Nick Cafardo - Baseball Hall Of Fame Writer

A posthumous reward for the longtime baseball scribe:

Saturday in Cooperstown, N.Y., the late Nick Cafardo takes his rightful place on the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum wall next to the likes of Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, and Damon Runyon. He’ll be on the same wall with Peter Gammons and the late Larry Whiteside, Globe teammates who welcomed Nick to our baseball coverage when we got him from the Patriot Ledger in 1989.

Nick died suddenly outside the Red Sox clubhouse at spring training in 2019 and later that year won a landslide election in which more than 420 baseball writers cast ballots for the BBWAA’s Career Excellence Award.

I didn't know he was at the Patriot Ledger before the Globe; the more you know...

Shank The Scold, A Continuing Series

Get vaccinated!!!! pic.twitter.com/Sco8VQyHnC

— Dan Shaughnessy (@Dan_Shaughnessy) July 19, 2021

I'm going to e-mail Shank right now and ask about his own vaccination status. I'll update this post accordingly, or the next post will be a full post on his response if matters warrant it.

UPDATE, at 6:32 PM - E-mail sent!

UPDATE, at 8:15 PM - E-mail received! We had a brief conversation and I emphasized the above point that explicitly mentioning his vaccination status, and perhaps the reasn for it, would make his argument better and I left it at that. I mentioned that it's on him to disclose it and although he offered for me to disclose it, I said no - that's on him. We talked about some other stuff but that's tangential to the main point.

Who's Trolling Who?

JUst to confirm the obvious - Shank writes & tweets more about the Red Sox when they're on losing streaks:

Red Sox spanked 9-1 on Sunday Night Baseball. Are 2-6 and have lost three straight series since trolling everyone with this Twitter bio. pic.twitter.com/gWbLhQlzWo

— Dan Shaughnessy (@Dan_Shaughnessy) July 19, 2021

Reader reaction is pretty much what you'd expect:

I wrote this about an hour ago: pic.twitter.com/nIHG9Urqvq

— Geoff Walker (@gewa76) July 19, 2021

Hey Dan do you ever say anything positive about the team

— Ben (@bennythebunny22) July 19, 2021

Having read as much of what you’ve written since 2004 as I could stand, I have to conclude that you prefer being miserable. Ain’t that right, CHB?

— Greg Murphy (@MurphyGreg) July 19, 2021

DHL Dan CXLIV - The Covid Column

Shank thinks all professional baseball players should get vaccines for Covid-19, AKA the Wuhan Flu virus:

Major League Baseball needs to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while nervously waiting for the first Olympic fiasco . . .

▪ Memo to Major League Baseball: Just get the COVID-19 vaccine, fellas. It’s not about politics or a government plot to put a microchip in your body. Risks? Of course. There are risks that you could choke on your steak dinner. Have you stopped eating?

This 'logic', as it were, is unpersuasuive. If you could choke on steak, wouldn't you simply stop eating... steak?

Enough with the boogeyman and the tin-foil-hat, science-denying. It’s pretty clear that the personal benefits from vaccination outweigh the potential risks. This is a public health issue. Stop piggybacking on the cooperation of the majority while endangering that majority (and yourself) by exercising your right to refuse. You have the “right” to push your way into a crowded subway car when you have the flu. How about stepping up for the greater good?

What other measures 'for public health' would Shank (and others) advocate mandating? Has he gotten the vaccine himself? Funny how he doesn't discuss that. Full discosure - because of prior heart attacks, I got two Moderna shots back in May.

Thank God smallpox and polio vaccines came along before all-knowing Dr. Google.

Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred has ordered a mandatory vaccination policy for those who work in his office. He should do the same with his players, coaches, managers, and clubhouse workers. Unfortunately, Manfred is a lawyer and knows he’ll never get a mandate past baseball’s all-powerful Players Association.

Another angle Shank doesn't consider - the FDA fast-tracked approval of these vaccines; last time I checked they have not undergone the full approval process, which can take years. In that sense they are considered experimental vaccines and I have no problem with vaccine skeptics. Too bad Shank disagrees with that notion because one fucking baseball game was cancelled on Friday night.

The Pedro Gomez Contribution

There's a book out on Pedro Gomez, the (now deceased) baseball writer and TV guy for ESPN. Here's Shank's contribution - another rip job on Curt Schilling.

