Is anyone planning on watching The Bronx is Burning? While I'm not excited about watching a program that will probably end with the Yankees win in the World Series, John Turturro is one of my favorite actors and I'm interested in seeing Olly Platt's depiction of Steinbrenner.

Franco from Rescue Me is Reggie Jackson....yikes

That's one of the only FX shows I don't watch. I've considered it crap since I started watching it the first season. So does this mean you will be watching or not?
The promos have looked good. Again like I said, I know that '77 ended up in the Yankees winning it all but this is an era that I knew little about as a kid and am interested in seeing the portrayals.

They had a preview of a scene on bb tonight this evening. It looked pretty good. In one of the scenes Jason Giambi was a taxi cab driver. I'll toon in to the first episodes and we'll see how it goes.

Rescue Me is fantastic so I am sorry you are missing out.

Franco is a terrible actor and a terrible character, the fact he is Reggie Jackson just makes it even more laughable.

John Turturro is the ****ing man though, can not argue that.

I will not watch this though.

"Nobody ****s with the Jesus!"

and Reggie is a terrible person, so it should be a perfect fit

The guy playing Reggie looks too small. IIRC Jackson was a big man during his Yankee days.

I wonder if Buster Olney is going to do the narrative....

This can't be possible. I thought that ESPN had a "Yankee Bias". atleast that's what all Yankee fans proclaim.

Anyone else watch this? Thoughts?

Already have a thread on it here: http://www.redsoxnation.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=25820
The damn home run derby went too long, I had a DVR conflict, I'll watch it tomorrow or Wednesday.

As soon as I saw it was about 1977, instead of 2007, I was massively disappointed and put a shoe through my TV screen.

Seriously, I wanted to watch and wasn't home. I lived through that season but wasn't rabid yet at the time. I'm going to have to catch it on re-runs, but I DO want to see it.

Missed this due to the home run derby going too long and a DVR conflict. Plan on recording it tomorrow and watching.

i was watching it at work tonight while waiting for the damn derby to end. turturro makes a great billy martin. had to pin his ears back a bit, maybe too much. he looks like an elephant with those ears. but i love the job he does with billy. his body and posture are eerily similar. of course, turturro had a lot of old footage to study.

nobody ever gets yogi right. oliver platt is pretty good as the young steinie, even if he doesn't look like him.

today's yankees are dull compared to the 1977-81 yanks. and the red sox-yankees rivalry of that era was very hostile. those two teams hated each other. that isn't true anymore. i sense a little too much respect being handed out the past couple of years, ever since you know what happened in 2004.

I hope they don't portray Yogi as a moron in the dugout and clubhouse because he was far from that when it came to baseball.

But twelve minutes before this you said... oh, nevermind.


That I do remember. It was less of a business then.

I honestly recall (and this isn't just the twelve-year-old speaking) the obvious and deep animosity the Sox and Yank players seemed to have for eachother back then; it was shielded, but you could hear it in their yells and see it in the aggressiveness of their play. It's what was imprinted on my brain at the time.

So... I think most of that is lost now, but that era is great to look back upon (only because of the 2004 Redemption) as a more "pure" sporting era. I hated Billy Martin. I hated Reggie Jackson. They were hateable.

Joe Torre? Diplomat. Hard to hate except for the pinstripes. A-Rod? Same. Except he's a clown and Jackson was a warrior.

Even down to the second tier (Bill Lee once called the NY logo an "off-kilter swastika"... that's hate!) you could see the intensity of the rivalry. Anybody who was a kid in the Seventies (especially the godforsaken scorched battlefield of the '78 season) had their roots dip into groundwater for the rivalry during this era. That's why I can understand why the younger posters here who never lived through this era don't get why some of us 40+ guys are so childishly rabid in our rivalry feelings.

In MANY ways, I wish it were still like this. I hate looking foolish, but the '78 Yankees really had more of an emotional impact on my emotional development than even my parents' 1984 divorce six years later... and I'd bet there are a lot of other kids from that era who could say the same sort of thing! It was THAT bad.

I'd bet there are NYC kids who went to med school and succeeded because the Yankees of '78 when they were twelve made them feel like anything was possible.

