
What Pep Guardiola started with his lineups out of a hat, H1N1 and thigh injuries are finishing. It looks like Ibra, Messi, Marquez, Abidal and Toure could be out of the Inter match next week. We got another taste yesterday of what the patchwork lineup can do -- all foreplay, no climax, except for that sexy thug Dani Alves. I've heard this is what 2006-07 was like. I didn't like my old job much back then, and I'm not liking this.
The Times has a nicely-documented piece today about how baseball champions (like the 2009 Yankees) regress to the mean if they don't take a cold look at their age and their overachievers and move to replace the old and the one-offers. It's clear that not doing renovations is fatal: For those champions that turned over 25% of their roster or less, the average increase in losses from championship season to next was eight. For those that turned over more than 1 in 4 players, the average regression was less than 0.5 losses. I don't know how closely this might apply to soccer. It's arguable that Pep should have turned over more of Barca's squad, not less. He was ruthless about Sylvhino and Caceres, and Ibrahimovic has been far more of a complete player than Eto'o; but Maxwell and Chygrinsky have been frightening. Cock your head a bit, and you can now see that Henry's year was probably the last garden party in the sunset of a career; that Messi would regress a bit to the mean; that Puyol would slow a bit. You might have made a case to get rid of Henry, Puyol, maybe not sign Toure to an extension; push harder on Fabregas. Instead of turning over the roster, though, Guardiola keeps turning over the lineup, which is not exactly the same thing, especially when you're playing Messi as a false 9. Swine flu is one thing; not knowing how to play together three months into the season is another. It's starting to look a little like Liverpool of last year -- lots of ties, lots of wins, few losses, much disappointment.(Image credit: boldorak2208/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
The world is always rolling between our legs.
It comes for us, dribbler, slow roller,
humming its goat song, easy as pie.
We spit in our gloves, bend our stiff knees,
keep it in front of us, our fathers' advice,
but we miss it every time, its physic, its science,
and it bleeds on through, blue streak, heart sore,
to the four-leaf clovers deep in right field.
The runner scores, knight in white armor,
the others out leaping, bumptious, gladhanding,
your net come up empty, Jonah again.
Even the dance of the dead won't come near you,
heart in your throat, holy of holies,
the oh of your mouth as the stone rolls away,
as if it had come from before you were born
to roll past your life to the end of the world,
till the world comes around again, gathering steam,
heading right for us again and again,
faith of our fathers, world without end.
By the time the Yankees rushed the field to celebrate their 27th World Series victory, Robert Caplin had photographed the action — 12,000 times. The result is a romantic and captivating time-lapse presentation.
Mr. Caplin used three cameras to shoot that night so that he would have enough footage to “properly capture the narrative of the evening”; a narrative of ice melting into hot dogs, the greasy glass of a popcorn cart, the rise and the fall of the fans.
Much of the game was photographed with a tilt-shift lens, rendering the players as smudges of chalk pastel in a children’s book illustration.

Along 3rd Avenue near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY sits this low, unassuming building. The blandness of the structure certainly does not draw the attention of passersby, myself included, having walked by it dozens of times without thinking twice about it. But as I learned from a nice older Brooklynite who was having brunch next to me one day at the Station Cafe in Park Slope, the building (or what's left of it) is in fact the original home of the Brooklyn Dodgers (at the time known as the Brooklyn Superbas).
The building was called Washington Park, and was first used by the team a loooong time ago, 1898 to be exact, and remained the team's home park until 1912 when they moved to the famous Ebbets Field. It's currently owned and used by Con Edison, and although little remains of the structure, what does remain is the "oldest section of any former major league ballpark still standing in the country," according to Forgotten New York.
Bases loaded, 4th inning. Matt hits a single, drives in first 2 runs for Twin Ridge, making it 5-2.