Big Year

Nineteen-eighty-eight is shaping up to be another banner year for Beatlemania - in movies, records and television. Fans can look forward to an animated musical titled Strawberry Fields Forever. Produced by Yellow Submarine producer Al Brodax, the film's soundtrack features new artists singing "Blackbird," "Hey Jude" and other Beatles favorites. Michael Jackson, who owns the Beatles song catalogue, is reportedly investigating the possibility of making feature-length films based on Fool on the Hill and Eleanor Rigby.

As Ross Grimsley once proved, almost anybody can win 20 games. But you have to be somebody special to lose 20. That must be true, or else it wouldn't be 10 years since anybody has done it, right? When you think of all the lousy pitchers who have passed through baseball in the last decade, you recognize how impressive it was that Oakland's Brian Kingman was the only 20-game loser of the '80s. Why, Kingman did it way back in 1980, and people still talk about him in reverent tones.

I VIEWED "The Big Year" and for the first time in my life left a movie thinking: needs more bird-watching. Weird, since it's putatively ABOUT competitive bird-watching, loosely based on a nonfiction book about three actual people who devoted a year of their lives to an obsessive, continental bird-spotting contest. There is a rich premise here for a distinctive comedy about a singular subculture - think of how "Best in Show," for example, looked for laughs by delving into the details of dog-show culture.

Max von Sydow can do more with a walk than most actors can do with 10 pages of dialogue. See him in "Pelle the Conqueror," and you'll know just what that means. As Lasse Karlsson, Pelle's itinerant farm-worker father, he shambles across the screen, all elbows and knees, hands flapping, duck-footed, head bobbing down in habitual obeisance with every step. It's a walk that speaks of a lifetime of oppression. It shouldn't surprise you to learn that that is not the way that he walks as Max von Sydow.

This hasn't been easy for Ryan Luzinski. The starting catcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers' double-A farm team in San Antonio, Texas, missed 11 games because of injury. It's been a seemingly interminable stretch. Sure, he has a fractured right cheekbone. But hey, Luzinski played for two weeks after the home-plate collision in El Paso, Texas, on April 15 before realizing how serious it was. Luzinski was activated prior to last night's game against Jackson, Miss., the second of a five-game series.

Hammonton coach Pete Lancetta, set to open his 15th season, has one concern entering the year. "Our main problem will be a lack of depth," Lancetta said. The team has 42 players, sophomores through seniors, as it looks to defend its Cape-Atlantic National crown. But the Blue Devils do have talent. Matt Silvesti (5-foot-10, 215 pounds), a four-year starter at nose tackle and guard, is "the best D-lineman" he has has ever coached, Lancetta said. Lancetta plans to move Silvesti around defensively.

Spotlight: Triton RB/DB James Burns It's easy to overlook James Burns. On a Triton team that features quarterback Brian Keller and running back Josh Woods, Burns is the guy who does a little bit of everything. And all of it well. "I think people do overlook me sometimes," Burns said. "I'm a guy who fills in the gaps. " Triton (4-1) will need Burns to play his typical complete game Friday night at Bishop Eustace (3-2) in what looms as a tough WJFL interdivision clash.

Brett Myers does not want to talk about whether he will start for the Phillies against Atlanta on opening night. "What, am I going to say no? I'll do whatever they need," Myers said when asked if he wanted the ball April 5. The righthander threw five innings in yesterday's 3-0 loss to Boston, allowing five hits and two runs. He walked five and struck out one. Asked which pitches he was unhappy with in yesterday's loss, Myers said: "Every one of them, but I think I made the pitch when I had to. . . . I'm going to have games like that during the year.

Don't try to stop me. For better or worse, for right and wrong, it's once again time for bold and occasionally boneheaded predictions for golf in the coming season. First, let me say that I am flush from victory in 2000, if I do say so myself. Personally, I had forgotten that I had written so much as a word forecasting the year, until a reader was kind enough to send me a copy of last year's handiwork. He had not only saved the page from that week, he'd gone to the trouble of evaluating every prediction on a scale of 1 to 10. Among my dead-on predictions were my forecast of a big year for Tiger Woods (I figured eight wins and more than $7 million in winnings)

Nineteen seventy-two was a big year for Josh Rouse. Both he and his trusty Fender guitar were born that year, and the first records he remembers owning were Carole King's Tapestry and Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, albums that were ubiquitous in the early '70s. With those records in mind, he wrote a song that began, "She was feelin' 1972 / groovin' to a Carole King tune / Is it too late, baby? Is it too late?" That song, "1972," turned into the template and the title track for his fourth album.

