Squirrel Hover

Baseball people may be superstitious, but baseball writers are just out of control:

If a scholar of Norse mythology had been in the stands of Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night, he or she probably would have advised Yankees fans to not make too much out of the 5-3 victory against the Red Sox.

The result, after all, still left the Yankees trailing Boston by an imposing seven games in the American League East. But more significant, perhaps, was the pesky and distracting squirrel that scampered up and down the right-field foul pole during the game and that, according to Norse mythology, just might have foretold that the Yankees will not prevail over the Red Sox this season.

Believe it or not, the squirrel’s actions closely resembled those of Ratatosk, or “gnawing tooth,” a squirrel in Norse mythology that climbed up and down a tree that represented the world. Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic scholar and poet, recorded the story in his 13th-century work “Prose Edda.”

As the story goes, Ratatosk carried insults as it traveled to opposite ends of the tree, fueling a rivalry between the evil dragon residing at the bottom of the tree and the eagle perched at the top.

. . .

The Yankees said the squirrel came down about 20 minutes after Tuesday’s game and was allowed to go on its way. It joins a cast of baseball creatures that includes the black cat that crossed in front of the Chicago Cubs’ dugout during their ill-fated pennant-race battle with the Mets in 1969 and the bird that Dave Winfield killed with a throw in Toronto in 1983.

You’ve Come All This Way — Shouldn’t You At Least Get To See A Little More Of The City?

Where running and minimalism meet:

Imagine, for a moment, running 3,100 miles — the distance from Queens to Los Angeles plus an additional 300 miles — all around a single city block in Jamaica Hill. This is how 10 men and one woman are spending part of their summer.

The Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race began June 17, and Asprihanal Aalto of Finland was the first to finish Monday at about 10:30 a.m., completing the race in 43 days, four hours, 26 minutes and 32 seconds of pounding the pavement. Yet he was right back at the race course Tuesday morning to offer encouragement to the other runners.

“My heart is still in the race,” Aalto said, checking a photocopied sheet with each runner’s mileage and laps completed per day. “I saw Smarana [Puntigam, of Austria, currently in fourth place] had a bad day yesterday — he only did 108 laps — so I went to talk to him.”

The remaining 10 are on track to complete 5,657 loops of the block around Thomas Edison Career and Technical High School, bounded by the Grand Central Parkway eastbound service road, 168th Street, 164th Place and 84th Avenue. The man in second place, Ayojan Stojanovich, of Serbia, was expected to finish the race Wednesday on day 45, and most runners take about 51 days. A support team tracks the runners’ laps and mileage, offers encouragement and keeps a supply of water and high-fat, high-calorie snacks on the tables at the finish line.

. . .

The runners stay moving from 6 a.m. to midnight every day, jogging, trudging or walking.

“You can’t do this race looking behind you. You have to look deep inside,” [runner Suprabha] Beckjord said.

Abichal Watkins, of Wales, said he had to drop out the first year he applied for the race because his visa expired before he had completed the 3,100 miles.

“I came back the next year to finish,” he said. “This is the longest certified footrace in the world. It’s an opportunity to self-transcend, do something you’ve never done before.”

In This, The Most Competitive City In The World, Even Diving Around Like A Monkey For Tennis Balls Is Hard Job To Get

Becoming a U.S. Open ball person requires agility, speed, focus and most of all, a belief in oneself:

Making it to Center Court at the U.S. Open requires speed, agility, determination, and focus — that’s true for the likes of such top seeds as Andy Roddick and Venus Williams, and just as much so for the ball boys and ball girls who snatch out-of-play balls off the court.

At least, that’s what I learned yesterday when I tried out to be one at the 2007 U.S. Open.

I was number 263 of nearly 400 candidates vying for 75 rookie slots at this year’s Open. In two weeks, the outstanding among us would be invited back for a callback tryout and an interview. Some will go on to work during the Open’s qualifying rounds, and a select few would make it to the final draws.

. . .

I asked a girl standing next to me, Aishwerya Sharma, 12, how she felt. She said “confident.”

“I hope she will make it,” her mother, Hem Lata, told me. “She’s tall enough and mature.”

(By the way, is everyone planning on doing a first-person story about trying out this week?)

