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?

DHL Dan CXXVI - The Next Grab Bag

I was expecting another semi-weekly mail it in job from Shank with this one, but I see some interesting things already:

Let’s not take the bats out of the pitchers’ hands completely, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while wondering whether Charlie Baker will dispatch Ed Davis to clean up this vaccination chaos …

▪ Have we seen the last of pitchers in the batter’s box? Is Major League Baseball ready to adopt the universal designated hitter?

“I think it’s time,” J.D. Martinez said in Fort Myers, Fla. “I think everybody knows it’s time. Even the owners, the players, the fans, they know it’s time. Everybody loves offense.”

MLB and the Players Association have yet to agree on a universal DH for 2021, which means the upcoming National League season may be the farewell tour for pitchers hitting. The universal DH almost certainly will be implemented as part of the next basic agreement, which will be hammered out after the 2021 season.

Put me down as one with a fondness for pitchers hitting. How else would the world have discovered Babe Ruth?

It's worth a read - give it a go.

Skid Row - II

Is the panic real, or is it Memorex? You make the call!

The skidding Celtics don’t need patience. They need action

Trade Jayson Tatum. Trade Jaylen Brown. Fire Brad Stevens. Fire Danny Ainge. Take down the banners from the rafters, splinter the sacred parquet floor for a West End bonfire, then tear down the New Garden. Sell the team back to Paul “Thanksdad” Gaston.

It’s time for the Celtics to DO SOMETHING!

No more lollygagging. No more mealy-mouth mutterings from wimps in command. We thought things were at rock bottom a couple of weeks ago, but that was before the 24-point blown lead in New Orleans, the Luka Doncic double dagger in Dallas, and Wednesday’s humiliation at the hands of the immortal Danilo Gallinari and the forever-moribund Hawks.

The entire colum is pure fucking snark and completely unserious. He doesn't offer Clue One about how to address any of these situations; a reasonable sort like Chris Gasper would give that kind of analysis to the Nth degree. It's further possible that this is an extended funk or injury bug to a key player or two (Marcus Smart, etc.) but that's nowhere to be mentioned.

Then again, you could say that a lack of seriousness describes a lot of his columns.

DHL Dan CXXV - Position Overstated

Unable to devote full columns criticizing the Red Sox while otherwise enjoying his normal Ft. Myers winter vacation, Shank instead writes about a lot of little things :

Celtics continue to be treated as if they have won something — which they haven’t — and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while paying homage to the underrated Boston Bruins — the only local team that’s getting the job done in 2020-21 …

▪ Danny Ainge, when asked about losses to the Pistons, Wizards, and Hawks, on 98.5 FM Thursday said, “I don’t think we respect our opponents enough.” That’s it, right there. The Celtics act as if they have won something when they have not. They are not as good as they think they are and that includes Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum. Brown and Tatum are not yet All-Star starters. This means they are not yet top-10 players. Why does everyone around here treat them like they are top-10 players?

This looks like a classic strawman agument; assert that 'everyone around here' thinks the team and its top two players are the cat's ass. It's based on a rather thin reed:

Also, when did our market go totally soft in its evaluation of this team? I watched the Celtics win a Tuesday game at the Garden against a Denver team that had only four of its top nine players. Friday I watched the Celtics handle the 12-17 Hawks — a team that stunned them two nights earlier. During and after both of these pedestrian wins, folks at NBC Sports Boston reacted as if the Green just beat the Lakers in LA in the seventh game of the Finals. Seriously. How did the bar get so low for this team? It’s like NESN gushing over the last-place Red Sox. I remember when the Larry Bird Celtics went 50-1 at home and barely drew a round of applause. Tommy Heinsohn was the ultimate homer, but the Celtics’ flagship nonsense has only gotten worse since we lost Tommy. Get back, Green Teamers! That means you, Scal.

So, Brian Scalabrine (and supposedly some others at the local NBC Sports affiliate) are the new Tommy Heinson? Somehow I don't find the opinions of a few local sports jocks being the widely felt sentiment of Celtics fans, including this one. It's trademark Shank hyperbole.

From there, he goes on to... complain about pretty much everything; might be worth a read just to marvel at that.

And Now For More Boston Globe Employee Bashing

(Another installment in a continuing series)

Is Kevin Cullen ^* talking about Our Man Shank or Trollin' Volin?

Imagine taking joy in being mocked by a player you did everything you could to chase away from a team you’ve done everything to bad mouth owned by a man who your employer has done everything to see receiving a handjob? https://t.co/maQ5egMSzK

— Kevin Cullen (Parody) (@KevinCulIen) February 18, 2021

^*Parody account!

The Bullshit Meter Is Redlining

For the first time in about five hundred years, Shank does not get to enjoy a Boston Globe funded vacation to Fort Meyers, FL this spring in order to tan his pasty white Irish skin and shit on the Red Sox for a few weeks. It's enough to make you weep, isn't it?

What I will miss about Red Sox spring training

NOT FORT MYERS, Fla. — I miss baseball. I miss the Red Sox being a pleasant diversion and an important topic of conversation at this time of year.