(“Remember Who You Are,” a collection of essays about ESPN baseball reporter Pedro Gomez, who died in February, was released on Tuesday. This is the contribution to the book by columnist Dan Shaughnessy. Click here to visit the book’s website.)

Curt Schilling despised both of us. To his dying day — and it’s still painful to type those words — the thing I shared most with Pedro Gomez was our coveted claim as Schill’s two least-favorite baseball writers.

Our small club was formed during the 2001 World Series when Pedro called out the Diamondbacks ace on the day of the seventh game of the World Series against the vaunted New York Yankees. These were not normal times. America’s soul was ripped open when the Towers fell and the presence of the Yankees in the World Series became a metaphor for American resilience. The Yanks and D-Backs helped heal our country with a spectacular seven-game series, but in my capacity as a Boston Globe sports columnist, I was blissfully unaware of Schilling’s fraudulence and clubhouse divisiveness until he was called out by Republic columnist Pedro Gomez on the day of the most important game in Arizona’s franchise history.

A Local Angle

Uninterested in reporting on the baseball All-Star game, Shank takes a predictable parochial angle to the NBA Finals:

Here’s one (local) reason to be interested in the NBA Finals

If you’ve tuned out the NBA Finals because there’s no LeBron, no Steph Curry, and no Kyrie to boo, there’s still reason to watch the Suns against the Bucks.

It’s the local angle. A kid from Arlington is playing big minutes for the Bucks.

Pat Connaughton is running up and down the court with Giannis Antetokounmpo, guarding Chris Paul, and averaging 10 points and four rebounds and 30 minutes in a series that resumes Wednesday night in Milwaukee with the Bucks trailing, 2-1. Connaughton has made eight of his 17 3-point attempts.

“He brings toughness and versatility,” says former Celtics basketball boss Danny Ainge. “He can switch and guard multiple positions. He’s a strong, tough kid who can guard bigger people and smaller people. He makes open shots and gets offensive rebounds. He’s just a really active player that gives everything he’s got.”

Boston Globe Death Watch - XV

Nothing says corporate self-implosion quite like employees in a dying industry making imperious demands of company management:

Three labor unions representing different groups of Boston Globe employees have sent a joint letter to the newspaper company's ownership and executives, criticizing what they called “a series of aggressive, harmful tactics by management” during labor negotiations.

The main union representing Globe journalists and business employees, The Boston Newspaper Guild, also said that a “super-majority” of members has indicated support for a strike authorization vote, should one be called by a bargaining committee. A statement from the unions alluded to “talk of a potential strike vote,” though the timing on such a vote is at this point unclear.

The letter marks the first time the Newspaper Guild and local chapters of the International Association of Machinists and the Teamsters have joined in coordinated action regarding Globe negotiations, according to the organizations.

If these fools went on strike, all fucking hell will break loose, and I'll love every minute of it.

DHL Dan CXLIII - Strip Mining Away

With the Boston Red Sox doing far better than he anticipated earlier this year, and with no other news items to write about, Shank takes a look back and comes up with a new (and negative) way to describe some parts of former Sox GM Dave Dombrowski's tenure as general manager:

Dave Dombrowski doesn’t agree that he strip-mined the Red Sox to win a title, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while thanking Daddy Globe for not sending me to the Tokyo Olympics . . .

▪ Theo Epstein got all the credit for the 2004 curse-busting Red Sox even though Dan Duquette assembled half the championship roster. It was the oft-maligned Duke who brought Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, Jason Varitek, Derek Lowe, Johnny Damon, Tim Wakefield, and Kevin Youkilis to town.

In this spirit we should recognize contributions Dave Dombrowski made to the Sox’ first-half success of 2021. John Tomase brought this to our attention in his column for NBC Sports Boston this past week and I tracked down Dombrowski to give him an opportunity for a belated victory lap.

Dombro’s been something of a dartboard ornament since Sox ownership dumped him near the end of the 2019 season, but it’s only fair to acknowledge that he brought J.D. Martinez, Nate Eovaldi, and Chris Sale to town, resisted offers to trade Rafael Devers and Matt Barnes, hired Alex Cora, signed Xander Bogaerts to a team-friendly long-term deal, and drafted outfielder Jarren Duran, who is projected to be a big thing at Fenway someday soon. Dombro also won a World Series and three division flags.

