Singing A Different Tune

Dan Shaughnessy, three weeks ago:

Are the Red Sox contenders or pretenders?

A few series wins against three bad teams seems to have changed Shank's tune a wee bit:

Remember all that talk about urgency and the need for the 2016 Red Sox to get off to a good start

Yes, Shank - you wrote about it nearly every day over a span of two freaking months!

Turns out it was all true. And the Red Sox thus far have done what they set out to do.

Our local spring sports calendar is suddenly darker, and we are going to need baseball to fill the days and nights and blogs and endless hours of sports talk ("and re-reading half my columns on The Sports Hub every Tuesday!" - ed). The Bruins didn’t make the playoffs, the Celtics checked out early, and the Patriots felt the full wrath of Deflategate punishments in a week in which they were denied a seat in the first round of the draft and learned they’d be playing without Tom Brady in September.

That would depend on whether Brady decides to appeal that decision, but why let that pesky little fact get in the way?

Warning - Shankism Alert! All hands to battlestations - captain to the bridge!

Into the breach stepped the Olde Towne Team, the Local Nine, the Sons of Sam Horn and Nomar Garciaparra. Boston baseball’s April ended on an upswing, and the last-place Red Sox became the first-place Red Sox on May Day.

They are five games over .500 for the first time since the inadvertent (jeez, not this shit again - ed.) championship season of 2013, and we have reason to believe they will once again be playing meaningful games in July, August, September, and (maybe) October. Dozens of questions linger about this team, but at least the Sox are worthy of discussion again. A daring dance with irrelevancy has been averted.

Much to Shank's chagrin...

And while it’s handy to say the Bostons just routed three last-place teams (Houston, Atlanta, and the reeling Yankees), two of those teams were in the playoffs just seven months ago.

While you’re at it, take a good look around the American League and tell me where the good teams reside. The entire league is a collection of average teams waiting to be beaten.

Which brings us back to these Red Sox, who should be turning the clock back to a theme of 2004, when one of the mantras was “Why Not Us?’’

And thus we see a slightly different take of the way Shank routinely treats the New England Patriots. Instead of making absurdly high expectations of the Patriots during the season (for the purpose of criticizing them if / when they fail to meet those expectations), he now considers every American League team to be average, and if the Red Sox somehow do go on to win another World Series, he will call it another inadvertent championship like he did earlier in this column about the 2013 team.

No Shaughnessy column is complete without one piece of howling bullshit:

Being the glass-half-full guy that I am, look at it this way:

Anyone who's buying that needs a freaking MRI scan on their brain.

At least he has something to regurgitate tomorrow morning!