A little of this and a little of that on this gorgeous autumn weekend ...
This past week, Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts and the presumed frontrunner in the race to unseat him next year -- Elizabeth Warren -- got into a war of words that, frankly, doesn't make the sitting senator look all that, shall we say, mature.
Here's what happened. During a debate (more like a friendly round-table discussion) between Democratic candidates, Warren, a Harvard professor, was asked what she did to get through school. The questioner (and this is important) reminded her that Brown had posed in the altogether for Cosmo, using the money to foot his educational bill.
"I kept my clothes on," Warren said, to laughter (and thankfully, there was laughter, because everyone saw it for what it was ... a light, off-the-cuff, and some might even say disarming, answer to a somewhat loaded question.
Next day, on a local morning drive-time radio show, Brown was asked what he thought of Warren's remark.
"Thank God," he said, again, to much laughter.
What followed is the very definition of "knee jerk." All the usual suspects got on their high horses about Brown's remark. Democrats called him sexist, said it was outrageous that he used "frat-boy" talk to demean Warren's appearance.
It was really a stupid thing for him to say. Nothing like reducing a senatorial campaign to "rate-them-on-a-one-to-ten-scale" lockerroom talk.
It's what he said later that really offended me, though. Brown said he didn't go to Harvard, and that he went to the school of hard knocks. There's so much wrong with this statement that it's tough to know where to begin.
First, the obvious. Warren did not go to Harvard. She started out at George Washington University in D.C., got her undergrad at the University of Houston, and then went to the Rutgers School of Law. Hardly Ground Zero for Eastern elitists.
Brown went to Tufts University (hardly a "college of hard knocks" school) and then to Boston College Law. I'd say that educationally speaking, the senator might have the upper hand in "elitism," if that's the label he's trying to pin on Warren. Graduating with a BC law degree is not too shabby.
So let's just cut that out now. Brown tries to portray himself as "everyman," and it worked in his last campaign against the politically inept Martha Coakley, who -- in somewhat of a reversal of the usual political ethic -- is a better administrator than she is a campaigner. Brown was able to box her ears off by doing the type of political pandering 101 that Coakley found odious -- such as shaking hands in front of Fenway Park on an ice-cold New Year's Day before the NHL's winter classic between the Boston Bruins and Philadelphia Flyers.
Something tells me Warren won't fall into that trap. Something also tells me she's a tad bit tougher than Coakley. She was passed over for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's directorship in part because she intimidated Republicans who would have to be instrumental in approving her nomination. With that knowledge in hand, President Obama turned to someone else (it's things like this that aggravate people who voted for the president in 2008).
So far in her public life, Warren has had no problem standing up for what she holds near and dear, so I don't see where Scott Brown's going to give her many sleepless nights. It remains to be seen, however, whether even the Massachusetts electorate, with its reputation for electing liberals, will -- in its current mood -- vote for anyone connected with Harvard.
We're not that much different than anyone else up here. The economy affects us, too. And just being associated with the cradle of east coast liberal elitism (go into the Harvard Co-op sometimes and you'll know what I mean) might put a little too much baggage on her back.
Still, I like her. And I agree with her belief that no one gets rich on his own. People who make a lot of money do so with a generous portion of help from both the public and the public sector. Good for her for reminding everybody.
One hopes the election turns on more than catty remarks about posing nude for Cosmo ... and the subsequent rebuttals and the usual fallout. In this day and age, however, I doubt it will.
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It was a simply, snarky Facebook status: "NEWS FLASH: Steve Jobs still dead." Yet the reaction was interesting.
The notion came about after I read an column by someone -- obviously not a Jobs fan -- taking people to task for their over-the-top reaction to his death earlier this week.
I posted the article on another bulletin board, where it was suggested that I had to be a liberal because the author minimized Jobs' contribution to the human condition. I hadn't thought of that. I simply thought the article had something kind of interesting to say.
But to me, the message to me wasn't about politics. It was about the way people overreact to the death of their icons -- something that goes double for Baby Boomers like myself.
And make no mistake: Steve Jobs was one of our icons as as much as he may belong to the ages. His genius is/was totally, totally lost on a lot of the people who came of age in World War II through the 1950s. What he did, more than anything else, was to move move technology forward by making it more accessible to people who didn't necessarily have a technical aptitude. Such as me.
I'm one of those guys who needs to find someone my son's age to help me with even the slightest detour with my computer. Yet even I know how to work an iPod (well, now, after he taught me).
(I've mastered the Blackberry, but the idea of converting to an iPhone is still a bit intimidating to me.)
You know how they say that computers become obsolete almost as soon as they hit the market? Well, that's because Jobs helped make it that way. As much of a genius as he was with the technology, he was even more of a genius at marketing. He used to say that people don't know what they want until you show them. And he had an uncanny ability to know exactly what to show and when to show it.
There are a thousand different ways to honor Steve Jobs in death, most of them to do with talking about all that he did for, and contributed to, our culture. He was as important to this generation as Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell were to theirs, and his legacy will certainly be on a par with theirs.
But can we please stop these shrines? And the over-emoting? And the muck-raking that's already starting to unearth itself now that he's gone? (example: "The Secret Private Life of Steve Jobs" ... the headline that greeted me when I logged onto the internet today)?
I don't care. I don't care if you're all broken up about it. And I don't care about his secret life either, unless it affects how my iPod works.
This is the downside of social networking, if you ask me (something Jobs is certainly responsible for too). It's so easy, with Facebook and Twitter, and the rest, to go from any kind of decent retrospectives to all-out mawkishness. It just becomes mind-numbing, and it cheapens the whole discussion.
Thirty years ago, when John Lennon was shot to death, there was no Facebook. No Twitter. Apple was really in it infancy. The only way to mourn the unconscionably violent death (key point!) of such a cultural icon was to go to New York and sing songs in Central Park, across from the Dakotas. The people who went actually had to do something ... and, you know, unite.
These days, there's no such spirit because all you have to do is get on Facebook and say "RIP, Steve Jobs," or post something about how hearing of his death reduced you to tears (really? I mean, seriously?). And then, after that, you go back to posting about about how good (or bad) Glee was last night, or cutting and pasting some absolutely inane political statement that 120 other people have already posted. There's no connection beyond that. At least, not to me.
The sadness in Steve Jobs' death, to me, lies in the fact that he was only 54 (four years younger than I am) and that whatever else was germinating inside his brain -- things that could have further humanized technology -- will now remain locked inside. We'll never bear witness to them. That is sad.
Years ago, there was a running joke on Saturday Night Live about Francisco Franco, whose death watch was like Waiting for Godot. SNL spoofed the whole thing by having Chevy Chase say, "this just in ... Francisco Franco still dead."
Some of the over-the-top coverage of Jobs' death reminded me of that.
And, I suppose, we'll get it some more now that Al Davis (Oakland Raiders' owner) has died. I guess it's this old, crusty New Englander's way of saying that owning a Mac, or an iPod doesn't mean you're on such intimate terms with their inventor that you have to go around acting as if someone near and dear to you just died.
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I don't have a problem with religious people. I don't see religion as superstition, and I bristle when I hear people who refer to believers as ignorant and uninformed.
To me, whatever puts you on the right path in your life has as much validity as anything else. And if that includes a belief system -- any belief system -- that works, and it doesn't intentionally aim to harm non-believers, who's to argue and tell you you're wrong.
However ...
Now that Mitt Romney is a serious contender for the presidency (in fact, I'd even say that the nomination at this point is his to lose, only because he's less scary that any of his alternatives), his Mormon faith has become an issue.
And here's where I take issue with Christians who feel qualified to demean Romney's faith. Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor (and, not surprisingly, a Rick Perry backer) says Romney's no Christian, but, rather, a member of a "cult."
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Raise the red flags. He said "cult." Bad word. It conjures up images of crazed people like Jim Jones and David Koresh.
First, Mitt Romney was my governor for four years (well, it was probably two and a half, and then he set his sights on the White House and pretty much abdicated day-to-day governing unless doing so made him look good). I'm no Mitt Romney lover. In fact, I think he's one of the biggest phonies in politics.
But one thing Romney did exceptionally well during his tenure as Massachusetts governor was keep his Mormonism out of it. If you didn't know he was a Mormon, nothing he did, or said, would have given it away.
It is OK to give people with whom you disagree politically their proper props, by the way.
But having said all that, it is entirely beside the point. There is nothing more boring than listening to religious zealots find fault with those who don't follow their particular path to salvation. And nothing more irrelevant.
Here it is still only 2011, and we're going to have to wade through this stuff? We're going to have to wade through the "my God is better than your God" argument?
Who cares?
If you need a better reason for the framers of the U.S. Constitution ensuring that a specific religion never becomes too powerful a force in this country, I don't know where you're going to find it. The idea of any Christian foisting any kind of a litmus test on the political process is patently offensive, even if it comes from nutjobs like the Reverend Jeffress.
We already have enough religious extremism in this world -- everything from radical Islamists (we all know about them) to whack jobs like the Westboro Baptists and Fred Phelps, who -- by the way -- planned to picket Steve Jobs' funeral (how's that for tying up all these fragmented subjects?). The last thing we need is to enter into a debate on who's version of salvation has more validity and throw it into the process of electing our president.
I'm a Catholic. But I don't care what Romney is. I don't care if he believes that the tides that go in and out every day carry the key to salvation, or whether he finds it in a quiet walk through the woods in the early morning. In fact, if I ever found out he did, I'd probably like him a whole lot more than I do, because, frankly, those are my two favorite places to be ... walking along the beach or walking through the woods.
One of the worst things about our political climate today is that candidates feel compelled to avow some attachment to a deity. I so wish it weren't so.
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Speaking of religion, there's this:
I wonder if this is on the level. If it is, it appeals to my sense of the uber perverse.
But since the perpetrator's name is Sam Mullet, I have my doubts. Lest any of you out there doesn't know what a "mullet" is, Google it.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011
Monday, Monday ...
As the cataclysmic events from Fenway Park last week recede in the rear view mirror, let's go over a few things about both the Red Sox and the Patriots -- one hopes -- a bit more dispassionately than perhaps some of the screeds that were unleashed last week.
First, we should all adhere to the following maxim: Things are never as good as they seem; and they're never as bad as they seem either. Maybe at the moment they seem hopeless, but with time and distance, a lot of the visceral emotion sorts itself out.
Judging from the stuff we've been reaching, Yawkey Way has been the site of one giant, ongoing, bacchanal. Pitchers swilling beer on their days off ... players running up and down Terry Francona's back ... Adrian Gonzalez bitching about having to play Sunday nights (poor baby!) ... Kevin Youkilis antagonizing everyone with his oh-so-engaging personality ... John Lackey being, well, John Lackey!
Dysfunction, they name is Red Sox.
These Red Sox, and their ignominious September swoon, are surely the cause for stock market unrest, the rise of violent terrorism in the world, Barack Obama's slippage in the polls, snow in the winter, and halitosis.
Well, if you read some of the stuff written around Boston last week, you'd have to come to a similar conclusion.
Let's get the most obvious thing out of the way first. Yes, it is unprofessional to be pounding those Budweisers down during a game. But whenever I hear things like this, I always wonder. Is the act of doing such a thing that much out of step with general Major League practices? Or is it, perhaps, something that goes on much more often than we think, and that it's being trotted out as an excuse here simply because of the way the Red Sox folded in September.
That's the million dollar question. The culture of Major League clubhouses being what it is, somehow I suspect that these things happen. I've read, many times, that Keith Hernandez and Kevin Mitchell were having a beer together in the Mets clubhouse moments before Mitchell was summoned to pinch hit in that legendary sixth game of the 1986 World Series.
And we've also heard, and read, of the 2004 Idiot Red Sox toasting each other with Jack Daniels prior to going out onto the field (though that was Kevin Millar's tale, so who knows, really, what the deal is there!).
Obviously, whoever was doing imbibing was under the impression that it was a somewhat accepted practice. Otherwise, that person (or persons) wouldn't have ever though of doing such a thing. Also, having a beer and sloshing it down to the point of slurring your words ... big difference.
The bottom line here is that you can do these things when you're 82-41 and nobody cares. It's like the old tale that when one of his aides told Lincoln that Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk, Lincoln replied that said aide should find out what he drinks and sent a carton of it to all his generals.
However, when you're 7-20, as the Sox were in September, all of a sudden it's a big issue. So at the very least, the guzzlers should have understood that and knocked it off.
Regarding Francona, losing your job, whatever the circumstances, is a blow to your dignit. There can be a thousand and one good reasons why it might be time to go, but the damage being let go does to your psyche is immeasurable. So you bet I feel for Tito.
Francona is in a "what-have-you-done-for-me-lately" business, however. And, as he says, it's the only thing he ever wanted to do, and probably the only thing he really knows how to do professionally. Professional manager and coaches are hired to be fired, and it isn't often you see a man such as Bobby Cox or Don Shula stay with one organization through retirement. Hell, even Tom Landry was fired from the Cowboys. What happened to Francona has happened to almost every professional coach and manager at one time or another.
This doesn't mean I think firing Francona was fair. I don't. For seven of his eight years, he was the right guy for the players he managed. This year, he was not? That just doesn't make sense.
There are so many reasons for what happened, and laying it all on Francona's feet is simply ridiculous. But that's how it works. You can't fire everybody, so you snip off the head of the hydra, and hope that the next person who comes along and put the pieces back together.
I'm pretty sure he will, whether it's Bobby Valentine or someone else. The team is simply too talented to fail the way it did this year. It might not be talented enough to win a World Series (that pitching's going to have to get a lot better for that to happen), but it's too talented to play .333 baseball over an entire month -- and especially to lose five out of seven to a Baltimore Orioles team that could have easily lost 100 games were the Red Sox not in such disarray.
I go back and forth with this whole team chemistry thing. There are times when I truly believe Earl Weaver's formula of chemistry=pitching and three-run homers. There is nothing more soothing to a team's nerves than well-pitched game accompanied by some timely hitting. That cures all.
Francona alluded to it when he said that for a team to be harmonious, they didn't have to all want to go to dinner together. But they had to play together on the field. They had to know their roles, and understand what they couldn't and couldn't do ... and to understand what was needed at specific points in a ballgame.
One game seems to stand out in my mind that acts almost as much as a microcosm of the entire season as the last game did. The Red Sox were losing, 4-2, to the Yankees on Sept. 1 (the series that, I think, planted the seed of doubt in their minds). That was the game where Jon Lester seemed to get no breaks from the plate umpire ... but still managed to give up only one run.
That was the game that started Daniel Bard's slump, too, as he and Alfredo Acevas squandered a 2-1 lead in the seventh inning.
But the reason I bring this up is this: Gonzalez was up with two outs and the bases loaded in the ninth inning when he took a called third strike to end the game. It was a borderline strike ... and one uncharacteristic of the umpire's strike zone most of the night (which really didn't exist) ... but he was retired with his bat on his shoulders none the less.