Is anyone else irritated bu his use of 'Dombro'? Unless I'm missing out on some sort of inside joke, I think this is disrespectful and juvenile.

The lasting local perception is that he strip-mined the farm system and left the Sox with nothing in the tank.

Any guesses as to which local sports columnist helped to push this notion?

DHL Dan CXLII - Musings, By Dan Shaughnessy

Now that life's returned to normal, Shank gives us some thoughts about it:

After all we’ve been through, baseball is really helping the recovery, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while fondly remembering Arthur Fiedler leading the Pops through the “1812 Overture” at the Hatch Shell . . .

▪ Sitting in my second-floor home office early Thursday afternoon, I was thumbing through seven daily newspapers (the ultimate sign that you are old) and had NESN’s Sox pregame show on in the background. The scalding-hot Red Sox were getting ready to beat the stuffing out of the Royals again.

Focusing on my New York Post sports, some words from TV got my attention. Young NESN sideline reporter Jahmai Webster was leading into a segment about the Sox going back to the West Coast for the first time in two years, after playing to full houses at Fenway for the past week. He spoke of how it felt like things were getting back to normal and said, “Baseball is healing. Just like nature is healing.’’

More like 'ultimate signs that you are old', but whatever...

The One Where Shank Saves Me The Work

Shank finally gets around to interviewing Red Sox general manager Chaim Bloom, whose team Shank has been savaging since spring training. I was going to do the usual linkfest to point all this stuff out, but today's my lucky day:

At the halfway point, Chaim Bloom is pleased with Red Sox but says: ‘We haven’t accomplished anything yet’

Red Sox baseball boss Chaim Bloom returned a phone call Tuesday, which was pretty nice of him considering that I’ve been driving a pipe through his ball club since he got the job 20 months ago.

You might remember: Tampa Bay by the Charles. The Boston Devil Rays. The worst Sox deal (Mookie Betts to the Dodgers) since Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. The joke of “payroll flexibility.” The worst outfield in Red Sox history. Fangraphs’s idiotic projection of 89 wins. “Sneaky good” mockery. Sox bound for irrelevance. Sox are Fool’s Gold.

So here we are at the midpoint of the 2021 baseball season, and the Sox are in first place, own the second-best record in baseball, and are on pace to win 98-100 games.

Raising Questions

Red Sox starting pitcher Garrett Richards got his ass kicked last night, and Shank is here to start the burial:

Garrett Richards’s problematic start against the lowly Royals raised more questions than it answered

What are the Red Sox going to do about Garrett Richards?

Does he get another start? Is he banished to the bullpen? Would he be willing to pitch at Polar Park for a while? Or are the Sox fine watching him learn how to pitch in games that count?

In the last two weeks it has been established that Richards can’t pitch effectively without applying foreign substance to the baseball. As a result, we are watching a 33-year-old professional athlete making $10 million per year try to re-learn his craft during the major league season.

All the good feeling from the Sox weekend dismantling of the Yankees dissolved early Monday when Richards gave up three homers before getting five outs in the series opener with the Kansas City Royals at Fenway.

Hearing this guy whine all season hasn't exactly added to his case, either.

Sale Not Made

Shank's not at all psyched about this weekend's local baseball festivities:

Still not sold on this iteration of Red Sox-Yankees

Red Sox-Yankees. Still special? Are you not entertained?

Folks in these parts were laughing at the Yanks when the Sox swept three from the Bronx Bombers New York in the first weekend in June. The big payroll, preseason-favorite Yankees were on their way to falling nine games out of first place and there was smug satisfaction seeing them eat the dust of Alex Cora’s upstart nine.

A lot of that momentum had shifted by the time the Yankees got to Fenway on Friday. New York was a mere 3½ games behind the Red Sox, three in the loss column. The Yankees came to Boston winners of seven of nine, victorious in each of their previous three series.

So by all accounts it just might be an interesting series, right? Read on for the reasons behind Shank's pessimism.

Gettin' Paid

The Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA and in favor of student athletes when it comes to compensation / renumeration:

Paying college athletes is incredibly complicated, and the Supreme Court did not untangle it

There were big headlines Monday when the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA violates US antitrust law when it limits compensating college athletes.

