Not that I’m complaining about the eventual outcome, which looks quite rosy, but if all the time that I’ve been devoting to wedding-related activities could be put towards my writing, I could have started a blog… or a book. But rather than kvetching, I’ll just offer a few quick hits for your reading pleasure:

• Reason #265 whiy I love New York City: the day after I wrote my 10th anniversary piece, I was wandering the East Village with an old friend in town for my bachelor party. We were waiting to cross at a light, and I looked down at one of those plastic boxes for those community magazines, the kind that sit next to the more prestigious Onion and Village Voice boxes. Atop of one was a dog-eared but intact paperback copy of The Lords of the Realm, John Helyar’s look at the history of baseball’s power elite. I haven’t read it, but I’ve been meaning to since coming across his quoting of Charlie Finley (“Make ‘em all free agents!”) came up as I was writing the David Ortiz chapter of Baseball Prospectus’ book on the Red Sox this winter. By the looks of that price at Amazon, Lords is not the easiest book to find these days — my copy says $6.99, that one and the one at BN.com, both with the same covers and pub dates, are going for $29. Score!

I used to joke that as I walked down the streets of this city, books and CDs would stick to me as if they naturally belonged in my hands. Ladies and gentlemen, I now have proof (and a witness) that this is true.

• There’s plenty of good stuff from Rich Lederer at his new Baseball Analysts home. Last week’s long-awaited three-part interview with Bill James made for some fine reading. In the lightning round, Lederer offered James the names of a handful of players for some free associaton. My favorite response was about Rickey Henderson, whose career might best be summed up by the quote about him in the New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract: “If you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” Here’s what he told Lederer:

Rickey is one of a kind. Someone should write a really good book about Rickey. There is an essential connection between ego and greatness and no one better illustrated that than Rickey. When Rickey is 52, he will still believe that he could play in the majors. You can say that his ego is out of scale to his real world, but his ego is what made him so special. Somebody should document mannerisms and Rickey was a walking catalog of annoying mannerisms. He was a show. Every at-bat was a show. It’s not like a Reggie Jackson show where it’s done for television. It’s a live show. It’s done for the guys in the ballpark and the guys on the field. The show made him totally unique.

Here’s hoping somebody gets on that Rickey bio. I’d read it.

This week Lederer brings us a tale of the time his father managed the Dodgers for a day. George Lederer was a baseball writer for the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram (is that a mouthful?). On March 7, 1964, he and Dodger manager Walter Alston swapped places for an intrasquad game, with Lederer managing one side and Alston filing the game report to the I-PT.

It’s a good thing neither man quit his day job. Lederer’s team lost 6-2, while Alston showed himself to be something other than the second coming of Red Smith. Still, the Dodger skip delighted in watching the writer’s gaffes. He managed to get off a couple of good lines, and took great pleasure in recounting an on-field practical joke of which his replacement was the butt:

Before the game, Lederer reminded me a lot of Pee Wee Reese. Maybe it was because Lederer wore Reese’s old jersey. Come to think of it, there couldn’t have been another reason.

One of the writers said, “Lederer in uniform reminds me more of Captain Kangaroo.”

One of the contributing factors to Lederer’s defeat might have been in the fourth inning when he was a victim of a prank by Pete Reiser, his own coach.

The score was 2-2 with the Collier Cats batting, none out and a runner on first base. Derrell Griffith of the Cats grounded to the right side and collided with Dick Tracewski, the second baseman who was covering first.

Griffith and Tracewski lay sprawled. Neither moved a muscle. Lederer, deep in thought, didn’t move either until Reiser yelled to the dugout: “Hey, Lederer, get some water. Hurry.”

Lederer panicked. Not knowing whether to bring the hose or a bucket, he fumbled, finally filled a Dixie cup with water and ran to the scene.

“Where do you want it, Pete?” Lederer asked. “Give it to me, and hurry,” yelled Reiser. Then Pete drank the water and added a polite, “Thanks.”

