role in the passing of the 18th Amendment.

This caught my attention because I remembered that James Joyce used one of Billy Sunday's fiery, wildly fervent sermons in Ulysses. It appears at the end of the 14th episode, the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter where Bloom joins Stephen and a bunch of medical students who are drinking and carousing boisterously in a hospital waiting room. It's one of Joyce's most ingenious chapters stylistically: a survey of the English language with a style that varies and grows chronologically throughout the chapter, starting with what seems like literal translations of Latin ("Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's oncoming") moving on all the way through the centuries of prose styles from the Elizabethans to Dickens and finishing up with a sloppy amalgam of drunken slurs and street slang. The closing paragraph contains this crazy exclamation (which, I think, is mockingly made between the drunken medical students who are out at a pub at this point):

Come on, you winefizzling ginsizzling booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed four flushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J. Christ Dowie, that's yanked to glory most half this planet from 'Frisco Beach to Vladivostok. The Deity ain't no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that he's on the square and a corking fine business proposition. He's the grandest thing yet and don't you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus. You'll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God. Pflaaaap! Not half. He's got a coughmixture with a punch in it for you, my friend, in his backpocket. Just you try it on.  (Ulysses pg 428)

The "Pflaaaap!" is the sound of vomiting. These are the last words before the absinthe-fueled nightmare hallucination that is the "Circe" episode where they all go to a whorehouse in Dublin's red light district.

It was only fairly recently that scholars realized Joyce had taken that crazy "altar call parody" verbatim from a couple of Billy Sunday sermons which must have been transcribed in a newspaper Joyce came across. The article I found (linked above) appeared in the Joyce Quarterly in 2006 and was written by one of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, Peter Gilliver, who realized the connection between Joyce and Sunday while researching whether there was a precedent to Joyce's use of the adjective "peanut-brained." At the time of Ulysses' composition, Billy Sunday was at his height of fame with his animated sermons that were just as much a form of entertainment as they were evangelical calls to repent. The sermons were delivered first inside large canvas tents that Sunday actually put up himself most of the time until a heavy snowstorm in Colorado destroyed one of his tents and he subsequently insisted that towns build him temporary wooden "tabernacles" at their own expense. I highly recommend checking out Mr. Sunday's wiki page to read more about him because it's fascinating stuff but here's a little snippet:

Sunday gyrated, stood on the pulpit, ran from one end of the platform to the other, and dove across the stage, pretending to slide into home plate. Sometimes he even smashed chairs to emphasize his points.

During the 1910s, Sunday was front page news in the cities where he held campaigns. Newspapers often printed his sermons in full, and during World War I, local coverage of his campaigns often surpassed that of the war.

As for his baseball career, in his Historical Baseball Abstract Bill James lists him as the fastest player in the entire decade of the 1880s. He was an exciting and charismatic speedy outfielder for 8 seasons with the Chicago White Stockings, Pittsburgh Alleghenys, and the Philadelphia Phillies. He batted .248 for his career with just 12 homeruns but 246 stolen bases. Once he was converted to Christianity, he gave up the relatively high baseball salary of $3,000 a year to work at $83 a month in a YMCA preparing him for his career as a rabid evangelist.

Here's a nice video I found of an older Billy Sunday and his famous antics:

A Memorialable Baseball Day

What a friggin' day of Baseball. As summer's solstice approaches, the advancing 2010 baseball season reached its apex again today. All sorts of colorful varieties of the summer game were displayed radiantly today, the first day of a three-day weekend. When the sun went down, an orange-tinted waning full moon oversaw our game's second perfect pitching outing of the year already.

A brief overview:

-Roy Halladay threw a perfect game tonight against the Marlins in Miami. It's already the 2nd perfect game pitched in the major leagues this season and third in the last two years although it's only the 20th ever, including two that happened in the 1800s. Joe Posnanski perfectly captured the uniqueness of what we've been witnessed.

-The Mets and Brewers played an action-filled ballgame wearing Negro League throwback uniforms. The Mets were the New York Cubans from the 1930s and the Brewers were the Milwaukee Bears circa 1923. In stark contrast to Halladay's gem, both starting pitchers in this game were knocked out before the 4th inning as there was plenty of offense, 14 runs in all including two homers from Corey Hart with the Brewers beating the Mets 8-6. John Axford, sporting a classic handle-bar mustache, closed out the game for the Brewers.

-After seeing their starting pitcher take an A-Rod missile of a line drive off the side of his head (it hit his skull so hard that it bounced almost 300 feet away), the Cleveland Indians stormed back at Yankee Stadium to beat the Bronx Bombers 13-11 sending their fans home disappointed and unhappy.

-Gabe Gross made this ridiculous catch in the Tigers-A's game. Notice how he couldn't stop smiling afterward. This is a kid's game after all.

-After hitting a walk-off grandslam in the bottom of the 10th inning in Anaheim, Kendry Morales jumped on home plate so hard he broke his leg.

-In the only game that my TV let me watch, the Cubs' Carlos Silva, who was literally dumped on the Cubs after embarrassing himself for two years as a horrible waste of money in Seattle, baffled the Cardinals offense with 11 strikeouts in 7 scoreless innings. He's now 7-0 on the year. Salvation thy name is Carlos Silva.

And plenty of other fun stuff happened.

The Stanley Cup Finals also began today with a hard-hitting and exciting 6-5 game won by the Chicago Blackhawks. And the Lakers are going to the NBA Finals again to play the Celtics (again). It is a damn good time to be a sports fan.

The Brooklyn Bridge

Having spent four years attending college at Pace University in downtown Manhattan, I spent a lot of time looking at and pondering the Brooklyn Bridge. Today I came across a surprising tidbit on the front page of Wikipedia. When the Brooklyn Bridge was completed (after 14 years of construction) in 1883 it was not only the longest suspension bridge in the world but its towers were the tallest structures in the western hemisphere.

Here's a picture from when it was first built

 

Comparing that to a more recent photo from a similar angle creates a perfect snapshot of modern industrial and economic growth.

There are plenty of other fun Brooklyn Bridge photos like this one from when it used to have trains running across or, always my favorite, the ones with construction workers nonchalantly sitting on the suspension wires like this:

 

I highly recommend taking a look at the BB's Wikipedia page, lots of interesting facts.

A Collage of Thoughts on the Milwaukee Brewers

On the morning of June 3rd, 2008, my brother Billy and I drove away from our house in Staten Island headed towards Chicago. My car, a 2003 blue Buick Rendezvous, contained as many of my belongings as I could squeeze into it plus suitcases, sleeping bags, a tent, and a huge box of snacks for our planned 10-day roadtrip across America that would end at her southwestern edge in San Diego.

