First Night Out

Shank sort of likes Re-Opening day for the Boston Celtics:

Just getting to the Garden was weird.

There were no flag-wavers selling “$40 for Garden event, no blocking” parking on Friend and Portland Streets. Boston’s Causeway neighborhood featured a lot of dark saloons and eateries. Walking past sad, shuttered “The Fours” on Canal Street, I felt like Bluto in “Animal House” when he shouts, “They took the bar! The whole [expletive] bar!”

The Harp on Causeway Street was open, but had no patrons at 4 in the afternoon. This would have been unthinkable on a normal Celtic game night. When the first customers filed in, they were politely asked to furnish phone numbers and names for contact tracing. This is a night out at a Celtics game in March 2021.

It's a start.

DHL Dan CXXX - Mailing It In Yet Again

It's incredible to marvel at the level of (non) production from Shank the past few months, and the blandness of his columns in particular, and wonder why he's still employed by the Boston Globe:

Picked-up pieces while trying to fit into my clothes as I return to games at the Garden and Fenway …

All yours - I have zero interest in this one.

Setting Up The Bowling Pins

That's the only thing that springs to mind when you read something like this:

Red Sox will be better this year, but irrelevance awaits if they don’t start quickly

There have been other years when the start of the Red Sox season was awkward and critical:

▪ Six months after winning 99 games, Don Zimmer was booed when he brought out the lineup card at Fenway on Opening Day 1979.

▪ The 1987 Sox were urged never to speak of their previous season, in which they advanced to the seventh game of the World Series; they responded with a fifth-place follow-up.

▪ In the wake of the 2012 Bobby Valentine train wreck, the 2013 Red Sox theme was “Please don’t hate us,” and the Local Nine rebounded with a championship season, winning the World Series on the Fenway lawn for the first time in 95 years.

Remember when Shank had a major league hard-on for Valentine? How soon we forget!

Idiot High School Football Gets Shitcanned

Imagine being someone with this kind of mentality...

Duxbury High School should dismiss its football coach after anti-Semitic play calls

Update, 2:47 p.m. Wednesday: Duxbury football head coach Dave Maimaron fired after team’s use of anti-Semitic terms revealed

It’s past time for Duxbury High School to dismiss football coach Dave Maimaron. High school kids have been immature and foolish for hundreds of years, but the notion that a play-calling system that uses anti-Semitic terminology has been tolerated by a veteran coach at a local high school is unacceptable.

Listening to in-game audibles is part of the fun of watching pro football on television. Peyton Manning became famous for hollering “Omaha!” when he changed the play at the line of scrimmage. Jared Goff called out, “Elvis!,” “Tupac!,” and “Ric Flair!” to alert his teammates of a change of plans. The Steelers tried “dilly dilly!” a couple of years ago.

Now close your eyes and try to imagine lining up opposite the Duxbury team and hearing one of the team leaders yell, “Auschwitz!”

What a fuckin' moron - glad he's gone.

DHL Dan CXXIX - Dubious Reasoning

Here's something new and refreshing from the Shankster:

LeBron James being a Red Sox part-owner is a good thing, and other thoughts

Isn't that nice? This is his third picked up Pieces column in one week; he's just going through the motions until Opening Day.

And how exactly is LeBron James becoming a part owner a good thing?

All kidding aside, it’s good to see that James is joining FSG. Baseball benefits when a globally famous basketball star becomes part of MLB ownership. Especially in Boston. Especially with the Red Sox. James’s name on the FSG masthead represents progress for a franchise that admits being haunted by the institutional racism of a previous regime.

So it's a good move for the Red Sox because a long since dead former owner of the team was a racist? That's definitely Boston Globe thinking right there.

Did you ever notice the people constantly and incessantly bringing up the subject of race... are always liberals?

The rest of the column sucks - don't waste your time. UPDATE, 3/25/2021, 6:50 PM - I dropped the ball on this one; will get to his other 'efforts' soon.

A Righteous Rick Pitino Column

Rick Pitino, coaching in his 2,000th college basketball game (or so it seems) gets back into the NCAA tournament yet again. Shank, in one of his better columns in quite some time, pays the proper tribute to the guy who destroyed the Celtics in the 1990's:

Rick Pitino, basketball survivor, is back in the NCAA Tournament

Rick Pitino: basketball savant, basketball survivor.

His name is mud in man caves and and saloons across New England. He is a bad memory of a dark time in Boston Celtics history. I mentioned him alongside M.L. Carr in a column carving up the 2021 Celtics a couple of weeks ago, and Carr objected, saying, “Do not put my name in the same paragraph with Rick Pitino.”

Pitino became a punch line in the college basketball world a few years ago after his latest scandal (this one involving an FBI investigation) got him bounced from a lucrative lifetime gig at Louisville. In addition, his 2013 NCAA championship at Louisville was vacated.

Still, Pitino could not quit, and his Basketball Jones took him to Athens. Like Michael Corleone in fictional exile in Sicily, real-life Pitino coached Panathinaikos for a season while things cooled down back in the States.