I understand a walk's as good as a hit (though it only would have made the score 4-3). If you're the league's leading hitter, and leading RBI man, you have to be up there with a mind to drive the ball. If you make an out, so be it. But at least you made an out trying to do something.
His job, at that point, wasn't to "get on base." Jed Lowrie, Jacoby Ellsbury and Marco Scutaro had already done that. His job was to knock in some runs. Or go down trying.
I'll guarantee you this; Dustin Pedroia wouldn't have stood there long enough to take Strike Three. He may not have driven in the runs, but he'd have gone up there and taken his cuts. That's what your RBI guys are supposed to do.
I have to think that anyone who understands the game, and the moment, had to have been a little disappointed in Gonzalez. Yes, he was facing Mariano Rivera, and yes, Rivera is the all-time saves leader in the history of baseball. But it was pretty obvious that night Rivera didn't have his best stuff. I mean, he walked two batters and Marco Scutaro got a base hit off him. So he wasn't fooling anybody.
I think this display of being totally lacking in intestinal fortitude destroys team chemistry faster than any clubhouse spat can. Gonzalez has to swing the bat and take his chances.
I don't know, but after that, I started to worry. There's a fine line between playing to win and playing not to lose. It sounds like a cliche, but that's only because it's the best way to describe the dichotomy. And it just seemed to me as if the Red Sox were starting to play not to lose.
If you play to win, you take chances. If they fail you live with it. Bill Belichick going for it on fourth and five two years ago in Indianapolis ... everything though that was ridiculously stupid. I didn't. Belichick figured that the Patriots had a better chance of winning if they didn't give Peyton Manning the ball back. They lost, because they didn't make it on fourth-and-five, and Manning brought the Colts right down the field and scored.
But with all the complaining and second-guessing, nobody ever stated the obvious: Bill Belichick was right. Whether he gave Manning the ball back on his side of the 50 or on the Indy 20, Manning was going to zip down the field and score. That's what he'd been doing the entire quarter.
You can't be afraid to fail. And in that at-bat, Gonzalez acted as if he'd rather take a walk and leave it up to the next guy to be the hero. For the money the Red Sox are paying him, Gonzalez needed to wear the crown and accept failure if it happened.
The Red Sox never stopped playing not to lose after that. They seemed to handle every situation as if they were carrying a stack of Waterford crystal down a flight of stairs. And when you're that scared, you're easy prey.
As for Francona's role in this, it's tough to say. I suppose you can preach, until you're blue in the face, that, hey, we're up by nine games ... just go out and play the way you did to get to this point. But if it's in enough people's heads that trouble's brewing, then trouble it is. And just as winning is infectious, so is losing. That snowball keeps rolling down the hill regardless of what's in it. Soon enough it becomes an avalanche, and it's impossible to stop until it's left major damage.
The problem with these Red Sox is that too many of their principal players never stopped struggling, so that when some of the ones who'd carried them all summer started scuffling, there was no alternative. Carl Crawford just couldn't step into the breach when Gonzalez wore down and lost his mojo. Kevin Youkilis was too beaten up. They had no right fielder who could hit. There just ended up being too many automatic outs.
Without Lester and Josh Beckett pitching to near perfection, there was no one else on the staff to take up the slack because Lackey was horrible all season long ... even when he was winning. Tim Wakefield is 45, and you can't realistically expect a guy that old to carry your rotation.
As for No. 5: Pick your poison (and that's exactly what it was, too ... poison). Andrew Miller? Kyle Weiland? Nobody who took the ball came through.
When the Red Sox won, and players scuffled, other players stepped in and covered. There was always someone lurking somewhere in that lineup who could do major damage (and by that, I mean hit home runs, and not just singles and the odd double). This year, there was nobody once Gonzalez started struggling and Youkilis was hurt.
The question you have to ask yourself is why? Why did all these players wear down the way they did? It's not because they played too many Sunday games, or because they drank beer. It's because a) they were out of shape; b) they'd rolled through the league for so long they forgot what it was like to have to earn it; and c) once they were put in that position, they couldn't come up with the requisite amount of cajones to earn it.
So unless the next manager can teach cajones, I'm not sure what else he can do.
But, as I said, things aren't always as bad as they seem. Perhaps the next manager puts the players on some kind of a between-season scheduled. Perhaps he puts some realistic conditioning expectations on them and acts accordingly if they come to Fort Myers having not met them. Perhaps he's not afraid to look Gonzalez in the eye after he strikes out looking with the bases loaded and reminds him of why it is the team's paying him a gazillion and a half dollars to hit.
And perhaps he locks the beer cooler until the game's over.
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Is the Patriots defense so bad that once they start playing the good teams they'll be trampled to death (as we've been reading today)? Or is it more a case of the defense has playmakers who have, consistently over the past two seasons, risen up to make critical plays at critical moments? This was how those teams from the mid-2000s won three Super Bowls. They were never dominant. They just made big plays when they needed to be made.
It's a fair question. One of my favorite, if not my all-time favorite, Patriots players was Troy Brown, and it's not because he had dazzling talent. It's because he made plays. I wish sometimes NFL scouts would put the stop watches away and just focus on what players do to win games. That's the value of a Troy Brown and a Troy Palomalu. They sense the big moments and they come through. And when the Indianapolis Colts won a Super Bowl in 2007, it was as much because of James Sanders, and his propensity to come up huge in crucial moments, as it was because of Peyton Manning.
I kind of like this Patriots team. There seems to be that sense of what's needed, and when. And there seem to be players who respond. It's probably an exaggeration to say Patrick Chung made a huge play when he picked off Jason Campbell in the end zone to kill and Oakland Raiders drive, but the fact is he was there and the receiver wasn't. It counts as an interception however it happened.
Sunday's Patriots game was a classic example of a team with the ability to steal a game when it isn't at its best. Over the course of a season, these things happen. You can't be picture-perfect all the time. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you're a little off. And when that happens, the difference between winning and losing comes down to making more plays than the other guy. Bill Belichick says that every time the Patriots win ... "we were able to make a few more plays than they did" ... and most of the time you want to scream.
But not this time. This time he was spot on. It came down to making plays, and the Patriots made a handful of them on both offense and defense. The Raiders marched the Patriots up and down the field, but when it came time to make a play -- as in doing something that would permanently tip the balance of the game to them -- they couldn't do it. That's why the Patriots won, and that's why Oakland lost.
There's no need to be over-analytical about this. Do the Patriots have some issues on defense? They do. Does any team not? Would the Patriots be better off with Aaron Hernandez playing instead of rehabbing his knee? They would. But wouldn't any team benefit from having Aaron Hernandez in its starting lineup?
Are the Patriots going to miss Jerod Mayo going forward? They'll miss him a lot. But also take note of the fact that without Mayo, who left in the second quarter Sunday, the Patriots allowed three measly points until the outcome was beyond doubt. Maybe the people who get paid to worry about such things care about the whys and wherefores, but, really, should any of us? Does it matter? They won on the road, in Oakland (where they generally have a tough time), and against one of the league's best running backs in Darren McFadden.
They did what they had to do. They ran for more than 100 yards, and that helped keep the Raiders, and McFadden, off the field in the second half. They did enough good things to win the game ... quite comfortably, in fact.
And you know, sometimes that has to be enough.
First, we should all adhere to the following maxim: Things are never as good as they seem; and they're never as bad as they seem either. Maybe at the moment they seem hopeless, but with time and distance, a lot of the visceral emotion sorts itself out.
Judging from the stuff we've been reaching, Yawkey Way has been the site of one giant, ongoing, bacchanal. Pitchers swilling beer on their days off ... players running up and down Terry Francona's back ... Adrian Gonzalez bitching about having to play Sunday nights (poor baby!) ... Kevin Youkilis antagonizing everyone with his oh-so-engaging personality ... John Lackey being, well, John Lackey!
Dysfunction, they name is Red Sox.
These Red Sox, and their ignominious September swoon, are surely the cause for stock market unrest, the rise of violent terrorism in the world, Barack Obama's slippage in the polls, snow in the winter, and halitosis.
Well, if you read some of the stuff written around Boston last week, you'd have to come to a similar conclusion.
Let's get the most obvious thing out of the way first. Yes, it is unprofessional to be pounding those Budweisers down during a game. But whenever I hear things like this, I always wonder. Is the act of doing such a thing that much out of step with general Major League practices? Or is it, perhaps, something that goes on much more often than we think, and that it's being trotted out as an excuse here simply because of the way the Red Sox folded in September.
That's the million dollar question. The culture of Major League clubhouses being what it is, somehow I suspect that these things happen. I've read, many times, that Keith Hernandez and Kevin Mitchell were having a beer together in the Mets clubhouse moments before Mitchell was summoned to pinch hit in that legendary sixth game of the 1986 World Series.
And we've also heard, and read, of the 2004 Idiot Red Sox toasting each other with Jack Daniels prior to going out onto the field (though that was Kevin Millar's tale, so who knows, really, what the deal is there!).
Obviously, whoever was doing imbibing was under the impression that it was a somewhat accepted practice. Otherwise, that person (or persons) wouldn't have ever though of doing such a thing. Also, having a beer and sloshing it down to the point of slurring your words ... big difference.
The bottom line here is that you can do these things when you're 82-41 and nobody cares. It's like the old tale that when one of his aides told Lincoln that Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk, Lincoln replied that said aide should find out what he drinks and sent a carton of it to all his generals.
However, when you're 7-20, as the Sox were in September, all of a sudden it's a big issue. So at the very least, the guzzlers should have understood that and knocked it off.
Regarding Francona, losing your job, whatever the circumstances, is a blow to your dignit. There can be a thousand and one good reasons why it might be time to go, but the damage being let go does to your psyche is immeasurable. So you bet I feel for Tito.
Francona is in a "what-have-you-done-for-me-lately" business, however. And, as he says, it's the only thing he ever wanted to do, and probably the only thing he really knows how to do professionally. Professional manager and coaches are hired to be fired, and it isn't often you see a man such as Bobby Cox or Don Shula stay with one organization through retirement. Hell, even Tom Landry was fired from the Cowboys. What happened to Francona has happened to almost every professional coach and manager at one time or another.
This doesn't mean I think firing Francona was fair. I don't. For seven of his eight years, he was the right guy for the players he managed. This year, he was not? That just doesn't make sense.
There are so many reasons for what happened, and laying it all on Francona's feet is simply ridiculous. But that's how it works. You can't fire everybody, so you snip off the head of the hydra, and hope that the next person who comes along and put the pieces back together.
I'm pretty sure he will, whether it's Bobby Valentine or someone else. The team is simply too talented to fail the way it did this year. It might not be talented enough to win a World Series (that pitching's going to have to get a lot better for that to happen), but it's too talented to play .333 baseball over an entire month -- and especially to lose five out of seven to a Baltimore Orioles team that could have easily lost 100 games were the Red Sox not in such disarray.
I go back and forth with this whole team chemistry thing. There are times when I truly believe Earl Weaver's formula of chemistry=pitching and three-run homers. There is nothing more soothing to a team's nerves than well-pitched game accompanied by some timely hitting. That cures all.
Francona alluded to it when he said that for a team to be harmonious, they didn't have to all want to go to dinner together. But they had to play together on the field. They had to know their roles, and understand what they couldn't and couldn't do ... and to understand what was needed at specific points in a ballgame.
One game seems to stand out in my mind that acts almost as much as a microcosm of the entire season as the last game did. The Red Sox were losing, 4-2, to the Yankees on Sept. 1 (the series that, I think, planted the seed of doubt in their minds). That was the game where Jon Lester seemed to get no breaks from the plate umpire ... but still managed to give up only one run.
That was the game that started Daniel Bard's slump, too, as he and Alfredo Acevas squandered a 2-1 lead in the seventh inning.
But the reason I bring this up is this: Gonzalez was up with two outs and the bases loaded in the ninth inning when he took a called third strike to end the game. It was a borderline strike ... and one uncharacteristic of the umpire's strike zone most of the night (which really didn't exist) ... but he was retired with his bat on his shoulders none the less.
I understand a walk's as good as a hit (though it only would have made the score 4-3). If you're the league's leading hitter, and leading RBI man, you have to be up there with a mind to drive the ball. If you make an out, so be it. But at least you made an out trying to do something.
His job, at that point, wasn't to "get on base." Jed Lowrie, Jacoby Ellsbury and Marco Scutaro had already done that. His job was to knock in some runs. Or go down trying.
I'll guarantee you this; Dustin Pedroia wouldn't have stood there long enough to take Strike Three. He may not have driven in the runs, but he'd have gone up there and taken his cuts. That's what your RBI guys are supposed to do.
I have to think that anyone who understands the game, and the moment, had to have been a little disappointed in Gonzalez. Yes, he was facing Mariano Rivera, and yes, Rivera is the all-time saves leader in the history of baseball. But it was pretty obvious that night Rivera didn't have his best stuff. I mean, he walked two batters and Marco Scutaro got a base hit off him. So he wasn't fooling anybody.
I think this display of being totally lacking in intestinal fortitude destroys team chemistry faster than any clubhouse spat can. Gonzalez has to swing the bat and take his chances.
I don't know, but after that, I started to worry. There's a fine line between playing to win and playing not to lose. It sounds like a cliche, but that's only because it's the best way to describe the dichotomy. And it just seemed to me as if the Red Sox were starting to play not to lose.
If you play to win, you take chances. If they fail you live with it. Bill Belichick going for it on fourth and five two years ago in Indianapolis ... everything though that was ridiculously stupid. I didn't. Belichick figured that the Patriots had a better chance of winning if they didn't give Peyton Manning the ball back. They lost, because they didn't make it on fourth-and-five, and Manning brought the Colts right down the field and scored.
But with all the complaining and second-guessing, nobody ever stated the obvious: Bill Belichick was right. Whether he gave Manning the ball back on his side of the 50 or on the Indy 20, Manning was going to zip down the field and score. That's what he'd been doing the entire quarter.
You can't be afraid to fail. And in that at-bat, Gonzalez acted as if he'd rather take a walk and leave it up to the next guy to be the hero. For the money the Red Sox are paying him, Gonzalez needed to wear the crown and accept failure if it happened.
The Red Sox never stopped playing not to lose after that. They seemed to handle every situation as if they were carrying a stack of Waterford crystal down a flight of stairs. And when you're that scared, you're easy prey.
As for Francona's role in this, it's tough to say. I suppose you can preach, until you're blue in the face, that, hey, we're up by nine games ... just go out and play the way you did to get to this point. But if it's in enough people's heads that trouble's brewing, then trouble it is. And just as winning is infectious, so is losing. That snowball keeps rolling down the hill regardless of what's in it. Soon enough it becomes an avalanche, and it's impossible to stop until it's left major damage.