Almost exactly 12 hours later, we were in Chicago driving on the highway past US Cellular field where we could see the stadium's lights on as a game between the White Sox and Royals was about to begin. "Real quick: should we go?" I asked. He hesitated for a minute. "Yes." I missed the exit and we kept on going. We skipped the game because, upon further consideration, we needed to eat dinner and get settled with a place to stay for the night and a three hour baseball game would leave us tired, hungry, and scrambling for a hotel at 10 PM in an unfamiliar city. We already had plans to fulfill our foreign city baseball fix the next day in Milwaukee. After dinner at a restaurant only a block or two away from Wrigley Field (which was quiet while the Cubs were getting ready to play over in, you guessed it, San Diego) we settled into a cheap, dirty hotel just north of Chicago and flipped between the Cubs-Padres game and the movie "Money Train" on television while we went to sleep.

The next morning we were back on the road heading up Interstate-94 through rain and thick fog to Milwaukee. We arrived at the stadium very early and cruised around the premises a bit, admiring the beautiful building from the outside. After a quick breakfast at Perkins a mile away, we were settled into our seats just 10 or 12 rows behind home plate. They'd cost us only $40 a piece and we sat between two elderly couples for a Wednesday afternoon tilt between the hometown Brew Crew and the Arizona Diamondbacks. When we had sat down the old woman to my right had her chubby arm completely in my seat space and she made no effort to remove it once I was there. As the Brewers took their warm-up tosses I considered the prospect of having to spend the entire game leaning to my left so as not to be touching this woman's arm that was invading my $40 seat. I battled within myself. She's an old lady and she's a bit too wide for her seat, give her a break. No! I paid 40 bucks for this seat, I should be entitled to enjoy it and not concede part of it to this inconsiderate bleep! Am I gonna say something... What do I say? Dammit, this is the first day of my true adulthood and being out on my own, am I gonna remain timid and quiet when people are taking advantage of me? No! "Excuse me, can you keep your arm in your space please? Thanks." She looked at me wide-eyed, shocked that I was daring enough to call her out for her injustice, then quickly reeled her arm in. And chuckled. I'd passed my first test.

*   *   *
Looking back, the Brewers had seeped their way into my life over the last couple years before I journeyed to their foggy city and spaceship-like stadium. In May of 2006 I joined my brother James and his family for a Saturday afternoon game in Philadelphia against the Brewers. It was a highly entertaining game with lots of offense including a Bill Hall missile of a homerun caught by the guy sitting right next to us in the left field grand stand. Almost exactly two years later I was in Boston for the weekend visiting my cousin Mary and her husband Chris and they brought me to my first ever Red Sox game at Fenway Park, a Sunday afternoon interleague contest against the Brewers. That was also a highly entertaining offensive show featuring 8 homeruns (two apiece by Ryan Braun and David Ortiz), won by the Sox 11-7.

*   *   *

Current Milwaukee manager Ken Macha (right) looks exactly like my dad. In his first season at the helm last year the Brewers finished with a disappointing 80-82 record, third place in the National League Central. They were favored by many to be a contender for the division title and they were in first place as late as July but they sunk because of an atrocious pitching staff (5.05 runs allowed per game, second worst in the NL) and ended up 11 games out of first. Former Oakland A's and Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson was hired by the Brewers before the current season to work his magic on an unsuccessful group of moundsmen.

When Peterson was with the Mets, I remember reading an article about the peculiar mullet-haired pitching coach and how he came to be one of the most sought after pitching gurus in baseball. His dad, Pete Peterson (quite a name) worked in the Pirates front office when Rick was a kid and he got to spend alot of time around the "We Are Family" Pirates growing up. He went to college in Jacksonville and got degrees in psychology and art before spending some time floundering as a pitcher in the low minor leagues. I can't locate the article now or anything that mentions this but I remember it described how he went away to southern California (San Diego, if I remember right) and lived in a tiny studio apartment, studied Zen, practiced yoga and Tai Chi, and didn't work much. That sounded like what I wanted to do with my life and that article played a major role in my decision to leave New York and move to San Diego with no job, no apartment, no plans. Of course, Mr. Peterson went on to become a major league pitching coach and he's noted for using a mix of psychological techniques and Eastern philosophy to lead his hurlers through the long baseball season.

"A full season is like crossing an ocean," Peterson says. "It's every day the same guys, same uniforms, same colors, and it's easy to get lost and lose your perspective before you reach the other shore seven months later. Helping people understand where they are along the way and what their recipe for success is, and being there to get them back on track when it slips away is my job."

*   *   *
With the full use of both armrests on my $40 seat, I relaxed and soaked in the encapsulated environment we were in, huge glass windows behind centerfield showed it was raining heavily outside. My second indoor baseball game experience (previously saw 2 games at Olympic Stadium in Montreal back in 2002) felt like a festive event, the crowd was very happy and very loud as their team put up 10 runs on the way to a 10-1 easy victory over the D'backs. In the 4th inning, Corey Hart hit an inside-the-park three-run homerun and I high-fived my brother and people in front of me amidst the euphoric excitement.

After the game was over, the elderly couple that was sitting next to Billy explained that today was "Senior's Day" at the ballpark and all seniors were granted a postgame stroll around the field. My love for Milwaukee was solidified when that couple, unprovoked, suggested to Billy that we follow them onto the field pretending that we were their sons. Thus we were granted access to the beautiful green pasture. We slowly strolled around the perimeter, walking along the warning track in the outfield and trying to soak it all in. "I can't believe we're in Milwaukee!" one of us said. My brother took of his sweatshirt to reveal a blue Shea Stadium tee shirt and we snapped a picture at the centerfield wall's 400-foot marker capturing how far we were from home:

*   *   *
I've already written the story of the first Padres game I ever attended, a 15-12 loss to the Braves in July 2006. That night, with a 9-8 lead in the 9th inning, Petco Park seemed to briefly transform into a WWF wrestling arena and I wasn't sure if The Undertaker or Trevor Hoffman was entering the game. Loud, somber bells tolled and heavy rock-and-roll accompanied the arrival into the game of Hoffman, the San Diego Padres legend and holder of the all-time saves record. One out away from winning, he blew the game and the Braves took the lead. It was his second blown save of the year. He would finish the season with 5 blown saves but he also led the league with 46 successful saves and pitched so well that he finished second in the Cy Young award voting.

*   *   *
After the Brewers game we spent the whole day seeing Milwaukee and then had a brief scare as a we got lost in the heavy evening fog off Lake Michigan and drove around the city for hours (our guiding light, a Garmin navigation system, was left at the hotel) trying to find our hotel before a couple of bearded college fellows we encountered tossing around a football in the street gave us directions. The next day we were to pack up again and head west through Wisconsin and Minnesota into South Dakota for the next leg of our trip.

We woke up in the middle of the night to extremely loud thunder, frequent lightning and heavy rain at our window. The Weather Channel was in full emergency mode, explaining that there were heavy winds, lightning storms and tornadoes all over Wisconsin. The map they displayed had little computer-generated twisters all across our proposed path westward. We briefly argued whether or not to go ahead and drive west as planned but the pleas of the weather man---"STAY OFF THE ROADS"---won out. The storms cleared by the afternoon and we spent the day strolling the sidewalks, going to museums, sports bars, city parks. At one point we walked over a bridge underneath which a flowing river purled and pulled along big logs and forest debris.

