Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out where the former Yankees center fielder Bernie Williams will be playing in a couple of months. We’ll also get details on where Mayor Eric Adams has gone for a few days.
Bernie Williams has played in places like Central Park and Times Square. And the Blue Note New York in Greenwich Village, the city’s biggest jazz club. And the Café Carlyle on the Upper East Side. And the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. As a guitarist. When he played baseball with the Yankees, he was known in the clubhouse as the guy with the guitar and the amplifier next to his locker. He took the guitar on road trips. Since his last game with the Yankees nearly 20 years ago, Williams has gotten a degree in music. Now he has gotten a gig at Carnegie Hall. “The pressure’s on,” Williams said. “Pressure, expectations, a little bit of nervousness.” And the concert is not for three months. He is to appear with the tenor Jonathan Tetelman, who in a conversation at Carnegie Hall on Monday joked about being the closer for the performance on Jan. 13. Williams said the program would be “a mix of things that I might be more comfortable with, popular-slash-jazz music.” Tetelman used the word “eclectic.” They will be backed up by violinists from the Met Orchestra and Katia Reguero, a violinist who is married to the Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor. (She played “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a game at Citi Field last month.) So, an up-to-the-moment question: Did Williams think that Aaron Boone was taking heat after the Yankees’ embarrassing losses in the American League division series over the weekend? “He’s taking a lot of heat,” Williams said. “I think the whole team is taking a lot of heat.” The concert at Carnegie Hall was the brainchild of Adam Unger, who had met Williams when Unger was a 14-year-old ball boy with the Yankees. Unger later played for the Yankees’ team in the Gulf Coast League, then became an opera singer and is now a sports lawyer. “I was like, no one’s using this guy” — Williams — “the way that he should be used” as a guitarist, Unger said. To test that idea — and to promote the concert among baseball fans who might not think about going to Carnegie Hall — he made the rounds of bars and bodegas around Yankee Stadium during the final game of the American League wild card series last week. “This is what the Metropolitan Opera is trying to do,” he said. “Put more butts in seats and expand the audience.” Unger said he had heard a reporter asked Williams how being a Yankee had prepared him to be a musician. Unger said Williams’s answer was it was the opposite — learning music as a child had prepared him to be a professional athlete. Williams himself talked about “approaching baseball like I did, as an artist, and putting all the things that I learned by learning an instrument to my training in baseball.” These days, he said, he tries to pick up his guitar and practice every day, sometimes as little as a half-hour, sometimes as much as four or five hours “if I find the time.” Williams attended a high school for musically gifted students in San Juan, P.R., where one of his classmates was the saxophonist David Sánchez. He has said that he always figured he would end up working as a guitarist in clubs in Manhattan rather than as a center fielder in the Bronx. But he said that after his baseball career ended and he enrolled in the jazz department at the Manhattan School of Music, “I started finding out that as hard as I would play and as good as I would become in my own mind, I was never going to be a Mozart, I was never going to be a Beethoven, a Charlie Parker, a Miles Davis.” But he said that finding “joy in the process” mattered. He was also candid about his unusual path to Carnegie Hall. “I can’t divorce myself from being a Yankee since, you know, that’s all I know in the baseball world,” he said — the Yankees were the only major league team he played for. But “the fact that I have this past life being a former baseball player for this team has opened doors that otherwise would not be open.” “The caveat of that,” he said, “is that once they’re open, you’ve got to play.” WEATHER Today will be mostly sunny with a high near 79. Tonight, expect showers and a low near 66. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING Suspended today and tomorrow for Sukkot. The latest New York news
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Where’s Adams? In Albania.
He’s a lame-duck mayor with well-known wanderlust. Over the weekend, he flew far from City Hall. Mayor Eric Adams went to Albania for what his spokeswoman described as talks on business and tourism. He was to meet with Prime Minister Edi Rama, who figured in a federal corruption case against the F.B.I.’s leading counterterrorism official in New York in 2023. (The official, Charles McGonigle, pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions and laundering payments from a Russian oligarch. Rama was not accused of any wrongdoing.) The mayor’s departure, coming with little more than 12 weeks left in his term, surprised some in the municipal government orbit. “I’d think he would be making sure your legacy — your education, your housing, every last little bit is done,” said Gale Brewer, a city councilwoman and former Manhattan borough president. “I thought that’s what he’d be doing.” My colleagues Dana Rubinstein and William K. Rashbaum write that Adams’s ties to Albania run relatively deep for a country that does only limited business with the United States and has only a small expatriate population in New York. Still, Adams’s son, Jordan Coleman, was a contestant on Albania’s equivalent of “American Idol” in 2022. In August, the Albanian ambassador to the United States posted a photo on social media with Adams. The mayor’s spokeswoman said the Albanian government was covering the cost of the mayor’s hotel room — about $200 a day — and his ground transportation, which she put at $90 a day. In addition to meeting with Rama and his cabinet and looking for ways to boost economic activity and tourism for New York, Adams planned to meet tech leaders and tour factories, said the spokeswoman, Kayla Mamelak Altus. METROPOLITAN DIARY Nice Sandals
Dear Diary: My husband and I were visiting New York in early summer, and we went to Townhouse Bar for happy hour the day we arrived. The back room with the piano was just starting to get crowded, but we found seats — he on a couch next to a handsome man and I on an ottoman. I said hello to the man sitting next to my husband and complimented him on his leather sandals. He said they were years old and that he loved wearing them. That got the three of us talking, and we enjoyed his company for a couple of hours until leaving for dinner. The next day, we had tickets to the Morgan Library and took a leisurely walk there. At one point, we saw a doorman up ahead helping a woman into a car. We veered a bit to leave room on the sidewalk. The car door closed, and the doorman was suddenly standing directly in our path. We veered slightly again. Then he veered so that he was in our path once more. “I like those sandals,” he said. Neither my husband nor I were wearing sandals. It was then that I looked more carefully at the doorman’s face. It was the man we had talked with at Townhouse. — Stephen Zagami Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Makaelah Walters, Lauren Hard and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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