The problem with these Red Sox is that too many of their principal players never stopped struggling, so that when some of the ones who'd carried them all summer started scuffling, there was no alternative. Carl Crawford just couldn't step into the breach when Gonzalez wore down and lost his mojo. Kevin Youkilis was too beaten up. They had no right fielder who could hit. There just ended up being too many automatic outs.
Without Lester and Josh Beckett pitching to near perfection, there was no one else on the staff to take up the slack because Lackey was horrible all season long ... even when he was winning. Tim Wakefield is 45, and you can't realistically expect a guy that old to carry your rotation.
As for No. 5: Pick your poison (and that's exactly what it was, too ... poison). Andrew Miller? Kyle Weiland? Nobody who took the ball came through.
When the Red Sox won, and players scuffled, other players stepped in and covered. There was always someone lurking somewhere in that lineup who could do major damage (and by that, I mean hit home runs, and not just singles and the odd double). This year, there was nobody once Gonzalez started struggling and Youkilis was hurt.
The question you have to ask yourself is why? Why did all these players wear down the way they did? It's not because they played too many Sunday games, or because they drank beer. It's because a) they were out of shape; b) they'd rolled through the league for so long they forgot what it was like to have to earn it; and c) once they were put in that position, they couldn't come up with the requisite amount of cajones to earn it.
So unless the next manager can teach cajones, I'm not sure what else he can do.
But, as I said, things aren't always as bad as they seem. Perhaps the next manager puts the players on some kind of a between-season scheduled. Perhaps he puts some realistic conditioning expectations on them and acts accordingly if they come to Fort Myers having not met them. Perhaps he's not afraid to look Gonzalez in the eye after he strikes out looking with the bases loaded and reminds him of why it is the team's paying him a gazillion and a half dollars to hit.
And perhaps he locks the beer cooler until the game's over.
----------
Is the Patriots defense so bad that once they start playing the good teams they'll be trampled to death (as we've been reading today)? Or is it more a case of the defense has playmakers who have, consistently over the past two seasons, risen up to make critical plays at critical moments? This was how those teams from the mid-2000s won three Super Bowls. They were never dominant. They just made big plays when they needed to be made.
It's a fair question. One of my favorite, if not my all-time favorite, Patriots players was Troy Brown, and it's not because he had dazzling talent. It's because he made plays. I wish sometimes NFL scouts would put the stop watches away and just focus on what players do to win games. That's the value of a Troy Brown and a Troy Palomalu. They sense the big moments and they come through. And when the Indianapolis Colts won a Super Bowl in 2007, it was as much because of James Sanders, and his propensity to come up huge in crucial moments, as it was because of Peyton Manning.
I kind of like this Patriots team. There seems to be that sense of what's needed, and when. And there seem to be players who respond. It's probably an exaggeration to say Patrick Chung made a huge play when he picked off Jason Campbell in the end zone to kill and Oakland Raiders drive, but the fact is he was there and the receiver wasn't. It counts as an interception however it happened.
Sunday's Patriots game was a classic example of a team with the ability to steal a game when it isn't at its best. Over the course of a season, these things happen. You can't be picture-perfect all the time. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you're a little off. And when that happens, the difference between winning and losing comes down to making more plays than the other guy. Bill Belichick says that every time the Patriots win ... "we were able to make a few more plays than they did" ... and most of the time you want to scream.
But not this time. This time he was spot on. It came down to making plays, and the Patriots made a handful of them on both offense and defense. The Raiders marched the Patriots up and down the field, but when it came time to make a play -- as in doing something that would permanently tip the balance of the game to them -- they couldn't do it. That's why the Patriots won, and that's why Oakland lost.
There's no need to be over-analytical about this. Do the Patriots have some issues on defense? They do. Does any team not? Would the Patriots be better off with Aaron Hernandez playing instead of rehabbing his knee? They would. But wouldn't any team benefit from having Aaron Hernandez in its starting lineup?
Are the Patriots going to miss Jerod Mayo going forward? They'll miss him a lot. But also take note of the fact that without Mayo, who left in the second quarter Sunday, the Patriots allowed three measly points until the outcome was beyond doubt. Maybe the people who get paid to worry about such things care about the whys and wherefores, but, really, should any of us? Does it matter? They won on the road, in Oakland (where they generally have a tough time), and against one of the league's best running backs in Darren McFadden.
They did what they had to do. They ran for more than 100 yards, and that helped keep the Raiders, and McFadden, off the field in the second half. They did enough good things to win the game ... quite comfortably, in fact.
And you know, sometimes that has to be enough.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Choking is putting it mildly
All righty, then, let's dispense with the rating system. I don't know when a team in any sport has choked like this year's Boston Red Sox did.
Ordinarily, I don't like the word -- mainly because I think it does a grave disservice to the other team. Did the 2004 Yankees choke? Or did the Red Sox who beat them seize their opening in a series that turned on a stolen base and a clutch home run? Truth be told, maybe a little of both.
But to chalk it up merely as a "choke" denies the fact the Red Sox also picked themselves up and won the thing.
Ditto the 2007 Patriots. Did they choke? Or did the New York Giants have the personnel -- a huge front four nimble enough to chase Tom Brady around and minimize his pinpoint accuracy -- to match up with them? And was it a choke that David Tyree made that incredibly spectacular (and lucky) reception right before Plaxico Burress caught that touchdown pass? Not really. It was just one of those catches for the ages.
Did the 2010 Bruins choke against the Philadelphia Flyers? Or was that 3-0 series lead in games a tale of incredibly good fortune in the first place?
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Sports history is full of moments when teams provide an ever-so-slight opening, and their opponents storm down the door.
But this? What we witnessed in the past month? THAT, my friends, was a choke. To choke, you have to lose in the face of overwhelming odds. All other things need to be equal, which his why you can't really call losing a game choking, even if everyone thought you should win it. Anything can happen in a game. Or even in a short series. Sometimes things take on lives of their own.
The Vancouver Canucks probably lost last spring's Stanley Cup final in Game 1, when the referees wouldn't do anything about Alex Burrows biting Patrice Bergeron. That enraged them enough so that when they came back to Boston, after running into some crummy luck up in Vancouver, they ran the Canucks off the ice three times. They put themselves in a position to win it, and that's how it goes sometimes. The Canucks had to scratch and claw to win three games in their own rink, while the Bruins won comfortably all four times. To me, that says the Bruins were simply better and the Canucks, therefore, did not choke.
But going 7-20 in the month of September, and playing yourself from being nine games up in the wild card race -- and even being in first place in the division -- to being bounced from the postseason on the last day of the year -- that's choking.
Another definition of "choke," to me, is that there can be no reasonable excuse for it. None. Recite me a litany of injuries, and I might agree that, yes, it seemed as if every time you looked, some other Red Sox player was missing games because of this ailment or that. Some of them seemed pretty dubious, too, but since it's not my body, and I'm not a doctor, I don't feel especially qualified to make those judgments. But it does seem, on the face of it, that this was not a well-conditioned team.
But injuries or not, if a team that terrorized the Major Leagues from May through August 27 (from the time they started 2-10 to the day they swept the Oakland A's in a day-night doubleheader, they were 80-41, which -- as any baseball fan knows -- is a shade under .667 (.661, to be more precice ... derived from dividing the number of wins by the total number of games played during that stretch).
You could argue that no team -- or few teams, anyway -- could keep that pace all season. The 1998 Yankees, maybe; and the 2001 Seattle Mariners eclipsed it. But as a matter of perspective, if you win 100 games (which a lot of people thought these Red Sox would do) your winning percentage is .617.
So if the Red Sox came back down to earth in September, it would have been easily understood. But OK. Let's say they came back down to earth in a normal way. After that doubleheader, their record was 82-51 (.616). From that point on, they were 8-19 (a woeful .333 for all you statisticians).
If 8-19 had become 13-14 ... not anything to write home about, but certainly not horrible for a team that seemingly had at least a playoff spot wrapped up before Labor Day) ... that would have ended the season with a 95-67 record ... more than enough to have won the wild card, at least, comfortable. All they had to do was play .500.
With that team, and that talent, that shouldn't have been a whole lot to ask. And we'd have all figured that Terry Francona was doing the smart thing, resting players, easing up on the gas a little to save their stamina for what has become an increasingly mind-numbing and grueling post-season.
But apparently it was a whole lot to ask.
There's a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which the poem's main character -- an old seaman -- kills the albatross (widely seen as a bird of good fortune) and thereafter bears witness to a chain of horrible events.
I don't know which one of the Red Sox was out shooting birds in late August, but the hideous chain of events that ensued reminds me of that poem. There wasn't a single element of their game, or their team, that escaped unscathed. Their starting pitching was a disaster. Here, one supposes, you could legitimately site injuries and bad luck. We've discussed elsewhere in this blog the effects losing Clay Buchholz had on the rotation.
But it goes deeper. The team made some horrible decisions, such as bringing up an untested rookie and trotting him out there five times while this swoon was gathering momentum. Don Zimmer got crucified in 1978 for pitching Bobby Spowl once., though that could be because Zimmer told her world "the kid has ice water in his veins" right before the Yankees lit him up during the famous Boston Massacre.
But Terry Francona has to account for this. Five times. His record? 0-3. His ERA? 7.66. How many times did he have to trot the kid out there to realize he wasn't ready?
David Ortiz caught all kind of flack for saying that perhaps Alfredo Aceves should get a start instead of the manager trotting this kid out there five times to get belted around like a pinata. I would agree that kind of overt second-guessing is bad form (Bill Belichick would not have been pleased). I would also agree that Ortiz had a point. Saying Aceves was too valuable in the bullpen to spare is little like your boss saying you're too valuable working the night shift to get the promotion you think you deserve. You reward people for performing well, and figure it all out from there.
And Aceves certainly performed well. He's one of the few people on this team who didn't choke.
Ortiz was somewhat of a loose cannon around here this year, and one wonders, even with the decent season he had, whether we've seen the last of him. Is it time to cut ties and move on? Second guessing Francona on his pitching is bad enough. But that stunt he pulled interrupting Francona's press conference to bitch about what he thought was a scoring change that took a hit away form him ... he should have been benched for that. And he wasn't.
And that brings up another point. Francona can safely be called a players' manager. His style is to create a comfortable atmosphere that he feels is conducive to winning. Damage control is a big part of Tito's MO. Whatever goes on behind the scenes, Francona maintains an even strain in public, and his players know they'd have to practically commit an axe murder in the clubhouse before he'd ever call them out to the media.
This is great ... as long as the players respond by respecting the game ... and by winning. The minute that changes, then it's really time to try something else. Francona, I think, was slow to respond to this malaise. There were signs, even as far back as when they were winning, that there were some high maintenance situations that needed to be monitored ... Ortiz being one of them.
The two other principals: John Lackey and Carl Crawford.
What is there left to say about Lackey? Saying he was merely a disappointment is being unnecessarily charitable. He was an anchor that dragged this team down all season. Maybe he shot the albatross.
Bad enough to lose. Bad enough to be hammered night after night. Bad enough that every time he pitched, practically, the team had to come from behind to win. But his total unwillingness to be accountable was astounding. And because of that, Lackey becomes the official poster boy for how arrogant unlikeable this team was as the season progressed.
And just when he did something positive -- albeit holding a junior varsity Yankee team long enough for the Red Sox to win in 14 innings last Sunday -- he ruins the moment by bitching about the TMZ divorce story (after the team asked him not to, by the way). Who needs the Yankees and Rays chasing you when you have such camaraderie in the same room?
Crawford was Exhibit B. I'm tired of hearing how stressed out he was because of the contract. He could have just as easily laughed at his agent and said, "come on, nobody's worth that much money." Nobody held a gun to his head and made hims sign it.
I'll admit I was happy as hell when the Red Sox got him. I still think he's a good ballplayer ... the type of guy the Red Sox have historically eschewed (to their detriment). I figured, hey, with guys like Crawford and Jacoby Ellsbury on the team, the Red Sox won't play as much station-to-station baseball, and may be able to stem some slumps by resorting to smallball.
I figure Crawford and Ellsbury gave them two great slump-proof weapons.
Turns out I was half right. Ellsbury was one of the few consistent players on this team from stem-to-stern. I'm afraid the egregious collapse will sour a lot of MVP voters toward him, and if that's the case, it's too bad. Because Ellsbury absolutely had an MVP season, and he can thank his underachieving bonehead teammates for robbing him of what which he truly deserves.
Back to Crawford. Like Lackey, Crawford's disappointing ineptitude was compounded by a few stunts, and a few dubious injuries. Throwing Jason Varitek under the bus after the captain -- apparently -- called him out for sitting out a doubleheader with a stiff neck was perhaps the most gutless thing I've seen on a Red Sox team in many years. I'm sure, at that point, if it wouldn't have cost the Red Sox a king's ransom, they'd have been happy to release his ass right then and there.
Whatever virus it was that infected the pitchers it spared no one. Josh Beckett was lights out all season until he sprained his ankle. Once he returned, he lost his mojo.
Jon Lester, for two years plus, was one of the best pitchers in the game until he strained a lat muscle and had to miss some starts. He was never the same when he got back either. Either both of these guys were hiding much more serious injuries, or they got worn down. And if it's the latter, you have to ask why? And who's fault is it?
Daniel Bard picked a two-week stretch in September to lose his mojo too, and the results were disastrous. He pitches like the Bard of April through August, and this series wouldn't have even mattered. Jonathan Papelbon was having his best year ever ... until September. Then he blew two crucial saves (including Wednesday night's). He saves either of them and, at the very least, we're heading to St. Petersburg today. And did the Red Sox crack medical staff -- the ones who misdiagnosed (or took took too long to properly diagnose) Ellsbury's injury last year and then left him hanging out to dry for not having the requisite amount of balls to play through five broken ribs -- do any kind of background check on Bobby Jenks? What a wasted signing that was.
The whole thing was so out of kilter that even when Francona tried to do the noble thing, trotting out Tim Wakefield so he could get his 200th win, it worked against him and the team. We all love Wake. He's been a loyal soldier forever, and if anyone deserved the milestone, it was him.
But when Wake's knuckleball goes south, it goes all the way to Tierra del Fuego -- which is where it was last seen in August and September.
This is a perfect example of how that cliche that "nobody's bigger than the team" can be true, even if the very thought of saying that makes you sick. Francona became fixated on getting him No. 200, and you have to wonder whether everybody took their eyes off the ball as a result.
But on the other hand, this is what happens when you have nobody who can throw the ball. Relying on Wakefield, a 45-year-old man, in August in September as one of your principal starters is just asking for trouble.
Go right down the line. Adrian Gonzalez? Wha-happened? He was the sweetest looking hitter I've ever seen for four months and then disappeared. And please don't blame the Home Run Derby. It's just another excuse.
The right field situation was a mess from Day One. J.D. Drew was useless and Josh Reddick, while had his moments, certainly wasn't the answer.