*   *   *
The cost-cutting Padres chose to let their 39-year-old franchise statue (on the team since 1993) Hoffman walk away after the 2008 season and he signed a one year contract to serve as the closer for the Milwaukee Brewers. With a high salary, declining effectiveness, and a maturing protege (Heath Bell) ready to inherit his job, the Padres' decision-makers determined that Hoffman was expendable. It was as though they were suggesting that he retire because few thought he would go on and continue his career somewhere else after being with the same team for 16 seasons. It felt like the Brewers had adopted another family's grandpa. He was a relic and he was leaving one of the coziest pitcher's parks in baseball. After putting together a surprisingly strong season finishing games for them though (by ERA+ it was his second best season ever), he was signed for another season.

So far in 2010 he has been absolutely terrible, blowing 5 saves already in just 10 save attempts. This past Tuesday afternoon in Cincinnati he appeared to hit rock bottom. Entering the game in the bottom of the 9th with a two run lead, this is how the Reds handled his offerings:

• single
• homerun (tying the game)
• double
• walk
• (hard-struck) single to win the game

He recorded no outs and didn't appear to fool anyone with his pitches.

As a whole, the Brewer pitching staff is off to a dreadful start. They've allowed the third most runs per game, 5.86 to be exact, ahead of only the Pirates and Diamondbacks. The starters aren't pitching deep into games and the bullpen hasn't performed when called upon, not just Trevor Hoffman, LaTroy Hawkins has also faltered in high-pressure situations. They don't look anything like contenders at this point despite an explosive offense.

Can Rick Peterson right the ship? It's been reported that he has worked extensively with Hoffman recently to sharpen his pitching mechanics, explaining that Hoffman's "arm slot has gotten too high in his delivery, and that has contributed to a loss of movement on both his famed changeup and fastball." Even though he's 42 years old, I can't imagine the future Hall of Famer would lose his touch so suddenly after a what was really an excellent season at age 41. Fangraphs calculates how much each pitch has been worth in terms of runs and last year Hoffman's fastball and changeup were better than they've ever been in the years Fangraphs has kept tabs on it (since 2002). His velocity is the same and while he doesn't throw hard at all he was baffling hitters with the same stuff last year. I foresee Peterson's tune-up working for the beleaguered closer, although I hope the Brewers are patient enough to give him another chance. As desperate as they are right now for pitching help, they'd be insane not to. Their makeshift replacement so far has been Carlos Villanueva, a curveball-twirling righty swingman. This afternoon, in his second save attempt, he relinquished what was a hard-earned one-run lead (his team rallied for 5 runs in the 9th) against the Twins. The bullpen managed to stave off defeat for a little while longer but eventually lost when Joe Mauer scored on a sacrifice fly in the 12th inning. The Brewers have now lost 9 of their last 10 games.

The starting rotation is a complete mess. Its two prize additions, Randy Wolf and Doug Davis both have ERAs over 5. So does Dave Bush and so does Chris Narveson. The only bright spot is Yovani Gallardo but he hasn't even averaged 6 innings per game in his starts before putting it into the hands of a shaky bullpen. It's on Rick Peterson's shoulders to uplift the minds and spirits of his charges using his psychological, Eastern philosophical approach. For some silly reason, I have faith in him. I'm rooting for these guys to climb back to life.

Some early season thoughts on Padres, Athletics, Mets

I haven't written any baseball posts since my Season Preview and now that we're more than 30 games in I'd like to take a look at my three favorite teams.

San Diego Padres
Record: 22-12
Run differential: +45

They've been the baseball season's biggest surprise so far, starting the season as a projected last place team but with 34 games played they're comfortably in first place in their division and have the best record in the National League. Today they finished off a sweep of the Giants (again) on the road with a nearly perfect game pitched by Mat Latos.

I spoke very highly of the Padres' chances in my preseason predictions but I couldn't have imagined they would burst out of the gates with the second best start to a season in franchise history. Their bullpen has been the best in baseball so far and they've gotten great work out of a rotation that wasn't supposed to be very good but Jon Garland has pitched great (although a bit over his head), Mat Latos is getting better with each start (complete game one-hitter today), and lefties Wade LeBlanc and Clayton Richard have done surprisingly well. The offense doesn't look quite so good, though. Adrian Gonzalez (.265/.383/.453) hasn't heated up yet and for as great as Chase Headley's looked thus far, he's got a sub-.400 slugging percentage. I'm waiting for Kyle Blanks to gain some composure (41 strikeouts already in 89 at-bats) and start mashing like he did last year and the rest of the outfield has been weak enough at the plate that the local paper was making a case for the team to sign Jermaine Dye this week.

They've won with great pitching, defense (second-best UZR in baseball), and baserunning (league-leading 44 steals) which must make the baseball classicists feel warm inside. But can they keep us this up for very long? I'm a fan, I go see their games all the time, but I don't think so. The Dodgers and Rockies, the division's projected powerhouses, stumbled to start the year but the Padres have lost both series they've played against the Rockies so far and they haven't even played the Dodgers yet. The boys in blue are in San Diego for a weekend series and they've won their last 4, should be a fun weekend (too bad I'll be in New York for the next four days). I stand by my prediction of the Dodgers winning the division, but they have to get over their weird affection for washed up pitchers (Jeff Weaver, Ramon/Russ Ortiz). The offense is there and, despite the worries of their fans, I think the pitching staff will be fine with the top 3 of Kershaw-Billingsley-Kuroda. Crafty young righthander (you don't hear that description too often) John Ely looked good in his first three starts and I'm hoping he sticks around for the year.

Oakland A's
Record: 18-17
Run differential: -2

Similar to the Padres, they got off to great start and beat up on division rivals but they ran into a tough stretch where the AL East beasts smacked them around a little bit until Dallas Braden's world-shocking perfect game against the Rays this past Sunday. They've suffered their usual injuries already (Brett Anderson, Mark Ellis, Kurt Suzuki, Coco Crisp, and more) but have stayed competitive mainly due to strong pitching, defense, and baserunning (just like the Pads).

Daric Barton is finally playing as good as he'd been expected to for a few years and he's become my favorite player. His at-bats are fun to watch; a very composed hitter, he's got an excellent batting eye never seeming to swing at anything out of the strike zone, draws a ton of walks (his .400 OBP is 10th in the American League), and smacks line drives all over the place. He's not hitting for the type of power you'd hope for in a first baseman but his on-base percentage is so good that it makes up for the lack of power. A perfect Billy Beane player.

