Dock Ellis, the former Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher, recalls his day of excellence.

Three years to the day that he hit his 500th home run, Alex Rodriguez, breaking a 12-day, 47 at-bat homerless drought, hit his 600th home run in a 5-1 Yankee victory over Toronto, becoming only the 7th man to reach that milestone. SI.com’s Joe Sheehan thinks it’s inevitable that Rodriguez will one day hold the all-time record now possessed by Barry Bonds. “Rodriguez’s early start leaves him plenty of room to decline, as well as to suffer the minor injuries that often chip away at an older player’s at-bats, and still chase down Bonds with room to spare.” Below is Sheehan’s “very conservative estimate” of the remainder of A-Rod’s career, beginning with the rest of 2010, showing Year, Projected Number of Plate Appearances, and Projected Home Runs. “If this path were to hold,” predicts Sheehan, “Rodriguez would hit his 763rd home run early in the the 2018 season.” He would be 43 years.

2010 220 12
2011 595 31
2012 561 27
2013 526 24
2014 508 21
2015 455 19
2016 430 15
2017 397 13
2018 323 11
2019 211 6

It’s hard to convince any Yankee fan who has grown up in the love fest era of Joe Torre and Derek Jeter that George Steinbrenner, who died today, is or was anything but a kindly old man who benignly sprinkled money on gifted young men fortunate enough to wear the pinstripes. You have to be older to appreciate Steinbrenner for the blustering comic villain that he was, not the feckless loudmouth who lives on in episodes of Seinfeld, but a despot in a blue blazer and white turtleneck who thought he could win championships for the greatest city in the world by dominating the back pages of the tabloids with bluster and invective.

Like cheesy reality television and genital-flashing starlets and so many of the the other circuses which we alternately deplore and enjoy, Steinbrenner’s ignorant bullying of his managers and players was thought to be great entertainment. His torturing of managers, including the classy Dick Howser, the iconic Yogi Berra, and most especially the insecure, alcoholic Billy Martin, was appalling. His nasty badgering of stars like Reggie Jackson and Dave Winfield showed his ignorance. His petulant harangues over the failures of his young players was simply disgraceful. A commissioner with guts would have fined him until he shut up. It wasn’t until Steinbrenner himself went beyond the beyond and paid the gambler Howard Spira to find damaging information on Winfield that Steinbrenner finally received some punishment for his crimes against baseball.

Ironically, it was during that absence that the seeds of Steinbrenner’s rehabilitation were sown. General Manager Gene Michael drafted Jeter, Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera who formed the nucleus of the modern dynasty. When Torre was hired in 1996, a genuinely new Yankees took the stage, one that was accessible, professional, smart and triumphant, a team that New Yorkers have been proud to root for and have supported far more enthusiastically that Bronx Bombastics of King George’s prime. During these last fifteen years, as an increasingly enriched Steinbrenner took a back seat to the real stars of his franchise, his image evolved into that of a somewhat demanding but kindly old man. As his mind faded, others forgot as well. As for me, I’ll cherish the memory of Steinbrenner, angry about losing a game to the Dodgers in the 1981 World Series, breaking his hand by punching a wall in an elevator, and then claiming he hurt it fighting with classless Dodger fans who had impugned the honor of the Yankees.

It’s a moment that should go on his plaque in Cooperstown.

The topic of this article is supposed to be Why Men Don’t Like to Dress Up, but I’m having some difficulty with it, because the premise is obviously untrue.  Men love to dress up.

If you have any doubts, go to a football game—NFL, NCAA. Look in the stands. You’ll see tens of thousands of men who have taken enormous care with their day’s wardrobe, starting next to the skin with the luckiest of their lucky T-shirts and building to the regulation team parkas. They will wear the official jersey of a current star, or the throwback jersey of a retired idol in order to help draw the mystic power of mighty ancestors into the day’s conflict. They will top off the ensemble with a well-chosen cap, or imitation leather helmet, or plastic pig snout, or styrofoam cheese head, and they will feel that they have dressed perfectly for the occasion.

