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Thursday, August 28, 2008

Who are you talking about Dan?

It's all about efficiency in business today. And what business needs it more than newspapers?

It takes Dan only eight sentences to introduce a groan inducing pun:

Jack Nicholson was on hand to watch the blood drain out of the Yankees' season. Who says he can't handle the truth?

(I always chuckle when the notoriously thin-skinned Dan writes that line.)

I have to give it to Dan, though. He actually bothered to watch the game before he wrote his column. Maybe he finally learned something from Bob Ryan after all these years.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, the sainted Ryan. Are we talking about the same guy who used to write Celtics game stories off of Johnny Most's play-by-play of West Coast games that the Globe didn't staff in the Finkle era?

Chris said...

I LOVED this line:

"Jack Nicholson was on hand to watch the blood drain out of the Yankees' season. Who says he can't handle the truth?"

I loved it because Jack Nicholson once starred in a movie with Tom Cruise called 'A Few Good Men.' In it, Nicholson's character screams 'You Can't Handle The Truth!' at a cowering Cruise.

I don't know if anyone else made that connection, but I thought it was pretty clever of Shaughnessy to meld a movie line into a reference of an actor seen at a baseball game. COOL!!! I am in awe. Never mind that the line was said BY Nicholson, not TO Nicholson, which contorts the reference completely. Still, I am bowing to Shaughnessy in the same way that 75,000 people will bow to Obama tonight at the Roman Coliseum...er...sorry, Invesco Field at Mile High.

Anonymous said...

Mike Timlin - who has morphed into the Greg Kite of the Red Sox...

One good line out of a stinker of a column; every cloud has it's silver lining...

dbvader said...

I liked the part about the old-timey dropballs.

This time it was double-pumping Paul Byrd dazzling the billionaires' club with his 87-mile-per-hour heaters and old-timey dropballs in an 11-3 rout.

JJ said...

They are going to finish out of the playoffs for the first time in 14 years. They are going to close out the House That Ruth Built in a regular-season night game against the Orioles. Mr. October will be asked to turn out the lights Sept. 21. Yankee Stadium will be dark when the playoffs commence at the hardball aquarium in St. Petersburg, Fla.

This is a bit nit-picky, but what Shank means here is postseason, not playoffs. Baseball only has a playoff when two teams are tied at the end of the regular season, such as in 1978.

Shank confuses this with NFL, the NBA & NHL - I'm almost willing to give him a pass on this because just about every journalist / media member gets this wrong. Still doesn't make it right.

And of course, there's that gratuitous Babe Ruth reference.

Anonymous said...

Roger posted:

Mike Timlin - who has morphed into the Greg Kite of the Red Sox...

Ok this is one of the problems that I have with Shank. I'm twenty-seven. However, I do know who Greg Kite is. I'm willing to bet that quite a few people my age don't, and don't necessarily think that it is because they don't know sports.

Is it really to much to ask for Dan to use a reference to someone from say maybe the last ten or fifteen years. I could rattle off a couple of Boston sports guys who might work. JR Redmond, Brian Scalbrine, Scott Pollard, Brent Zabo, Marty Conlan, hell even Blane Lacher, yeah I can definetly think of a few.

Vin

dbvader said...

Ah, the sainted Ryan. Are we talking about the same guy who used to write Celtics game stories off of Johnny Most's play-by-play of West Coast games that the Globe didn't staff in the Finkle era?

King of the Strawman, such is OB. I don't think that a beat writer told to write game stories from the radio feed by his boss is in any way comparable to the contemptible crap that CHB spews on an irregular basis.

Vin,

For Dan, time stopped in 1994. That's why 2004 was such a problem for him. His shtick no longer worked.