The Coldest Summer

For the yankees' newest left fielder who is not Shane Spencer-Tony Womack-if it's Wednesday, it must be Totowa. And that seems to be the good news for the pinstripers.

This week, Womack, the speed merchant who helped kill the Yankees in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series as an Arizona Diamondback, will finish dressing after the 1:05 p.m. game against Seattle in the Bronx and head for the Toys R Us in Totowa, NJ, just off U.S. Highway 46. The Yankees are calling it a "rare personal appearance." Womack will sign autographs for people who spend at least $35 on official MLB merchandise in the store.

After Womack's public relations duty, the Yankees head out west for one of those character-defining road trips reminiscent of the first Tino Martinez era.

If the fans in Oakland are anything like the Giants fans across the bay, then the Bellamy Road stable boys can expect some serious razzing. The vast foul territory of the Oakland ballpark gives them an Al Davis buffer zone, so they are somewhat protected from verbal barbs. But in San Francisco, at least at the old Candlestick facility, even the Grey Pouponers sitting in the front rows were leather lunged and nasty in an annoyingly educated way.

The San Francisco baseball experience really settled in after seeing Michael Wranovics' excellent documentary Up for Grabs. It is the story of the two men who claim to have caught Barry Bonds' 73rd home run in San Francisco back in October of 2001.

One oddity that jumped out from a DVD viewing was that Giants fans, even the dwellers in the right field concourse where Bonds' homer landed, are an upscale bunch. There was a piano-store owner, a group of aerospace engineers, a retired salesman and a dentist. There was one stoner in a Dodgers jersey, but the rest of the witnesses in the scrum that ensued once the ball cleared the wall seemed way too high-brow for a general-admission terrace.

Wranovics makes his documentary stand out by finally destroying the established norm of Ken Burns talking-head sobriety by putting his subjects in real settings. The stoner in the Dodgers jersey is buying smokes at a liquor store; the engineers are standing in polo shirts in a landscaped corporate office park, the retired salesman is doing some daytime juicing at a bar with a couple ogling him in the background; the dentist is shown drilling a patient, which provides the metaphor for the excruciating lawsuit that provides the drama of Up for Grabs.

The lawsuit, and therefore the documentary, is completely unnecessary, as is the agonizing footage of the dentist doing his work. The film inadvertently catches some other nuances, like the pretense-heavy and self-important Major League Baseball security department. The filmmaker also shows why MLB will never have the marketing chops or street credentials of the NBA: Too many baseball fans are nerds.

-Spike Vrusho