Catching? I love Varitek. Next to Carlton Fisk, he's the best catcher they've had in my lifetime. I love the way he played in his prime. Balls to the wall all the time. And he'll always have a special spot in my heart for the mitt-sandwich he fed Alex Rodriguez in 2004.
But he's done. I don't think the Red Sox should just give him a "seeya later." Maybe they should do a Jake Taylor and make him a coach. Maybe he can coach heart, because whatever he lacked in physical skills he more than made up for with guts and determination.
And I'm afraid Jarrod Saltalamacchia is not a first-string catcher. I have no doubt but that he did the best he could. I don't think he laid down like some of the other ones did. But what can you say if a person's best just comes up woefully short a lot of the time?
There are others who are exempt too. Dustin Pedroia may have had his rough spots, but, really, how can you criticize him? The guy's got the pedal to the floor every second he's out there. What's really disturbing about this team is that too many of its players didn't feel ashamed enough by Pedroia's example to get up off their asses and snap out of it.
I'm not a huge Marco Scutaro fan, but you can certainly count him as someone who showed up in September. So basically, by my estimation, you have four guys out of 25 (Pedroia, Ellsbury, Scutaro and Aceves, and if you add Ortiz, who wasn't horrible, make that 4½.) who carried their weight the last month of the season. But it wasn't just their weight they were forced to carry, was it? It was also the dead weight of the other 21 players.
I've saved Kevin Youkilis for last because his situation is, well, complicated. Let me be clear. I'm not his biggest fan. I've always admired him for his all-out style of playing, but even though you could never question his effort or his desire, he's also one of those players prone to lengthy slumps where even I could get him out.
He's also 33, and he's the type of player who's only going to break down more and more often. You can only push yourself so far before your body pushes back, and his body is starting to push. I really question the wisdom of leaving him as the team's only power-hitting every-day right-hander. They just had to know there would be stretches, even if he was healthy, where he'd get worn down from his frenetic style of play and go into long tailspins.
Even when he was healthy, he wasn't having his best season ever, and you have to wonder, going forward, whether we've seen the best of him. My guess is yes.
After having said all this, the collapse of 2011 was -- as the cliche goes -- a total team effort. Outside of the aforementioned four players (maybe five), everybody else needs to step up and be accountable. What happened this month was a inharmonic convergence where the planets just went off in as many different directions as there are players on the team. Each situation took on its own life, and the resulting chain reaction was truly horrific (only in the baseball sense of course).
There was too much bad baseball, and too many bad decisions, and lackluster performances, and underachieving, to call this anything else but what it was: A choke for the ages.
The question is where do we go from here? Well, let's start by gutting the entire coaching staff, manager and all. I think Francona did wonderful things for this team. He was instrumental in changing the entire culture of it for seven years. That's longer than any other manager in my lifetime has done it. But whatever happened, and however it happened, Francona lost this team.
If firing him fair? Of course it's not. But what else can you do in these situations? It isn't as if he'll be collecting unemployment. He'll get a job the second he's let go from this one. He's legitimately earned it.
And I'd also tell Theo Epstein that if he wants to go to Chicago and rebuild the Cubs, go right ahead, and that I'm not going to try and match any offers they give him. Cut him slack for not being clairvoyant enough to realize that Carl Crawford was going to have horrible year and be somewhat of a clubhouse cancer to boot, and you can't really blame him because Gonzalez fell back to earth with a thud. But you can ask him why the pitching staff was so thin, and why signings like Jenks and Dan Wheeler turned out as horribly as they did.
You can also, if you want to quibble, ask him whether, in the long run, it would have been better to keep Jason Bay and forgo signing Lackey (I think we all know the answer to that one), and whether, in the long run, they'd have been better off keeping either Victor Martinez or Adrian Beltre and leaving Gonzalez where he was. That one may be a push, but there's one thing you cannot deny: The Red Sox were easy pickings for even middle-of-the-road lefties down the stretch because with Youkilis out, they didn't have one right-handed hitter who put the fear of God into them.
Yes, it's going to be a very, very interesting off-season, isn't it?
Now if you'll excuse me, there's a Heimlich maneuver that needs to be performed.
Ordinarily, I don't like the word -- mainly because I think it does a grave disservice to the other team. Did the 2004 Yankees choke? Or did the Red Sox who beat them seize their opening in a series that turned on a stolen base and a clutch home run? Truth be told, maybe a little of both.
But to chalk it up merely as a "choke" denies the fact the Red Sox also picked themselves up and won the thing.
Ditto the 2007 Patriots. Did they choke? Or did the New York Giants have the personnel -- a huge front four nimble enough to chase Tom Brady around and minimize his pinpoint accuracy -- to match up with them? And was it a choke that David Tyree made that incredibly spectacular (and lucky) reception right before Plaxico Burress caught that touchdown pass? Not really. It was just one of those catches for the ages.
Did the 2010 Bruins choke against the Philadelphia Flyers? Or was that 3-0 series lead in games a tale of incredibly good fortune in the first place?
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Sports history is full of moments when teams provide an ever-so-slight opening, and their opponents storm down the door.
But this? What we witnessed in the past month? THAT, my friends, was a choke. To choke, you have to lose in the face of overwhelming odds. All other things need to be equal, which his why you can't really call losing a game choking, even if everyone thought you should win it. Anything can happen in a game. Or even in a short series. Sometimes things take on lives of their own.
The Vancouver Canucks probably lost last spring's Stanley Cup final in Game 1, when the referees wouldn't do anything about Alex Burrows biting Patrice Bergeron. That enraged them enough so that when they came back to Boston, after running into some crummy luck up in Vancouver, they ran the Canucks off the ice three times. They put themselves in a position to win it, and that's how it goes sometimes. The Canucks had to scratch and claw to win three games in their own rink, while the Bruins won comfortably all four times. To me, that says the Bruins were simply better and the Canucks, therefore, did not choke.
But going 7-20 in the month of September, and playing yourself from being nine games up in the wild card race -- and even being in first place in the division -- to being bounced from the postseason on the last day of the year -- that's choking.
Another definition of "choke," to me, is that there can be no reasonable excuse for it. None. Recite me a litany of injuries, and I might agree that, yes, it seemed as if every time you looked, some other Red Sox player was missing games because of this ailment or that. Some of them seemed pretty dubious, too, but since it's not my body, and I'm not a doctor, I don't feel especially qualified to make those judgments. But it does seem, on the face of it, that this was not a well-conditioned team.
But injuries or not, if a team that terrorized the Major Leagues from May through August 27 (from the time they started 2-10 to the day they swept the Oakland A's in a day-night doubleheader, they were 80-41, which -- as any baseball fan knows -- is a shade under .667 (.661, to be more precice ... derived from dividing the number of wins by the total number of games played during that stretch).
You could argue that no team -- or few teams, anyway -- could keep that pace all season. The 1998 Yankees, maybe; and the 2001 Seattle Mariners eclipsed it. But as a matter of perspective, if you win 100 games (which a lot of people thought these Red Sox would do) your winning percentage is .617.
So if the Red Sox came back down to earth in September, it would have been easily understood. But OK. Let's say they came back down to earth in a normal way. After that doubleheader, their record was 82-51 (.616). From that point on, they were 8-19 (a woeful .333 for all you statisticians).
If 8-19 had become 13-14 ... not anything to write home about, but certainly not horrible for a team that seemingly had at least a playoff spot wrapped up before Labor Day) ... that would have ended the season with a 95-67 record ... more than enough to have won the wild card, at least, comfortable. All they had to do was play .500.
With that team, and that talent, that shouldn't have been a whole lot to ask. And we'd have all figured that Terry Francona was doing the smart thing, resting players, easing up on the gas a little to save their stamina for what has become an increasingly mind-numbing and grueling post-season.
But apparently it was a whole lot to ask.
There's a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which the poem's main character -- an old seaman -- kills the albatross (widely seen as a bird of good fortune) and thereafter bears witness to a chain of horrible events.
I don't know which one of the Red Sox was out shooting birds in late August, but the hideous chain of events that ensued reminds me of that poem. There wasn't a single element of their game, or their team, that escaped unscathed. Their starting pitching was a disaster. Here, one supposes, you could legitimately site injuries and bad luck. We've discussed elsewhere in this blog the effects losing Clay Buchholz had on the rotation.
But it goes deeper. The team made some horrible decisions, such as bringing up an untested rookie and trotting him out there five times while this swoon was gathering momentum. Don Zimmer got crucified in 1978 for pitching Bobby Spowl once., though that could be because Zimmer told her world "the kid has ice water in his veins" right before the Yankees lit him up during the famous Boston Massacre.
But Terry Francona has to account for this. Five times. His record? 0-3. His ERA? 7.66. How many times did he have to trot the kid out there to realize he wasn't ready?
David Ortiz caught all kind of flack for saying that perhaps Alfredo Aceves should get a start instead of the manager trotting this kid out there five times to get belted around like a pinata. I would agree that kind of overt second-guessing is bad form (Bill Belichick would not have been pleased). I would also agree that Ortiz had a point. Saying Aceves was too valuable in the bullpen to spare is little like your boss saying you're too valuable working the night shift to get the promotion you think you deserve. You reward people for performing well, and figure it all out from there.
And Aceves certainly performed well. He's one of the few people on this team who didn't choke.
Ortiz was somewhat of a loose cannon around here this year, and one wonders, even with the decent season he had, whether we've seen the last of him. Is it time to cut ties and move on? Second guessing Francona on his pitching is bad enough. But that stunt he pulled interrupting Francona's press conference to bitch about what he thought was a scoring change that took a hit away form him ... he should have been benched for that. And he wasn't.
And that brings up another point. Francona can safely be called a players' manager. His style is to create a comfortable atmosphere that he feels is conducive to winning. Damage control is a big part of Tito's MO. Whatever goes on behind the scenes, Francona maintains an even strain in public, and his players know they'd have to practically commit an axe murder in the clubhouse before he'd ever call them out to the media.
This is great ... as long as the players respond by respecting the game ... and by winning. The minute that changes, then it's really time to try something else. Francona, I think, was slow to respond to this malaise. There were signs, even as far back as when they were winning, that there were some high maintenance situations that needed to be monitored ... Ortiz being one of them.
The two other principals: John Lackey and Carl Crawford.
What is there left to say about Lackey? Saying he was merely a disappointment is being unnecessarily charitable. He was an anchor that dragged this team down all season. Maybe he shot the albatross.
Bad enough to lose. Bad enough to be hammered night after night. Bad enough that every time he pitched, practically, the team had to come from behind to win. But his total unwillingness to be accountable was astounding. And because of that, Lackey becomes the official poster boy for how arrogant unlikeable this team was as the season progressed.
And just when he did something positive -- albeit holding a junior varsity Yankee team long enough for the Red Sox to win in 14 innings last Sunday -- he ruins the moment by bitching about the TMZ divorce story (after the team asked him not to, by the way). Who needs the Yankees and Rays chasing you when you have such camaraderie in the same room?
Crawford was Exhibit B. I'm tired of hearing how stressed out he was because of the contract. He could have just as easily laughed at his agent and said, "come on, nobody's worth that much money." Nobody held a gun to his head and made hims sign it.
I'll admit I was happy as hell when the Red Sox got him. I still think he's a good ballplayer ... the type of guy the Red Sox have historically eschewed (to their detriment). I figured, hey, with guys like Crawford and Jacoby Ellsbury on the team, the Red Sox won't play as much station-to-station baseball, and may be able to stem some slumps by resorting to smallball.
I figure Crawford and Ellsbury gave them two great slump-proof weapons.
Turns out I was half right. Ellsbury was one of the few consistent players on this team from stem-to-stern. I'm afraid the egregious collapse will sour a lot of MVP voters toward him, and if that's the case, it's too bad. Because Ellsbury absolutely had an MVP season, and he can thank his underachieving bonehead teammates for robbing him of what which he truly deserves.
Back to Crawford. Like Lackey, Crawford's disappointing ineptitude was compounded by a few stunts, and a few dubious injuries. Throwing Jason Varitek under the bus after the captain -- apparently -- called him out for sitting out a doubleheader with a stiff neck was perhaps the most gutless thing I've seen on a Red Sox team in many years. I'm sure, at that point, if it wouldn't have cost the Red Sox a king's ransom, they'd have been happy to release his ass right then and there.
Whatever virus it was that infected the pitchers it spared no one. Josh Beckett was lights out all season until he sprained his ankle. Once he returned, he lost his mojo.
Jon Lester, for two years plus, was one of the best pitchers in the game until he strained a lat muscle and had to miss some starts. He was never the same when he got back either. Either both of these guys were hiding much more serious injuries, or they got worn down. And if it's the latter, you have to ask why? And who's fault is it?
Daniel Bard picked a two-week stretch in September to lose his mojo too, and the results were disastrous. He pitches like the Bard of April through August, and this series wouldn't have even mattered. Jonathan Papelbon was having his best year ever ... until September. Then he blew two crucial saves (including Wednesday night's). He saves either of them and, at the very least, we're heading to St. Petersburg today. And did the Red Sox crack medical staff -- the ones who misdiagnosed (or took took too long to properly diagnose) Ellsbury's injury last year and then left him hanging out to dry for not having the requisite amount of balls to play through five broken ribs -- do any kind of background check on Bobby Jenks? What a wasted signing that was.
The whole thing was so out of kilter that even when Francona tried to do the noble thing, trotting out Tim Wakefield so he could get his 200th win, it worked against him and the team. We all love Wake. He's been a loyal soldier forever, and if anyone deserved the milestone, it was him.
But when Wake's knuckleball goes south, it goes all the way to Tierra del Fuego -- which is where it was last seen in August and September.
This is a perfect example of how that cliche that "nobody's bigger than the team" can be true, even if the very thought of saying that makes you sick. Francona became fixated on getting him No. 200, and you have to wonder whether everybody took their eyes off the ball as a result.
But on the other hand, this is what happens when you have nobody who can throw the ball. Relying on Wakefield, a 45-year-old man, in August in September as one of your principal starters is just asking for trouble.
Go right down the line. Adrian Gonzalez? Wha-happened? He was the sweetest looking hitter I've ever seen for four months and then disappeared. And please don't blame the Home Run Derby. It's just another excuse.
The right field situation was a mess from Day One. J.D. Drew was useless and Josh Reddick, while had his moments, certainly wasn't the answer.
Catching? I love Varitek. Next to Carlton Fisk, he's the best catcher they've had in my lifetime. I love the way he played in his prime. Balls to the wall all the time. And he'll always have a special spot in my heart for the mitt-sandwich he fed Alex Rodriguez in 2004.
But he's done. I don't think the Red Sox should just give him a "seeya later." Maybe they should do a Jake Taylor and make him a coach. Maybe he can coach heart, because whatever he lacked in physical skills he more than made up for with guts and determination.
And I'm afraid Jarrod Saltalamacchia is not a first-string catcher. I have no doubt but that he did the best he could. I don't think he laid down like some of the other ones did. But what can you say if a person's best just comes up woefully short a lot of the time?