Now Pitino is back in the Big Dance with Iona, a school with a 1-14 lifetime NCAA Tournament record (the win was against Holy Cross when Jim Valvano and Jeff Ruland were Iona’s coach and star). Iona was the only NCAA school that would take a chance on Pitino. He is Norman Dale in “Hoosiers,” getting a shot at Hickory after nefarious activity banished him from every other coaching opportunity.

One of the few things I'm with Shank on - some respect for him (begrudging, of course) but definitely a dislike of this guy.

NFL Free Agency Has Begun

...and we all know what that means - time once again to criticize the New England Patriots!

Patriots’ free agency spending frenzy has heads — and theories — spinning

Bill Belichick has put the NFL on notice that the Patriots are back in business.

That was stolen right off of Felger and Mazz yesterday, and the rest of the column is basically copy and paste of the same show. There are other parts of the column that make it wretched as well, like weak sarcasm and analogies, a bunch of Shankisms, a mention of Larry Bird and of course contradicting himself yet again:

In less than 24 hours, while most of the league stood still, the Patriots locked up the best two tight ends on the market (Henry and Jonnu Smith), a Super Bowl wideout (Kendrick Bourne), a receiver from the Raiders (Nelson Agholor), a Pro Bowl linebacker (Matt Judon), a defensive back with green hair (Jalen Mills), a nose tackle from Miami (Davon Godchaux), and a lineman cut by the Jets (Henry Anderson).

“I’ve never seen a spending spree like this,” said former Patriots general manager Upton Bell. “Are the Patriots checking the borders to see who might be coming across?

“They have to do this because they drafted poorly for a number of years. That used to be deadly, but now you can make up for it with free agents. Luckily, they have the money and the cap space.

“Belichick is good at picking up people. The difference is that, in the past, he picked them up to complement what he had. Now he’s signing people to fill positions that were never filled properly.

“Look at their roster. It’s almost like they are the Red Sox, starting all over again.”

There is a Sox-like overreaction to the Patriots’ supermarket sweep.

The critics are being mean. Let’s shut everybody up by overpaying free agents.

How the sports world has turned around here. The Patriots and their fans used to laugh at bad teams that went out and opened their wallets for free agents. Now the Patriots are one of those teams. Je suis Tomato Can.

Shank spent the entire 2020 season ragging on the Patriots for (at a minimum) not spending money on players, only to turn right around and criticize Belichick and the team for doing exactly that.

It's probably just easier to recognize one truth that's been pointed out over and over again - If the New England Patriots do 'X', Shank will find a way to criticize it.

A Pair Of Humdingers

Shank wrote two columns this week - one about not going anywhere for a year to 'cover' sporting events (after being part of the lockdown crowd) and yet another Picked Up Pieces column.

The two are related in one sense - being locked out of stadiumsballparks results in a lot of Picked up Pieces columns because you have nothing specific to write about. Can't wait for Shank to start writing shitty columns about specific games and events again!

Dennis Eckersley - The Covid Column

Shank sits down with the former (and current!) Red Sox ace, who reveals he caught the Wuhan Flu a few months ago:

It began in America one year ago. The Utah Jazz’s Rudy Gobert got the coronavirus and the NBA shut down. We learned that American icon Tom Hanks and his wife tested positive for the virus while filming in Australia. The world as we knew it was over.

Fast-forward 12 months and I am talking with Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley, a man Red Sox fans love to hear when NESN games are broadcast into our homes. In the middle of a casual conversation about the suspect 2021 Sox, I ask Eck how his winter went and he tells me, “It’s been good, but I got COVID, for [expletive] sake.

“I got it Jan. 4. I was on the West Coast visiting my daughter and her kids. I didn’t see the grandkids two days prior to finding out. It could have been a disaster if I gave it to my daughter or her kids.

Who are at far less overall risk because of their age, but go on...

“I had a feeling. I had been around somebody that had it and he called me and said he and his wife had it. I said, ‘Really?’ Two days later, I felt something. I went in, got tested, I had it.

“I had like a mild fever for 10 days and that’s all I had. It was annoying, but I couldn’t be annoyed because I didn’t have it that bad.

“It wasn’t pretty. I never felt right for a month. But I feel lucky. It can happen to anyone.’’

It can happen to anyone.

A year into this awful thing, that is still the message (from a media dinosaur with zero knowledge of remedial measures - ed), and we cannot let our guard down. Eckersley got his first vaccine shot last Friday.

I still have a serious lack of appreciation / hatred for this purposeful fearmongering. I'd like to know if either Shank or The Eck were taking any of the following during the whole 'pandemic' - selenium, zinc and / or Vitamin D3. Full disclosure requires me to state that selenium started for me by April of 2020, I was already taking zinc by January 2020 and I started taking D3 about two months ago. And why is that? It's because I looked this shit up so I could figure out a way to prevent myself from getting sick, and so far it's worked. Admittedly the decision to start taking zinc looks like dumb luck in retrospect given that I was taking it two months before the start of the panic pandemic, but not the other two. If you're not boosting your immune system, you have worse odds for getting sick by this and other things.