Photos and the complete article are available at the site. Thanks for sharing, Rich!

• Back in the day, the Detroit’s’ Bobby Higginson was a pretty good outfielder, peaking with a .300/.377/.538 season in 2000, his age-29 season. To that point, he’d hit .281/.367/.489 in his career, all of it with the Tigers. Just prior to the beginning of the 2001 season, he signed a four-year, $35.4 million contract extension to take him through 2005.

Then, Higginson’s career fell off a cliff. He’s hit only .260/.347/.406 the past four years, and his decline, coupled with that immovable contract, has made the Tigers’ woes that much worse.

Reading this column, it’s apparent that the zombie takeover of Bobby Higginson is complete; I now pronounce him officially undead. Check this quote:

“You have to hit for average. That’s what people get caught up in. There’s only one Oakland A’s team out there that really cares about on-base percentage. It looks better if you’re hitting .300 and getting on base .320, than if you’re hitting .260 and getting on base .360.”

Higginson was third on the Tigers last year with a .353 on-base percentage, but hit only .246.

Eeeeech. Slow, aging outfielder with moderate plate discipline decides to discard the only skill that’s keeping him in the big leagues. Two words for Tigers GM Dave Dombrowski: sunk cost.

• Not that it’s a challenge to find the anti-Moneyball backlash, of course. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting some of the ignorati. Why, here’s Chris Dufresne in the L.A. Times:

OBP (on-base percentage). Somewhere between Bill James and “Moneyball,” the OBP overtook ERA in a palace coup to become baseball’s most elite statistic.

Oh, and it could lead to the Dodgers’ ruination.

OBP is based on the total of hits, walks and hit by pitches divided by total at-bats, walks hit by pitches and sacrifice flies — kind of sticks in your throat, doesn’t it?

The theory on OBP is you can trade star players for a bunch of slap hitters who work every count to 3 and 2.

Some believe OBP is a code word for “cheapskate ownership.”

Ba-dum-pum. Presumably, Dufresne’s working the Laff Hut out on Route 21; he’ll be there all week. Try the veal…

• It’s not the Moneyball A’s, but it’s still the green and gold… and the silver and black. Rebels of Oakland is an hour-long HBO documentary on the colorful A’s and Raiders teams of the 1970s. I missed it during its first airing a couple of months back, but I was psyched to find it on HBO In Demand while doing some late-night channel-surfing this past week.

The doc alternates the sagas of the two teams as they rose to their championships, providing ample footage of both as well as latter-day interviews done in a manner similar to ESPN’s SportsCentury series. On the Raiders side, you get to see one of the most vicious, ugliest defenses known to man and NFL Films. Ben Davidson, John Matuszak, Ted “The Stork” Hendricks, George Atkinson, Jack “The Assassin” Tatum and some of the most devastating hits on wide receivers and QBs you’ve ever seen, plus quarterback Kenny “The Snake” Stabler, wide receiver Fred Biletnikoff (covered in gobs of stickum) and coach John Madden in all of his weird, sideline-pacing glory.

On the A’s side, you get Reggie Jackson, Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, and Rollie Fingers in their early primes helping the A’s to three straight World Championships from 1972 to 1974. You also get to see the madness that was Charlie O. Finley, who paid his players extra to grow mustaches and hired Stanley Burrell, the future MC Hammer (!), as his teenage executive VP; from Chicago, Finley would keep tabs on the team via phone to Burrell, his eyes and ears in the clubhouse.

As the voiceover (done by stalwart narrator Liev Schreiber) discussed Finley’s antics, I thought of what an impression he must have made on the relatively naive (in a baseball sense) George Steinbrenner. Think about it: Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in 1972, when a tyrannical owner was at the sport’s pinnacle. Soon enough, Steinbrenner was bullying his players and managers publicly as they won their own titles.

