DHL Dan CCCX - Grudge Match

This seems like a column theme right up Shank's alley:

Jayson Tatum-Jaylen Brown is the latest in a long line of Boston sports grudge matches, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while wishing Tom Brady a sincere welcome home Sunday at Gillette . . .

⋅ The Celtics are in Philadelphia Tuesday, which means we finally get to see Jayson Tatum playing basketball against Jaylen Brown in a regular-season NBA game.

I haven’t been this fired up for an old-fashioned Boston sports grudge match since Roger Clemens came to Fenway in a Blue Jays uniform for the first time in 1997 and glared in the direction of Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette while coming off the mound after striking out 16 batters in a 3-1 victory.

Memo to coaches Joe Mazzulla and Nick Nurse: Let there be no load management for this one. NBA America needs to see Tatum and Brown in each other’s faces for the full four quarters.

DHL Dan CCCIX - The Return Of The Royal We?

Is Shank jumping on the bandwagon here?

Patriots are where we thought they’d be after seven games, but it’s been fun so far, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while wondering what to do Sunday when the Patriots aren’t playing …

⋅ With seven games down and 10 to play, the Patriots’ place in the AFC is about what we thought it would be. The Flying Elvises are 4-3 and now 1½ games behind the Bills in the division. A legit playoff contender but probably not bound for a second straight trip to the Super Bowl.

Still, it’s a fun ride.

When the schedule was released, it was obvious there wouldn’t be another 10-game winning streak this year. Playing five of last season’s playoff teams in the first seven weeks, we figured they would do well to come out of it 4-3.

Which is what they are.

Echoes of Bill Parcells - 'You are what your record says you are.'

DHL Dan CCCVIII - The Greatest Game

First off, let me apologize for the lack of posts for the past month. Maybe all the exposure to Shank finally did me in, but I had a serious bout of laziness that I should be done with. Now on to the Picked Up Piece for the week - Shank's right about playoff baseball:

The playoffs remind us why baseball will always be the greatest game, and other thoughts

TUCSON — Picked-up pieces while watching four MLB Division Series . . .

⋅ I was in a hospital in Arizona for much of the week, visiting an ailing older brother who’s about to turn 80 and has been bed-bound for a couple of months.

Bill Shaughnessy was a strong, small-town baseball player in Central Massachusetts, Groton High School’s starting right fielder as a seventh-grader in 1960. By 1968, he was good enough to play outfield for Orleans in the Cape Cod League.

In 1955, one of his first Little League teammates was Boston Globe/ESPN baseball writing legend Peter Gammons. I spent a day with Gammons in our Groton hometown a couple of weeks ago. He’s 81, has a new book out (“It’s All About The Players”), and also has encountered significant health issues in recent years.

DHL Dan CCCVII - The Drake Passage

In this week's Picked Up Pieces column, Shank ranks the current top dogs of Boston sports:

With all respect to Jayson Tatum, Patriots QB Drake Maye is Boston’s No. 1 star, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while packing for Seattle …

⋅ Is it OK to declare that Drake Maye is Boston’s No. 1 star athlete? Will this prompt big-time pushback from the formidable Jayson Tatum fan club?

I’m OK with it. The NFL is by far America’s No. 1 spectator sport and Maye is coming off a season in which he completed 72 percent of his passes, took his team to the Super Bowl, and placed a close second to the Rams’ Matthew Stafford as league Most Valuable Player. All that at the age of 23.

Argue for Tatum if you must, but he’s probably never going to be better than what we’ve seen and he’s never been voted the second-best player in the NBA. Give me the Drake. The NFL is far bigger than the NBA and Maye has a chance to become one of the faces of the league. It feels like the best is yet to come from New England’s fast-talkin’, slow-walkin’, humble hero of the hashmarks.

The Playoff Race

Shank does a column on another Red Sox late inning win:

It’s finally September and the Red Sox, with their dramatic comebacks and overachieving no-names, are still winning

Days of miracle and wonder.

