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Thursday, April 12, 2007

Dan Shows a Little Effort

And brings you into the ballpark with the column for Daisuke Matsuzaka's first start at Fenway. (The headline for which could also describe the last decade of Dan's career.)

It was a pretty good effort, offering some interesting detail about Daisuke's day and actually providing an in depth description of the game, which is rare because Dan usually spends the game writing his column instead of watching.

It wasn't a clean slate, however. He once again felt obligated to refer to Matsuzaka as the "$103 million Red Sox rookie." I wish sports reporters would get over the fascination with player salaries. It's unbecoming and irrelevant.

Then there is this analogy that doesn't hold up: "This was Japanese baseball's version of Bill Russell vs. Wilt Chamberlain". First, basketball matchups aren't anything like the batter vs. pitcher matchup. He has all of baseball history to reference and he feels the need to go back 40+ years for two basketball players? Second, professional basketball in the 1960's wasn't nearly the sensation that baseball is in Japan. How about something from the 80's or 90's when Americans were actually watching basketball?

And Dan's lame joke for the evening is attributed to someone else, but he cannot avoid it still falling flat: "It was, in the words of one reporter, the million cameramen march." It's close, but maybe next time his cultural references can be from the last decade. Baby steps.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not to mention he has already used the million cameraman march reference once. It's even lamer this time around.

Anonymous said...

Shank still doesn't get it. If Matsui is the Japanese Babe Ruth and Ichiro is their Ted Willams, Dice-K is their Pedro Martinez. I can understand the media attention.

Let's turn the tables and say for the sake of argument that the quality of football was greater in the CFL than the NFL. If Tom Brady decided to play for the Toronto Argonauts after dominating the inferior NFL, the media coverage would be huge. We'd all tune in to watch Brady's first pass.

Enough with the $103 million stuff. Dice-K is only going to see half of that and the other half goes to the Seibu Lions. Dice-K is making $8 1/2 to 9 mil. this year not $103 mil. And that's the "inconvienent truth"

JJ said...

Odd that there was not even a passing mention that Mariner's catcher Kenji Johjima was also from Japan.

Wouldn't the fact that there were TWO Japanese players in Seattle's starting lineup be worthy of some small note?

dbvader said...

anon is right. Back in February Dan mentioned that he wished he thought of "the million cameramen march" joke. The first person to use it was Callahan.

http://tinyurl.com/3ayl2f

I bet Callahan was the same guy who used it in the press box. So what we have is a sports reporter reusing the same stale joke and another repeating it twice because he thought it was so funny.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Jaha

And oh yeah, "once again" more repetition from old columns...Shaughnessy has previously used the Francona-Michael Jordan-great hype angle

ObjectiveBruce said...

The NESN dinner show on Thursday night was the absolute worst piece of crap I have seen on any sports cable station since ESPN did a regular roller derby program back in the early 80s.

I blame Shaughnessy and Ryan and everyone who has allowed them to set the agenda for their botching recollections of the 1967 Sox. 1967 stands for the last real pennant race ever (in the sense that there were no playoffs, you had the best record or you went home.) and the greatest pennant race ever with four teams in it until Friday of the last weekend.

Here we have Reggie Smith back in town for the first time since he was sent toddling off for Rick Wise and we see interviews with Ortiz and speeches by sponsors and badly reproduced music? Why was Reggie back? How was his reunion with Billy C. and Yaz? What does he think of race and sports and Boston? Instead we get Tom Caron and Tina Teeth using Shaughnessy/Ryan spin to ask inspid questions of the usual suspects, Williams and Lonbog. What a complete botch job. Dan Osinski ripped Dick Williams at a news conference 40 years later and nobody followed up?

I was at the game in 1966 the night Billy Herman got fired. The Sawx were rolling toward the end of a successful second half. the lineup had Scott and Foy and Rico and Yaz, and everyone knew that the Toronto AAA team was stocked with studs. There were 21,000 there on family night for a game wiht the yankees (who were battling it out with the locals for 9th place).

This silliness about 1967 saving the Sawx is nonsense. The story of 1967 is the story of the ultimate (and penultimate if one notes that division play began in 1969) pennant race.

I'm ticked. But then that's what sports columnists are supposed to evoke.

Anonymous said...

P.S. The most impressive part of the Sox-yankees game of 1966 was Stan Bahnsen's debut in the majors -- he was throwing absolute smoke; the pop into Billy Bryan's mitt reverberated off the wall

Anonymous said...

If NESN started a roller derby show, it would be a vast improvement over their Globe-related programming, ob.

Anonymous said...

...get over the fascination with player salaries. It's unbecoming and irrelevant.

Yeah, it's too bad the writers can't drop this the way Sox fans never mention Alex Rodriguez and his $252 million.

dbvader said...

enoughalready

Nice use of a red herring. This site isn't about Sox fans. I don't care about player's salaries and have never mention A-Rod's or any one else's salary.

Chris said...

Can I be the first to re-name CHB to 'Nappy-Headed Boyfriend?' It does, without being satirical, fit his profile.