There are others who are exempt too. Dustin Pedroia may have had his rough spots, but, really, how can you criticize him? The guy's got the pedal to the floor every second he's out there. What's really disturbing about this team is that too many of its players didn't feel ashamed enough by Pedroia's example to get up off their asses and snap out of it.
I'm not a huge Marco Scutaro fan, but you can certainly count him as someone who showed up in September. So basically, by my estimation, you have four guys out of 25 (Pedroia, Ellsbury, Scutaro and Aceves, and if you add Ortiz, who wasn't horrible, make that 4½.) who carried their weight the last month of the season. But it wasn't just their weight they were forced to carry, was it? It was also the dead weight of the other 21 players.
I've saved Kevin Youkilis for last because his situation is, well, complicated. Let me be clear. I'm not his biggest fan. I've always admired him for his all-out style of playing, but even though you could never question his effort or his desire, he's also one of those players prone to lengthy slumps where even I could get him out.
He's also 33, and he's the type of player who's only going to break down more and more often. You can only push yourself so far before your body pushes back, and his body is starting to push. I really question the wisdom of leaving him as the team's only power-hitting every-day right-hander. They just had to know there would be stretches, even if he was healthy, where he'd get worn down from his frenetic style of play and go into long tailspins.
Even when he was healthy, he wasn't having his best season ever, and you have to wonder, going forward, whether we've seen the best of him. My guess is yes.
After having said all this, the collapse of 2011 was -- as the cliche goes -- a total team effort. Outside of the aforementioned four players (maybe five), everybody else needs to step up and be accountable. What happened this month was a inharmonic convergence where the planets just went off in as many different directions as there are players on the team. Each situation took on its own life, and the resulting chain reaction was truly horrific (only in the baseball sense of course).
There was too much bad baseball, and too many bad decisions, and lackluster performances, and underachieving, to call this anything else but what it was: A choke for the ages.
The question is where do we go from here? Well, let's start by gutting the entire coaching staff, manager and all. I think Francona did wonderful things for this team. He was instrumental in changing the entire culture of it for seven years. That's longer than any other manager in my lifetime has done it. But whatever happened, and however it happened, Francona lost this team.
If firing him fair? Of course it's not. But what else can you do in these situations? It isn't as if he'll be collecting unemployment. He'll get a job the second he's let go from this one. He's legitimately earned it.
And I'd also tell Theo Epstein that if he wants to go to Chicago and rebuild the Cubs, go right ahead, and that I'm not going to try and match any offers they give him. Cut him slack for not being clairvoyant enough to realize that Carl Crawford was going to have horrible year and be somewhat of a clubhouse cancer to boot, and you can't really blame him because Gonzalez fell back to earth with a thud. But you can ask him why the pitching staff was so thin, and why signings like Jenks and Dan Wheeler turned out as horribly as they did.
You can also, if you want to quibble, ask him whether, in the long run, it would have been better to keep Jason Bay and forgo signing Lackey (I think we all know the answer to that one), and whether, in the long run, they'd have been better off keeping either Victor Martinez or Adrian Beltre and leaving Gonzalez where he was. That one may be a push, but there's one thing you cannot deny: The Red Sox were easy pickings for even middle-of-the-road lefties down the stretch because with Youkilis out, they didn't have one right-handed hitter who put the fear of God into them.
Yes, it's going to be a very, very interesting off-season, isn't it?
Now if you'll excuse me, there's a Heimlich maneuver that needs to be performed.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Quick hits ...
Just a random sample of quick hits as we catch up on the events of the past weekend ...
I'm a charter member of the "I Think John Lackey Is Overrated" club. I thought it was a terrible decision by the Red Sox to throw that ridiculous contract at him, and always pegged him as middle-of-the-rotation guy who might be able to give you innings, and even shut a team down once in a while.
But that's all. He's not a front-liner, and he never was. And if the Red Sox had paid any attention to how Lackey's pitched against their own team they'd have saved their money and re-signed Jason Bay. Because, with few exceptions, the Red Sox have pounded Lackey worse than when Buster Douglas cold-cocked Mike Tyson.
That said, the fact he sucks as a pitcher shouldn't turn him into a pinata when it comes to his personal life.
Sunday night, Lackey went off on reporters because someone (we still don't know who) texted him an hour before he was supposed to start against the New York Yankees to ask him (I guess) to corroborate TMZ reports that he and his wife were getting divorced.
Well I have to questions right off the bat. First, why would someone do that? Has the media become so invasive that someone would harass the guy an hour before the biggest game he'll probably pitch this regular season? Couldn't it wait? I'm a fan of getting the story, and getting it first too. That's how I was brought up in the business.
But this? Lackey's right. That crossed a line. Even though Tiger Woods can attest to the fact that your life is not your own when you're a worldwide celebrity, I'm sure no one who covers golf would walk up to Tigger as he's teeing off at the Masters and ask him about his 10 affairs.
So, yes, that was more than a little insensitive and invasive.
As for my second question, why is Lackey even paying attention to his cell phone?????
Man, you've got the ball in a game that could possibly make or break the entire season. The difference between rescuing your team from this tailspin and kicking it further along on the road to the Underachiever's Hall of Fame rests on your overrated right arm!
What are you doing checking your text messages?
No wonder why the guy can't get out of the fourth inning half the time. If you're that unfocused you don't deserve to do well.
----------
Onto the Patriots. There's nothing mysterious about what happened Sunday. The Patriots thought they'd just roll over the Buffalo Bills, just like they always do, but the Bills weren't having any. Lazy, sloppy play by the Patriots got the Bills back into the game, and once they got a taste of it, they weren't going to stop until they finished the job.
Good for them. I don't know about anyone else, but I like to see teams like Buffalo rise up and start counting for something ... even if it's against the Patriots.
Bill Belichick and Tom Brady aren't above learning a few lessons, even as they're getting measured for those ugly banana-colored blazers wear when they're being enshrined in the NFL Hall of Fame. It's never too late, and you're never too good, to be humbled.
But there are some glaring weaknesses on that team, no? We're back to two years ago with the receivers. They don't have a deep threat, and I can't imagine how anyone would trust Chad Ochocinco after Sunday's game. It wouldn't surprise me if Belichick cut him this week and cast his lot with Matthew Slater.
Yes, the loss of Aaron Hernandez ultimately ended up hurting them (though it shouldn't have ... if you jump out to a 21-0 lead should be able to finish the job without much trouble). It would be nice if they could run the ball a little better. That way they wouldn't have to keep throwing it up and risking interceptions.
The defense is a mess. Belichick made that a priority in the short signing period between the time the walkout ended and the season began. But so far, that has been a massive disappointment. They're getting no push, and I'm sorry, but you could have Ty Law and Darrelle Revis out there together, and if the quarterback has all day to throw, he's going to beat you.
Devin McCourty is neither Ty Law nor Darrelle Revis. He's a second-year player who probably could have benefited from some off-season workouts that got wiped out by the lockout.
Kick a few of those big guys in their big asses and get them to rush the passer. That'll make the likes of Devin McCourty a much better player.
-----
I thought maybe that last night's win over the Yankees might do the same thing for the Sox that the Ortiz home run did in '04 ... serve as a catalyst to snap out of it and start playing baseball.
Nope. It's 6-2 Baltimore in the seventh, and Tampa Bay's winning. If the this holds, the Red Sox are done. If the Buffalo Bills smelled blood, what do you suppose it is the Rays are smelling? And they're playing a Yankee team that isn't the slightest bit interested in putting the pedal all the way down to the floor.
Just awful.
-------
On that subject, I'd find it real hard to gas Terry Francona for one bad season. The month of September was like some virus that just spreads through your system and destroys everything in its path. By the time you know you even have it, it's too late to do anything else but wait until it runs its course.
Every possible thing that could go wrong with this team has gone wrong. Everything. Bad luck. Bad breaks. Bad baseball. And bad attitudes.
You know, I do have a lot of sympathy for Lackey when it comes to defending him against idiots who would invade his privacy on that whole TMZ divorce thing. But having said all that, he's a big boy. And while he gets some slack for his personal problems, he gets none for choosing to make an issue out of them after what could have been the team's biggest win of the season.
Sorry. That was just wrong.
------
Even quicker hits ... Apparently Michael Vick thinks he's special. After breaking his hand Sunday, he went off on the referees, suggesting that their standards for protecting him are different than they are for protecting everyone else. Way to go, Michael Vick. Just when your image is somewhat on its way to being saved, show the world what a jerk you really are ... I like this Rays team a lot. They have a look about them that reminds me of those Minnesota Twins teams under Tom Kelly and Ron Gardenhire, a team that was impossible to dislike. I like the manager, Joe Maddon, who is kind of a quirky character, and I love their pitching. I don't know what happens to them if they make the playoffs, whether they run out of gas because of the energy they had to expend to get there. But if they make the post-season, they're my team. Hands down ... And, please, can the Cardinals do the same thing to the Braves? Pretty please? ... Before anyone concedes the AL West to the San Diego Chargers, let's see the Oakland Raiders play a few more games. Somebody, apparently, forgot to tell them they're supposed to suck. Right now they're 2-1, with a win over the Jets. And if you want to judge them for coughing up a big lead to the Bills, you'll have to judge the Patriots similarly ... I guess Tony Romo gets SOME props for playing with a punctured lung and broken ribs. There. I said it. It was painful, but there it is.
I'm a charter member of the "I Think John Lackey Is Overrated" club. I thought it was a terrible decision by the Red Sox to throw that ridiculous contract at him, and always pegged him as middle-of-the-rotation guy who might be able to give you innings, and even shut a team down once in a while.
But that's all. He's not a front-liner, and he never was. And if the Red Sox had paid any attention to how Lackey's pitched against their own team they'd have saved their money and re-signed Jason Bay. Because, with few exceptions, the Red Sox have pounded Lackey worse than when Buster Douglas cold-cocked Mike Tyson.
That said, the fact he sucks as a pitcher shouldn't turn him into a pinata when it comes to his personal life.
Sunday night, Lackey went off on reporters because someone (we still don't know who) texted him an hour before he was supposed to start against the New York Yankees to ask him (I guess) to corroborate TMZ reports that he and his wife were getting divorced.
Well I have to questions right off the bat. First, why would someone do that? Has the media become so invasive that someone would harass the guy an hour before the biggest game he'll probably pitch this regular season? Couldn't it wait? I'm a fan of getting the story, and getting it first too. That's how I was brought up in the business.
But this? Lackey's right. That crossed a line. Even though Tiger Woods can attest to the fact that your life is not your own when you're a worldwide celebrity, I'm sure no one who covers golf would walk up to Tigger as he's teeing off at the Masters and ask him about his 10 affairs.
So, yes, that was more than a little insensitive and invasive.
As for my second question, why is Lackey even paying attention to his cell phone?????
Man, you've got the ball in a game that could possibly make or break the entire season. The difference between rescuing your team from this tailspin and kicking it further along on the road to the Underachiever's Hall of Fame rests on your overrated right arm!
What are you doing checking your text messages?
No wonder why the guy can't get out of the fourth inning half the time. If you're that unfocused you don't deserve to do well.
----------
Onto the Patriots. There's nothing mysterious about what happened Sunday. The Patriots thought they'd just roll over the Buffalo Bills, just like they always do, but the Bills weren't having any. Lazy, sloppy play by the Patriots got the Bills back into the game, and once they got a taste of it, they weren't going to stop until they finished the job.
Good for them. I don't know about anyone else, but I like to see teams like Buffalo rise up and start counting for something ... even if it's against the Patriots.
Bill Belichick and Tom Brady aren't above learning a few lessons, even as they're getting measured for those ugly banana-colored blazers wear when they're being enshrined in the NFL Hall of Fame. It's never too late, and you're never too good, to be humbled.
But there are some glaring weaknesses on that team, no? We're back to two years ago with the receivers. They don't have a deep threat, and I can't imagine how anyone would trust Chad Ochocinco after Sunday's game. It wouldn't surprise me if Belichick cut him this week and cast his lot with Matthew Slater.
Yes, the loss of Aaron Hernandez ultimately ended up hurting them (though it shouldn't have ... if you jump out to a 21-0 lead should be able to finish the job without much trouble). It would be nice if they could run the ball a little better. That way they wouldn't have to keep throwing it up and risking interceptions.
The defense is a mess. Belichick made that a priority in the short signing period between the time the walkout ended and the season began. But so far, that has been a massive disappointment. They're getting no push, and I'm sorry, but you could have Ty Law and Darrelle Revis out there together, and if the quarterback has all day to throw, he's going to beat you.
Devin McCourty is neither Ty Law nor Darrelle Revis. He's a second-year player who probably could have benefited from some off-season workouts that got wiped out by the lockout.
Kick a few of those big guys in their big asses and get them to rush the passer. That'll make the likes of Devin McCourty a much better player.
-----
I thought maybe that last night's win over the Yankees might do the same thing for the Sox that the Ortiz home run did in '04 ... serve as a catalyst to snap out of it and start playing baseball.
Nope. It's 6-2 Baltimore in the seventh, and Tampa Bay's winning. If the this holds, the Red Sox are done. If the Buffalo Bills smelled blood, what do you suppose it is the Rays are smelling? And they're playing a Yankee team that isn't the slightest bit interested in putting the pedal all the way down to the floor.
Just awful.
-------
On that subject, I'd find it real hard to gas Terry Francona for one bad season. The month of September was like some virus that just spreads through your system and destroys everything in its path. By the time you know you even have it, it's too late to do anything else but wait until it runs its course.
Every possible thing that could go wrong with this team has gone wrong. Everything. Bad luck. Bad breaks. Bad baseball. And bad attitudes.
You know, I do have a lot of sympathy for Lackey when it comes to defending him against idiots who would invade his privacy on that whole TMZ divorce thing. But having said all that, he's a big boy. And while he gets some slack for his personal problems, he gets none for choosing to make an issue out of them after what could have been the team's biggest win of the season.
Sorry. That was just wrong.
------
Even quicker hits ... Apparently Michael Vick thinks he's special. After breaking his hand Sunday, he went off on the referees, suggesting that their standards for protecting him are different than they are for protecting everyone else. Way to go, Michael Vick. Just when your image is somewhat on its way to being saved, show the world what a jerk you really are ... I like this Rays team a lot. They have a look about them that reminds me of those Minnesota Twins teams under Tom Kelly and Ron Gardenhire, a team that was impossible to dislike. I like the manager, Joe Maddon, who is kind of a quirky character, and I love their pitching. I don't know what happens to them if they make the playoffs, whether they run out of gas because of the energy they had to expend to get there. But if they make the post-season, they're my team. Hands down ... And, please, can the Cardinals do the same thing to the Braves? Pretty please? ... Before anyone concedes the AL West to the San Diego Chargers, let's see the Oakland Raiders play a few more games. Somebody, apparently, forgot to tell them they're supposed to suck. Right now they're 2-1, with a win over the Jets. And if you want to judge them for coughing up a big lead to the Bills, you'll have to judge the Patriots similarly ... I guess Tony Romo gets SOME props for playing with a punctured lung and broken ribs. There. I said it. It was painful, but there it is.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Arms for the poor ... or a Farewell to Arms?
