DHL Dan CCLXXIV - Driving Ms. Russell

This looks like an interesting column:

Bill Russell’s daughter had never met Bob Cousy. Until now.

WORCESTER — It’s Sunday morning in mid-October and Worcester is looking unusually colorful and picturesque.

I am driving Karen Kenyatta Russell to Bob Cousy’s home because we’re new social media friends, and she texted that she was going to be in town for the Celtics’ season opener, mentioning, “I am going to try to see Mr. Cousy.”

So, I am driving Ms. Russell to meet Mr. Cousy.

Russell and Cousy are New England sports royalty. Bill Russell and Bob Cousy were pillars of the greatest dynasty in American professional sports, built by Red Auerbach.

Karen Russell is the 63-year-old daughter of Bill Russell, who died three years ago at the age of 88, 53 years after winning his 11th championship in his 13th and final season with the Boston Celtics.

Bob Cousy is the 97-year-old last survivor of the first Celtics championship, won in 1956-57, which happens to be the year Russell brought his talents to Boston.

Cousy and Russell are NBA Hall of Famers, NBA MVPs (Russell five times!), Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients, have their own statues, and won six championships together before Cousy retired in 1963, one year after Karen Russell was born.

DHL Dan CCLXXIII - Looking Back

With the Boston Red Sox no longer in the playoffs, Shank looks back a half century:

Why are we still looking back at the 1975 World Series 50 years later? Because it’s who we are, and other thoughts.

Picked-up pieces while blissfully remembering what life was like when the World Series was here 50 years ago this weekend . . .

⋅ A half-century later, the October 1975 and 2025 calendars align perfectly.

Game 4 in Cincinnati was Wednesday, Oct. 15. That’s when Luis Tiant whirled and twirled for 163 pitches and went the distance in a 5-4 series-squaring victory. The Reds’ Game 5 win was Thursday, Oct. 16. Then everybody flew back to Boston for Game 6 on Saturday.

In October 1975, Kevin Paul Dupont and I were 22 years old, covering high school football for the Globe for the princely sum of $35 per game. Through the kindness of veteran Associated Press sports editor Dave O’Hara, we also were quote-runners at Red Sox games at Fenway Park ($7 per game), which is how we happened to be at the Park Plaza for the food-and-booze World Series hospitality feast on Friday, Oct. 17, the eve of Game 6 — originally scheduled as Bill Lee vs. Jack Billingham. There was a threat of rain all weekend.

While inhaling our free Lobster Newburg, we learned that the Globe was looking for Peter Gammons’s World Series notebook. Nobody on Morrissey Boulevard could find Gammons and we were tasked with cobbling together some notes for the next morning’s paper.

DHL Dan CCLXXII - The Mike Vrabel Column

This week's Picked Up Pieces column focuses on first-year head coach of the Patriots Mike Vrabel:

The Patriots aren’t there quite yet, but they sure have the coaching part figured out with Mike Vrabel, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while wondering when Bill Belichick can put UMass on the Tar Heels’ schedule to pick up a much-needed win . . .

⋅ We’re not going to get all Super Bowl silly on you. The Patriots have a lot of work to do and, realistically, are in no position to think any upcoming opponent is an easy win. New England is still a very young and flawed football team.

But the Patriots have the coach part figured out. They have Mike Vrabel.

Five games into this new regime, it’s pretty clear that Bob Kraft made a great move when he admitted Jerod Mayo was a mistake and switched to Vrabel at the end of Mayo’s single season as head coach in Foxborough.

It couldn’t have been easy. Kraft’s ego is bigger than Gillette’s new lighthouse, and he probably wanted to honor the commitment he made to Mayo and give the neophyte coach a second chance.

Taking shots at ownership - check!

The Other Type Of Shank Column

By now we're all familiar with one type of Dan Shaugnessy column - the ones where he's second guessing a team / coach / player and / or crapping on the team's ownership. Today we get the opposite type of column, the heads version of the coin. When a team's on a winning streak, their opponents all of a sudden turn into small aluminum things!

Maybe we shouldn’t be thinking playoffs for the Patriots just yet, but their softer-than-soft schedule says otherwise

The Patriots just enjoyed their best win in five years, are over .500 after five games for the first time since the Brady era, and we are seriously talking playoffs again.

Not a moment too soon. The Red Sox thrill ride has been over for a week, and with the Bruins/Celtics launching seasons of low expectations, the Patriots have come to our emotional rescue.

