In a week of American protest and crisis, the Red Sox stood smallThe quaint notion that what has happened in Kenosha and elsewhere this week are mere protests is world class sophistry. These are riots by any reasonable / logical definition. Look at this guy's thread and tell me otherwise. Andy Ngo's by far and away the number one chronicler of these riots that Shank and other media rumpswabs try to pass off as protests. False premises like this need to be taken out back and tossed in the dumpster.
The Red Sox are not only a horrible baseball team, they are also ever-divided. And really hard to like.Worth noting - the presence of these ellipses suggest / confirm that Shank (or the guy he copied it from) is doing what's known in the recording business as sampling; in other words using parts and sections potentially taken out of context and other pertinent and inconvenient facts removed for maximum negative impact. That said, I see nothing incendiary about those two semi-sentences. Clumsy for sure, but that's it.
After playing a game Wednesday — the day the NBA shut down and three major league games were postponed — the Sox had a team vote Thursday and agreed to stand behind Jackie Bradley Jr., who had told his teammates he wasn’t going to play Thursday. In the early hours after the decision to boycott was announced, Sox outfielder Kevin Pillar and reliever Ryan Brasier made their true feelings known.
Participating in a Zoom news conference, Pillar said, “It was not an easy decision for a lot of us . . . We all have different beliefs. We don’t agree on everything . . . I don’t think right now, as a country, we should be necessarily identifying individual groups of people that need to be uplifted . . . ’'
Not to be outdone:
A few hours after Pillar spoke, Brasier retweeted a video mocking Doc Rivers’s emotional response to the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wis. It’s truly hateful and appalling stuff. See if you can find it. Search Twitter for Hodgetwins — conservative comedians with almost 600,000 followers. Brasier evidently is a big fan. Pinky Higgins would be so proud. Color me haunted.I'm sort of two minds with this guy and what he did - on the one hand, getting in trouble for a retweet seems incredibly petty. On the other hand (and the one I'm going with) is that Brasier's always seemed like a knucklehead to me and this merely provides confirmation. Doc Rivers is a class guy par excellence and that was a no-thought classless thing to do.
Brasier’s retweet was discovered Friday by NBC Sports Boston’s John Tomase. Brasier did not respond to Tomase’s request for comment, but he deleted the retweet from his timeline. Ron Roenicke said that Brasier reached out to Bradley and the Sox manager to explain his actions. Wonder what Brasier would say to Rivers, whose father was a cop.
No, I did not miss the Pinky Higgins reference / name drop -of course not! I'm not a baseball historian / aficionado like my co-blogger, but the guy sounds like a real winner (please note the sarcasm, folks!). You'll see some other name drops later on that you're going to love...
I spoke with Sox baseball boss Chaim Bloom after midnight Friday.Again, these aren't protests anymore; they are riots, complete with bullhorns, looting, fire and physical assault, and they haven't been 'protests' for quite a while to the degree they ever were. Siding with rioters and calling it 'dignity and unity' seems to have things like priorities seriously inverted. Fortunately these riots are largely confined to ten or fifteen downtown areas of certain major American cities controlled by Democrats lock stock and barrel for a period on average equivalent to my age.
“I talked to Ryan about this today,’' said Bloom. “He was very apologetic and regretted the timing, and the message that the timing sent. He took down one of those tweets and spent time having a lot of conversations in our clubhouse with people he felt he needed to have conversations with. He was upset and regretful about the entire thing . . . This wasn’t something that we felt warranted discipline. He made a mistake, but once he did I think he took a lot of the right steps to try to make amends.’'
This is so Boston Red Sox. In a week of American protest and crisis, the Sox stood small while so many around them demonstrated dignity and unity. While America paused to take a long look in the mirror, the Red Sox provided division and continuation of a culture that has long plagued the Boston baseball franchise.
“You bring any group of this many people together, you’re bound to have people with different views and different thoughts,’' said Bloom. “Peaceful protests are about changing minds. If we can’t look at progress that gets made towards a goal in a room of people with very different opinions — if we can’t look at that and see progress, then we’re undermining our own goals.’'Everyone got that? Now watch this:
“We don’t demand that everyone have the same political opinion,’' added Sox CEO Sam Kennedy.
Good. This is America. You are not obligated to agree with everyone else, and a big league ball club doesn’t release a player for being a dumbbell.