The difference, in a nutshell, is that Finley was a man who knew baseball talent himself; he served as his own GM and oversaw the development of that homegrown talent. But he was a miser who refused to reward his players for their successes on the field, and his breach of Catfish Hunter’s contract ushered in a new era of upwardly spiraling salaries. At the other end was Steinbrenner, unflinchingly willing to pay top dollar for talent, but lacking — to this day, some would say — any real understanding of how to evaluate it. There’s a book in there somewhere, too.

If you’ve got HBO, find time to watch this one.

• Heh, I love a good trainwreck, so I can’t wait to see how this comes out in the wash…

Today at Baseball Prospectus, the Jaffe WARP3 Score (JAWS) system takes on the 25 players on the Veterans Committee Hall of Fame ballot. This is the second time the “new VC” — consisting of living Hall of Fame members, Spink (writers) and Frick (broadcaster) award winners, and “old VC” members whose terms haven’t expired, 83 voters in all — will have voted, and the first time JAWS has been used to evaluate the field.

JAWS (which was named very self-consciously, I assure you) is based on Clay Davenport’s Wins Above Replacement Player measures, which combine hitting, pitching and fielding, normalizing for everything from ballpark to scoring environment to league difficulty. A JAWS score is simply the average of a player’s career WARP3 total and that of his five-consecutive-year WARP3 peak (with allowances made for injury or military service). While a JAWS score shouldn’t be confused with an attempt to define One Great Number by which all players should be measured and definitively ranked — my colleague Nate Silver has compared it to “a very tasty sausage,” with appropriate dietary precautions — the score enables a player to be easily compared to his peers in the Hall. In short, it’s a handy tool for pattern recognition.

In 2003, their last time around, the Vet Committee put up a big zilch, its voters failing to shower the requisite 75 percent on any of the candidates. Gil Hodges led the voting at 61.7 percent, while Tony Oliva (59.3 percent) and Ron Santo (56.8 percent) were the only others over 50 percent. JAWS points to only a couple of candidates — Santo and Joe Torre, whose managerial career will push him over the top when it’s all said and done — as worthy of induction, and it also reveals a pretty wide gulf between the previous VC selections and those voted in via the Baseball Writers Association of America. As much flak as the latter group draws for, say, failing to elect Bert Blyleven and Goose Goosage, they’ve made very few mistakes in the players they’ve selected compared to the spotty record of the old VC. That said, if the new VC bakes another donut, we may be seeing the next overhaul before too long. Frankly, they need to elect Santo to instill confidence in their own credibility. We’ll know this afternoon whether that happens…

Update: Nope, Santo and Hodges topped the voting at 65 percent, Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat both broke 50 percent, and Joe Torre pulled in 45 percent. Let the fallout begin.

• • •

Speaking of Davenport, anybody looking for insight into his — and thus BP’s — method of translating statistics from any given league to the majors should read his piece on translating Cuban performance today. BP doesn’t show what’s behind the curtain often enough for some tastes, but here’s a fine example to the contrary.

Oh, and by the way, Baseball Prospectus 2005 is now shipping from online retailers for the insanely low price of $12.21 plus shipping, and it’s available in bookstores as well. On that note, the BP book tour is in full effect as well. I’ll be in the hizzy for three New York City-area appearances with the likes of Joe Sheehan, Chris Kahrl, and Steve Goldman in the next two weeks:

Brooklyn, Wednesday, March 9 @ 7pm
Barnes & Noble
106 Court Street
Brooklyn, NY
718-246-4996

Manhattan, Saturday, March 12 @ 6 pm
Coliseum Books
11 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
212-803-5892

Manhattan, Monday, March 14 @ 7:30 pm
Barnes & Noble
396 Ave. of the Americas @ 8th St.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-8780

Come on out, meet the crew, and pick up a copy for yourself if you haven’t already.