Cheap and shitty panic induction like this doesn't help in any fashion and has been the number one reason I've always disliked and distrusted the media industry. What's left of the Boston Globe's circulation numbers further validates this fact.

DHL Dan CXXVII - Wondering

Jackie Bradley Jr. was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers earlier this week. Shank, never a fan of JBJ, leads off his latest Picked up Pieces column in that precise fashion:

Wondering about Jackie Bradley Jr.’s place in Red Sox lore, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while applying for membership to the Milwaukee chapter of the JBJ Love Society …

▪ What is Jackie Bradley Jr.’s place in Red Sox history? Who was he? Where does he fit?

An epic underachiever at the plate (.239 career batting average), Bradley dazzled in center field for eight seasons at Fenway Park. He probably was Boston’s best center fielder since Jimmy Piersall, and there aren’t many folks around who remember Piersall. If Bradley played in Baltimore, a good comparison would be Paul Blair.

JBJ was overrated locally because of his amazing catches, but he also delivered big hits when he was MVP of the 2018 ALCS against Houston. He was a one-time All-Star and Gold Glover, and has two World Series rings, but was never as good as Johnny Damon or Trot Nixon. Troy O’Leary was a better hitter, but JBJ no doubt is a more important figure in Sox history.

Talk about damning with faint praise! The rest of the column's worth checking out.

Slow On The Take

Who could have ever figured out that prolonged separation from your teammates could have negative effects?

COVID-19 has robbed our young athletes of joys they can never get back

Everything must be viewed in perspective, because there has never been a time quite like this. Those blessed with good health, employment, and family support can’t complain or demonstrate impatience. There’s real suffering all around us, so we all need to suck it up and wait for the pandemic to play itself out.

All that said and understood, please allow me a moment to shine a light on COVID-19′s impact on team sports — a small but critical slice of everyday Americana that’s been erased from the lives of so many young people over the last 12 months. Our high school and college juniors and seniors have lost seasons they will never get back.

He's just figuring this shit out (perhaps because his son & daughters are now out of the terrible environment that Shank writes about). You want to tell me this guy has serious IQ?

The Ultimate Mercy Rule

In case you're wondering just how bad and unbwatchable professional baseball has become, look no further than this column:

Two games into spring training, and we have a solution for the 2021 Red Sox: The Little League Mercy Rule.

It’s a new preseason thing. If you are getting crushed by your opponent, you can stop an inning once your pitcher has thrown more than 20 pitches in a frame. Alex Cora ran up the white flag three times in seven innings of Monday’s 5-3 loss to the Braves and has invoked the slaughter clause four times in the first two games, both losses.

The Sox should petition MLB to make this an option during the regular season. No more jail-break innings. Everybody goes home feeling good about themselves, even on a day when you commit five errors and three times walk off the field before getting a third out.

But wait - it gets worse:

I watched on Fubo because the bosses at NESN have made watching the Sox harder than ever. NESN was dropped by YouTube TV last fall after negotiations between the two parties broke down. This meant that a large chunk of Boston baseball watchers had to scramble, and many steered toward Fubo, which just happens to be the top overall streaming service for futbol, offering 32 soccer channels.

Loyal baseball fans (remember them?) who dumped YouTube TV for a NESN carrier were doubly disappointed Sunday when the Sox exhibition opener against the Twins was not televised on the flagship. Imagine that. You have a sagging last-place team with little star power, aggressively cutting costs on player payroll … and you make it hard for your remaining loyalists to watch the team and perhaps learn the names of some of your faceless new players. Genius.

After paying my new streaming bill, and learning the bells and whistles of Fubo, I navigated around the menu’s soccer smorgasbord and found the Sox NESN broadcast at 1 p.m. I couldn’t wait to get a look at Garrett Richards’s vaunted spin rate.The view of JetBlue Park and the dulcet tones of Dave O’Brien made me warm all over. It was good to hear OB alongside Jerry Remy, who told us it was 84 degrees at the sunny ballpark. For a moment, I longed to be back in Fort Myers, but then O’Brien said he and the RemDawg were broadcasting from their Watertown studios, no more than a mile from where I was sitting on the Brighton/Newton border.

The view of JetBlue Park and the dulcet tones of Dave O’Brien made me warm all over. It was good to hear OB alongside Jerry Remy, who told us it was 84 degrees at the sunny ballpark. For a moment, I longed to be back in Fort Myers, but then O’Brien said he and the RemDawg were broadcasting from their Watertown studios, no more than a mile from where I was sitting on the Brighton/Newton border.

So there you have it - the Red Sox are again expected to be a poor team this year and when you can find the game on a local channel, the booth guys won't actually be at the park, which will be next to empty like they were last year.

Exactly what reason is there to watch baseball anymore?