It isn't all that difficult to explain why the Red Sox have gone from a team on pace to win 100 games to one that might not even reach 90.
It comes down to one word: Pitching. Or, in the case of the Red Sox, lack of pitching.
With rare exceptions, and even with some of the team's best hitters fighting through late-season slumps, the Red Sox have scored runs. They scored runs last year, too, when they didn't even win 90 games and couldn't make the playoffs.
The line on them last year was that they couldn't hit good pitching and that's why they came up short. But really, who does hit good pitching? That's why it's ... repeat after me ... good pitching! Because nobody can hit it.
It's no crime to have a quiet day at the plate with C.C. Sabathia or Justin Verlander on the mound. You just have to hope, in those instances, that your pitcher can at least give your side a chance by keeping the Yankees and Tigers off the scoreboard.
Really, the anatomy of this late-season-collapse-in-waiting can be easily explained. Tell me that last time the Red Sox got the early jump? Can you? I'm not sure I can, and I'll be damned if I take five minutes off my life to look it up. Suffice it to say that every time you look up, the Red Sox are losing early in the game. They may come back on some nights ... and they may not. But it's a safe bet that they never score first ... or, at least, haven't very often in the last month and a half.
Their pitching continually puts them behind the eight-ball. Even the ones who belong here, let alone the ones who are only in the rotation because there's no one else healthy enough to throw the ball.
I don't care how good your offense is. If you're constantly playing from behind, and your back end of the bullpen is being lit up like the Griswolds' house on Christmas Eve, then you're not going to win. The 1927 Yankees couldn't score enough runs to overcome that.
Let's examine. Coming out of the chute, the Red Sox had five projected healthy major league starters: Josh Beckett, Jon Lester, John Lackey, Clay Buccholz and Daisuke Matzusaka.
But the theme song for this staff should be "Ten Little Indians." One by one, they all went down at one point in the season. First it was Daisuke, who had to have Tommy John surgery. Then Lackey went on the DL, ostensibly for some kind of elbow problem, but more likely because of the mental anguish he's been suffering due to his wife's illness.
OK. Let's cut him some slack here. We're all human beings, and we're all affected by what goes on around us. And you'd have to be abnormally tough not to let your wife's cancer, and the issues surrounding it, creep into your psyche and make you less effective at your job.
Now, some people might be. Lackey, clearly, is not. In fact, Lackey, even before his wife got sick, is one of those guys who crumbles like a stale cracker the minute something goes wrong. You can see it. He puts on a face, goes into all these body contortions, and you can just tell he's rapidly coming undone. The Sox have had lots of pitchers recently with the ability to shrug these things off and refocus. Not Lackey. the minute he, or someone else, makes a mistake, that's his cue to stomp around, gesture, make a face, and then exacerbate the problem.
I don't know how much fun it is to play behind someone like that, but it sure as hell isn't any fun to watch.
Lackey's had his moments. But not many. So when he pitches, the onus is on the offense to put up a lot of runs. But what's a lot? Eight? That's how many they put up for him last time out, and he couldn't hold that lead.
Buccholz? Lost year. To me, he's the key to the whole thing. Considering he's probably missed about 12 starts now (at least), let's speculate that with the offense this team has, and his 3.64 ERA, the team probably would have won nine of them. Not sure how many they won with the rag-tag group of arms that took his place, but I'm betting it wasn't that many. It could very well be that this thing would be over now with a healthy Buccholz. There would have been no Andrew Miller, and some of the other stiffs who have been thrown in there because of the Sox' paucity of pitchers.
Thirty or forty years ago, you asked your starter to go seven or eight innings, and perhaps even nine. Whatever Tony LaRussa was doing in the 1960s, he wasn't re-inventing pitching, and running guys in and out of there three/four times an inning depending on matchups.
But since that's where we are with pitching, all we're asking the starter to do is go six-seven innings. Seven is ideal. Six is more the norm, unless his pitch count is low. Now, we have specialists for the last three innings, and when everything is set up properly one guy each pitches the last three innings.
The Red Sox signed Bobby Jenks for the seventh inning. Obviously that didn't work out. They tried to Matt Albers in that role after some of their other ones didn't pan out. No dice. They had a lefty who could come in to get tough left-handed hitters out (Rich Hill) but he blew out his elbow the same time Daisuke did, with the same result. So, basically, they had no lefty-on-lefty pitcher all season.
The top two guys, Beckett and Lester, pretty much held up their end of the bargain until about a month ago, and then even they started breaking down. I'm really baffled about this. There was some speculation that the Red Sox aren't in very good shape, and there may be some credence to that, especially among the pitchers. It just seems awfully strange that all five of them suffered major injuries this year, and that Lester, in particular, all of a sudden can't find home plate with a GPS.
Something is amiss here. And with all the finger-pointing going on, you have to wonder why pitching coach Curt Young seems to be getting a pass here. Aren't pitching coaches supposed to be able to take guys like Daniel Bard aside and detect flaws in their delivery so that they don't go three or four games in a row just totally stinking out the joint? Aren't they supposed to be able to take Lester on a side session or two and knock heads to figure out why a guy who was among the best pitchers in baseball the last two years all of a sudden can't locate his pitches and ends up going deep into almost every count?
I mean, what else is the guy getting paid for?
While the offense cannot be totally exonerated, let's be real. These pitchers, and this bullpen, do what they're suppose to do, which is throw strikes and get outs, this race is over and we're talking about a team that's poised to win about 95 games. The entire conversation is altered.
And what does all this prove? It proves, once again, that you can never ... again, repeat after me ... never, ever, ever, EVER, have enough pitching.
Seems like anybody who knows anything about baseball should have figured that out by now.
It comes down to one word: Pitching. Or, in the case of the Red Sox, lack of pitching.
With rare exceptions, and even with some of the team's best hitters fighting through late-season slumps, the Red Sox have scored runs. They scored runs last year, too, when they didn't even win 90 games and couldn't make the playoffs.
The line on them last year was that they couldn't hit good pitching and that's why they came up short. But really, who does hit good pitching? That's why it's ... repeat after me ... good pitching! Because nobody can hit it.
It's no crime to have a quiet day at the plate with C.C. Sabathia or Justin Verlander on the mound. You just have to hope, in those instances, that your pitcher can at least give your side a chance by keeping the Yankees and Tigers off the scoreboard.
Really, the anatomy of this late-season-collapse-in-waiting can be easily explained. Tell me that last time the Red Sox got the early jump? Can you? I'm not sure I can, and I'll be damned if I take five minutes off my life to look it up. Suffice it to say that every time you look up, the Red Sox are losing early in the game. They may come back on some nights ... and they may not. But it's a safe bet that they never score first ... or, at least, haven't very often in the last month and a half.
Their pitching continually puts them behind the eight-ball. Even the ones who belong here, let alone the ones who are only in the rotation because there's no one else healthy enough to throw the ball.
I don't care how good your offense is. If you're constantly playing from behind, and your back end of the bullpen is being lit up like the Griswolds' house on Christmas Eve, then you're not going to win. The 1927 Yankees couldn't score enough runs to overcome that.
Let's examine. Coming out of the chute, the Red Sox had five projected healthy major league starters: Josh Beckett, Jon Lester, John Lackey, Clay Buccholz and Daisuke Matzusaka.
But the theme song for this staff should be "Ten Little Indians." One by one, they all went down at one point in the season. First it was Daisuke, who had to have Tommy John surgery. Then Lackey went on the DL, ostensibly for some kind of elbow problem, but more likely because of the mental anguish he's been suffering due to his wife's illness.
OK. Let's cut him some slack here. We're all human beings, and we're all affected by what goes on around us. And you'd have to be abnormally tough not to let your wife's cancer, and the issues surrounding it, creep into your psyche and make you less effective at your job.
Now, some people might be. Lackey, clearly, is not. In fact, Lackey, even before his wife got sick, is one of those guys who crumbles like a stale cracker the minute something goes wrong. You can see it. He puts on a face, goes into all these body contortions, and you can just tell he's rapidly coming undone. The Sox have had lots of pitchers recently with the ability to shrug these things off and refocus. Not Lackey. the minute he, or someone else, makes a mistake, that's his cue to stomp around, gesture, make a face, and then exacerbate the problem.
I don't know how much fun it is to play behind someone like that, but it sure as hell isn't any fun to watch.
Lackey's had his moments. But not many. So when he pitches, the onus is on the offense to put up a lot of runs. But what's a lot? Eight? That's how many they put up for him last time out, and he couldn't hold that lead.
Buccholz? Lost year. To me, he's the key to the whole thing. Considering he's probably missed about 12 starts now (at least), let's speculate that with the offense this team has, and his 3.64 ERA, the team probably would have won nine of them. Not sure how many they won with the rag-tag group of arms that took his place, but I'm betting it wasn't that many. It could very well be that this thing would be over now with a healthy Buccholz. There would have been no Andrew Miller, and some of the other stiffs who have been thrown in there because of the Sox' paucity of pitchers.
Thirty or forty years ago, you asked your starter to go seven or eight innings, and perhaps even nine. Whatever Tony LaRussa was doing in the 1960s, he wasn't re-inventing pitching, and running guys in and out of there three/four times an inning depending on matchups.
But since that's where we are with pitching, all we're asking the starter to do is go six-seven innings. Seven is ideal. Six is more the norm, unless his pitch count is low. Now, we have specialists for the last three innings, and when everything is set up properly one guy each pitches the last three innings.
The Red Sox signed Bobby Jenks for the seventh inning. Obviously that didn't work out. They tried to Matt Albers in that role after some of their other ones didn't pan out. No dice. They had a lefty who could come in to get tough left-handed hitters out (Rich Hill) but he blew out his elbow the same time Daisuke did, with the same result. So, basically, they had no lefty-on-lefty pitcher all season.
The top two guys, Beckett and Lester, pretty much held up their end of the bargain until about a month ago, and then even they started breaking down. I'm really baffled about this. There was some speculation that the Red Sox aren't in very good shape, and there may be some credence to that, especially among the pitchers. It just seems awfully strange that all five of them suffered major injuries this year, and that Lester, in particular, all of a sudden can't find home plate with a GPS.
Something is amiss here. And with all the finger-pointing going on, you have to wonder why pitching coach Curt Young seems to be getting a pass here. Aren't pitching coaches supposed to be able to take guys like Daniel Bard aside and detect flaws in their delivery so that they don't go three or four games in a row just totally stinking out the joint? Aren't they supposed to be able to take Lester on a side session or two and knock heads to figure out why a guy who was among the best pitchers in baseball the last two years all of a sudden can't locate his pitches and ends up going deep into almost every count?
I mean, what else is the guy getting paid for?
While the offense cannot be totally exonerated, let's be real. These pitchers, and this bullpen, do what they're suppose to do, which is throw strikes and get outs, this race is over and we're talking about a team that's poised to win about 95 games. The entire conversation is altered.
And what does all this prove? It proves, once again, that you can never ... again, repeat after me ... never, ever, ever, EVER, have enough pitching.
Seems like anybody who knows anything about baseball should have figured that out by now.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
... As If We Could Ever Forget
I'm not sure it's possible for anyone who remembers September 11, 2001, to forget. It's still to fresh in our minds. There have been a handful of events in my life where I remember exactly what I was doing when they happened: JFK's assassination; the announcement on national TV by Howard Cosell that John Lennon had been shot; the explosion of the Challenger shuttle; and 9/11.
This isn't to grade the events by significance. Obviously the mass slaughter of 3,000 innocent people carries more weight than the gunning down of one person, even if he was an icon to people of my era. But these events, regardless of their significance in the overall big picture, are indelibly etched into my brain as four moments when the sheer horror of what I was hearing, seeing, and -- even if vicariously -- experiencing left me speechless.
I was only 10 when JFK was shot, and being that young, I didn't understand the big picture. All I knew was that the president was dead. There was no real big picture with Lennon and the Challenger. They were enormous tragedies to be sure, but their context was limited to the visceral reaction to their occurrences. There were no long-term ramification to Lennon's death that went beyond the tragically-enough knowledge that an important voice in our lives had been silenced needlessly and senselessly.
Sept. 11, 2001, was different. I'm not even sure, 10 years later, that the big picture has totally emerged. It's as if someone thrust an extremely difficult, obtuse Rorschach Test on us and demanded, on the spot, that we interpret it. There were so many ways to go, the real question, back on that day, was "where do you begin?"
At the beginning, of course. Strip away all those questions and you have the initial shock of watching it unfold. And on that day, as well as the few days and weeks that followed, I submit that it was impossible to do any kind of critical analysis about lessons we may have learned from it, or the reasons it happened, or the geopolitical implications of it. It was enough simply to digest the horror.
We may have thought we could do it, but looking back, it was unrealistic to think that, as a nation, we could have come up with a suitable response. And I think that's one of the faults of the American psyche: that we want these solutions now ... chop! chop! He who waits somehow waffles.
That kind of shock takes months to absorb. We woke up on Sept. 11, 2001, worrying about how much gasoline cost. And on the east coast, we had a plethora of shark attacks off the coast that dominated the news. Congressman Gary Condit was embroiled in the scandal surrounding Chandra Levy. The Red Sox had already begun their annual September decline (which, I'm happy to report, continues to be a trend in 2011).
Myself, I was recovering from blood poisoning and was still home, recuperating from a recent hospital stay. At 9 a.m. every day, on one of the local cable TV stations, I watched reruns of the old Perry Mason TV show. I set my body clock to them.
I believe it was about 8:57 when I checked into the Today Show on NBC ... just in time to hear that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Oh, God, I thought. What kind of a stupid, idiotic pilot can't steer a plane away from two buildings that stick out like buck teeth in reverse on the southern tip of Manhattan?
I was curious to see what fool had done this ... and how much damaged he caused. I assumed it was a "he," at least.
When I saw, it was instant disbelief. This was no single-engine prop job ... not from the looks of that fire. And again, not being able to put two and two together adequately, I could think of was "oh, no, people are going to die because some pilot, or some air traffic controller, screwed the pooch. Heads are going to roll!
Then ...
It was right there before my eyes. I saw the plane come into the picture, and I remember saying to myself, "wouldn't you think they'd have rerouted air traffic away from that area until they could figure out how a plane could be steered so tragically wrong?"
Then, I saw the explosion. And that that point, there was no doubt. No ambiguity. My son was standing there, watching with me, and I said -- I know, the ultimate "d'uh" moment -- "you know what this is, don't you? This is a terrorist attack. Somebody's grabbed these airplanes and they're flying them all into buildings."