Imagine what this must be like for incoming college freshmen on Park Drive, Bay State Road, and Commonwealth Avenue. It’s your first night in Boston and the evening’s periodically interrupted by joyous noise and pulsating lights from inside the ancient, hardball theater across the street from the Cask ‘n Flagon.

The Red Sox did it again Monday at Fenway Park. Winning a game that featured three lead changes and runs scored in every inning except the fourth, they rebounded from a three-run deficit in the eighth and bested the Mariners, 9-8, in the 10th when Trevor Story — playing his first Fenway game since May 14 — cracked a gapper to left-center with the bases loaded and one out.

“I’ve been watching the boys do it all year,” Story said. “It inspires me. These guys have done some great work. It’s what this team has been doing all year and I’m proud to be part of it.”

DHL Dan CCCVI - Induction

In last week's Picked Up Pieces column, Shank looks forward to some awkwardness next year:

Patriots sure to be prominent when Pro Football Hall of Fame induction rolls around, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while wondering why the Seahawks are only 3½-point favorites against the Patriots in Seattle on Opening Night . . .

⋅ The Pro Football Hall of Fame’s class of 2026 was inducted in Canton, Ohio, a couple of weekends back, and we got to see Adam Vinatieri take his rightful place in the shrine alongside new inductees Luke Kuechly, Larry Fitzgerald, Drew Brees, and Roger Craig.

With the Patriots set to kick off their regular season Sept. 9 in a Super Bowl rematch in Seattle, I got to thinking about potential Patriot presence on the HOF stage next summer.

Rules require that Tom Brady must wait until the summer of 2028. It’s the price he pays for playing until he was 45. The good news for New England fans is that all-world tight end Rob Gronkowski hung up his cleats a year before Brady and has a great shot to wear a gold jacket in Ohio next August.

But what about Bill Belichick and Bob Kraft, the bookend backbones of pro football’s greatest dynasty? Their omissions from the Hall last winter were a loud statement on the confusing process required to gain admission and the troubling tonnage of jealousy and hard feelings generated across Football America (Spygate and Deflategate, anyone?) during the two decades they dominated the sport. It’s also fair to say that since they won their last Super Bowl together, post-dynasty failures, salvos fired at one another, and non-football shenanigans have dented the legacies of New England football’s real men of genius.

I can't wait to see Belichick and Kraft pretend to like each other at this ceremony.

DHL Dan CCCV - Tripping

Well, if Shank can take a few weeks off, why can't I?

Shank's last column tries to hit on unfamiliar ground:

Watching the Red Sox from the front row of baseball’s alternate universe has been quite the trip, and other thoughts

A baby boomer who came of age in the counterculture late 1960s, I missed America’s troubling recreational teen drug scene. No psychedelics for me. Not even a toke of weed. I was always afraid Groton police chief Mayo Darling would burst through the door of my dorm room.

So now I wonder if watching the 2026 Red Sox is giving my aging peers flashbacks to their post-Woodstock, hallucinogenic experiences of more than a half-century ago? Is this what that was like? Profound sensory distortion? An altered cognitive state?

Seriously, folks. Since the end of June, Sox fans have shared box seats in the front row of baseball’s alternate universe. Go ask Alex (Speier). Up is down and down is up. Caleb Durbin is Wade Boggs and Ceddanne Rafaela is Reggie Smith. The team that couldn’t win is the team that can’t lose. With apologies to Grace Slick, the man on the chessboard is telling us where to go. White Knight Tom Caron is talking backward, and logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead. Once 14 games under .500 and 15½ games behind the Yankees, the Red Sox enter Sunday within 1½ games of the Yanks and look like a sure playoff team.

The Fire Sale

This will go down as one of the worst trades in sports history:

Jaylen Brown for Paul George: 40 cents on the dollar, and one of the worst trades in Boston sports history

Stupefying.

What is going on with the Boston Celtics?