The 9-0 vote led to a flurry of knee-jerk reaction and flamboyant hot takes. And why not? Everybody hates the sanctimonious, greedy governing body of college athletics. Dumping on the NCAA is like trashing the IRS and the Fake News Media. It’s easy and it feels good.

But there was something misleading about this dance on the heads of the lords of college sports.

The Globe’s Page 1 headline was, “Justices back payments to NCAA athletes,” while the vaunted New York Times went with “College Athletes Cannot Be Denied Pay, Justices Rule.”

Boston Globe Death Watch - XIV

Seems the Globies issue whiny, petulant demands on a semi-weekly basis:

.@BostonGlobe reporters have been working on the ground, risking their safety to bring key information and reporting to the public during the pandemic — all while working without a fair contract. Take action: https://t.co/bE8N7X1O8v @newsguild pic.twitter.com/itmsA9zt4E

— Boston Newspaper Guild (@BostonNewsGuild) June 15, 2021

A fair contract will preserve exceptional talent in the @BostonGlobe newsroom and provide quality journalism in New England. Join our fight: https://t.co/bE8N7X1O8v ✊ #1u @newsguild pic.twitter.com/gD07GK7v3J

— Boston Newspaper Guild (@BostonNewsGuild) June 14, 2021

DHL Dan CXLI - Keep Hope Alive

When Shank has a proverbial bone to gnaw on, he simply won't give it up easily:

Red Sox can’t unstick themselves from this issue, and other thoughts

Doesn't help when you keep bringing the subject up, but go on...

Picked-up pieces while combing the Internet for the last stashes of Spider Tack …

▪ Can Red Sox fans, uniformed personnel, and local media please stop pushing the narrative that your team has not benefited from violating MLB Rule 6:02 (c) by using using foreign substances to get a better grip? Every team had guys doing it, and the Red Sox pretty clearly benefited more than most. Just look at the cast of Boston starters who curiously overachieved, then fell back to earth as soon as warnings were issued.

Spider Tack and other substances don’t help only spin rate. They help a pitcher locate. Martín Pérez got lit up on high changeups against the Jays last Sunday. In the words of super-agent Scott Boras, foreign substances are “control enhancing, so it’s performance enhancing.”

It's pretty much a repeat of everything he's said on the subject for the past week, interspersed with recent quotes. Let's see how many more columns he's gonna milk from this cow.

The Tom Lamb Column

Shank occasionally does a column of a local athlete, coach or team so you get the false impression he's not just all about shitting on the Patriots, the Red Sox, etc. all the time.

Tom Lamb, scholastic sports legend, is still in the game at 73, coaching Natick girls’ softball

Tom Lamb has been coaching high school athletes since Richard Nixon was president.

That’s a lot of cold afternoon practices, bus rides, orange slices, rainouts, battles with the MIAA, and one-on-one conversations with fragile teens straddling that elusive line between adolescence and adulthood.

Lamb is a Massachusetts scholastic sports legend. As a varsity football coach, he won 248 games and four Super Bowls for Natick and Norwood. He has coached a future Heisman Trophy winner, been honored by four Halls of Fame, and put in time at Hoosac Valley, Northeastern, Framingham State, Boston English, and assorted Babe Ruth, Legion, and Little Leagues at multiple exits off the Mass. Pike.

If Only There Was A Profession Where They Asked Athletes Questions

Does anyone think Shank understands the irony of this tweet when he wrote it? How about any time thereafter?

Swell. And how does JD feel about the amazing performances submitted by his previously ordinary pitcher teammates over the first two months? https://t.co/UDPaxMcA8R

— Dan Shaughnessy (@Dan_Shaughnessy) June 16, 2021

No Love Lost Here

😀 https://t.co/aalCMxGfvR

— Dan Shaughnessy (@Dan_Shaughnessy) June 15, 2021

This Was Not A Difficult Call

Dan Shaughnessy Watch, April 12, 2021:

My final point - you and I know that at some point down the road, say when Calipari steps in some dog crap again, he'll go right back to 'disrespecting' the school. It's tough to teach an old dog new tricks.