Although they eventually lost 2-1, the Athletics played an excellent game against the Rangers on the road today in which they executed two shortstop-to-catcher plays at the plate, the second one a game saver. I watch a hell of a lot of baseball and it seems like teams mess up that simple play often but the A's executed to perfection. They're a crisp defensive team (although Coco Crisp hasn't manned the outfield pastures yet) that rarely makes mistakes behind a strong pitching staff.

Designated hitter/third baseman Eric Chavez was once my favorite player in baseball. He remains the only player whose baseball jersey I've ever bought (I have a few nameless team jerseys, though) but he's been an immense disappointment after signing a huge contract, sitting out with a multitude of injuries for the last 4 years now. He's back and he's healthy but he absolutely sucks (.660 OPS with 1 homerun). Presumably because of his huge contract, he's been the team's regular DH. This has to change. It bothers me that Jack Cust, one of the best hitters on the team, is playing in Triple-A right now. They've also got Chris Carter, a slugging prospect, waiting to come up and knock in some runs. The division doesn't look as tight as it was expected to be (the Mariners don't score enough to compete) but if the A's are serious about winning it they've got to insert a real hitter into that DH spot.

New York Mets
Record: 18-17
Run differential: +15

This team looks alot different with Ike Davis at first base. They just don't seem nearly as bad as I thought they would be with an on-base machine like Ike manning first. He's only played 22 games but I think the 23-year-old Davis is the real deal, maybe a bit short in the power department but that will come as he gets more major league at bats. David Wright looks like himself again (7 homers, .525 slugging) even though the sports audience in New York never stops whining about him. And even the pitching staff has been good, especially the bullpen (2nd best reliever ERA in the league). My main complaint is manager Jerry Manuel and his inability to grasp simple baseball concepts, most glaringly with his lineup selection. It's simple: the higher a player bats in the order, the more chances he will get in a game and over the season as a whole. Therefore, the best hitters should bat highest in the order, putting them in a position to get the most chances. David Wright, by far the best hitter on the team, continually bats 5th in the order. Ike Davis and his .400 OBP bats 6th. Jose Reyes, whose been the leadoff sparkplug for this team his entire career, has been inserted into the #3 spot for some ridiculous reason while Manuel regularly leads off with Angel Pagan, a solid player who I like very much but who definitely should not bat ahead of the likes of Reyes, Wright, Davis or even Jason Bay. Manuel even puts Alex Cora (.316 OBP this year, .313 career) in the #2 spot often! It's insane!

Whining about the batting order is minor, though. Most studies show that batting order makes a relatively minimal difference over the year but in a division with the Phillies, Braves, Marlins, and even surprisingly strong Nationals, they need to have their best hitters come to the plate more often.

I'm off to the eastern seaboard for the weekend and most likely won't post for a little while.

Finnegans Wake Treasure Map

I'd like to follow up on something I mentioned back in March: the "Finnegans Wake for Dummies" article in my first edition of the James Joyce Quarterly. In it, Professor Sebastien D.G. Knowles of Ohio State University describes a Finnegans Wake graduate seminar he put on after acknowledging the crisis that he (the author of a book on Joyce, attendee of two decades worth of Joyce seminars, and teacher of over a dozen courses on Joyce) had never read Finnegans Wake.

Inspired by Constantin Brancusi's "Symbol of Joyce" (shown above) he realized that the best way to read the Wake is to start in the middle and work your way out. After all, the book doesn't really follow a linear, chronological order---the "action" is timeless (and spaceless) and the book begins with a lowercase "riverrun" completing the final sentence of the book which ends with "the." So Knowles developed a reading plan that would enable one to read the chapters of the Wake in order of difficulty, "starting with what was generally agreed to be the easiest material, moving to the intermediate level, and finally attacking the hardest chapter of all."

Starting off with the dramatic, Qur'an-esque opening of the "Mamafesta" chapter ("In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!" FW pg 104), here is the reading plan he recommends for new readers of Finnegans Wake:

Round One:

I.5 "Mamafesta" (104-25)

I.6 "Riddles" (126-68)

I.7 "Shem the Penman" (169-95)

I.8 "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (196-216)

II.4 "Mamalujo" (383-99)

III.4 "Dawn" (555-590)

IV: "Ricorso" (593-628)

Round Two:

I.1-4 "HCE" (3-103)

II.1 "Children's Games" (219-59)

II.2 "Nightlessons" (260-308)

III.1-3 "Shaun" (403-554)

Round Three

II.3 "The Pub" (309-82)

Professor Knowles' graduate seminar using this reading plan also used four "gospels" to lead the way through the dark book and it was recommended to read the enigmatic text both during the daytime while sober and at night while under the influence of something "to bring the sounds of the text to life."

On the first day of the seminar, a diverse group of twenty students (graduate and undergrad students majoring in physics, Russian, Spanish, English, mathematics, education) showed up and in the reading they noted references in Persian, Afrikaans, and Serbo-Croatian, sometimes all at once. The readers were shocked at some of the other references in the book and argued

 whether Joyce would have known about Popeye, or King Kong, or the discovery of Pluto, or the teddy as an article of ladies' lingerie (yes to all four), or the Kit Kat Club, or Seabiscuit or the selling of Babe Ruth to finance the musical "No No Nanette" (maybe to all three), or Hell's Angels, or Tweety Bird, or the Kennedy assassination (no to all three).

They also found references to:

Tiger Woods - "tigerwood" (pg 35)
Nike shoes - "Nike with your kickshoes on" (pg 270)
e-mail - "Emailia" (pg (410)
Google - "googling" (pg 620)

And I've found such things as the word "iSpace" in a sentence that looks like html text. In a book that was published in 1939. Joyce was really working on a whole different level. Coming up soon I'll have some posts taking a look at the many mind-blowing perspectives people have been applying to the Wake and what they have found (how it predicts the atomic bomb or "abnihilisation of the etym" in Nagasaki or "nogeysokey"; modern physics and the whole quantum movement; Twitter, Facebook, and other modern media) but for now, I've actually been putting my own Wake studies aside as I prepare for my second reading of Ulysses which will be fully documented here along with FAQs and a walkthrough for reading each chapter. I'm resisting Finnegans Wake at the moment because I know that once I fully dive into it (or back into it because I've already read a few books on it) I probably won't read anything else for years. Its infinite depths are just too fun to look at.

"I'm going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn't exist until centuries after James Joyce's era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I'll be famous forever."  ---Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion

Defeated Kidd, Contested Will, and Conscious Maurice

My day job and my side jobs have left me short on free time for a couple of weeks now and I've had just about zero time to do any writing, which is exactly how I want my life to not be. Over that time I've assembled a list of topics I want to write about on here but the list has only grown longer as the days have passed. I'm finally back now and the time is ripe to revitalize this dormant blog. I'll start with discussion of a few links to get the gears in motion and then I'll have many more posts coming up in the next couple days (I hope).