It wasn't long afterward that we'd learned that both of the planes that hit the towers took off from Boston. And again, in these moments, you don't have a filter. I didn't think of whether MassPort was incompetent. All I could think of was that Logan Airport is only about six or seven miles as the crow flies from my house, and that my wife worked in a building that was literally right across the Boston Harbor from the control tower.
Part of me knew that whatever nuts had hijacked these planes and caused this much carnage were dead ... but there was another part of me that felt as if they were right next door to me. Those are the things that creep into your mind when these things happen. Rationality is out of the question.
The rest of the day was a blur. My wife's office evacuated, and she ended up taking a cab home from Boston because the subway line that runs past the airport -- the one she took to get to and from work -- had been shut down. We just sat and watch events unfold, from rumors that a truck bomb had blown up across from the state department, to the tragedy at the Pentagon, to the crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, PA ... all of it ... to watching the towers collapse. And do you know what the first rational thought I had was? It was that, my God, the world just got much, much smaller.
I also remembered what a priest from my parish said to me after the Oklahoma City bombings of 1995. He said that there was no way on earth anyone could possibly justify such indiscriminate murder. It was horrible enough that 3,000-plus people died. That it was so random, and indiscriminate, and that it was perpetrated not by a natural event, or an accident, but a massive conspiracy, was unspeakable.
Americans had always thought we were impervious to this kind of an assault. We've probably fought more wars (if you were to take a ratio of the age of the nation to the wars it has fought) than almost any other country on the planet. Yet it hadn't been since Pearl Harbor (and technically at the time Hawaii was not a U.S. state but but merely a territory) that any of the battles were fought on U.S. soil. Before Pearl Harbor, you had to go all the way back to the Civil War to find similar carnage.
And as events continued to unfold, and we heard that these terrorists who had been training right in front of our noses had done this to us ... that just added insult to the horror. Unknowingly, we were complicit in this (and I say this only in the loosest sense possible; this type of attack wasn't uppermost on anyone's mind).
So far, the theme here has been that the shock of seeing this happen, and experiencing the loss of people you knew, prevented us from thinking rationally. Before you can do that, you have to absorb the impact. If someone hits you in the stomach hard enough, you probably have to wait until you can breathe again before you worry about hitting him back.
There's no point in rehashing all the things that happened once we got our feet out from under us. Because by then, we'd moved past the initial shock and grief and into the realm of the political. I won't say I agreed with everything the U.S. did in response to 9/11, but I won't say I disagreed with it all either. And that's fine. I don't trust people who acquiesce on issues simply because that's what the party line dictates. Each situation has its unique solution, and if you tie yourself down to the same ideology and dogma every time, you do nothing but rob yourself of the opportunity to arrive at a truly measured, creative response. Sad to say, it doesn't appear as if many of my countrymen feel the same way on that.
Ten years later, my initial cogent reaction is still my strongest: This is a much, much smaller world than it used to be. You'd have to see that if a group as nomadic as Al Qaida could inflict as much damage on the U.S. as it did. Advances in communication and technology have made this a world as small, figuratively, as the state of Rhode Island.
The internet is a double-edged sword. One of its assets is anonymity, which is also one of its evils. All you need to do is go on any one of a number of hate sites to see that people who don't have to use their names to spew invective and vitriol can be pretty damn brave.
There are more shades of gray now than there ever were. There's ambiguity in everything. There are no absolutes ... or damn few, anyway. One man's hero is another man's villain. It all depends on your perspective.
Ten years and one day ago, we were oblivious to a lot of these feelings. Whether we should ever have been so naive, or so oblivious is another story entirely. But we were.
As the day segued into night ... and further segued back into Sept. 12, 2001, all I could think of was the final line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner:" "A sadder but a wiser man, I 'rose the morrow morn."
This isn't to grade the events by significance. Obviously the mass slaughter of 3,000 innocent people carries more weight than the gunning down of one person, even if he was an icon to people of my era. But these events, regardless of their significance in the overall big picture, are indelibly etched into my brain as four moments when the sheer horror of what I was hearing, seeing, and -- even if vicariously -- experiencing left me speechless.
I was only 10 when JFK was shot, and being that young, I didn't understand the big picture. All I knew was that the president was dead. There was no real big picture with Lennon and the Challenger. They were enormous tragedies to be sure, but their context was limited to the visceral reaction to their occurrences. There were no long-term ramification to Lennon's death that went beyond the tragically-enough knowledge that an important voice in our lives had been silenced needlessly and senselessly.
Sept. 11, 2001, was different. I'm not even sure, 10 years later, that the big picture has totally emerged. It's as if someone thrust an extremely difficult, obtuse Rorschach Test on us and demanded, on the spot, that we interpret it. There were so many ways to go, the real question, back on that day, was "where do you begin?"
At the beginning, of course. Strip away all those questions and you have the initial shock of watching it unfold. And on that day, as well as the few days and weeks that followed, I submit that it was impossible to do any kind of critical analysis about lessons we may have learned from it, or the reasons it happened, or the geopolitical implications of it. It was enough simply to digest the horror.
We may have thought we could do it, but looking back, it was unrealistic to think that, as a nation, we could have come up with a suitable response. And I think that's one of the faults of the American psyche: that we want these solutions now ... chop! chop! He who waits somehow waffles.
That kind of shock takes months to absorb. We woke up on Sept. 11, 2001, worrying about how much gasoline cost. And on the east coast, we had a plethora of shark attacks off the coast that dominated the news. Congressman Gary Condit was embroiled in the scandal surrounding Chandra Levy. The Red Sox had already begun their annual September decline (which, I'm happy to report, continues to be a trend in 2011).
Myself, I was recovering from blood poisoning and was still home, recuperating from a recent hospital stay. At 9 a.m. every day, on one of the local cable TV stations, I watched reruns of the old Perry Mason TV show. I set my body clock to them.
I believe it was about 8:57 when I checked into the Today Show on NBC ... just in time to hear that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Oh, God, I thought. What kind of a stupid, idiotic pilot can't steer a plane away from two buildings that stick out like buck teeth in reverse on the southern tip of Manhattan?
I was curious to see what fool had done this ... and how much damaged he caused. I assumed it was a "he," at least.
When I saw, it was instant disbelief. This was no single-engine prop job ... not from the looks of that fire. And again, not being able to put two and two together adequately, I could think of was "oh, no, people are going to die because some pilot, or some air traffic controller, screwed the pooch. Heads are going to roll!
Then ...
It was right there before my eyes. I saw the plane come into the picture, and I remember saying to myself, "wouldn't you think they'd have rerouted air traffic away from that area until they could figure out how a plane could be steered so tragically wrong?"
Then, I saw the explosion. And that that point, there was no doubt. No ambiguity. My son was standing there, watching with me, and I said -- I know, the ultimate "d'uh" moment -- "you know what this is, don't you? This is a terrorist attack. Somebody's grabbed these airplanes and they're flying them all into buildings."
It wasn't long afterward that we'd learned that both of the planes that hit the towers took off from Boston. And again, in these moments, you don't have a filter. I didn't think of whether MassPort was incompetent. All I could think of was that Logan Airport is only about six or seven miles as the crow flies from my house, and that my wife worked in a building that was literally right across the Boston Harbor from the control tower.
Part of me knew that whatever nuts had hijacked these planes and caused this much carnage were dead ... but there was another part of me that felt as if they were right next door to me. Those are the things that creep into your mind when these things happen. Rationality is out of the question.
The rest of the day was a blur. My wife's office evacuated, and she ended up taking a cab home from Boston because the subway line that runs past the airport -- the one she took to get to and from work -- had been shut down. We just sat and watch events unfold, from rumors that a truck bomb had blown up across from the state department, to the tragedy at the Pentagon, to the crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, PA ... all of it ... to watching the towers collapse. And do you know what the first rational thought I had was? It was that, my God, the world just got much, much smaller.
I also remembered what a priest from my parish said to me after the Oklahoma City bombings of 1995. He said that there was no way on earth anyone could possibly justify such indiscriminate murder. It was horrible enough that 3,000-plus people died. That it was so random, and indiscriminate, and that it was perpetrated not by a natural event, or an accident, but a massive conspiracy, was unspeakable.
Americans had always thought we were impervious to this kind of an assault. We've probably fought more wars (if you were to take a ratio of the age of the nation to the wars it has fought) than almost any other country on the planet. Yet it hadn't been since Pearl Harbor (and technically at the time Hawaii was not a U.S. state but but merely a territory) that any of the battles were fought on U.S. soil. Before Pearl Harbor, you had to go all the way back to the Civil War to find similar carnage.
And as events continued to unfold, and we heard that these terrorists who had been training right in front of our noses had done this to us ... that just added insult to the horror. Unknowingly, we were complicit in this (and I say this only in the loosest sense possible; this type of attack wasn't uppermost on anyone's mind).
So far, the theme here has been that the shock of seeing this happen, and experiencing the loss of people you knew, prevented us from thinking rationally. Before you can do that, you have to absorb the impact. If someone hits you in the stomach hard enough, you probably have to wait until you can breathe again before you worry about hitting him back.
There's no point in rehashing all the things that happened once we got our feet out from under us. Because by then, we'd moved past the initial shock and grief and into the realm of the political. I won't say I agreed with everything the U.S. did in response to 9/11, but I won't say I disagreed with it all either. And that's fine. I don't trust people who acquiesce on issues simply because that's what the party line dictates. Each situation has its unique solution, and if you tie yourself down to the same ideology and dogma every time, you do nothing but rob yourself of the opportunity to arrive at a truly measured, creative response. Sad to say, it doesn't appear as if many of my countrymen feel the same way on that.
Ten years later, my initial cogent reaction is still my strongest: This is a much, much smaller world than it used to be. You'd have to see that if a group as nomadic as Al Qaida could inflict as much damage on the U.S. as it did. Advances in communication and technology have made this a world as small, figuratively, as the state of Rhode Island.
The internet is a double-edged sword. One of its assets is anonymity, which is also one of its evils. All you need to do is go on any one of a number of hate sites to see that people who don't have to use their names to spew invective and vitriol can be pretty damn brave.
There are more shades of gray now than there ever were. There's ambiguity in everything. There are no absolutes ... or damn few, anyway. One man's hero is another man's villain. It all depends on your perspective.
Ten years and one day ago, we were oblivious to a lot of these feelings. Whether we should ever have been so naive, or so oblivious is another story entirely. But we were.
As the day segued into night ... and further segued back into Sept. 12, 2001, all I could think of was the final line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner:" "A sadder but a wiser man, I 'rose the morrow morn."
Friday, September 2, 2011
Labor Day Musings
Happy Labor Day Weekend, everyone.
Labor Day is easily the most bittersweet holiday of the year. For while it introduces the month that has perhaps the most spectacularly great weather of the entire year in the northeast, it also draws the curtain down on summer, and reminds us that uncompromising cold is not very far away.
But, as they say, let's enjoy the moment. We have September and October -- two absolutely gorgeous months, generally -- ahead of us before we have to start worrying about freezing to death. Right?
Anyway, let's begin ...
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I've been catching up with an old friend (and by old, I mean we haven't communicated but for a few emails in almost 30 years) recently. We made friends the first day of college (on orientation day, actually) and remained so for the five years (and beyond) we were at Northeastern University in Boston.
Fern was always a challenging person when it came to debating and discussing issues. We could never totally agree on anything. I've never considered myself conservative, by any stretch, but compared to her, I'm Dick Cheney.
Fern, who grew up in New Jersey, is now a Californian. And as such, probably more used to unstable ground than I am. So when the east coast had a 5.8 earthquake last week (more on that later), she emailed me out of the blue to ask me about it.
It was great to hear from her, and we've been emailing back and forth since. Over the course of our correspondence, I told her how much I idolized the author John Irving, and she told me how much she idolized Paul McCartney.
OK. I took that as a cue that we were going to discuss Paul's indelible contributions to baby-boom culture, so I sent her back a long, convoluted email outlining my self-appointed expertise on the subject.
I got one back basically telling me to stop being so convoluted and high-falutin', and that her idolatry for "Macca" began when she was 10 because he was the cute Beatle.
And it reminded me. At the end of the day, and despite everything that happened with the Fabs in the ensuing years, our first, and perhaps lasting, memory of them is of four mop-tops who shook their hair all over the place when they sang, and whose most profound lyrics might have been, "yeah, yeah, yeah."
It's easy to forget that. They may have grown into cultural phenomena, but they began as the cute one, the sarcastic one, the quiet one, and the guy on the drums with the big honker.
I guess you can't over-analyze that.
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It also occurred to me that 10-year-old guys did not look at, say, Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark the same way as little girls looked at the Beatles. It's hard, when you're 10, to get all worked up over women twice your age. My first celebrity crush -- if you want to call it that -- came a few years later when I was debating as to whether I'd want to kiss Ginger or Maryanne (and believe me, it was "kiss." Not anything else).
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I wouldn't know who Chaz Bono was were it not for the sex change procedure he's undergoing. I vaguely remember that there was even a Chastity Bono. And the only reason why that registers is that I really think that people who give their kids such strange names ought to be put in a room so that the rest of us can slap them around for a while.
But Chaz is going to be on "Dancing with the Stars" this fall. Now, the obvious question is when did Chaz Bono become a star? It's the same question I asked when Bristol Palin got her turn to spin around the dance floor. Other than getting pregnant when she was 16 and having a relationship with the father right out of Dogpatch, what did she ever do to become a star? Just because she's Sarah's daughter?
My only reaction is that we've set the bar quite low lately for defining the word "star."
That said, the reaction to Chaz being on the show -- not to mention the reaction to the reaction -- is certainly interesting, if not exactly eye-opening.
I do not watch Dancing with the Stars. Couldn't care less about it. And Chaz being on the show isn't going to make me watch either. I hate all that stuff ... American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, America's Got Talent ... (though I thought it was great that Kirstie Alley lasted as long as she did on the show).
First, to the producers of Dancing With The Stars: Chaz's story is compelling. No question. Him being on the show brings this story to light even more than it's been exposed already; and it perhaps entices more viewers as well.
Well, if you're going to put yourself on the line like that, then deal with the fallout. Because only an idiot wouldn't expect any. You can't have it both ways.
To the moralists out there who think that Chaz's appearance on the show is somehow sending the wrong message to kids: Please. The whole show's a circus. The only way Chaz would send the wrong message to kids is if he wore a sign around himself saying, "I'm transgender, and I'm lovin' it." And even then, what's the wrong message?
It makes me wonder when, in this country, are we simply going to allow people to be happy with who they are? When are we going to wake up and understand that as long as Chaz Bono (and others like him) isn't careening through life causing large-scale misery and mayhem, why should anybody be concerned about his lifestyle?