Dan Shaughnessy, a few hours ago:

Honoring John Calipari and Marcus Camby with statues is not a good look for UMass

There have been some bad ideas in our New England sports universe in recent years. There was the push for the 2024 Olympic Games, the Red Sox signing of Pablo Sandoval, and the Patriots’ estimation that it was not worth keeping Tom Brady around for another few years.

And now we have folks at the University of Massachusetts — our State U — breathlessly announcing Monday that they are going to “immortalize four basketball legends” with a dedication of statues to Julius Erving, Jack Leaman, Marcus Camby, and John Calipari outside the Mullins Center Sept. 11.

That’s right, ladies and gents. Our State U plans to dedicate statues to Camby and Calipari, two hoop talents who won big, then brought disgrace to UMass when the Minutemen’s 1996 Final Four appearance was vacated because of NCAA violations. UMass was officially erased from Final Four history and ordered to return $151,000 in tournament money.

I'm wondering if John Calipari killed any of Shank's pets, or did the old Kraft Super Bowl Snub on him, but I think the best explanation for the animosity is it's cheap grandstanding at Cal's expense, and that's notable to me because I don't see a lot of evidence of Shank doing the same to Marcus Camby with any regularity.

I'm, more amused by a) the utter predictability of this column and b) some of the Twitter crowd going to town on him:

I cannot imagine thinking something is disgraceful based on the moral standards of the NCAA. Save your outrage for people who actually deserve it, @Dan_Shaughnessy.

BTW, I’m thankful we were spared another Joe Burris & Desmond Tutu reference. 🙄

— Marc Bertrand (@Marc_Bertrand) June 14, 2021

Your employer brought back a field manager who won two championships by cheating to the top. I digress. https://t.co/2p6eNRMUDs

— Boston Radio Watch, Part 2 (@bostonradio2) June 14, 2021

Taking the moral high ground while working for a company where men in their 50’s held an “intern draft” of 19 yr old college girls based on their looks is some real pretzel twisting

— marC (@Zig2K) June 14, 2021

DHL Dan CXL - Pointed Questions For Alex Cora

Shank (finally or otherwise) notices cheating in baseball, and makes the Red Sox manager squirm and evade:

Picked-up pieces while wishing anyone loved me as much as Bill Belichick loves Cam Newton …

▪ Alex Cora is one fine big league manager. It’s great for the Red Sox that he’s back, and New England is excited with the team’s fast start.

We know all about Cora’s baggage. Major League Baseball suspended him for a year for his role in the world champion Houston Astros’ cheating scandal of 2017. Cora’s 2018 world champion Red Sox also were caught and punished by MLB for illegal sign stealing (video room shenanigans).

Now that MLB is cracking down on pitchers for using illegal sticky substances to make the baseball spin, I would think Cora has put his hurlers on notice. More than anyone in the game, Cora can ill afford to be associated with another cheating scandal.

When Cora was asked about this issue at a group Zoom session Wednesday, he said, “I don’t think it’s in the manager’s hands. It think it’s more the players.”

Preemptive throwing of players under the bus, or just deciding not to take that bullet? Here we have the Sox' general manager getting the 'ol Goodyear treatment:

I spoke with Cora one-on-one Friday morning to ask about recommendations he may have made to his pitchers.

“We had a meeting in spring training and Chaim [Bloom] addressed that part,” Cora answered.

Given his personal history, does Cora feel any need to be particularly vigilant on the issue?

“Um … like I said, Chaim talked about it in spring training,” said Cora. “He was very open about it, so now we have to wait for the memo or whatever they are going to do and then we’ll address it again.”

Let me also note - Felger referenced this column in the 2:00 hour of today's Felger & Mazz show. One hand washes the other...

Burial By Proxy

The Boston Bruins lost their 2nd round playoff series to the New York Islanders last night, 6 - 2. Instead of the usual Shank burial of the local team after the playoffs ('they're just not that good', et. al), he'll let former Bruins general manager Harry Sinden do it for him:

Harry Sinden was just like the rest of us Wednesday night. He watched the Bruins from the comfort of his home and found himself yelling at the TV as their season ended with a 6-2 loss to the New York Islanders at Nassau Coliseum.