"You can't get a hotel room in Philadelphia this week. We're having to put people at the airport, and over in Jersey," says John Beauchamp, who weighs and prices weather damage and other environmental risks for companies as an underwriter in the Philadelphia office of New York specialty insurer Beazley Group. He's talking about RIMS 12, the New York-based Risk Management Society's annual conference at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, which has collected crowds of pros who track floods, fires, storms, financial fraud, medical-data security, fear of terrorism, global warming, and other modern ills for their living.

WIMBLEDON champion Petra Kvitova won her first WTA Championships title yesterday in Istanbul, beating Victoria Azarenka , 7-5, 4-6, 6-3, for a victory that also will put her at No. 2 in the world rankings. Kvitova started the year outside the top 30 and was playing in the season-ending tournament for the first time. "It's unbelievable to play here," said Kvitova, who beat Azarenka in the Wimbledon semifinals on her way to winning her first Grand Slam title this year.

Tom Reed was recently spared a six-hour round-trip drive to North Jersey. He'd been headed there to see a bird. And not just any bird, but a calliope hummingbird, which normally doesn't come anywhere near here. But someone claimed to have spotted one near I-80. Shortly after leaving his home in Cape May County, however, Reed got a call. False alarm. It was a common rufous hummingbird. He was glad he didn't have to buck rush hour traffic around Newark. But, boy, he needed that bird.

Spotlight: Triton RB/DB James Burns It's easy to overlook James Burns. On a Triton team that features quarterback Brian Keller and running back Josh Woods, Burns is the guy who does a little bit of everything. And all of it well. "I think people do overlook me sometimes," Burns said. "I'm a guy who fills in the gaps. " Triton (4-1) will need Burns to play his typical complete game Friday night at Bishop Eustace (3-2) in what looms as a tough WJFL interdivision clash.

I VIEWED "The Big Year" and for the first time in my life left a movie thinking: needs more bird-watching. Weird, since it's putatively ABOUT competitive bird-watching, loosely based on a nonfiction book about three actual people who devoted a year of their lives to an obsessive, continental bird-spotting contest. There is a rich premise here for a distinctive comedy about a singular subculture - think of how "Best in Show," for example, looked for laughs by delving into the details of dog-show culture.

Cue the crickets. We're in one of the TV year's dead zones. It's so slow out there that MTV couldn't find anyone to host its Video Music Awards this weekend. Rather than stare at our navels, let us turn our gazes forward. With the new season fast approaching, I make the following fearless predictions: The winner of Dancing With the Stars will be a professional athlete and not an entertainer (or whatever the likes of David Arquette pass for). It will take only two episodes of Fox's new talent show, The X Factor , for old adversaries Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul to be going for each other's throats.

Joe Blanton got knocked around a little the last time he pitched, gave up a couple of homers in his rehab appearance for Double A Reading. "That means zero," said the big righthander, who will make his first big-league start of the year tonight against the St. Louis Cardinals at Citizens Bank Park. The Phillies sure hope he's right. Because while Charlie Manuel remains upbeat, he doesn't mind admitting that he needs to see a little more from everybody who's not named Roy Halladay.

WASHINGTON - With all due respect to the people who believe life begins on Opening Day, they are wrong. It really begins just after that, the next game after that, when the ceremonial first pitch isn't being thrown by the president and many more of the seats are empty and the atmosphere is less celebratory and more ordinary. This is when real life begins in baseball, real work, the relentless grind. It is, appropriately enough, the day Cole Hamels started his first game of 2010.

One of a team's most important pieces, coveted at all levels of sport, is the unselfish player. How often have you heard talk about the team player? How many times have coaches raved about the kid who doesn't care about himself and instead puts winning above all else? You know, the unsung hero who comes off the bench and does all the little things that add a spark when necessary, even though none of that shows up on the stat sheet. Rancocas Valley junior Elijah Burley is a bit of an oddity in that he puts the team first, but when he contributes, his numbers leap off the page.

As we rang in 2009, the buzz in Hollywood was that 3-D movies would be a game-changer (which was also the buzz back in 1952). And? Monsters vs. Aliens 3-D neither altered the course of cinema art nor palpably enhanced the movie-going experience. Up was a fantastic film with or without 3-D glasses (though many felt that the specs dulled its vivid colors). But then came Avatar, in which James Cameron used the illusion of dimensionality to make palpable the planet Pandora - thereby transforming a marketing gimmick into an artistic tool.