DHL Dan CCXXV - Welcome Back, Terry

Since Shank chose to criticize professional athletes' salaries, turnabout is fair play. The man who co-wrote a book with the main subject of this column and thus has a commercial interest in promoting the return of said subject so he can sell some more books, does just that with his latest column:

Catching up with Terry Francona on his return to baseball, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while saying a prayer for Drake Maye . . .

▪ Old friend Terry Francona is back in baseball, accepting an offer to manage the Cincinnati Reds for the next three seasons. He’ll be back in the third base dugout at Fenway Park next June 30 for a three-game series against the Red Sox.

We all thought he was done for good last October when he stepped down after 11 seasons managing the Indians/Guardians.

“I don’t have the energy to do the job the way I want to do it,” he said then. “Rather than hang around for the wrong reasons, I’d rather just go out on my own terms . . . It’s not like I came to this decision overnight.”

What changed?

Royalty checks, of course!

The Big, Bad Bruins

Did I say 'The Big, Bad Bruins'? What I meant was a Bad Bruins column by Shank:

Bruins are back home, and so are Cup hopes for yet another season

Can someone tell me what that headline's supposed to mean?

The 2024 Red Sox and Patriots are bad teams, as they often were in the old days.

The ‘24 Celtics are defending NBA champs, as they often were in the old days.

And the Boston Bruins are once again what they have been for most of this century. They are better than the average Bears . . . good, but not great. They will be in the playoff hunt. And if they enjoy a good run in the spring, they have an outside chance to contend for the Stanley Cup.

They'll contend... by bowing out in the first round, like they've doing often in recent years.

This is pretty much the way it’s been since Bobby Orr last skated on Causeway Street. The Bruins have won one Cup (2011) since 1972, and even though they had a Full Throttle offseason, they’re not likely to contend for the chalice in the spring of 2025.

Shank mentioning Bobby Orr is the hockey equivalent of him mentioning Larry Bird in any given column.

The Bruins welcomed their cult back to Causeway Thursday and delivered a 6-4 victory over the hated Montreal Canadiens. It was the Boston franchise’s 101st home opener.

Cult? Like the Manson Cult? Branch Davidians? Blue Oyster Cult? Or - The Cult?

Here's where the column turns into real crap:

It was a nice introduction for Cam Neely and Don Sweeney’s Full Throttle pickups. Moneybags center Elias Lindholm (seven years, $54.25 million) had one goal and two assists and big defen$eman Nikita Zadorov (six years, $30 million) assisted on two goals. Newcomers Mark Kastelic (two goals) and Cole Koepke (one) also scored for Boston. Meanwhile, $66 million goalie Jeremy (puck stops here, buck stops here) Swayman made 20 saves in his first game since hitting the sweet crease jackpot.

Is it me, or is it scumbag behaviour for a sports columnist to resort to low hanging fruit and basically complain about the salaries of professional athletes? And - note the '$' when describing Zadorov. It's a sign of a shitty person if you ask this cat.

Luis Tiant, RIP

The Red Sox legend passed away this week, and Shank has the column:

Luis Tiant was a beloved Red Sox icon, but to us, he was also ‘Uncle Luis’

New England is deeply saddened.

Luis Tiant has died.

Everybody’s favorite.

Only Red Sox fans of a certain age can fully appreciate what it was like around here in October of 1975. That’s almost a half-century ago, so young folks will have to believe us when we tell you that there was truly nothing like the El Tiante phenomenon when the Red Sox had it going that season. Baby Boomer Sox fans with imagination still hear chants of “LOO-ie, LOO-ie” bouncing around ancient Fenway Park.

Know this: Before there was Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, or David Ortiz, Boston had its first Latin American superstar in Tiant, the roly-poly Cuban righty with a Fu Manchu mustache who turned his back to batters as part of an elaborate windup that resulted in dazzling, unhittable pitches whizzing past befuddled batters (”wheeling and rotating on the mound like a figure in a Bavarian clock tower,” wrote Roger Angell).

DHL Dan CCXXIV - Time For A Rebuild?

After another season of below .500 baseball and not making the playoffs, Shank wants the Boston Red Sox to do what they couldn't be bothered doing the past five years or so:

Instead of an endless rebuild, the future should be now for the Red Sox, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while wondering why the Red Sox won’t make a commitment to increasing player payroll . . .

▪ If you are satisfied with the 2024 Red Sox season . . . if you support the Sox’ small-cost, big-hype, long-term rebuild . . . you are part of the problem.