First up is an article I found in the New York Observer from 1997 about the James Joyce scholar and "big academic troublemaker" who I discussed in my last post, Dr. John Kidd. Aptly titled "James Joyce and the Nutty Professor," it's a good read and it covers the entire story of Mr. Kidd in detail from his discrediting of Hans Walter Gabler's new edition of Ulysses in the 80s, to the elaborate version of the epic novel (complete with a CD-ROM which Kidd described at the time--keep in mind this is the mid-90s--as "the world's single most comprehensive digital document ever made") that Kidd worked on for years and received a $100,000 advance for, and full background to the "Joyce Wars" and the troubles scholars encounter when dealing with the Joyce Estate and the famous author's grumpy grandson, the only living James Joyce descendant (who paraphrases Shakespeare, wishing for "a plague on all [the Joycean scholars'] houses!"). The article is almost 15 years old and emphasizes the impatient wait for Kidd's supposedly superior edition of Ulysses which we still have not seen or heard about for a while.

There's also a Boston Globe article posted on the Globe writer's blog about the quirky, reclusive Kidd entitled "A Plummet from Grace" which describes how Kidd was put in charge of a brand new James Joyce Research Center at Boston University right around the time of his exposing the Joycean scholarly giants but that now (or, at the time of the article which is 2002) he was completely out of academia "amid allegations that he sexually harassed and unfairly failed some of his students and concerns about his propensity for befriending a range of creatures, from worms to rats to pigeons."

The piece describes Kidd as jobless, in poor health, and a frequent feeder and friend of pigeons on the sidewalk. The quotes from his friends ("I'm very concerned about him") don't sound very good and, not too long after the article, Kidd died in his early 50s with his highly sought-after edition of Ulysses unpublished. The president of the publishing company W.W. Norton explains that Kidd's Ulysses, if ever published at all, won't be for at least two decades.

For a taste of the "Joyce Wars" that Kidd sparked in the 80s, you can read the exchange of letters from The New York Review of Books that includes a response from Hans Walter Gabler to his young challenger and even John Updike chiming in to add a few punches to the defeated Gabler. Kidd's response at the end of the exchange displays what made him such an engaging scholar (he writes satirically looking back from the year 2088) but also one who his contemporaries hated.

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Roger Ebert is certainly one of the more worthwhile Tweeters to follow and a week or so ago he brought my attention to an article reviewing a new book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro. The review he linked to was a bit long and boring (and I can't find it now) but I've been reading some other reviews of Shapiro's book and it's apparently very good. In it, Shapiro examines the old debate over whether or not William Shakespeare from Stratford, an actor and businessman of no high education, actually wrote the works that are attributed to him. From the California Literary Review:

How could the ill educated, penny-pinching son of a glove maker from rural Warwickshire be credited as the author of the greatest plays and poems in the English language?

Beginning around 1800, the hunt started to find the “real” Shakespeare, the noble visionary who had exalted the spiritual struggles of humankind and celebrated the comedy of errors of our daily lives. 

In this engaging and well-researched book, James Shapiro charts the course of this pursuit of truth and beauty, arriving at conclusions that reflect both his insightful scholarship and common sense. Amassing an unassailable body of evidence, Shapiro proves that William Shakespeare of Stratford did indeed write the plays and poems credited to him, but not always as a solitary creative genius.

Shapiro gives thorough and sensitive attention to the opponents of William Shakespeare's authorship, giving them "a fair hearing" but he dismisses them in the process. The book doesn't merely present an argument though, it also tells the story of the raging Shakespeare debate that's gone on for centuries with so-called anti-Stratfordians (those who hold that William Shakespeare of Stratford did not author the plays) counting among their ranks such prominent figures as Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James and Sigmund Freud. These crusaders against the phony playwright from Stratford are split into groups of those who believe the true author was either Francis Bacon (these are the "Baconists"), Edward de Vere the 17th Earl of Oxford (the "Oxfordians"), Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley, or other less popular figures. Shapiro's book describes how Freud was a staunch proponent of the Oxfordian theory to the point where he was nearly obsessed with it.

I know little about the debate or the facts behind each side but I am partial to the Baconists because of what I read in Richard Maurice Bucke's book Cosmic Consciousness which actually introduced me to this whole authorship question. Bucke's book is an enlightening study of the evolution of consciousness in which he proposes that mankind is evolving to the point where our entire species will be capable of achieving the condition of "cosmic consciousness" which is basically the sense of one-ness with the entire universe. He proposes that more and more figures throughout history have achieved this state and he examines each known figure up until the time of the study (1901 or thereabouts) including Francis Bacon (pictured here) who, Bucke contests, must have been the author of the Sonnets which are no doubt an ode to the cosmic sense.

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I will have much more to say about Dr. Bucke's great book in the future but for now, since I brought him up, I must pass along the amazing story of his life. The bearded fellow on the left was a graduate of McGill Medical School and had a distinguished professional career, eventually being elected President of the Psychological Section of the British Medical Association in 1888 and President of the American Medico-Psychological Association in 1890 but he was also a good pal of Walt Whitman's and knew much of Whitman's work, including the enormous Leaves of Grass, by heart. It's his background that I find most fascinating, though:

Richard Maurice Bucke was born in England a year before his parents emigrated to Canada and settled down on a remote rural farm outside of London, Ontario. His father was a highly educated Cambridge man who knew seven languages and had a library of thousands of books. He taught his son Latin and turned him loose among the books to educate himself, the boy received no formal schooling and just doing the hard work of a farmer, years before the automobile or electricity. When Richard was seven his mother died and his father remarried but then when he was 17 his step-mother also died and Richard Maurice Bucke decided to set out from the farm and go see the world.

He went due south across the border into the United States and traveled around for three years doing whatever work he could find including working as a gardener in Columbus, Ohio, a railroad worker in Cincinnati and a deck-hand on a Mississippi steamboat. He eventually got a job as a driver in a wagon-train of 26 wagons that were to cross the Plains and head over to the "western edge of Mormon territory" in what is now the state of Nevada, a dangerous journey because at that time there were no permanent white settlements for the last 1,200 miles of the journey and "the peacefulness of the Indians was definitely not to be depended on." They journeyed for five months, eventually making it to Salt Lake City where Bucke received his pay and decided to keep going westward with a few others. These adventurers crossed the Rockies and started encountering roving bands of Native Americans who resented the presence of white men (considering what was going on at that time in history, the 1850s, it's understandable) and attacked them on sight. They had to fight their way from camp to camp and eventually ran out of ammunition and supplies and Bucke and a companion traveled the last 150 miles surviving on nothing but flour stirred into hot water until they staggered into a mountain trading camp and collapsed.