I'll bet there are Boston kids born in 1992 who will follow in the same footsteps because of the 2004 Sox.

Baseball.

I live for this.

i can't say any pennant races have shaped my life but some of them are etched in my mind like old rock-and-roll songs, reminding me of exactly where i was when the song came out.

1964 was one of those races. i lived just outside philly and even though i was a yankees fan, i felt bad when the season ended and the phillies had lost a pennant that should have been theirs.

2003-04 were awesome races with the day-to-day pressure killing us fans (on both sides) for the last half of the season. i think 1978 was that way, too, but i don't remember getting exhausted that summer the way i did in 2003-04. of course, an extra 35 years can tax a person's stamina.

the 03-04 teams had a pretty good hate going on. i did not like pedro anymore, not after he drilled soriano and jeter to open a game one time when i was on vacation and heard the news from some canadian hockey puck in nova scotia. Game 3 of the 2003 ALCS will stay with me forever. You get about 10 of those in your lifetime, games that are so memorable you can just about recite the boxscore from inside your brain.

anyway, i'm done rambling. you inspired me with a great ramble of your own, SSA.

Feel free to go on. I'll never forget in '77 (which, again, I was just a casual 11-year-old not expecting the Sox to win) when my dad went nuts over an early-season sweep of the Yanks when the Sox hit 11 homers in three games.

1978, though... I was listening to spring training games on the radio, and had caught the fever. We ALL expected to best New York that year. We'd picked up Torrez (from YOU guys!) and had Eck and Lee and Tiant too! And Bill Campbell! We had Rice and Yaz and Lynn and Fisk and Hobson (who'd hit ~30 homers in '77) and Boomer, Remy, Burleson and Evans. How could we lose??

We got off to an incredible lead, we were killing everyone. And nobody was really surprised, except at how bad the Yankees were playing.

Then... a freaking trap door opened. That's why 2007 smells so fishy.

the 1977-78 red sox were the scariest offensive team i have ever seen, especially in that ballpark. hobson was hitting 30 homers out of the No. 9 hole. i remember a day when they hit five homers off catfish in the first two innings. he hurt his neck looking at those shots going out.

what i remember with those sox were all the injuries that led to their downfall. hobson had to put his elbow bone chips back in place by himself. zimmy kept him out there and the guy made around 30 errors, most of them throwing. evans suffered a concussion that kept him out of the lineup and he was scary good in right field. both of those guys played down the stretch when they were hurting their team. but who could replace them?

i don't see a parallel to this year's red sox team, which is deep on pitching and short of hitters (at the moment). and these are not the 1978 yankees by any stretch.

every pennant race has so many plot twists and turns. i just read where phil hughes threw 36 pitches tonight for tampa and is scheduled to pitch saturday for trenton. he should be back by the end of july, barring any setbacks. that's a plot twist if the yankees can stick him in as the No. 4 guy ahead of moose. can the kid pitch in a pressure-packed playoff race? i just don't know.

Players as a rule were smaller back then. Twenty-five years ago, no one in baseball did any weight training whatsoever. It was thought that if you were too muscular, you were not flexible and would get hurt playing baseball. Someone weighing 200 pounds was a big player. Today's 6 ft, 200 pounds gets you a JD Drew. Even a pipsqueak like Dustin Pedroia weighs 180. Someone of Papi's dimensions playing baseball, or WMP or Pujolz or Prince Fielder, was just unheard of back then.

That said, from what I saw, I am inclined to agree with you. Jackson IIRC (and unlike you I was alive when he played) was stocky with broad shoulders. The guy from Rescue Me whose playing him has the wrong physique.

yep. he's too skinny. reggie was a bull. he went to arizona state on a football scholarship but arranged a deal where he could play baseball, too. reggie played high school football for cheltenham high, right outside philly. i grew up 20 miles away and we all knew who reggie was, even then, back in 1965.

I don't know about Jackson's actor, but you are dead-on about the rest. It was an oft-repeated mantra "Weights will kill your swing" back then.