The endless rebuild drones on. Ticket prices keep going up, but the level of play stays the same. The Red Sox are 353-355 with three last-place finishes in the five seasons since they changed philosophy and traded Mookie Betts instead of paying market value for a homegrown MVP. Betts has been in the playoffs in five straight seasons since he was dealt to the Dodgers in what Sox ownership said was “a baseball trade.”

“Autopsy Monday” has become an annual part of the Red Sox calendar — no less than Truck Day, Opening Day, and Patriots Day at 11 a.m. — and Sam Kennedy, Craig Breslow, and Alex Cora met with the local media one day after the season ended last weekend.

The Pete Rose Column

Baseball legend Pete Rose passed away earlier this week, and Shank has a ton of small stories to tell about him:

Pete Rose was crude and rough around the edges, but his love for baseball was evident every game

Pete Rose, who died Monday in Nevada at the age of 83, loved baseball and compiled more major league hits (4,256) than anyone else who ever played. Unfortunately, his apparent addiction to gambling blew up his career and kept him out of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Rose was crude. Rough around the edges. And he noticed everything.

“I remember in 1982 when I first did the ‘Game of the Week,’ ” Bob Costas said Monday night. “I was set up on the field before the game and Pete was playing catch down the third base line and he looked at me and said, ‘I’ve seen you. You do those Big Ten football games.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Why would Pete Rose know me?’

“Years later, I figured it out. It wasn’t like he was following my career. It was the betting. He bet on everything.”

Definitely worth a read.

Starting Time

The 2024 New England Patriots are 1 - 3 at this point of the season. Shank wants to throw caution to the wind:

We have seen enough: Drake Maye should take over as the Patriots’ quarterback. Now.

MayeDay! MayeDay!

The SS Kraft is taking on water. The good ship and crew are in peril and the gales of October may come early.

Serious football scholars insist we’re not supposed to talk about playing Drake Maye over Jacoby Brissett because the rookie quarterback would be permanently damaged if he were thrust into the starting role Sunday against Miami at Gillette Stadium. The No. 3 pick in the 2024 draft needs to learn by watching and it’s too much to ask him to start his NFL career behind the Swiss Cheese Five, a.k.a the Patriots’ offensive line.

We don’t care. We have seen enough. And it just keeps getting worse.

Remember Steve Martin playing Neal Page in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”? After many hours enduring John Candy’s Del Griffith character (the boring shower curtain ring salesman), Neal finally explodes and says, “I could tolerate any insurance seminar! For days, I could sit there and listen to them go on and on with a big smile on my face. They’d say, ‘How can you stand it?’ I’d say, ‘Cuz I’ve been with Del Griffith. I can take anything.’

DHL Dan CCXXIII - Back To Earth

It's safe to say any buzz there was over the 2024 New England Patriots has worn off, with a brutal loss to the New York Jets on Thursday night:

We knew it was going to be bad for the Patriots this season, but not this bad, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while noting that the NFL’s new “dynamic” kickoff rule has basically changed nothing . . .

▪ The moribund Red Sox got shut out and managed only one hit Thursday against the Rays at the Trop.

And still . . . they gave us a better offensive show than the Patriots.

Yikes. We have to watch 14 more of these?

The final score was Jets 24, Patriots 3. Bigly misleading. It might as well have been 73-0. The Patriots were thoroughly pantsed by the Jets.

That’s right. The (gulp) Jets; the team New England beat 15 straight times before last year’s season’s finale. The Jets: the Sultans of suck, the masters of the buttfumble, the team that hasn’t been to the playoffs in 13 years, the team that’s riding a streak of eight losing seasons, the team Bill Belichick hates with the power of a thousand suns.

The Sultans of Suck - I'm stealing that one!

Can You Feel The Excitement? No?

Two weeks into the 2024 season, Shank thinks a certain element is missing from the New England Patriots:

After two games, it’s clear that something is missing from Patriots game plan: excitement

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The Patriots play the Jets at 8:15 Thursday night.

Pretty late, don’t you think? How are we supposed to stay awake after halftime if New England’s rookie coach, Jerod Mayo, keeps game planning as if he’s Amos Alonzo Stagg?

We are two games into the season, and the good news is that the Patriots are 1-1 and could easily be 2-0. The defense is pretty good. They’ve not turned the ball over, they’ve dominated time of possession, and they haven’t committed many penalties.

But would it be OK to maybe throw a deep ball one time? Or try a little trickeration? Maybe some play-action? Perhaps just open things up a little?