Sunday’s wildly entertaining 23-20 victory over the unbeaten, Super Bowl-favorite Bills at Highmark Stadium put Gillette back on the NFL map. After two straight 4-13 campaigns and five years of front office frostiness, draft day boobery, personal vendettas, and abject incompetence — patterns and pettiness that put the franchise on the road to irrelevance — the Patriots are a team on the rise.

The prudent thing, of course, is to pump the brakes and remind everybody that the 2025 Patriots couldn’t beat the awful Raiders, losing 20-13 in Foxborough Sept. 7. Two weeks later, they committed five turnovers in a ridiculous 21-14 home loss to the Steelers.

The lords of television buried the Patriots in the anonymous 1 p.m. Sunday slot for at least 13 weekends. And they did it for a reason; the Patriots were not expected to be interesting.

But thanks to Mike Vrabel and Drake Maye, they’re suddenly a must-watch. And thanks to the easiest schedule these eyes have ever seen, the Patriots are a threat to return to the postseason and possibly even contend for first place in the AFC East.

It’s all about the schedule, people.

Seriously. Not enough has been made of the clear path the Patriots have been handed.

Welcome to the March of the Tomato Cans, 2025.

THat's right - it's not because our team's good; it's because everyone else sucks!

DHL Dan CCLXXI - Second Guessing, Shank's Favorite Pastime

In this weeks Picked Up Pieces column, Shank plays the what if? card with the Red Sox:

Rafael Devers might have been the piece the Red Sox were lacking in the playoffs, and other thoughts

Picked up pieces while predicting a big Patriot win Sunday night in Buffalo …

A fun Red Sox season is over. The locals made it to the postseason for the first time since 2021, then flamed out in a best-of-three Wild Card Series vs. the hated Yankees. The Sox were staggering at the finish, with only one-and-a-half starting pitchers, the worst defense in baseball, a lot of injured players, and a Charmin-soft lineup peppered with guys who’ve been cut loose by other teams and picked up from the recycling bin.

Seriously. How far were you going to go with Rob Refsnyder batting leadoff and Romy Gonzalez hitting cleanup against a Yankees team that featured four former MVPs in the first four spots in the lineup?

I will leave it to the Globe’s super-smart baseball scribes to speculate on what should be a busy winter for Boston baseball boss Craig Breslow and the Sox owners.

But for one final time, please let me address the myth of the Rafael Devers trade/salary dump that has been credited with turning around the Boston season, but, in fact, ultimately sunk the team in its final days.

The Red Sox batted .198 with one homer in the playoffs. Gonzalez, Refsnyder, Jarren Duran, Ceddanne Rafaela, Wilyer Abreu, Nathaniel Lowe, and Carlos Narváez combined to hit .054 (3 for 55).

Predicting a big Patriot win tomorrow night, is he? Here's another prediction - if the Patriots lose to Buffalo, Shank will be all over their case on Monday and he'll somehow blame Robert Kraft for it.

Belated Red Sox Playoff Wrap-Up

I didn't spot these columns 'til late in the week, so I'll mention them briefly.

Shank's first column celebrates the grand tradition of the Red Sox / Yankees playoff baseball. He loved Garrett Crochet's pitching in Game 1 of the series, and then things came crashing down in Game 2 when the Yankees tied the series up. In the end, the Yankees were the better team, who now go on to play the Toronto Blue Jays in the next round.

I'm left wondering one thing - would the series have turned out better for the Red Sox if we could've played just one freaking game at Fenway Park?

Back On The Bandwagon?

With the Boston Red Sox now in the playoffs, their opponet is their traditional rival, the New York Yankees. After shitting on the Red Sox and their ownership team for a majority of the past four years this season, Shank's now back at the front of the bandwagon:

Red Sox-Yankees in the playoffs. Does it get any better than this?

It’s just too good.

The Red Sox are in the playoffs Tuesday for the first time in four years, only the second time since they won the World Series in 2018 . . . and they are playing a best-of-three against the New York Yankees.

Red Sox-Yankees. Again.

Do we need to educate the young’uns and remind everyone what this means?

Red Sox-Yankees is an all-timer. It’s Harvard vs. Yale, Kennedy vs. Nixon, Athens vs. Sparta.

It’s Ohio State-Michigan, Army-Navy, Trump-Comey.

It is the ultimate American sports rivalry and we are getting it in the first round of baseball’s ever-expanding playoffs.