“I was into it pretty good,” Sinden said with a chuckle Thursday morning. “I told my wife, ‘If you don’t like me yelling, you can go upstairs.’ ”

Now 88, Sinden is listed fourth on the Bruins administrative masthead as “Senior Advisor to the Owner and Alternate Governor.” He was Bobby Orr’s first head coach with the Bruins in 1966 and acquired both Cam Neely (trade) and Don Sweeney (draft), the two men who run the Bruins for Jeremy Jacobs in 2021.

Boston Globe Death Watch - XIII

It's been a while since there's been anything new on this front, but the union representing most of the Globies is still whining:

Without a new contract, @BostonGlobe workers have been forced to go more than 2 years with uncertainty and no cost of living increase during the worst public health crisis in a century. Stand up for us at https://t.co/bE8N7X1O8v @newsguild pic.twitter.com/RtFOdtAd52

— Boston Newspaper Guild (@BostonNewsGuild) June 3, 2021

Staff at The @BostonGlobe are speaking out: At a paper owned by a billionaire, workers still don't have a contract after 2+ years. Tell John Henry and Linda Pizzuti Henry that our work is worth a fair contract. Join us at https://t.co/bE8N7X1O8v @newsguild pic.twitter.com/bEJlqbJTBd

— Boston Newspaper Guild (@BostonNewsGuild) June 1, 2021

If you clowns don't like the pay / conditions there, then quit. Learn to code, bitchez!

DHL Dan CXXXIX - No Longer On The Ortiz Case

Shank updates us on the David ortiz case, which seems like it's going nowhere:

It turns out Ed Davis is no longer on the David Ortiz case, and other picked-up pieces from the sports world

Picked-up pieces while wondering whether Celtics players have chartered a jet so they can fly to Milwaukee to cheer for Kyrie in the next round …

▪ Boston super cop Ed Davis is no longer cracking the case on the two-year-old shooting of David Ortiz in the Dominican Republic. Ortiz hired Davis to get to the bottom of things, but the search proved futile, and according to Davis, the investigation is ongoing in the DR with more than a dozen suspects still in custody.

“I’m just a security guy here, so I don’t want to go off on a tangent,” Davis said Thursday. “The bottom line on it is this: This is a very complicated and still-dangerous situation that we’re looking at. We provided the government down there with important information and there’s still no resolution.

Here's something amusing - Danny Ainge lied to Shank last month:

▪ I had this exchange with Danny Ainge on May 14:

Me: Are you coming back?

Ainge: Of course.

Me: Is [Brad] Stevens coming back?

Ainge: Of course.

After resigning this past Wednesday, Ainge told the Globe’s Adam Himmelsbach that in late March he approached Celtics ownership and told them he did not think he had the energy to continue on the job.

So which is it? Did Ainge know he was leaving back in March, or was this a sudden departure after things fell apart in the first round of the playoffs?

I checked in with Ainge to ask about the timeline discrepancy.

Rest at the link.

Shank On The Celtics' Front Office Changes

I'm kind of impressed that Shank banged this one out in under two hours:

A weird, abrupt ending for Danny Ainge, a daunting new challenge for Brad Stevens with Celtics

It happened overnight.

Literally.

The soft and annoying Boston Celtics of 2020-21 were eliminated from the playoffs Tuesday evening in Brooklyn, a 123-109 noncompetitive whimper at the end of one of the most disappointing local sports seasons of all time.

And then, after a meeting back in Boston Wednesday morning, the team issued a press release at 11:01 a.m. announcing that Danny Ainge was retiring and coach Brad Stevens would be leaving the bench and moving into Ainge’s position as president of basketball operations.

Love the picture - Ainge looks like he's in a hostage video.

He Came To Bury Them

With a Game 5 loss to the Brooklyn Nets, the Boston Celtics are out of the playoffs and Shank is here to shovel dirt on their grave:

Mercifully it’s over, but Celtics need big changes after a season of failure and disappointment

It’s over. The bull gang can put the parquet panels in storage for the summer. Let’s thank the hoop god for that.

Now it’s time for a change. Fire basketball boss Danny Ainge. Fire coach Brad Stevens. Fire the roster. Something has to give. The Boston Celtics simply cannot stand pat after the season we just witnessed.

Kyrie Irving (25 points) and the Brooklyn Nets put the Celtics out of their misery Tuesday in Brooklyn, beating the soft C’s, 123-109, in Game 5 at the quiet Barclays Center to advance to the second round of the NBA playoffs.