And they will not be alone in their sartorial exactitude. Civil War reenactors in blue and gray will scour the hinterlands to find the precise regimental button to wear to their mock conflagrations.  Star Trek devotees will never be caught wearing items from their Deluxe Captain Kirk Uniform Packages from the original series when they meant to be wearing Gold Kirk Uniform Shirts from the 2009 film. A yachtsman will have his special windbreaker and a golfer will have his special sweater and slacks, and many a tennis player will continue to sport his short McEnroe-ish tennis shorts long after his slender McEnroe-ish figure has joined John in retirement. One need look no further than the example of Mr. Elmer Fudd, who always wears the same cap with the side flaps snapped together at the crown whenever he hunts that cwazy wabbit.

What most men do less and less, and what many men no longer do at all, is dress up for work. There was a time, as we see on Mad Men, when men were expected to dress for the office, and that the more successful you were, the better you were expected to dress. None of this came to anyone as a shock, since the world was still governed by a relatively small elite, and they mandated fashion and taste. Appearances mattered, often too much: men who had the right look often rose higher than men of greater ability who didn’t.  And even those who challenged the powers that be—Martin Luther King Jr., Lenny Bruce, Chuck Berry—wore versions of the suit and tie. They wanted to change, challenge, join the power structure, not destroy it, and their clothes demonstrated that.

But as Mad Men shows, not all men take to a suit and tie. Don Draper looks great and takes pleasure in the power that his appearance brings him. But Pete Campbell, young and unformed, doesn’t so much wear his suit as is worn by it; the suit is like the outline of a drawing that he is filling in. And for poor Harry Crane, deskbound and thickening, wearing a suit is a yoke of servitude, another obligation that society, family, marriage imposes upon him.

The sixties, of course, changed everything.  The new fashion freedom men enjoyed  fell on peacocks and drones alike. But over the years, the easygoing spirit of Casual Friday took over, and in many places became Sloppy Whenever. “Suits’’ became a synonym for executive power that was clueless and stodgy. Instead of the Don Drapers pulling the Harry Cranes to dress up, the Cranes pulled the Drapers down.  “The only people in Los Angeles who wear a tie,’’ a friend from the television business recently noted, “are the agents.’’

“It’s appalling how men dress today,’’ Tim Gunn, the creative director of Liz Claiborne said to me in a recent phone call. “More and more, I’m meeting men who have attained some professional stature, who not only don’t wear a tie, but who don’t know how to tie a tie.  I’m flabbergasted. It’s like they’re wearing a sign that says `I have arrested development.’ What are they signifying?’’

What indeed.  Back in 2005, the current chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank Ben Bernanke gave a speech in which he answered that very question. “The biggest downside of my current job is that I have to wear a suit to work,’’ the former scholar and researcher told his audience. “Wearing uncomfortable clothes on purpose is an example of what. . .Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence taught economists to call ‘signalling.’ You have to do it to show that you take your official responsibilities seriously.’’

Bernanke’s right (although you’d think a guy who’s able to understand credit default swaps could find himself a comfortable suit.) Men should be as willing to demonstrate their pride in their families and their professions as they do in their teams. And don’t forget: a lot more people are going to admire the way you look in a suit and tie than the way you rock a cheese head.

This article originally appeared in BG, the magazine of Bergdorf Goodman.

No point crying in one’s beer, but like Armando Galarraga of the Detroit Tigers, the US Soccer team was deprived not merely of an accomplishment, but of place in history. No team in World Cup history has come back to win after trailing by a 2-0 score, and yet the US would have done just that, had not referee Koman Coulibaly disallowed what appeared to be a perfectly spotless goal by Maurice Edu; if anything, the American Michael Bradley was obviously tackled and should have been awarded a penalty kick. The call was inexplicable and unexplained; nobody knows what Coulibaly thought he saw. Oh well. The most memorable moment of the comeback, however, was the first goal scored by the US, a shot by Landon Donovan that hot up like a mortal rocket at about a 75 degree angle, seeming to take the goalie’s eyebrows with it. Fantastic.