Via Tom Gorman and Rob McMillan comes this gem, an MP3 of Vin Scully calling the 9th inning of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game against the Chicago Cubs on September 9, 1965. In that final frame, Koufax strikes out Chris Krug, Joey Amalfitano and Harvey Kuenn, the latter his sixth K in a row and 14th on the night. It was the eighth perfect game in major league history.

The great Dodger announcer Scully, who had already called three other no-no’s by Koufax, handles the call with a brilliance that rivals the hurler’s. Calling out the time on the clock with an obvious eye towards the history, he somehow elevates a moment that needs no elevation — like a pool of melted butter atop a perfectly cooked filet. Heard nearly forty years later, his voice remains instantly familiar, his cadence every bit as graceful as it ever was. Timeless.

This recording was done by Hugh Smith of Escondido, California for his son Dave, who only went on to found the Retrosheet website (see comment). Most famously, Jane Leavy transcribed much of Scully’s narration in her fine biography, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, reconstructing the entirety of the game through the tape and a long-forgotten filmstrip done by Dodger trainer Bill Buhler. It’s an amazing piece of history, so do yourself a favor and get a bite of perfection in the making.

Two of the fine bloggers at All-Baseball.com have decided to leave the fold and join forces. Rich Lederer of Rich’s Weekend Baseball Beat and Bryan Smith of Wait Til Next Year are merging their blogs into a new site called The Baseball Analysts (www.baseballanalysts.com). According to their press release, the site will be “devoted to examining the game’s past, present, and future,” which makes sense since Lederer has done some excellent historical work, including his big dig through the Bill James Baseball Abstract series, and Smith is devoted to covering top prospects.

This week, Lederer has a three-part series in which he polled baseball writers of varying renown to ask “Who Was Your Favorite Player Growing Up?” in a five-question format:

1. Who was your favorite player when you were growing up? 2. Why? 3. What do you most remember about that player? 4. Did you ever come into contact with him? 5. Do you have any special memorabilia (baseball card, autograph, etc.)?

Part one ran yesterday. Part two, which features yours truly in a star-studded lineup that includes Peter Gammons, Bill James and Rob Neyer (hooray for alphabetical placement) as well as a few of my BP colleagues, runs today. And as you might guess, part three will air tomorrow.

I had a difficult time settling on my answer, offering no fewer than four Dodgers from my youth: Davey Lopes (whom ESPN’s Eric Neel named as his fave), Ron Cey, Pedro Guerrero, and Fernando Valenzuela. Ultimately I settled on Fernando, figuring that the bobblehead and the retro jersey I have of his seal the deal (in honor of this, I christened the new hard drive I installed yesterday Fernandomania; my laptop is Mendoza Line Drive).

I enjoyed that particular stroll down memory lane, particularly in thinking about the Dodgers’ 1981 World Championship. I suspect, once you read some of the responses that Rich’s questions elicited, that you’ll find some fond memories there too.

It’s that time of the month again, as my Prospectus Triple Play (now bylined in a welcome improvement) is up over at Baseball Prospectus. Because I was hosting out-of-town guests over the weekend (for my bachelor party, which started with an hour of hacking at the Chelsea Piers batting cages), I had to prepare the bulk of this one a few days ahead of time, and so missed an opportunity to discuss the players from these teams who made BP’s just-released Top 50 Prospects List. As such, I’ve got a few outtakes and bonus tracks (so to speak), though I’ll save most of the prospect-related talk (and number-gathering) for my next shot:

• The Dodgers placed four players in the Top 50, along with catcher Dioner Navarro, who was an honorable mention:

7. Joel Guzman, SS
20. Chad Billingsley, RHP
34. Willy Aybar, 2B
45. Edwin Jackson, RHP

Jackson was on last year’s list as well, ranked at #6, but his stock fell considerably with a lousy year in Las Vegas (a 5.86 ERA in 90 innings) and an even worse one in LA (7.30 ERA in 24.2 innings). Repeat after me: There’s No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect.

