The 2018 World Series Champs - II

This is simply stunning, and borderline outrageous. Shank has ragged on, belittled and discounted the 2018 Boston Red Sox on a consistent basis from the first spring training game to Game 2 of this year's World Series. Behold the world-class mental gymnastics involved at justifying eternal pessimism:

LOS ANGELES — My parents went through their high school and college years during America’s Great Depression. My mom had seven siblings, my dad four, and there was never extra money for anything. They never felt financially secure.

They had what we all came to know as the “Depression Mentality,’’ and passed it on to their children. The message was: Take no risks and always say yes to a steady job. You never know when it might all go away.

This is how I explain my year-long skepticism about the 2018 Red Sox — the greatest Boston baseball club in history and now in the discussion with the 1927 Yankees and a handful of others as among the best ever.

I have the Depression Mentality about this franchise, and I believe it’s because of the times I grew up in.

As long as I've been following this asshole over many, many years, it is difficult to come up with a more disingenuous column than this one. It conveniently ignores the positive aspects of the change in ownership with John Henry and company, who were clearly committed to a winning culture from the start and his heavily discounting of the three World Series since that time, to the point they may have well been dismissed outright.

The only question I'd have is his motivation for writing this column in the first place. He's done the occasional mea culpa type column in the past, but nothing on this scale. It's not obvious from reading the column and I'm sure as hell not going to waste any time thinking about it, knowing he's going to start shitting on them again as soon as the trucks are unloading the bats & gloves in Fort Myers in a few months.