Easy Call Made / Glass Is Half Empty Guy

The Boston Red Sox have the best record in baseball and have won six road games in a row. Once again, Shank belittles this achievement by saying 'all the other teams suck':

The Red Sox Sunday completed their three-game sweep of the Kansas City Royals. Aggregate score: Boston 32, Kansas City 13.

The Sox are now 62-29 — 33 games over .500. The Royals have lost nine straight and 27 of 31. KC is 39 games under .500.

If one team is winning a lot of games, that strongly implies another team / teams is / are losing a lot of games. Logic has never been one of Shank's strong suits.

The Sox come home Monday and get to play the last-place Rangers for the next three nights. Then we’ll get a weekend look at the moribund Blue Jays who are 20 games out of first place.

On and on it goes. Meaningless game after meaningless game as the Red Sox put up cartoonish numbers while we wait for the real games to start in October. So much winning.

Whoop dee do.

If anyone has doubts about Shank despising at least this local professional sports team, that last little sentence should remove all doubt. This column goes on to make some good points about some of the reasons behind the declining popularity of baseball, but they are greatly devalued with flippant comments like that one.

Are you ready for this particular load of crap?

Here in baseball-savvy Boston, the Olde Towne Team is playing at a near-record pace, but it seems that local sports fans only want to talk about the Celtics and NBA free agency. Tom Brady and Julian Edelman. Try to find good baseball conversation. Spend an hour alternating between the Sports Hub and WEEI and take note of how little baseball conversation you hear. Unless there’s yet another caller bashing David Price, the Sox don’t generate much sports talk these days.

Shank appears for two hours on 98.5 The Sports Hub just about every week. If he feels there isn't enough baseball conversation, there's a way to address that problem - provide it when you do these appearances.

Strikeout inflation is a big part of the problem. I have grown to hate strikeouts. A strikeout used to be a measure of a pitcher’s dominance. Not anymore. Everybody strikes out. All the time. A 10-strikeout effort by a starting pitcher is no longer a big deal. For the first time in history, baseball features more strikeouts than hits. This will be the 11th consecutive season in which MLB sets a record for strikeouts.

Whoop dee bloody do.

See what I mean?

In case you're wondering, Shank still hates numbers and the people that use them:

Aanalytics (copy desk - get me rewrite! - ed.) are out of control. Even commissioner Rob Manfred agrees. Manfred recently told The Athletic, “There is a growing recognition that analytics have produced certain trends in the game that we may need to be more proactive about reversing. There are owners that feel that way. There are fans that feel that way.’’

Meanwhile, as the game is taken over by geeks, the players become more faceless. Mike Trout? Great player. Why isn’t he as popular and well known as Kevin Durant or Steph Curry?

I don't know, Shank - maybe columnists could write about him some more?

This is fairly irritating - Shank bitches and moans about a lack of certain sports conversation, yet he is in a position to rectify this in two ways - in print and in media. If he chooses not to do so, I think he should shut the hell up about it. That is the root of passive-aggressive behavior, which is in my book a character flaw.