One should always take the opportunity to associate oneself with the Marx Brothers. Yesterday Ginny and Cara and I went to Belmont Park in Queens for a day of races capped off by the Belmont Stakes. It was fetid afternoon in the metropolitan apple, but sitting in the lower grandstand, under the overhang, we enjoyed a modest breeze, and everything was relaxed. It was a very pleasant and even lazy atmosphere; very 19th century. We best all the races, and the best we did was short-odds winner that paid us $4.40. Otherwise, Ginny had a strong run of second place  finishers and in the tenth race picked two of four in the Super Perfecta, which means she had a rather ordinary Imperfecta. In the big race, the 14:1 Drosselmeyer under Mike Smith emerged from a starless field and legged out his rivals in a five-wide cavalry charge to the wire, and almost as quickly, off we went to the parking lot.

For all those who said that baseball had no precedent for overruling the blatantly erroneous call of umpire Jim Joyce and validating the perfect game that Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga had so obviously pitched, please travel with me back to Yankee Stadium on the sultry afternoon of July 24, 1983, when a two-run home run by George Brett of the Kansas City Royals was voided because an umpire ruled that Brett had too much pine tar on his bat. The Royals protested–at first vehemently, on the field, and then rather more decorously in the office of American League president Lee MacPhail, who decided that the rule was a technical one and since Brett “did not violate the spirit of the rules” with his tarry bat, he voided the Yankee victory, restored the home run, and ordered the game resumed from the point of Brett’s home run.

MacPhail evidently had not only the good sense that Bud Selig lacks, but a better appreciation of baseball’s role in American life. “The spirit of the rules” is precisely the sort of thing that needs to be invoked at this time. It needs to be invoked because Galarraga was so obviously jobbed, because nobody would be in any injured by an act of magnaminity, because no untoward precedent will be set because nothing like this will happen again in our lifetimes, because once, just once, I would like to see a person of public responsibility strike a blow for justice. And what if something like it did happen again? Well, let’s leave it to our descendants to act in the spirit of the rules as they sort through the issues. They couldn’t do a less enlightened job than Selig.

Ginny and I spent a pleasant hour Monday night watching the HBO documentary about the Philadelphia Flyers of the mid-seventies, the famous Broad Street Bullies, whose adventures Ginny and I much enjoyed. Indeed, some of the footage was a little like seeing home movies. The famous fog game in the Cup Finals in 1975? That was on the night of our college graduation. Game 5? Saw it at Francis Nathans’ house in Bucks County the day after we were married, the night the famous misdaventures of our wedding night. The Game 6 clincher? We saw it with Peter Westbrook at True Light Manor. And though the show caught some of what it was to root for the near-criminal Flyers, it somehow missed the essence: they were very brave, and they just never, ever, ever backed down. It’s true, as the program stated, that their heyday was pretty nearly over after the Montreal Canadiens swept the Flyers in the 1976 Finals (but as Bill Barber told me a few years later, the presence of the injured Bernie Parent would have rewritten the story.) But for me, their greatest moment came in Game 4 of a 1977 quarter-finale series. Trailing a very good Toronto Maple Leaf team two games to one, and behind in Game 4 by 5-2 with six minutes left, the Flyers rallied to tie on goals by Tom Bladon, Mel Bridgeman and the incredible Bobby Clarke, and won after 19 minutes of overtime on a slap shot by the cool, brilliant Reggie Leach.  That was the Flyers I loved.

Bird, Hammer, Hound and Moose/The Broad Street Bullies Are on the Loose.

It’s one of the few poems I know by heart.

The Final Four is in full swing, hockey and basketball playoffs are virtually moments away, and baseball’s Opening Day is in the air. So let’s talk a little football.

This week the NFL meets to discuss changes in the overtime rules. Specifically, they are meeting because they can no longer ignore the complaints that sudden death just isn’t fair. Or, to put it a bit more precisely, they can’t ignore the complains that sudden death, which has always been a bit unfair, has become, in a day and age when teams kick off from the 30 and when field goal kickers are pretty automatic, almost prohibitively unfair to the team that loses the coin toss in the overtime round. In response to this, the league, which doesn’t want to look like a bunch of damn liberals and just mandate that both teams get to possess the ball, is contemplating looking like a bunch of liberals on a congressional subcommittee, and mandating that both teams get to possess the ball, unless the first team to possess the ball scores a touchdown.