They rested there for a little while and then started off again, crossing the deserts of the southwestern United States until they reached a gold mining community of 100 white men scattered over 1,600 miles of territory "without laws, without courts, without a church or a school." Bucke stayed there for a little while working as a gold miner and he befriended a pair of brothers, the Grosh brothers, who had discovered vast deposits of silver in what would become known as the Comstock Lode, an area in western Nevada. The brothers kept their discovery quiet and traveled along with Bucke looking for more silver deposits but the harsh mountain environment brought disaster as one of the brothers died and the other brother, along with Richard Maurice Bucke, decided to try to cross over the mountains to head to the Pacific Coast, even though it was the winter time! The other brother died along the way and Bucke, with both feet frozen was rescued on the brink of freezing to death by a mining party. Bucke had to have the whole of one foot and part of the other amputated and spent an entire winter in a hospital bed. When he got out he was 21 years old (!!) and thus had come of the age when he could receive his deceased mother's inheritance and he used this money to put himself through college and medical school.

Years later, he would eventually have a mind-blowing spiritual experience one night while traveling home after an evening spent reading Whitman with friends and he was inspired to thoroughly study this "cosmic consciousness" and those figures throughout history who had experienced similar bursts of cosmic illumination. I'll eventually have much more to say about his book but that's all for now, folks. 

Links: Beach, Joyce, and a lost Guru

As I type this, the Padres are losing 10-0 to the Marlins and Jaroslav Halak is becoming a Montreal Canadiens playoff hero, withstanding a barrage of shots from the vaunted Washington Capitals. Just as I typed his name, he allowed the first Caps goal of the game on their 52nd shot.

I've got a few links to bring attention to.

I found another article on Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, this one from the Irish Times. The article has another cool photo of Beach and Joyce with JJ sporting his dapper suit, walking stick, and sneakers. Just like the last piece I discussed, this one begins with some extremely high praise for Beach:

SYLVIA BEACH would not have considered herself a candidate for sainthood: yet it is hard not to feel a certain reverence and awe when faced with someone who so assiduously and indefatigably advanced the difficult cause of literary Modernism in the early decades of the last century.

But the article doesn't have such high praise for the editing work done on her letters which have been gathered in a new book (it is this book that generated these recent Beach news items), noting many factual errors and faulty editing.

Speaking of which: an anonymous commenter had some very interesting things to say regarding my recent post on the "new" Finnegans Wake that recently came out. He brought my attention to John Kidd, a deceased Joyce scholar who had come under fire not too long ago for criticizing Danis Rose, the same editor who is largely responsible for this new "corrected" Wake. In an incisive article for The New York Review of Books, Kidd shed light on the new "Reader's Edition" of Ulysses that Mr. Rose had edited and released in the late 90s, changing much of Joyce's writing in the process to the point where the Joyce Estate went to court demanding that James Joyce's name be stripped from the book's cover and spine. They cited that Rose had made almost 7,000 editorial changes "that do not appear in any existing manuscript or edition, [and] are so anti-Joycean that the author is Danis Rose, not James Joyce."
It's actually pretty funny to read Kidd ripping Rose a new one. Rose described his own new edition of Ulysses as one which "liberates the text… and makes it possible for the first time for the general reader to relish every nuance and beauty of Joyce’s masterpiece” and he brags about smuggling Ulysses "out of the ivory tower of the academics" to bring it back to the common man in the marketplace. But before his version of the book even begins there's 80 pages of ridiculous prefatory material (preface, three-part introduction, appendix, footnotes, and something called a Technical Appendix discussing Rose's novel techniques) which "alone will intimidate all but the professional textologist or software engineer."

I'm still reading up on John Kidd after the interesting info the commenter passed along but I can say that, after thumbing through the two latest editions of the James Joyce Quarterly I don't agree with his negative assessment of it (the commenter paraphrased him describing it as a "circle-jerk") but it could be that they've changed things up since Kidd's scathing indictment.

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Along the same subject of forging an artist's words...One of my favorite hip hop emcees of all time, Guru from the group Gang Starr, passed away from cancer last week at the age of 43. The sad news comes a few months after he'd entered into a coma spawning swirling rumors of his untimely death. But last week it happened for real. Guru was the voice behind the legendary Gang Starr along with producer DJ Premier and he's responsible for some of the greatest hip hop songs of all time including one of my favorites, "Above the Clouds" featuring Wu-Tang Clan's Inspectah Deck:

Guru's intelligent lyrics provided a major influence throughout my teenage years and, along with the Wu-Tang Clan, helped inspire me (amidst a materialistic, dummy culture prominent amongst the youth in my hometown of Staten Island, New York) to become, or at least try to become, an intellectual. Over melodic, booming DJ Premier beats, Guru glorified the mind ("Street knowledge, intellect and spirituality: my survival package as I deal with reality") and downplayed material objects ("My sense of self and my mental health is much more powerful than any inch of wealth").

The controversy that has arisen after his death has been more than a bit discomforting for me. A slimy, sleezeball named "DJ Solar" who had been working with Guru the last few years (and was possibly involved with him romantically) apparently would not allow Guru's family members to see him on his deathbed, he also tried to prevent long time collaborator DJ Premier from seeing his old friend. The "official" statement that was released after his death seemed to overly praise Solar and there are rumors that he's trying to get in on the royalties from the deceased artist's estate. Things have gotten so bad that Guru's father, a prominent Massachusetts lawyer, had to send police to recover his son's body from the covetous Solar.

Here are two videos that perfectly paint the picture of the man trying to gain off the death of a so-called friend. The first is from a recent interview with MTV's Sway who openly grilled a sweaty, sunglasses-wearing Solar (the video has a bunch of segments, it is the second in the sequence which I bring attention to). The second is an interview with Solar and Guru which...speaks for itself.

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Changing things up...A cool piece in GQ magazine about perhaps the most unique (and entertaining) player in baseball.

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This sounds very cool: a marathon where actors are reading Joyce's books aloud. And they all drink beer afterwards. It's the James Joyce Ramble. Sign me up.

And, last but not least, the Ulysses spacecraft discovers our solar system's biggest comet. Somehow, the article doesn't allude to the "Ithaca" chapter.

Home Stand Part II (Padres-Giants Game Story)

I've been house sitting at my friend/co-worker's home for the past four days, feeding his dog, watching sports on his TV, and sleeping in his guest bed with my girlfriend. It's the first time I've done something like that and it was an interesting feeling, especially this morning when we gathered all of our things and left. It felt like we'd been staying at a nice hotel that had an exuberant English bulldog for us to hang out with. I first went to my friend (let's call him Joe)'s house on Tuesday night so he could show me around, explain what I needed to do, and have me sleep over so I could drive him to the airport at 4:30 in the morning. We ate pizza and watched the Laker game (fittingly, because heavy clouds were gathering all day, they were playing the Thunder) before going to bed and then popped up at 4 AM and drove in the dark to the airport.

After dropping him off, I went back to my apartment (which is pretty close to the airport) while the sun crept up giving a gray tint to everything and I hurried inside to get some sleep before having to wake up again and go to work.