But why can’t Pillar and Brasier keep their different views behind closed doors? This was an opportunity to back a teammate without pushing one’s own agenda. Most other teams presented as unified. Would a little unity from the Red Sox be too much to ask?Pillar was asked a question and presented his own viewpoint, albeit roughly. Braiser? He's a knob and not getting a pass on that - a lot of times shut the fuck up is the better part of valor. That said, Shank just contradicted himself in consecutive sentences, and not for the first time.
I truly wish these 2020 Red Sox could play in front of fans at Fenway. It would expose them to the boos they so richly deserve. And not just because they are 10-22. They remind me of the loathsome Joe Kerrigan Red Sox of 2001. Mike Lansing. Carl Everett. You remember those guys, right?An awesome blast from the past! Behold, the Bing results from typing in 'curly haired boyfriend' - this post is now writing itself!
These Sox certainly honor the ball club’s time-tested legacy of “25 players, 25 cabs.” They have only one Black player, just as they did when they were baseball’s last team to integrate 60 years ago. And they can’t seem to agree on anything.That's because it has become a politicized event, aided and abetted by media members like Shank.
Remember last year when the defending world champs were summoned to be honored at the White House? All the white guys went to Washington. With the exception of J.D. Martinez and Sandy Leon, all the Sox persons of color stayed home.
Opening night at Fenway, 2020? All the visiting Orioles took a knee during a pregame presentation dedicated to Black Lives Matter. Six Red Sox kneeled — Bradley, Michael Chavis, Alex Verdugo, and three coaches who are men of color. Everybody else stood.I alluded to this point two posts ago, but it bears repeating and a bit more expansion - there's a big difference between overt, direct acts of racism like barring people from businesses, pro sports teams and the like (which I see little to no evidence of in modern American society today) and in the case of Jacob Blake in Kenosha (which apparently triggered this latest pro sports boycotting this week), claiming solidarity with a black man wielding a knife and roaming around menacing other people and when white cops intervene lots of people freak out and call the cops every fucking name in the book. These two things could not be any more different from each other but here we are with some degree of American citizens accusing law enforcement and those who support them of the most vile and wicked motives and behaviour for the act of doing their jobs.
Now we have the last-place Sox stacking loss after loss like a pile of cord wood, then going public with clubhouse division during a week of protest and reflection by every team in every sport.
After Friday afternoon’s unfortunate flurry, Bradley, Brasier, and the rest of the Red Sox participated in a pregame ceremony at Fenway commemorating Jackie Robinson’s first day in baseball. When all players stood at attention, I couldn’t help but wonder what Ryan Brasier was thinking.
I'm quite sure we don't need to 'reflect' on the notion that thugs are allowed to rampage certain American cities and call the cops racists for doing their jobs.
Such faux outrage by this fraud who ripped Tim Thomas for not going to see Obama which was HIS RIGHT TO DO SO !!!!
ReplyDeleteHere's the question that was posed to Pillar, Xander Bogaerts, and Nathan Eovaldi: Given what you know now, given what you've learned from Bradley, do you feel differently about your decision to leave Bradley mostly alone taking a knee before Opening Day?
ReplyDeletePillar was the only one to answer. Here is an expanded soundbite (I don't know whether this is the full text of his answer):
"I feel like that's a tough question to answer collectively as a group. We, all three of us, come from different backgrounds, different states, different countries. We all have different beliefs. We don't agree on everything. We agree on a lot of things. It's a difficult question to answer collectively. We did talk as a group before Opening Day about what was going on and what was expected of us. The biggest thing the organization preached to us was, "Do what you believe is right." You saw how a lot of us stood up for what we believed in and what we thought was right. We all individually had an opportunity to do what we felt like we needed to do. A lot has changed since Opening Day, but at the same time, a whole lot hasn't changed. ...
"Is it more important that we uplift Jackie because he's the only one? My answer would be no. I think it's important that we uplift everyone in this room. Jackie is our only African-American baseball player on this team, but like they mentioned, we do have a coach, we have a trainer, there are teams that have quite a bit more African Americans on their team. But what we did today was 1,000% in support of Jackie Bradley Jr. (of the others), because this is how they felt. We wanted to show them support, that they weren't in this alone. ...
"It's a touchy subject, but I don't think right now, as a country, we should be necessarily identifying individual groups of people that need to be uplifted. I think the vast majority of us would like to encourage to uplift everyone and support everyone."
Brasier certainly deserves a jeer and more for what he posted, but I honestly don't see an issue with what Pillar stated. You can agree or disagree with his view, but at least he answered openly and honestly.