Now what in the name of Kill Bubba Kill Smith is going on here? First of all, having been reared on Butkus, Bednarik, Nitschke, Huff, Lambert, the Fearsome Foursome, the Steel Curtain, the Purple People Eaters and the Steel Curtain, I like football where the teams play a little defense. I hated that Green Bay-Arizona shootout in the playoffs this year, where both teams’ defenses resembled nothing so much as a group of pylons. Football is about offense and defense, and yes, it’s an advantage in sudden death to have the ball first, but that why need the defense needs some big fast mean sumbitches who can stop the other guys on third down.

But, yes, it is true that advances in the kicking game have given offenses tremendous advantage–better field position to start, and a shorter distance to cover to reach field goal range. But the answer to the problem needs to be a football answer, not a non-football answer, like acknowledging that defense is a secondary part of the game or that both sides should possess the ball (hey, in a game, neither side is actually guaranteed a possession!)

My answer is simple: eliminate the overtime kick-off. Treat the overtime period the way we three the second and fourth periods, and just play the game from point where the clock ran out. Obviously this will result in games where one team enjoys better field position than the other, but that position will result from the game action that preceded it, not from clean slate kick-off that gives the coin toss winner an advantage. And think of the quandries this will create for the coaches late in regulation–should they try to drive for the win, or punt the ball and set stick the other team deep in its own end?

Last Wednesday, the sports pages of The New York Times had two wonderful anecdotes, one about managerial leadership, and one about the art of negotiation. In the first, by William C. Rhoden, Emerson Boozer, a star running back on the Super Bowl II-winning Jets, told a story about the key role played by the team’s owner, Sonny Werblin, in bringing the team together.

“Our core unit had played at least three to four years together,” Boozer said. “We knew each other and trusted each other.” The turning point came as a result of an off-field incident during training camp before the 1967 season. Unresolved racial tensions that had percolated for some time surfaced during an ugly episode at a bar in Peekskill, N.Y., where players congregated after practice. Boozer recalled that one of the Jets’ white players got into a dispute with [running back Matt] Snell, who is black, over the use of the pool table. “It was a ‘we want you darkies off the pool table’ kind of thing,” Boozer said. “It was from one of your teammates. Not a resident, but a teammate.”

News of the incident got back to the Jets’ owner, Sonny Werblin. The next morning, Werblin went to the training facility in a chauffeured limousine. He addressed the entire team, including coaches, at the evening meeting.

“He says: ‘You know, I’ve got fine thoroughbred horses down at Monmouth Park. When those horses train and do not perform well, should I fire my trainer?’ ” Boozer said. “`‘I’ve got this football club here and I’ve got two stars on this club. I’ve got Namath and Snell. The rest of you can pack your things now if what happens at that bar last night ever happens again.’ ” Werblin left the room, got back in his limo and returned to New York.

“Werblin cleaned it up instantly,” Boozer said. “There was not another incident. No more spats, no more backstabbing. Things calmed down. After that, we built a good rapport. ”

In the second article, Richard Sandomir talked about an incident of Congressional horse-trading. After the AFL and the NFL merged, the newly-expanded NFL needed an antitrust exemption to operate. The man who held the key to that exemption was House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, a Louisiana man, and his price was an NFL team in New Orleans.

“Boggs was serious enough about the deal to blow up at [NFL Commissioner Pete] Rozelle before the conference committee’s vote on the legislation, which was one of many riders to an anti-inflation bill that was expected to pass. According to MacCambridge, as Rozelle and Boggs walked to the Capitol Rotunda, Rozelle said he did not know how to thank Boggs. “What do you mean you don’t know how to thank me?” Boggs said. “New Orleans gets an immediate franchise in the N.F.L.”

At another point, Boggs said, Rozelle sent a note into the committee room telling the elder Boggs that he had polled N.F.L. owners and that they had “approved of New Orleans.”
“And the committee approved the exemption,” said Boggs.”