The weather that day would be very un-San Diego-like, chilly with varying degrees of heavy downpouring showers and dark clouds. I spent most of the afternoon trying to secure someone to come with me to see the Padres-Giants game at Petco Park in the afternoon at 3:30, a game for which I'd been given free tickets. At about 2:45 my buddy Allan indicated that he was ready and willing and so I picked him up after leaving work at 3 and cruised southward through heavy rain showers, heading towards downtown San Diego and hoping the rain would let up so we could watch some baseball.

Thankfully, it did. But it was still freezing, windy, and drizzly. It was as though the San Francisco Giants had brought their cloudy Bay Area weather with them. I recalled how, in August 2008, I ventured up to San Francisco for a couple days to visit a potential grad school and went to a Giants-Braves game that I had to leave early (something I never do) because it was just too cold and windy. This time, though, we would bear the elements. We sat in the upper deck just behind home plate and watched as the Padres finished off a sweep of the Giants for their 6th win in a row, putting them in first place.

A chilly Wednesday afternoon game in April (that wasn't even televised) with an unspectacular pitching matchup is about as nondescript as a baseball game gets but, as I looked over the lineups, I found a way to be excited about seeing such players as Giants leftfielder John Bowker whose defensive ability Baseball Prospectus 2010 likened to a James Thurber-invented monster named Todal: "It sounds like rabbits screaming and smells of old, unopened rooms...you'd think his glove work was so Todal-y awful you dared not go looking for him, lest he gleep you." Sounds cool!

Bowker didn't do anything to attract attention in a game the Padres completely dominated. Starter Jon Garland shut down a meek lineup (7 innings, 6 hits, 1 run) and the Padres struck big blows (homers by Adrian Gonzalez and Nick Hundley) and tortured crappy starter Todd Wellemeyer with their patience, drawing four straight walks in the second inning. Wellemeyer was wild throughout the game but somehow managed to gut out 4 innings only giving up 2 runs. It was the Padres' continued propensity to pound bullpens that would put the game away, as they knocked 6 hits and three runs off the Giant penmen.

The game was pretty sparsely attended and featured a very diverse crowd including many bundled-up elderly folk. By the 9th inning, whatever warmth the sun provided was gone as it had retreated behind the stadium walls and most of the attendees had retreated along with it. Thankfully, we stayed and got to see Pablo Sandoval swing from his heels at a 3-1 pitch and make perfect contact on an absolute missile of a homerun. It was undoubtedly one of the hardest-hit homeruns I've ever seen in person (and I've been at Shea Stadium for a doubleheader with a couple Mark McGwire bombs) as Sandoval laced a line drive to dead centerfield in the major league's biggest park. Here's a video of the hit.

I walked out of the game proud of a team that I'm growing to really enjoy. They'd swept two straight division rivals handily (and, as of this writing, they've continued their streak with their 8th win in a row) and my bold prediction that they'd win 80-82 games and finish ahead of the Giants seemed more realizable than ever. Yes, it's only April. But this team looks very good. My blog voice is still a developing whisper but I look forward to yelling in the faces of the many analysts who have thoughtlessly brushed aside the Friars as 2010 cellar dwellers. Go Pads!

Sylvia Beach and Company

"If the world's dwindling independent bookstores have a patron saint...she is Sylvia Beach"

Quoted from a nice little article in Sunday's New York Times about Sylvia Beach who was the first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses at a time when nobody would publish the great work of art because in 1921 it had been declared "obscene."

Originally born in Baltimore, Maryland, Miss Beach eventually moved to Paris where she established an English-language bookstore in 1919, Shakespeare and Company, that became a hang-out for many of the famous writers of the time whom she befriended including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and especially James Joyce. She met Joyce in the summer of 1920 and timidly approached him to ask "Is this the great James Joyce?" As Richard Ellman describes,

She expressed her admiration for his books, and he asked her what she did in Paris. When he heard the name of her bookstore, he smiled gently and wrote it down in a little notebook which he nearsightedly held close to his eyes. He promised to come see her, and in fact arrived at her shop the next day. He wore, she noticed, a dark blue serge suit, a black felt hat on the back of his head, and rather dirt tennis shoes, with a twirling cane contributing an incongruously dapper element to this costume.

When I first read that I laughed out loud. Joyce rocking dirty tennis shoes in 1920 reminds me of Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Maybe he's wearing tennis shoes in that photo above. When they met that day, Joyce told her of his financial troubles. For the past five years he'd been engaged in the process of completing Ulysses and trying to get it published and he wasn't earning any steady income  while trying to feed his wife and two children. Sylvia Beach would eventually offer to publish Joyce's great masterwork which was being rejected by the publishers Joyce sought because it had been declared "obscene" for its sexual language.

The stories of the stress they had to go through to publish Ulysses are very entertaining (similar to those which I described regarding Finnegans Wake not too long ago) as, while the typeset was being put together and proofs printed, Joyce would cover the proof pages with notes and additions to the text. These handwritten notes were almost indecipherable and typists had to be hired to put it all together. One of these typists, hired to type up the "Circe" episode---the longest and dirtiest of the whole book---was getting along fine until her husband glanced at the manuscript and threw it into the fire in a fit of rage. The only other person with a copy of those manuscripts was a lawyer in New York named John Quinn who had been collecting and purchasing manuscript portions of Ulysses directly from Joyce. Quinn would not give up the manuscripts but then, after correspondence from Beach and Joyce, he gave in and had the pages photographed and the draft for the episode was completed.

Beach's efforts to help Joyce (both professionally and--often lending him money--financially) were vital to the publication of Ulysses and she holds an important spot in history because of that but it was a draining and stressful enterprise. The resilient woman would later write in her memoir, "It seemed natural to me that the efforts and sacrifices on my part should be proportionate to the greatness of the work I was publishing."

Home Stand (Padres vs Diamondbacks Game Story)

My Sunday afternoon was spent soaking up the bright spring sun sitting with my ladyfriend and 21,000 other people in Petco Park watching the Padres finish off a sweep of their weekend series with the rival Diamondbacks. I say "rival" mainly because there's a pretty large contingent of people from Arizona, "zonies" as they're called, in San Diego and it usually leads to a sense of rivalry (and post game gloating in the stadium exodus) amongst the game's attendees and the local downtown San Diego residents around the ballpark. Last year, following the ending of a Diamondbacks victory over the Padres which I'd attended at Petco along with my lady (the first game I brought her to), we were walking through the loud and crowded city streets to my car and saw a huge lit up sign from an apartment building window flashing "D'backs win!"