Strap yourselves in for two (possibly three) nights of hard-ball history and histrionics. This could be great. Enjoy the ride.

It's a good column by Shank, but I wonder - if Aaron Judge finally snaps out of his postseason slumps (and it's not pretty), do they win this series?

DHL Dan CCLXX - The Baseball Playoff Column

After the Boston Red Sox wrapped up a playoff slot this season (that next to nobody was able to watch because John Henry wants to nickle and dime us to death by putting these Friday games on Apple+), Shank takes a look at recent (non) Red Sox playoff runs:

Why not the Red Sox this October, and other thoughts ahead of the baseball playoffs

Picked up pieces while waiting for the baseball playoffs to begin . . .

Time to exhale, Red Sox Nation. The Sox are going to the playoffs again. Finally. The Alex Cora Athletic Club (ACAC?) made it official late Friday at Fenway, coming from behind to beat the Tigers, 4-3, in a pulsating walkoff win — probably Boston’s best baseball game since 2021.

Time to dig out that Instagram photo of Red Sox principal owner John Henry, who also owns the Globe, sitting in front of his fireplace smoking a stogie after signing free agent Alex Bregman in February. It’s Auerbach-esque, providing a hazy whiff of winning ways that marked Fenway Sports Group in its first 18 summers (2002-2019) of ownership.

Those “so-good, so-good” championship campaigns went away in recent years as the big-market Sox pivoted toward baseball’s big middle, finishing last three times after firing Dave Dombrowski and trading/salary-dumping Mookie Betts. Chaim Bloom was hired and fired, and Henry and Co. were booed at a mid-winter fan event. There was one outlier season in 2021 — 92 wins and an appearance in the ALCS — but it never felt like the good old days.

It’s better now.

It's better for now...

Just A Little Patience

Bill Parcells was inducted into the New England Patriots Hall of Fame last week. Shank was one of the few people who talked to Parcells after his induction:

Bill Parcells, now a Patriots Hall of Famer, looks back: ‘I should have been more patient’

A few choice words got my attention when Bill Parcells delivered his eight-minute speech as he was inducted into the Patriots Hall of Fame on Saturday.

“This place has a place in my heart and it always will,” said the 84-year-old former Patriots coach. “We sometimes reflect on things and you wish you would have done things a little different. Well, when I come back here and see this — I wish I would have done things a little different."

If you weren’t around 30 years ago, you might not know the complex, combustible history between Parcells and Patriots owner Bob Kraft.

A two-time Super Bowl winner, and perhaps the greatest team-builder in NFL history, Parcells already was in place when Kraft bought the Patriots in 1994, and the two fought bitterly when Kraft went behind the Tuna’s back on draft day in 1996. Parcells bolted for the Jets immediately after the Patriots were beaten by the Packers in Super Bowl XXXI, triggering a legal battle that had to be settled by the NFL commissioner. New England came away with draft picks and cash, but Parcells got a bigger prize when he signed Patriots running back Curtis Martin, who went on to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The Parcells-Kraft Border War was every bit as bad as what we’re seeing today between Bill Belichick and the now 84-year-old Patriots owner.

DHL Dan CCLXIX - Nail Biter

In this week's Picked Up Pieces column, Shank's happy that the Red Sox are in the playoff hunt:

Thanks to the Red Sox’ nailbiter of a playoff chase, this is our best September in a while, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while checking last night’s baseball scores every morning . . .

⋅ It’s our best September in a while. The weather’s been spectacular and those of us who consider daily box scores one of the major food groups search for results as soon as we get out of bed.

Are the Sox actually going to blow this thing? How’d the Yankees do last night? Will Houston or Seattle win the AL West? Are the billion-dollar Mets going off a cliff? Could Rafael Devers and the Giants actually make it to the postseason?

This isn’t a real pennant race like the Red Sox gave us in the pre-wild-card days, but Rob Manfred’s contrived, inclusive playoff system is working for me in 2025. Today, I’m officially thanking Sox owners for finally making good on their annual offseason pledge to play “meaningful games” in late September and October. It’s been too long and we’ve tolerated too many phony NESN moments hyping the illusion of contention when we knew the Sox had no chance to qualify for MLB’s annual October bakeoff.

This fall is different. The ’25 Red Sox are the proverbial little girl with the curl. When they are good they are very good, and when they are bad they are horrid.

So, no 'illusion of contention' this year, Shank?