The Patriots are Mr. Play-It-Safe. They buy their groceries at Safeway. They buy Safety Insurance. They’ve made Gillette Stadium a safe house. They are fail safe, safe at home, and better safe than sorry. They do the Safety Dance while listening to “Safe European Home.”

I didn't say it was going to be good...

Whoopsie!

The Red Sox beat the Yankees yesterday, 7-1. The part I missed was the most pivotal part:

The Yankees began overthinking, and that’s when the trouble started

NEW YORK — In the epic baseball film “Bull Durham,” grizzled vet Crash Davis tells hot-shot hurler Nuke LaLoosh, “Don’t think. It can only hurt the ball club.”

This is what we saw Saturday afternoon in the fourth inning of the Red Sox’ 7-1 victory over Gerrit Cole and the Yankees.

The Yankees led, 1-0. Cole, the American League’s reigning Cy Young winner, had yielded no hits and faced the minimum 10 batters. The Sox were mired in a major slump and it looked like the first-place Bronx Bombers were on their way to another win.

And then the Yankees overthought things. Bigly.

As Rafael Devers (lifetime .333 with eight homers off Cole) stepped to the plate, Cole looked to his catcher, held up four fingers of his right hand, and swooshed his pitching arm across his body toward first base with a Fiedler-esque flourish.

Paying no heed to a century and a half of Major League Baseball, Cole intentionally walked Devers with a 1-0 lead and nobody on base.

Left unmentioned, at least explicitly, is precisely why this move backfires. This Outkick column alludes to the move not backfiring, citing "Barry Bonds, Mike Trout or Judge himself getting intentionally walked in unusual situations" as the examples. My best guess without looking it up is - it does backfire most of the time, as it did this time.

Pick A Team

Another in the occasional series of Shank comparing two teams, and the Sox / Yankees type seems to be an annual favorite:

Which franchise would you rather be right now, the Yankees or Red Sox? Let’s break it down.

NEW YORK — Put aside your emotions and decades of deep-rooted hatred. Erase those Ruths, Dents, Boones, and ARods. Pretend all things are equal. You are neutral. You are Baseball Switzerland.

Which franchise would you rather follow and support at this hour: the Red Sox or the Yankees?

It’s clear the first-place Yankees are the better team in 2024. They emerged from Friday night’s 5-4 win over the Sox with a record of 86-62, 12 games ahead of third-place Boston. They are going to the playoffs and could get back to the World Series.

But this is about more than that. It’s about sheer totality. And the future.

So which is the better franchise to follow?

Today’s Sox fans like to mock the Yankees and say, “It’s all about championships. We’ve won four in this century and you’ve only one one — none in the last 15 years.’’

That's always a winning argument with Yankees fans, isn't it?

DHL Dan CCXXII - The Big Hurt

Who could've predicted Shank taking another steaming dump on New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft so soon?

Bob Kraft seems to be hurting his own cause with the Hall of Fame, and other thoughts

NEW YORK — Picked-up pieces while waking up in the city that doesn’t sleep . . .

▪ Patriots owner Bob Kraft has another chance to be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame later this season. Based on the team’s push to advance his candidacy, it’s pretty clear that the honor means a lot to the 83-year-old owner.

An exhaustive piece by ESPN’s Don Van Natta this past week demonstrated the “urgent and inventive” campaigning carried out by Kraft’s PR chief, Stacey James, over the last dozen-plus years.

According to ESPN, “No current owner has tried harder to get into the Hall — or been denied longer . . . In recent years, James has called, texted, dined, cajoled, and backslapped voters . . . James has emailed voters a six-page dossier that extolls Kraft’s many achievements as an NFL owner . . . James obtained a list of subcommittee voters. He phoned them, cornered them at Super Bowls, invited them to lunch or dinner or a visit to the owner’s suite, whatever it took to whip up votes.”

It's obvious (from this column and other reports) that Kraft's trying awful hard to get in; how many people he irritates and pisses off in doing so remains to be determined.

Stunning

You turn your back for a week, and what happens? You miss a slew of Shank columns! Let's check them out, including the New England Patriots' Week 1 win over the Bengals:

The Patriots, with new coaches and a new QB, looked like the good old Patriots in stifling the Bengals

New coach.

Old school.

Great result.

Playing a near-perfect 60 minutes of football, the much-maligned, heavy underdog New England Patriots stunned the Cincinnati Bengals, 16-10, at Paycor Stadium Sunday afternoon.

It was the debut of 38-year-old head coach Jerod Mayo — the first Patriots game not coached by Bill Belichick since Jan. 2, 2000 — and Mayo’s players sparked memories of the good old days for the full four quarters.

