Roger Angell Speaks to History; Sparky Lyle Speaks to Fran Healy

Two posts for the price of one today. I had planned to write about how ferociously MLB, in a bizarre attempt to squash free viral marketing of the game, is pulling videos of even short and relatively trivial action from sites like Google Video and YouTube, but I'll save that for another day. Although it hurts.

Somehow or other, I missed last week's publication of Roger Angell's excellent short piece on the new all-time career home runs record set by Barry Bonds. Thank you, the New Yorker, for continuing to improve your Web site, making archival material available and relatively easy to find.

As usual, Angell, in "Deathly Numbers," provides a unique and elegantly-written perspective on things; you may think differently about the "sacrosanct" mark after reading it. I do.

----

On an entirely different note, those who are either watching "The Bronx is Burning" or reading the book (or both, which I recommend), may find the conversation below, between 1977 Yankees Fran Healy and Sparky Lyle, of interest. It's interspersed with some vintage footage of the type we're seeing in the miniseries. At one point Lyle says, "I think a lot of us didn't understand Reggie," but unfortunately he doesn't explain further in this clip (perhaps he does elsewhere), and seems to indicate that they understood Reggie just fine -- but probably shouldn't have cared so much about what he said about them -- and himself.