In a town with three teams who are regularly second-guessed and sometimes openly mocked — hello, 2026 Red Sox — the Celtics have been our standard of excellence, smarts, and stability.

Sure there have been some low moments. The Sidney Wicks-Curtis Rowe days were rough, and fans still cringe at memories of the Rick Pitino and M.L. Carr eras. But by and large, the Celtics have been on the right path, giving us reason to believe they’re readying to hang another banner from the Garden rafters.

Not today.

News broke Wednesday night that the Celtics had shipped 29-year-old superstar Jaylen Brown to their forever-rival Philadelphia 76ers for 36-year-old Paul George and a raft of future draft picks — firsts for 2028 and ’31, and a pair of seconds — that will have no immediate impact.

I'm not even sure it's 40 cents on the dollar - The Brown / George contracts are in the same range so there's no salary relief here, an ostensible reason to trade away Jaylen Brown's max contract. I supose the thinking here is not having to give Jaylen a max contract extension when you also have Tatum in a max contract.

DHL Dan CCCIV - The Almost Jaylen Brown Trade

Last week's big NBA trade (that didn't happen) was the Boston Celtics dealing away Jaylen Brown to the Milwaukee Bucks for Giannis Antetokounmpo. Here's Shank taking half of his Picked Up Pieces column takling about... Manny Ramirez?

Can Jaylen Brown be like Manny Ramirez and brush off nearly being traded?

Picked-up pieces during hydration breaks and stoppage time . . .

⋅ Never thought it would come to this, but Boston needs Jaylen Brown to be like Manny Ramirez. Not like Nomar Garciaparra.

In December 2003, two months after the Red Sox’ epic collapse against the Yankees in the American League Championship Series, the Sox agreed to deal savant slugger Manny and wildly popular Garciaparra in a three-team deal that would have delivered Alex Rodriguez and Magglio Ordonez to Fenway Park. It all seemed pretty done. We even saw Red Sox infielder Kevin Millar on ESPN, smiling, telling Dan Patrick, “We’ll take A-Rod!”

The whole thing collapsed a few days later because of complexities involving Rodriguez’s massive contract and MLB’s Players Association, but the baseball world knew the Sox had been ready to part with both stars.

It made for a big bowl of awkward at spring training in 2004, but Boston’s “slighted” superstars took separate paths. Manny walked around smiling, saying, “They put me on eBay,” while drum-tight Nomar sulked and said, “The priorities are obviously not for me . . . I was definitely hurt by a lot of it.”

“My first day on the job in Boston was after all that had gone down,” former Red Sox manager Terry Francona remembered this past week. “It was unbelievable. Welcome to the Red Sox, right? Manny was yelling about being on eBay, but he sort of laughed about it and got over it. And he always hit. I remember John Henry telling me when I got there, ‘Keep him on the field. That’s your job.’ ”

DHL Dan CCCIII - Eddie Andleman, RIP

I didn't listen to sports talk radio a whole lot back when Eddie Andleman and others were on the airwaves, but it sure sounds like Shank did:

Eddie Andelman gave us sports talk radio gold with his no-holds-barred interview of Wade Boggs in 1989

Picked-up pieces while begging the Tartan Army to come back every year …

⋅ New England’s sports talk airwaves have been far less interesting since Eddie Andelman retired in 2010, and there were tributes aplenty when Eddie died this past Monday. A pioneer of the genre, he was hilarious, kind, charitable, combustible, and eternally devoted to his family, the Red Sox, the Celtics, the Hot Dog Safari, and the Kowloon. Eddie was one of one.

He brought me into radio in the mid-1980s, and I’ll always remember some advice he gave during a commercial break in one of my first days.

“Dan, sometimes you think before you answer a question,” Eddie said. “Any kind of silence is bad for radio. Don’t think about what you’re going to say. Just start talking.”

Says a lot about sports talk radio, doesn’t it?