It brings to mind the whole gay marriage issue. I've always rejected the notion that gay marriage somehow destroys the sanctity of the institution. No it doesn't. The strength of the institution, at its most pure, comes down to two people who love each other, and whether they can sustain that love over a lifetime. Gay, straight, transgender ... what's the difference? Love is love ... happiness is happiness.
Leave them alone. And leave Chaz alone. I'm sure the process he went through to even arrive at the decision to have a sex change was tortuous enough.
And finally, this is the very definition of irony. We're talking about dancing. Theater. Entertainment. Or, to be as delicate as I can possibly be about the subject, one of the most nurturing environments in the entire country for gays and transsexuals. I wonder whether these armchair moralists out there have any idea, when or if they go to the theater, how many of the people they're watching may also be gays or transsexuals?
We'd need one paramedic for every 10 of them!
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I promised more earthquake/hurricane talk. Well, when that earthquake hit, we were sitting in the theater that contains the massive diorama of the Battle of Gettysburg. Part of the production involves simulated artillery fire that is pretty vivid in its realism (it is said that the artillery barrage was so loud during the gunfight preceding Pickett's Charge on Little Roundtop that it could be heard as far as away as Philadelphia).
As we were preparing to listen to the presentation, the ground shook intensely for about 10 seconds. We looked around, a bit puzzled. There are no subways in Gettysburg (the usual reason the ground would shake in the middle of the day), and the train station's on the other end of town from where all the historical museums are.
With no other explanation forthcoming, we just figured that it was a bit of simulation to get us prepared for what was to follow. We saw the display, never giving it a thought (and yes, the artillery simulation was quite vivid). But when the show ended, someone who works at the museum came in to tell us, that the ground shaking was a 5.8 earthquake.
There was no damage. In fact, the only residual effect of the quake, in southern Pennsylvania, at least, was that we couldn't use our cellphones to make calls for almost two hours. We could text, however, and email through our Blackberys. But no calls.
Needless to say, there were countless texts sent back and forth to ensure all the folks up in Boston that we were OK.
The best line from the whole thing was from my friend Nancy in Minnesota, who emailed me, "well, you certainly felt the earth move, didn't you?"
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And not only did we get to experience an earthquake while we were in Pennsylvania, we got chased home by a storm ... Hurricane Irene.
First of all, can I just say that people who whine and complain that the storm was a bust, and that it was overhyped, maybe ought to move to Vermont. I'm sure the people up there would disagree. The state -- which is one of the most pristinely gorgeous in the entire country -- is a mess. Roads washed out ... bridges collapsed ... massive flooding ... a genuine tragedy. There are ton of people along the east coast who still don't have power, and it's been almost a week since the storm hit.
So let's stop talking about how overhyped this storm was. If there's a problem, it's that all storms are overhyped ... so much so that when the forecasters are actually right about one of them, nobody takes them seriously.
Thankfully, my little corner of the earth didn't get the worst of Hurricane Irene. This isn't to say we came through unscathed. There are lots of downed trees and power outages in metropolitan Boston too. But it could have been worse.
In fact, my worst experience with Irene came not on the day when the storm was supposed to be at its height -- in our case last Sunday -- but the day before, when we were driving home from Philadelphia. Even though we'd heard that there would be only "showers" on Saturday, the word "showers" didn't do justice to what actually happened.
It didn't just rain. And it didn't just pour. I don't even know if there's a word for what it was. I guess the best way to describe it is that there was a wall of water so thick you couldn't see. Were it not for the lines on the Mass. Pike, I'd have had no idea where I was. Thankfully, through all that water, I could see the highway lines as they came upon me, and could also see the tail lights -- barely -- of the car in front of me.
But some people are just idiots. We're talking so much rain in such a short period of time that there was nowhere for the water to go. Even the Mass. Pike was a river, especially the left and right lanes. The center lane wasn't as bad, and that's where I stayed!!
But there were people who just went speeding through those puddles like it was 80 and sunny. And one of them poured so much water on my car that, for a few seconds, I felt as if I was going through a carwash. I couldn't see anything.
That was scary. And that was also the worst it got for the rest of the weekend.
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Four and a half hours to play nine innings, with only six runs scoring? That's what happened Thursday at Fenway when the Red Sox and Yankees wrapped up their three-game series.
There's no excuse for this.
I don't know when throwing a strike became such a project, but Major League umpires are going to have to relax the strike zone a little bit. It was the same for both sides Thursday.
I really have to congratulate the umpire on his pinpoint eyesight. Either that, or suggest he get another job, or stronger glasses. There's no in between. Either he was so "on" the plate that he could tell the difference between a ball hitting the outside corner and one a hair of an inch off, or he was just being a jerk (I'd use a different word, but Lord knows what armchair moralist may read this and suggest I'm sending a bad message to someone).
My guess is No. 2.
Then, he calls Adrian Gonzalez out on a pitch that was low and outside ... and a ball every other time he saw it.
And I'm beginning to see the wisdom of timing pitchers and batters between pitches. This stepping out, stepping off, rumba is getting absurd. Throw the ball. Get in there and hit.
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No real way to end this, except to say it's been a nice, although short, summer. Not as warm as last year's perhaps (I'm not one of these people who complains about the heat).
We somehow missed June entirely, and August was up-and-down, weather-wise. But July was one for the books. With any luck, we'll have a seasonal fall and a much milder winter than we did last year, when it snowed enough to make me think we were in the Arctic.
My most vivid memory of last winter was watching my son shovel off my roof ... and then seeing him limping around with back pain for a month afterward!!
No repeats, please.
Labor Day is easily the most bittersweet holiday of the year. For while it introduces the month that has perhaps the most spectacularly great weather of the entire year in the northeast, it also draws the curtain down on summer, and reminds us that uncompromising cold is not very far away.
But, as they say, let's enjoy the moment. We have September and October -- two absolutely gorgeous months, generally -- ahead of us before we have to start worrying about freezing to death. Right?
Anyway, let's begin ...
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I've been catching up with an old friend (and by old, I mean we haven't communicated but for a few emails in almost 30 years) recently. We made friends the first day of college (on orientation day, actually) and remained so for the five years (and beyond) we were at Northeastern University in Boston.
Fern was always a challenging person when it came to debating and discussing issues. We could never totally agree on anything. I've never considered myself conservative, by any stretch, but compared to her, I'm Dick Cheney.
Fern, who grew up in New Jersey, is now a Californian. And as such, probably more used to unstable ground than I am. So when the east coast had a 5.8 earthquake last week (more on that later), she emailed me out of the blue to ask me about it.
It was great to hear from her, and we've been emailing back and forth since. Over the course of our correspondence, I told her how much I idolized the author John Irving, and she told me how much she idolized Paul McCartney.
OK. I took that as a cue that we were going to discuss Paul's indelible contributions to baby-boom culture, so I sent her back a long, convoluted email outlining my self-appointed expertise on the subject.
I got one back basically telling me to stop being so convoluted and high-falutin', and that her idolatry for "Macca" began when she was 10 because he was the cute Beatle.
And it reminded me. At the end of the day, and despite everything that happened with the Fabs in the ensuing years, our first, and perhaps lasting, memory of them is of four mop-tops who shook their hair all over the place when they sang, and whose most profound lyrics might have been, "yeah, yeah, yeah."
It's easy to forget that. They may have grown into cultural phenomena, but they began as the cute one, the sarcastic one, the quiet one, and the guy on the drums with the big honker.
I guess you can't over-analyze that.
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It also occurred to me that 10-year-old guys did not look at, say, Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark the same way as little girls looked at the Beatles. It's hard, when you're 10, to get all worked up over women twice your age. My first celebrity crush -- if you want to call it that -- came a few years later when I was debating as to whether I'd want to kiss Ginger or Maryanne (and believe me, it was "kiss." Not anything else).
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I wouldn't know who Chaz Bono was were it not for the sex change procedure he's undergoing. I vaguely remember that there was even a Chastity Bono. And the only reason why that registers is that I really think that people who give their kids such strange names ought to be put in a room so that the rest of us can slap them around for a while.
But Chaz is going to be on "Dancing with the Stars" this fall. Now, the obvious question is when did Chaz Bono become a star? It's the same question I asked when Bristol Palin got her turn to spin around the dance floor. Other than getting pregnant when she was 16 and having a relationship with the father right out of Dogpatch, what did she ever do to become a star? Just because she's Sarah's daughter?
My only reaction is that we've set the bar quite low lately for defining the word "star."
That said, the reaction to Chaz being on the show -- not to mention the reaction to the reaction -- is certainly interesting, if not exactly eye-opening.
I do not watch Dancing with the Stars. Couldn't care less about it. And Chaz being on the show isn't going to make me watch either. I hate all that stuff ... American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, America's Got Talent ... (though I thought it was great that Kirstie Alley lasted as long as she did on the show).
First, to the producers of Dancing With The Stars: Chaz's story is compelling. No question. Him being on the show brings this story to light even more than it's been exposed already; and it perhaps entices more viewers as well.
Well, if you're going to put yourself on the line like that, then deal with the fallout. Because only an idiot wouldn't expect any. You can't have it both ways.
To the moralists out there who think that Chaz's appearance on the show is somehow sending the wrong message to kids: Please. The whole show's a circus. The only way Chaz would send the wrong message to kids is if he wore a sign around himself saying, "I'm transgender, and I'm lovin' it." And even then, what's the wrong message?
It makes me wonder when, in this country, are we simply going to allow people to be happy with who they are? When are we going to wake up and understand that as long as Chaz Bono (and others like him) isn't careening through life causing large-scale misery and mayhem, why should anybody be concerned about his lifestyle?
It brings to mind the whole gay marriage issue. I've always rejected the notion that gay marriage somehow destroys the sanctity of the institution. No it doesn't. The strength of the institution, at its most pure, comes down to two people who love each other, and whether they can sustain that love over a lifetime. Gay, straight, transgender ... what's the difference? Love is love ... happiness is happiness.
Leave them alone. And leave Chaz alone. I'm sure the process he went through to even arrive at the decision to have a sex change was tortuous enough.
And finally, this is the very definition of irony. We're talking about dancing. Theater. Entertainment. Or, to be as delicate as I can possibly be about the subject, one of the most nurturing environments in the entire country for gays and transsexuals. I wonder whether these armchair moralists out there have any idea, when or if they go to the theater, how many of the people they're watching may also be gays or transsexuals?
We'd need one paramedic for every 10 of them!
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I promised more earthquake/hurricane talk. Well, when that earthquake hit, we were sitting in the theater that contains the massive diorama of the Battle of Gettysburg. Part of the production involves simulated artillery fire that is pretty vivid in its realism (it is said that the artillery barrage was so loud during the gunfight preceding Pickett's Charge on Little Roundtop that it could be heard as far as away as Philadelphia).
As we were preparing to listen to the presentation, the ground shook intensely for about 10 seconds. We looked around, a bit puzzled. There are no subways in Gettysburg (the usual reason the ground would shake in the middle of the day), and the train station's on the other end of town from where all the historical museums are.
With no other explanation forthcoming, we just figured that it was a bit of simulation to get us prepared for what was to follow. We saw the display, never giving it a thought (and yes, the artillery simulation was quite vivid). But when the show ended, someone who works at the museum came in to tell us, that the ground shaking was a 5.8 earthquake.
There was no damage. In fact, the only residual effect of the quake, in southern Pennsylvania, at least, was that we couldn't use our cellphones to make calls for almost two hours. We could text, however, and email through our Blackberys. But no calls.
Needless to say, there were countless texts sent back and forth to ensure all the folks up in Boston that we were OK.
The best line from the whole thing was from my friend Nancy in Minnesota, who emailed me, "well, you certainly felt the earth move, didn't you?"
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And not only did we get to experience an earthquake while we were in Pennsylvania, we got chased home by a storm ... Hurricane Irene.
First of all, can I just say that people who whine and complain that the storm was a bust, and that it was overhyped, maybe ought to move to Vermont. I'm sure the people up there would disagree. The state -- which is one of the most pristinely gorgeous in the entire country -- is a mess. Roads washed out ... bridges collapsed ... massive flooding ... a genuine tragedy. There are ton of people along the east coast who still don't have power, and it's been almost a week since the storm hit.
So let's stop talking about how overhyped this storm was. If there's a problem, it's that all storms are overhyped ... so much so that when the forecasters are actually right about one of them, nobody takes them seriously.
Thankfully, my little corner of the earth didn't get the worst of Hurricane Irene. This isn't to say we came through unscathed. There are lots of downed trees and power outages in metropolitan Boston too. But it could have been worse.
In fact, my worst experience with Irene came not on the day when the storm was supposed to be at its height -- in our case last Sunday -- but the day before, when we were driving home from Philadelphia. Even though we'd heard that there would be only "showers" on Saturday, the word "showers" didn't do justice to what actually happened.
It didn't just rain. And it didn't just pour. I don't even know if there's a word for what it was. I guess the best way to describe it is that there was a wall of water so thick you couldn't see. Were it not for the lines on the Mass. Pike, I'd have had no idea where I was. Thankfully, through all that water, I could see the highway lines as they came upon me, and could also see the tail lights -- barely -- of the car in front of me.
But some people are just idiots. We're talking so much rain in such a short period of time that there was nowhere for the water to go. Even the Mass. Pike was a river, especially the left and right lanes. The center lane wasn't as bad, and that's where I stayed!!
But there were people who just went speeding through those puddles like it was 80 and sunny. And one of them poured so much water on my car that, for a few seconds, I felt as if I was going through a carwash. I couldn't see anything.
That was scary. And that was also the worst it got for the rest of the weekend.
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Four and a half hours to play nine innings, with only six runs scoring? That's what happened Thursday at Fenway when the Red Sox and Yankees wrapped up their three-game series.
There's no excuse for this.
I don't know when throwing a strike became such a project, but Major League umpires are going to have to relax the strike zone a little bit. It was the same for both sides Thursday.
I really have to congratulate the umpire on his pinpoint eyesight. Either that, or suggest he get another job, or stronger glasses. There's no in between. Either he was so "on" the plate that he could tell the difference between a ball hitting the outside corner and one a hair of an inch off, or he was just being a jerk (I'd use a different word, but Lord knows what armchair moralist may read this and suggest I'm sending a bad message to someone).
My guess is No. 2.
Then, he calls Adrian Gonzalez out on a pitch that was low and outside ... and a ball every other time he saw it.
And I'm beginning to see the wisdom of timing pitchers and batters between pitches. This stepping out, stepping off, rumba is getting absurd. Throw the ball. Get in there and hit.
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No real way to end this, except to say it's been a nice, although short, summer. Not as warm as last year's perhaps (I'm not one of these people who complains about the heat).
We somehow missed June entirely, and August was up-and-down, weather-wise. But July was one for the books. With any luck, we'll have a seasonal fall and a much milder winter than we did last year, when it snowed enough to make me think we were in the Arctic.
My most vivid memory of last winter was watching my son shovel off my roof ... and then seeing him limping around with back pain for a month afterward!!
No repeats, please.
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