This was the first Sunday afternoon home game for the Padres and, since I had nothing else going on today, it seemed like a great way to initiate my (live) 2010 baseball experience. We parked for free on the corner of 10th and E Streets, only a four-block walk away from the stadium but hanging out in my car eating pregame veggie burgers delayed us a bit and we arrived at the end of the 1st inning. I decided to splurge a bit for my 1st game of the season and shelled out $58 bucks apiece for two great seats in the very first row of the 2nd level. The seats provided an absolutely perfect view of the diamond and we were uncovered out under the beaming sun. This was our view:

You can see the big "Opening Week" decorative sign painted on the grass and I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever been to an "Opening Week" baseball game, although I don't know if it's something all team's paint on their home grass. The Pads' special week had begun with an anomalous 17-2 demolishing of the visiting Atlanta Braves only to have the Braves deflate and defeat them by a combined 12-3 score over the next two games. Friday night the Diamondbacks came into town and pitcher Edwin Jackson carved through the San Diego lineup for 6 shutout innings before the home team rallied for 6 runs on the Arizona bullpen capped off by Chase Headley's walkoff three-run bomb that was the most exciting play of the young 2010 Padres season. They carried momentum and confidence into last night's 5-0 defeat of the D'backs (although they could only muster 2 runs off of a shaky Kris Benson) and so I assumed today would be a perfect game to watch in person; the home team going for a sweep on a sunny day game.

The game featured a very interesting pitching matchup, the Padres sending out crafty young lefthander Wade LeBlanc, a Triple-A callup who barely missed out on the 5th spot in the rotation to open the year and was stepping in for the injured veteran Chris Young. He was opposed by Arizona righty Ian Kennedy, a former Yankee prospect acquired in the winter's biggest trade. The two twenty-five year old hurlers didn't throw very hard and both relied on their changeups to generate lots of swings-and-misses. LeBlanc obviously had some nerves working against him to start off as he allowed a run on two hits and walk to start the game, but he settled down pretty nicely and kept the crimson-clad Arizona hitters whiffing at changeups to the tune of 7 strikeouts in 5 innings, with that first inning run the only one he allowed. Kennedy had a similar pitching line (5 IP, 7 Ks) but never seemed to be in any trouble and worked confidently, only allowing one extra base hit and generating lots of flailing swings with his changeup. For a while the Padre hitters couldn't make good contact against him and just kept tipping foul balls, the only hard-struck ball a double by Everth Cabrera when Kennedy was almost at 100 pitches. He surrendered only 2 hits and didn't allow a run. Interestingly, both pitchers hit a single against one another.

When the young soft-tossing starters departed and the firearmed relievers took over, the feeling of the game changed sharply and you could hear it. The loud crack of the bat, heard rarely throughout the first five innings, resonated on Edward Mujica's first pitch of the sixth, a fastball that Mark Reynolds knocked into the second deck in left field putting his team ahead 2-0. Mujica settled down and didn't allow another baserunner over his two innings but the D'backs did make four loud linedrive outs. The Padres' first look at a reliever (former Friar farmhand Leo Rosales) saw them put two runners aboard with no outs but a foul popout and a nifty double play from Mark Reynolds at third quieted the rally.

It would soon become apparent that Diamondbacks manager A.J. Hinch had made a mistake in only bringing Rosales in to pitch one inning. The pitcher's spot was due up next in the Arizona order when Hinch brought Rosales into the game and it seemed like a perfect opportunity for a double switch but Hinch instead opted to restrict Rosales to one inning and replace him with a pinch hitter in the 7th. The pinch hitter, Gerardo Parra, flailed at a fastball far out of the strike zone and, when it was the Padres' turn to hit in the bottom of the seventh, reliever Aaron Heilman entered the game for Parra. I knew this would be a big boon to the Padres and noted to my girlfriend how Heilman had often sucked with the Mets and practically played his way out of town. The Padre rally got started right away with Scott Hairston smacking a homerun to left field. Heilman managed to get two more outs but the Pads showed the same two-out resilience they'd shown in the previous two games. Everth Cabrera singled and stole second, setting the stage for the other Hairston brother, acrobatic utility infielder Jerry, Jr., who hit a double over the leftfielder's head to tie the game at 2-2. That was it for Aaron Heilman. I kind of felt bad for him as he skulked slowly off the field after being removed from the game. I thought of his past pleads to the morons running the Mets to let him be a starter instead of a reliever that always went unheeded.

The next Arizona pitcher, Juan Gutierrez, entered the game facing Adrian Gonzalez with the go-ahead run at second and didn't offer A-Gon anything to hit, eventually just giving up and issuing a free pass after missing the first three pitches. To the plate stepped the burgeoning star Chase Headley and he continued his breakout 2010 season with a smash into the left centerfield gap that plated two runs and then himself as he came across to score on what was ruled a triple but the play had the excitement of an inside-the-park homerun. The crowd was loud and joyful and the game was all but over. San Diego closer Heath Bell allowed a run before finishing off an exciting 5-3 win and the series sweep.

Further Notes:
- In the bottom of the 8th, manager Hinch tried to show everyone that he could, in fact, execute a double switch but it was too late and his efforts seemed like overmanaging. His decision was to shuffle up 4 positions in a lineup card sleight of hand that left the scoreboard operators puzzled and picking the wrong card. Going into the gory details, he brought in pitcher Blaine Boyer and inserted him into the leadoff spot where leftfielder Conor Jackson was, then brought in Stephen Drew to play shortstop and hit in the pitcher's spot, moved starting shortstop Tony Abreu to third, thirdbaseman Mark Reynolds to first, and firstbaseman Rusty Ryal to left field. This merry-go-round didn't show up on the scoreboard for a while after it was announced, then showed up incorrectly. I entered it correctly in my (free) scorecard, though so ha!

- I do think it's a smart move on Hinch's part to bat Conor Jackson leadoff and I'm glad to see such a break from tradition as Jackson is a big guy who doesn't physically profile as a "typical" leadoff hitter but always has a high on-base percentage. Jackson looked impressive today, although he had only one hit he smoked two line drives right at fielders.

- Neither starting pitcher recorded a win in the game and their combined career big league record sits at 5 wins, 6 losses. But they both showed the stuff of solid major league pitchers and both should stay in a big league rotation for years.

- I described Jerry Hairston, Jr. as "acrobatic" above because this weekend he made some spectacular plays in the field and, taking note of him during the between-inning infield warm-ups, he handles the ball with the finesse of a Harlem Globetrotter or old barnstorming Gashouse Gang infielder or something. It's really fun to watch.

- I don't think I've seen this comparison made before, but Nick Hundley reminds me of A's catcher Kurt Suzuki but doesn't get anywhere near as much praise. They're very similar hitters (.238/.313/.406 for Hundley last year in the worst hitter's park versus .274/.313/.421 for Suzuki who also plays in a big park) and have reputations for being good defensive catchers. They're both 26 years old (Hundley is almost exactly one month older), but Suzuki has been doing his thing for a few years now whereas Hundley is in second full season. As a fan of both teams, I'm pretty happy with who we've got behind the plate for the next few years.

- In the first paragraph I mentioned the first game I brought my girlfriend to. Justin Upton put on a show that night, basically winning the game singlehandedly. He launched two homeruns and was responsible for all three Arizona runs in a 3-1 while also gunning down a runner at the plate. In today's game he was quiet: 0 for 3 with a walk.

I'll be back there on Wednesday afternoon to see Padres-Giants.