The big sluggers weren't big; Rice was skinny. Mike Schmidt, too. Dave Parker wasn't big; he was tall but thin. There were HR hitters who struck out a lot who were heavy, but they weren't beefed-up.

Steroids suck.

there were some big boys in those days but they were big the way thome is big. ted kluzewski, frank howard (6-6, 260; nobody ever hit a ball harder), don mincher, boog powell, etc.

you know why mantle (5-11, 175 when he came up) could hit the ball so far? according to mel stottlemyre's recent book, mantle had the strongest hands and forearms he ever saw.

Don't forget Bill Campbell, the AL fireman of the year in '77 was injured in '78, and George Scott, who had a 33 hr, 95 rbi season in '77, followed up with a 12 hr, 54 rbi '78.
He wasn't alone. Yaz (28-102/17-81) Hobson (30 - 112/17-80) and Fisk (28 - 102 / 20 - 88) all had significant offensive dropoffs. Leadoff batter Rick Burleson hit .293 in 77 but dropped to .248 in '78.

That '77 team was the team that got me into baseball. I remember on stretch in June when they hit something like 33 homeruns in 6 or 7 straight games.

The '78 team was basically Jim Rice having a mega-monster year, and Eck winning 20. Lee, Torrez and Tiant all started hot but faded at midseason. Lee ended up in the bullpen and was dumped at the end of the year for a former mental patient.
The Red Sox started hot and were playing way above their heads. The yankees started slow and then found their stride right as the Red Sox fell to earth. What I remember about the '78 team was after the Yankees took the lead in early Sept. and had like a 2 1/2 game lead, the Red Sox won something like 8 of the final 9 games to tie it on the last game of the season. That's why I've never bought the meme about the Red Sox choking that year. They fought to the end and lost only because Bucky Dent happened to pick up Micky Rivers' corked bat.
Yaz popping out to Nettles with the tying run on third was the saddest image from my adolescence.

the 1964 phillies choked. the 1951 giants lost to a very hot team down the stretch, as did the red sox in 1978. and i do agree with your premise that the 1977 red sox team was stronger than the 1978 team. still, for three months in 1978, that was an awesome boston team. they made the big red machine of 1975 look like pussies.

here's an interesting side story about those red sox teams from the late 1970s. i learned this 10 or 15 years ago from a former pawsox clubhouse boy. would never print it, of course. but those sox were pretty heavy into the weed and used to send one of their regulars, who shall go unnamed, back to pawtucket to pick up a supply before every road trip.

you have to view this story in the context of the times. these were the 1970s and at least half of the young people i knew (myself included) were looking to get high. that kind of culture also existed in sports, college, pro, whatever. this was the prelude to the 1980s when cocaine got the best of a lot of people.

i doubt it affected boston's performance in those pennant races. i think.

I’m not going to be able to catch this series but I wonder if they’ll do a good job depicting the non-baseball atmosphere of that time. Stuff like the Son of Sam shootings, the NYC blackout and the financial and political strife NY was going through. The Yankees shared some of those internal problems with the city. It was coincidental in my mind but I think it was easier for the public to accept since the Yankees and the city shared it. Look forward to any Siskel and Ebert’s out there posting their reviews.

I was so intrigued by this but after watching the first episode (mind you with very low expectations) the quality is actually below that of your average made-for-TV movie-of-the-week starring the moms from either Growing Pains or Who's The Boss.

They do try and touch upon the Son of Sam investigation (including a scene in which a femail Columbia student is shot in the face) but considering the Police Captain is the dad from the Wonder Years (see above made-for-TV reference) and Oliver Platt's and Daniel Sunjata's performances are dreadful, I don't think I am long for this series.

Torturo is pretty good as Billy Martin. But the prosthetic ears seem ridiculously big.

I may be one of the only people who didn't think it totally sucked.

the production values are ridiculously low but i love when they use genuine footage from the games...last night they used the actual opening from ABC's World Series....Keith Jackson, Howard Cosell.....took me right back there.....

watched a 2-3 times when it was one while doing other stuff. Saw the poster for it yesterday in Wal-Mart to buy the DVD. WHO is going to buy this, especially down in Lubbock, TX that it's worth a poster marketing campaign?