• The Twins placed two players in the Top 50:

43. Jesse Crain, RHRP
46. Jason Kubel, OF

Kubel will miss the entire season with a torn ACL, setting off a lengthy debate in the Outfielders Roundtable as to whether to include him in this year’s list.

• The Giants had one player in the Top 50:

28. Matt Cain, RHP

Not surprising, given the points I made about the team’s focus on developing pitchers at the expense of producing hitters.

• My analysis of the Dodger catchers could have been a bit more complete, as a couple of readers have already pointed out to me. First off, I neglected to include Mike Rose, a non-roster invitee who hasn’t gotten much of a mention anywhere. He’s almost certainly slated for Las Vegas, and his defense is not loved (PECOTA says -10 in minimal playing time) but he might get a look if Dave Ross falters, and given that he put up a .407 OBP at Sacramento last year, he fits in as a DePodesta/Beane type. Still, he’s no Tom Wilson, and given that the Dodgers didn’t even take advantage of his presence in the second half last year, I’m not sure that Rose is more than a contingency plan.

Also, one of those early-spring stories has Dodger utilityman Jason Grabowski, who was drafted by the Rangers as a catcher in 1997, taking reps behind the plate. I’ll wager that at least part of the focus is simply because there’s no shortage of work for a catcher in spring training (look, it’s Lenn Sakata!); somebody always needs to throw somewhere, and as a good utilityman, Grabowski’s lending a helping hand. He was probably worth a tangential mention, though I don’t think he’s any threat to get significant playing time behind the plate, and he doesn’t add a lot beyond late-inning/emergency flexibility.

Here’s a revised chart of their PECOTAs with these two included:

          Age   AVG   OBP   SLG   MLVR   VORP   Break   Imp
Bako       33  .220  .299  .321  -0.261  -1.0   31.4   52.2
Navarro    21  .244  .306  .366  -0.173   3.9   12.7   28.2
Ross       28  .227  .317  .420  -0.095  10.4   53.1   64.5
Rose       28  .242  .353  .383  -0.068   8.4   31.9   49.2
Grabowski  29  .241  .323  .411  -0.087   3.4   26.4   51.2

Still looks like they’ll be bleeding runs here.

• Keith Woolner has revamped the Reliever Evaluation Tools for Baseball Prospectus 2005, reintroducing a measure called WXRL (Win Expectation, adjusted for Replacement-level and Lineup), which is based on the game state context (outs, baserunners, and score margin) in which a pitcher is used and the impact his performance had on a team’s chances of winning a game.

My editor had a joke about country music in upstate New York that fell on the cutting room floor along with this chart, which shows how freshly-retired Robb Nen ranks over the course of his 1994-2002 run as a reliever:

Pitcher           WXRL
Trevor Hoffman    42.5
Mariano Rivera    35.5
Troy Percival     34.3
Robb Nen          32.3
Armando Benitez   30.2
Jeff Shaw         26.9
Mike Jackson      26.4
Todd Jones        26.1
Jose Mesa         25.8
Keith Foulke      23.7
John Wetteland    23.7
Billy Wagner      21.9
Roberto Hernandez 21.8
Bob Wickman       20.7

Not too shabby. But sad to say, I called Nen’s demise just over a year ago in a discussion with Fogball’s Tom Gorman, who’s a certified Emergency Medical Technician and somebody who knows his way around the shoulder (and the elbow too). Three months into rehabbing my own surgically-repaired labrum, I told Tom, “From what you’ve said, Nen’s got a real salad going on there, and the cuff is only part of the problem. I hate to rain on Giants fans’ parade, but the bottom line from what I know is that you’ll be lucky if he’s ever a productive pitcher again.” Ouch.

It’s a bleak start to the day when the news of the death of one of your all-time favorites hits you like a sledgehammer before you’ve even sipped your morning coffee. Such was the case when I saw the ESPN front page today, where it’s reported that gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. He was 65 or 67, depending upon the sources I’ve seen so far.

Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is on my short list of desert island books; I never tire of reading its hilarious, harrowing, savage prose, and it certainly inspired the occasional rant and reference around here. His collections of Rolling Stone columns and other essays, such as the The Great Shark Hunt, are some of the most astute and acerbic political commentary anywhere. I’ve got an unfinished copy of Hey, Rube!, a collection of his post-millenial columns for ESPN’s Page 2, sitting not three feet from my desk as I type this.

Given his hard-driving lifestyle and outrageous behavior, it’s amazing that he lived this long, and quite apparent to even his most ardent fans that his best work — a unique and indelible mark on journalism based on injecting the reporter headlong into the story — was behind him. That such an injection (no pun intended; he wasn’t a needle man) was often fueled by a cocktail of drugs and alcohol that would fell a herd of rhinos is beside the point, mostly, because when he stared into the heart of darkness, that crazy bastard felt like the last sane reporter on earth.

Of his style’s genesis, the New York Times has this to say:

It was in the heat of deadline that gonzo journalism was born while he was writing a story about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s magazine, he recounted years later in an interview in Playboy magazine.

“I’d blown my mind, couldn’t work,” he told Playboy. “So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody.”

Instead, he said, the story drew raves and he was inundated with letters and phone calls from people calling it “a breakthrough in journalism,” an experience he likened to “falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids.”

Thompson was never better than when he was writing about Richard Nixon, his arch-nemesis, and one of my favorite pieces of his is his scathing eulogy of the disgraced former President:

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing–a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that “I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hatedNixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.”

…If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

The truth never sounded more brutal than when it came out of Thompson’s typewriter, and the fear and loathing he reserved for the men in the corridors of power is all too absent in today’s reportage. There are a few more of his presidential eulogies I’d like to have read, and perhaps his demise’s timing with today’s holiday is but one more (final?) ironic twist to his tale. Alas it will be left to somebody else to pick up that particular baton, but as Thompson would say, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

The San Francisco Chronicle has a lengthy obit. ESPN’s Page 2 has an archive of his columns, while Salon has several pieces about him, and his unofficial home page, The Great Thompson Hunt, has a trove of pieces by and about him as well. I suspect Rolling Stone will have something weighty and worthwhile to say in short order, as he was hands down the most important writer to grace its pages back when that mag was a true (counter)cultural force.

Farewell, HST. Thanks for the laughs and the inspiration, but more importantly, thanks for telling the terrifying truth as only you could.

Reason #264 on “Why I Love New York City” is the way it can bring you full circle at any given moment. This entire week has been one of those times.

The Venn diagram of New York City-based Mekons fans who’ve been published at Baseball Prospectus is a small one, which is why I found myself emailing Neil deMause last fall after we found ourselves bitching to each other and a few other writer friends about the Yankees’ dreadful collapse in the ALCS. A short time after that, with the bleakness of the season’s end having been trumped by the even worse travesty of the Presidential election, Neil and I met for dinner, talked baseball and music, and promised that we’d catch a show sometime. When he offered me his extra ticket to last Sunday’s Neko Case and the Sadies show at Bowery Ballroom, I was on it like white on rice.

I met up with Neil at 9 PM, and no sooner had we worked our way inside and ventured into the coatcheck line than I head somebody calling my name. I didn’t recognize the source at first, in part because I was trying to track Neil as he wandered off, but the bespectacled redhead, behind his unfamiliar beard, revealed himself to me as Mike, my downstairs neighbor and friend from the tail end of my time living in Providence, Rhode Island.

Ten years ago today, Mike and his friend Keith helped me load my belongings into a U-Haul and waved goodbye as I left town. I’d spent about six years in Providence, four of them in college and two more as a working stiff, long after most of my classmates had moved on. When I outgrew my job as the production manager of a show horse magazine, it was time to go, and Mike gracefully helped usher me out of town.