“We’re going to enjoy this one,’’ said Mayo, who was presented with a game ball by owner Bob Kraft. “I’m very proud of my players . . . Walking off the field, you get in that victory formation . . . and I’m going to enjoy this one. We’re still not where we want to be, but we’re headed in the right direction.’’

The Long, Cold Season Ahead

It's safe to say this year's version of the New England Patriots aren't expected to be very good, and this allows Shank to smother the Krafts like a wet blanket:

With this new era of Patriots history, we might be in for a long, cold football season

The Patriots open their season Sunday at Cincinnati and are consensus favorites to be one of the NFL’s worst teams.

It feels like we’re in for a long, cold football season. By any measure, these are the most barren days of Bob Kraft’s ownership, which dates back to 1994. After two decades of NFL dominance, the Patriots are in full decline.

They haven’t won a playoff game since 2019 and are coming off a four-win season — their worst since the 2-14 Dick MacPherson campaign of 1992 when Hugh Millen and Scott Zolak were New England’s quarterbacks.

The good news for Bob and Jonathan Kraft is that they have control of their franchise for the first time this century. For the last 24 years, the team was largely under the powerful thumb of Bill Belichick, who won 17 AFC East titles, nine conference championships, and six Super Bowls. It started to go south when Tom Brady left for Tampa Bay in the early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020, and four days after last season’s final game — a home loss to the (gulp) Jets — Belichick was fired by Bob Kraft.

You can tell by Shank's style and enthusiasm that when he's over a target, he just opens the bomb bay doors and carpet bombs the place. I trust we'll see more of these columns in the upcoming weeks.

On Your Radar

Every now and then I'll read a column by Shank that has the feeling (and accuracy) of an amateur / rookie gang member in their first gunfight, and his response will be 'spray and pray (that you hit something). This is one of those columns, and it's a humdinger:

Mb>He’s not on any team’s sideline, but Bill Belichick looms large over the NFL this season

For 24 seasons he was hiding in plain sight, grumbling, mumbling, taking care of every Patriot detail while playing the Stupid Game at NFL-mandated press conferences, refusing to release any information other than bare minimum, fearing it might hurt his team.

Now that he’s been fired and the Kraft family has tried to erase him from the franchise’s glorious 21st century history (see “The Dynasty”), Bill Belichick is ubiquitous. He’s on TV, radio, and social media outlets. And with the NFL set to kick off its season Thursday night, Belichick also will be rumored as the next head coach for high-profile teams that lose a couple out of the gate (hello, Giants, Cowboys).

In September of 2024, Belichick is the NFL’s Roy Kent. “He’s here. He’s there. He’s every(expletive)where.”

Sittin' on a park bench:

When we last saw him coaching — eight months ago at Gillette Stadium — Belichick was in full pandemic mask mode, covered from hoodie-to-Nikes while he slinked off the field as anonymously as possible. Greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes. He could have been Cosmo Kramer (“Look away … I’m hideous!”). Four days later, Belichick was fired by Bob Kraft.

It goes on from there, rehasing much of the discussion about Belichick getting back into coaching, etc.

This ending is odd, I think:

Welcome to the media, Bill. Hope you don’t mind if we engage in rumors about the job you covet most: your next NFL head coaching position.

It doesn’t concern us anymore.

We’re on to Cincinnati.

It doesn't concern 'us' anymore, so I'll write a column about it!

DHL Dan CCXXI - Rough Season Ahead

As New England Patriots fans are mostly aware already, they're in for a difficult 2024 season. As us older Patriots fans can attest to, there were some really bad teams in the years prior to Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. Here's Shank to tell you all about it:

These Patriots won’t match the worst teams in franchise history, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while staying off Storrow Drive until move-in season is over …

▪ Many New England Baby Boomers have been around long enough to witness the entire history of the Patriots. We remember when Billy Sullivan invented them as the Boston Patriots in 1960. We remember when they played the New York Titans and Dallas Texans at Boston University Field. We remember when Patriots fans threw snowballs at the Buffalo Bills at Fenway Park. We remember Bob “Harpo” Gladieux getting paged in the stands at Harvard Stadium, then tackling Miami’s Jake Scott on the opening kickoff.

We have seen it all, and speak with some authority when it comes to identifying the worst teams in franchise history.

In this spirit, I am here to give you spoiled young folks a little perspective.

Yes, the 2024 Patriots are going to be bad. Years of frugal spending, bad drafting, inept offensive coaching, and upper-management dysfunction have caught up with America’s most successful sports franchise of the 21st century.

Read it all for the worst of the worst!