See also: U.S. Open at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

L.E.S. Pitches

It’s getting to be a cliche to say that you wouldn’t believe you can find such-and-such in New York City (for example), but it’s not often you find a Major League pitching prospect from the Lower East Side:

To have a heart-to-heart talk with young Dellin Betances or to just look him in the eye, a stepladder would come in handy, because this 19-year-old baseball pitcher from New York City stands a whopping 6-foot-9-inches tall, without his cleats on. He has been affectionately nicknamed the “Baby Unit,” a reference to “The Big Unit,” Randy Johnson, the Hall of Fame-bound southpaw, because on a good day, Betances, a righty, throws heat up to 97 miles per hour, averaging around 93 to 94 miles per hour.

Better than winning the lottery, at 18 years old, Betances agreed to a $1 million signing bonus with his favorite team, the New York Yankees. During the draft, he had been sitting around at the home of Mel Zitter, his Youth Service League coach, when his older brother, Anthony, called to him from the other room, “You’ve been drafted by the Yankees!” Anthony had been feverishly following Draft Tracker on MLB.com when the notice came up that Betances was drafted in the eighth round, the 254th pick over all.

. . .

Young Betances attributes his success to his loving, supportive family, especially his mother, Maria, his father, Jaime, and his brother, Anthony, who are fielding questions about the rising star from their home on Avenue D. He thanks Anthony for teaching him the value of working hard toward his goals, and also telling him to quit high school basketball when he got two teeth knocked out. The basketball team’s big loss was the Yankees’ gain.

David McWater, founder of the L.E.S. Gauchos baseball organization, said when he started the Gauchos in 2002, all the young players in the neighborhood were raving about Betances.

“He was a schoolboy legend down here,” said McWater.

Rafael Roman, commissioner of the Felix Milan Little League, said Betances was a quiet — and just normal-sized — kid when he played with them on the East River Park ball fields on the F.D.R. Drive. Roman said he thinks it’s good for Betances to get out of the city and into, hopefully, a healthier environment.

“If he sticks with it, he can make it,” Roman said. “If he stays out of the street, he can make it. He has a very good head on his shoulders, and he can make it if he puts 110 percent into it.”

The Yankees’ Scooter Libby

So in the end I guess that didn’t really work out too well:

With one misstep on Tuesday, Phil Hughes, a Yankees rookie pitcher, lost his chance for a no-hitter. On Wednesday, Marty Miller lost his job.

Miller was not the manager. He was not even on the playing roster. He was the first-year strength coach, and he became the Yankees’ latest casualty in a dreary 10-14 start to the season that includes four hamstring injuries to pivotal players.

“It’s time to find something else that works,” General Manager Brian Cashman said in explaining the dismissal. “We’re experiencing too much of this stuff. I can’t tell you it’s directly related to him, but we’ve never dealt with this much of it at the same time, either. So I can’t deny it or ignore that.”

Cashman hired Miller last winter to the newly created, if awkwardly titled, role of director of performance enhancement.

Miller’s charge was to prevent injuries, but instead they multiplied, hobbling a team that has the largest payroll in baseball but, in recent days, has found itself in last place in the American League East.

Over the last two weekends, the Yankees lost five of six games to the Boston Red Sox, the team’s bitter rival, prompting the team’s principal owner, George Steinbrenner, to consider firing Manager Joe Torre.

Torre received a reprieve Monday when Steinbrenner issued a statement saying he supported him. But after Hughes strained his hamstring while throwing a curveball in the seventh inning of a game in which he had not given up a hit, Steinbrenner agreed with Cashman’s decision to fire Miller, an employee who few, if any, fans would recognize if they bumped into him.

. . .

When Hughes is placed on the disabled list Thursday, he will be the fourth Yankee to have landed there with a hamstring injury since mid-March, joining pitchers Chien-Ming Wang and Mike Mussina and outfielder Hideki Matsui.

Only one other major league team, the Cleveland Indians, has had even two players on the disabled list with hamstring problems since March 1. The injuries are a major reason for the Yankees’ poor start.

“It’s weird,” said center fielder Johnny Damon, who sustained a calf injury on opening day and then opted out of Miller’s program, although he did not go on the disabled list. “Sometimes there are years when it could be a calf injury or another injury that’s cropping up around the league — but not all the players on your team.”