I miss spring training.

Red Sox pitchers and catchers report to Fenway South this week. Player physicals are scheduled for Wednesday, with the first workout for pitchers and catchers Thursday morning. The first full-squad workout is Monday, and the Sox’ Grapefruit League opener is Feb. 28 against the Minnesota Twins at Hammond Stadium.

This guy's been shitting on the Red Sox with regularity, and we're supposed to believe absolute bullshit like this. The more likely explanation is that he doesn't get to escape the New England winter (and lord knows what else) for a few weeks.

DHL Dan CXXIV - Head Scratcher

Shank 'treats' us to another half useless column:

The Red Sox still have us scratching our heads, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while wondering who’ll be the next Boston athlete to leave town …

I wonder if he means 'leave' or him running someone out of town?

▪ There are times when it seems as if the Red Sox front office is trying to turn fans against the hometown team. I can’t remember anything like it. Instead of touting big-name talents and inspiring pennant fever, the Sox peddle payroll flexibility, team contract control, spin rate, and exit velocity while asking fans to be patient and wait for the future.

The Sox have admitted they are not “all in” to win this year and dumped many popular players in a quest to assemble a 25-man roster of nameless, faceless, analytic-friendly castoffs. And there’s no accountability or explanation from above.

He goes on from there to detail what the Red Sox have done (and haven't sone) for offseason moves, so in that sense, the column is useful. If you consider we've had five picked up pieces columns over the past month (from a total of ten), it reeks of laziness, and he spends the majority of the rest of the column ragging on as many people as he can.

Still Debatable

With Tom Brady winning his seventh Super Bowl on Sunday, the debate about him being the GOAT got going almost immediately. Here's Shank's contribution to the conversation:

Tom Brady, the greatest winner ever in sports? Not so fast

We have ceded almost all platitudes. Tom Brady is the best quarterback and greatest football player ever. Better than Johnny Unitas, Peyton Manning, Lawrence Taylor, or Jim Brown.

He is chiseled on our New England Rushmore alongside Ted Williams, Bobby Orr, and Bill Russell. Nobody else is close. Sorry, Larry Bird. And please don’t bring David Ortiz into the conversation (”Ooh, but Papi has three rings and Williams has zero.” Curtis Leskanic has a ring. Was he better than Carl Yastrzemski?).

Events of Sunday night have brought us to a predictable place. And now we wonder if Brady has supplanted Russell as the greatest of all the greats. Is Brady the greatest winner in sports history? Better than Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe, and LeBron James? Better than Jim Thorpe and Serena Williams? Better than Tiger and Jack? Better than Ali? Better than Secretariat?

Or Formula One greats Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton, and you could throw in Pele and Lionel Messi for good measure.

I’m saying no. Let’s not rush to judgment based on Sunday night’s sugar high.

Brady is closing the gap, but this debate still starts and ends with Russell, the man won two NCAA championships, an Olympic gold medal, and 11 NBA championships in 13 seasons. At the age of 43, Brady just won his seventh Super Bowl in his 21st season. It’s truly unbelievable, especially in an age of parity, salary caps, four rounds of playoffs, and a 32-team league. But it does not make him a greater winner than Russell.

You think it’s a big deal that Bruce Arians let Brady help coach the Buccaneers? Swell. Russell actually coached the Celtics to two championships while he was busy being their best player.

I called around to make sure this is not just me. I spoke with four people who have seen a lot.

I'm in agreement with Russell still holding the crown, but being a cyclist I can make a solid argument in favor of Eddy Merckx; just look at this guy's resume - eleven Grand Tour wins, former hour record holder (average speed / distance covered - 31 miles / MPH) and won a grand total of 525 bike races. It's estimated that he won thirty percent of the races he's ever entered.

Two things make the whole column better - Shank actually did some serious work with this column and he lets the four (Ernie Accorsi, Bob Cousy, Bob Ryan and Richard Johnson) take over the column from here. It's definitely worth a read.

DHL Dan CXXIII - Super Bowl Recycling

What better way is there to write about tomorrow's Super Bowl than rehasing one of your old columns?

Recalling another high-stakes Brady-Mahomes matchup, and other thoughts

Recalling, recycling - it's all the same!

Picked-up pieces while picking up a Super Bowl sheet cake at Star Market …

▪ Super Bowl LV is easily framed as Tom Brady vs. Patrick Mahomes, quite possibly the top pairing of quarterbacks in the 55-year history of this event. Those of us lucky enough to be at Arrowhead Stadium on Jan. 20, 2019, will never forget the first championship matchup of the GOAT vs. NFL Future.

It was the biggest game in the 47-year history of Arrowhead at that time, and the Patriots cut the hearts out of the frozen local fans by keeping a lid on Mahomes and bolting to a 14-0 halftime lead. New England led, 17-7, at the end of three quarters before a flurry of scoring filled the fourth. Both teams scored twice in the final 3:32 of regulation and it went to overtime tied, 31-31.

The original column can be found here. The rest of the Picked Up Pieces column is the usual stuff - shit on the Red Sox, shit on Curt Schilling, a silly quiz, etc.