My favorite show with Eddie was a dinner-hour special at the USA Inn in Winter Haven, Fla., during Red Sox spring training in 1989. Ever embroiled in controversies, Wade Boggs was a favorite Eddie target and didn’t like Boston’s favorite blab-master. I told Boggs that Eddie was in town doing shows for three nights and wanted him as a guest. The future Hall of Famer smiled mischievously and said, “Can’t wait.”

On that fateful Friday night, our “studio” was a table in the middle of the Florida fleabag’s sprawling lobby. A handful of sunburned spring-breaking Sox fans served as our “live studio audience.”

A potential shitshow interview in the making here? I'm all for it!

DHL Dan CCCII - Rooting For A Shitcanning

In this week's Picked Up Pieces column, Shank wonders about the employment status of Craing Breslow:

Maybe the Red Sox should replace Craig Breslow, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while debating whether to watch Haiti-Scotland World Cup or Knicks-Spurs Game 5 Saturday night . . .

⋅ Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver rarely held “team meetings” when the Orioles were struggling.

“Why would I have a meeting if we’re going bad?” Weaver reasoned. “Suppose we have a big meeting then go out and lose the next game. What do I do then?”

This is where the Red Sox find themselves as they lurch into the middle third of their sorry season. Fenway Sports Group and Craig Breslow nuked face-of-the-franchise manager Alex Cora and six of his coaches after merely 27 games of the 2026 season. Now that the Red Sox look even worse, it’s bad optics to fire chief baseball officer Breslow, even though it’s fairly obvious he’s a huge part of the problem.

Asked Thursday about the possibility of replacing Breslow, Red Sox president and CEO Sam Kennedy told WEEI, “It’s not even on the table.” Swell. But it should be on the table.

If part of your earlier response was to fire Alex Cora and most of his staff, then maybe you should consider Breslow as well. That would depend on what direction ownership truly wants - to win or to maximize profits.

Not Feeling The Excitement

The 2026 World Cup, hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States this time around, is currently taking place. Here's Shank to take a dump on the event:

We are Boston, so can we stop worrying and just enjoy the World Cup? Doubt it.

The World Cup is here and it’s all the rage in Greater Boston.

You can’t gas up your car, pick up an iced coffee at Dunks, or take a walk through your neighborhood without engaging in a conversation about Haiti vs. Scotland Saturday night in Foxborough. Every grade schooler from Eastport to Block Island knows that French superstar Kylian Mbappé has a chance to break the World Cup’s all-time scoring mark before the month is out. World Cup fever is a local epidemic.

Actually, none of this is true.

Here in the Route 1 corridor between Boston and Foxborough, the vaunted Cup has largely been a source of irritation and inconvenience. Ticket prices are astronomical, transportation promises to be confusing, local municipalities worry about congestion/security, and advocates have warned international fans about heightened immigration scrutiny.

Sounds like a party, no?

There was lots of celebration when FIFA — soccer’s ever-suspicious and all-powerful worldwide governing body — named Boston one of its 11 American host cities in June 2022. But our four-year run-up has been a study in chaos, confusion, and fiscal uncertainty.

Big surprise, right? I mean, did we really expect smooth sailing and universal agreement in a process that involves FIFA, the MBTA, the FBI, the governor of Massachusetts, the mayor of Boston, the mighty Foxborough Select Board, Meet Boston, Robert Kraft’s estimable empire, and mega-sponsors such as Coca-Cola and State Street?

I think that,by and large,these complaints are commonplace with any city that's hosting an event where tens of thousands of people are descending on a stadium for a few hours, so this isn't unique to Boston / Foxborough as Shank's made it out to be. Second - I had a temp job where I worked the five games that were hosted at the okd Foxborough Stadium when the United States hosted the event in 1994, so I've watched it ever since that time. Third - I was at a CVS today and ran into two gents from Scotland, and one of them was wearing a kilt. I talked to them for a few minutes and they mentioned the three hours it took them to get back to Quincy from last night's match at Foxborough, so Shank's right about that part. Still, the point stands - this isn't a uniquely Boston thing.