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Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Backhanded Compliment

Watching the beginning of tonight's Red Sox game, when the 1986 Boston Red Sox were being honored, I was sitting there, thinking - 'I'm imagining Shank doing a column right now, larding up the insults and cheap shots for coming one strike away from winning the World Series'.

I wasn't far off the mark - check out the massively insulting nickname Shank conjured up to 'commemorate' this team:
They were Boston’s One Strike Away Boys of Summer. Coming off a perfectly boring .500 season, the 1986 Red Sox took over first place in mid May and stayed there the rest of the season. They staged (what was at the time) the greatest comeback in ALCS history in Game 5 in Anaheim. Then they came closer to winning the World Series — without actually winning — than any team in history. They were the ones who could have broken the Curse, purged the ghosts, and prompted New Englanders to ring church bells and place Sox artifacts on gravestones of those who never lived to see it happen.
This insult is repeated throughout the column, with a paint by the numbers recollection of various points of that season. Typical Shank hatchet job.

2 comments:

ObjectiveBruce said...

Your lack of basic understanding borders on the creepy. The biggest single memory of the 1986 season is 'it gets through Bucker and the Mets win it;

Roger Bournival said...

Four days after this was posted, and that's the best you can come up with?

The biggest single memory of the 1986 season...Classic non-sequitur, Brucie - the premise of the post was Shank's predictability, as has been demonstrated time and time again on DSW for over a decade, and you missed it completely. Do try and keep up...