My destination was New York City. Manhattan. The East Village. Seventh Street. I had never in my wildest dreams considered moving there until my car was stolen for the second time inside of a year. But I could no longer take the ordeal of protecting my vehicle, keeping up with its maddening quirks that needed repair, or finding parking for it when I would go to visit my then-girlfriend in Boston; I needed a place where I could get by without one. I had never considered living in New York until about three months before I moved. Several of my school pals had migrated to the city. They had all figured out how to make a buck down here without getting shot, and within a few visits, they had me convinced I could, too.

Some four hours after leaving Providence, I reached the Triboro Bridge and screwed up a lane change so badly that I ended up having to re-cross the bridge and pay the toll a second time. This rube was out six bucks before he even hit town. Finally taking the correct exit, I got off on 125th Street, found Second Avenue, and carefully drove 111 blocks south, stoplight by stoplight, my thumbs pounding on the U-Haul’s steering wheel to the music on the boombox, as I rode the brake all the way down Second. I entered the city listening to Exile on Main Street because there’s no easier way, in my mind, to make 67 minutes fly by — especially under the duress of driving an unfamiliar vehicle with all of my worldly possessions within — than with that Stones album.

I treated the friends who helped me unpack the truck to dinner that night at El Sombrero, a Ludlow Street restaurant with the greasiest hot-plate Mexican food you could possibly hope to find. I lost count of how many pitchers of frozen margaritas I paid for, went home and carved out a space to lay my futon, and fell into a deep, tequila-aided slumber.

Somewhat bewildered, I awoke the next morning to see the boxes and furniture strewn randomly around my room. Seven stories up, from where I lay I could see the Empire State Building and the Chrysler standing tall against the blue Manhattan sky. I’ve never forgotten that view or the excitement I felt that morning, and I’ve never looked back.

When I came to this city, I fancied myself a writer based on a few published pieces in various music rags, most of then now as long-gone as the golden age of indie rock. I was out of sorts as a baseball fan (the previous year’s World Series had been cancelled), I hadn’t heard of the Internet, and blogs hadn’t been invented. The idea of writing every day (well, several times a week) was a pipe dream because I put myself through such agony writing about music.

The day I moved down here is a dark one in rock and roll history, as it happens. Bob Stinson, the dress-wearing lead guitarist of the Replacements, died that day. A few days after I moved here things got even darker; Kurt Niemand, a schoolmate of mine in the same greater group of friends as well as the bassist for Six Finger Satellite, my favorite Providence band, turned up dead of an OD. Kurt had been one of the Six Finger members I interviewed for my first paid piece of writing, a profile of Six Finger Satellite in Option magazine.

If you asked me ten years ago whether I’d be writing a decade later, I’d have nodded, but without conviction. To say that I had any idea that I’d wind up doing this even as a hobby is farfetched, but this little site is just one more of the great things that’s happened to me during my time here. Reacquainting myself with baseball via Yankee Stadium and with a dynasty-building team in front of my nose did a lot to bring me back, helped along by bonding with some of my closest friends over our trips to the ballpark or merely catching the games on TV. Just as players don the pinstripes with an eye towards a World Series ring, I needed to prove that like the Sinatra song, I could make it here, I could make it anywhere. I’ve lasted a decade, and now I can’t envision living anywhere else.

I love New York City in all of its grandeur and its gritty, grimy glory. I live here because I’m honestly more scared of what goes on in the rest of the country, in those strip malls where the only choices are Bennigan’s, Appleby’s, TGIFriday’s and the Olive Garden, than of anything I might find at the wrong end of some dark alley here. I feel safe and at home in NYC, and I crave returning every time I leave. I’d rather be here to smell the eye-watering stench of garbage on St. Marks Street as the sun strikes it on an August morning than to live someplace that lacks the energy, excitement, diversity and even chaos that New York City offers. Consider this my belated valentine to my city. As the Mekons sing, I (Heart) the Apple.