The Knucklehead Column

Here's Shank's Game 4 recap between the Celtics and Nets:

It just gets worse.

Kyrie Irving scored 39 against the Celtics in a 141-126, Game 4 drubbing Sunday night, then stomped on the Celtic midcourt logo before leaving. When Irving exited the floor with his teammates, a fan wearing a Kevin Garnett jersey fired a water bottle at Irving, narrowly missing his head. The fan was apprehended by Boston Police and led from the lower bowl in handcuffs.

“It’s unfortunate that sports has come to this crossroads, where you are seeing a lot of old ways come up,” said Irving. “It’s been that way in history, in terms of entertainment, performers in sports, for a long period of time. Underlying racism and just treating people like they’re in a human zoo. Throwing stuff at people, saying things. There’s a certain point where it just gets to be too much. I called it out. I wanted to keep it strictly basketball. But people just feel very entitled out here . . . we’re not at the theatre. We’re not throwing tomatoes and other random stuff at the people that are performing. It’s too much.”

DHL Dan CXXXVIII - Kyrie's Homecoming

Former Boston Celtic Kyrie Irving got a warm and loving reception on Friday night:

Boston fans didn’t cross the line with Kyrie Irving Friday night, and let’s keep it that way

Picked-up pieces while loving our return to sports played in front of full houses:

▪ Boston fans stood tall at the Garden Friday night. They booed Kyrie Irving every time he touched the basketball. They delivered harsh chants in Kyrie’s direction. But nothing went over the line. After the big Celtics win and Irving’s subpar game, even the complex and sometimes loathsome Kyrie said, “It’s basketball. I’ve been in a few environments in my life. If it’s nothing extra, I’m cool with it.’’

Good. Let’s have more of the same Sunday when the Garden is full for Game 4. Boo Irving because he lied to you about staying here and quit on your team. Just as you booed Roger Clemens when he came back here with the Yankees. Just as you would let Rick Pitino have it if he ever walked through that door on Causeway Street. But “nothing extra” please.

It almost makes you wonder - if Kyrie (and Marcus Smart, for that matter) really heard N-bomb(s) when it supposedly happened, why are we only hearing about it now?

Head Of The Class

Shank banged this one out a bit before the other Kyrie Irving column:

Right now, Kyrie Irving in a class by himself in being hated by Boston sports fans

There are two categories when we get into athletes who are hated by Boston sports fans.

Category No. 1 includes natural-born enemies of our teams. Guys such as Bill Laimbeer, Ulf Samuelsson, Manny Machado, Alex Rodriguez, LeBron James, and Peyton Manning. Easy targets, one and all.

The second group is the house of hombres who played or coached here in New England, eventually wore out their welcome, and left a trail of bad feelings when they moved to new destinations. This group would include Roger Clemens, Bill Parcells, Carl Crawford, David Price . . . and Kyrie Irving.

Kyrie, who spent two wild and unsatisfactory seasons in Boston, made the key plays in a fourth-quarter surge and scored 29 points in a 104-93 Game 1 Brooklyn playoff victory over the Celtics Saturday. Wearing green shoes, as if to taunt Boston again, Irving combined with superstar teammates Kevin Durant (32 points) and James Harden (21) to put the .500 Celtics into the fast lane for a quick exit from the 2021 NBA playoffs.

It's a good column in part because he lets Kyrie do the talking, which leads to interesting results.

Bury Them Early - It Saves Money

I'm not saying he's wrong about the Celtics losing the series, but you'd expect Shank to pull the trigger later rather than now:

Celtics season can’t end soon enough, and now Kyrie Irving has Boston on notice

It just keeps getting worse. The Celtics’ season needs to end. The C’s were embarrassed by the Nets, 130-108, in Game 2 Tuesday.

And then Kyrie Irving lit a match and dropped an R-bomb on Boston in his postgame Zoomer.

The ever-combustible Irving will be back in Boston Friday and inflamed his visit after Game 2 when he said, “Hopefully we can just keep it strictly basketball, no belligerence or subtle racism and people yelling [expletive] from the crowd. Even if it is, it’s part of the nature of the game.”

Irving doubled down on the Boston-as-racist theme, saying, “I’m not the only one that can attest to this. The whole world knows it.”

Such a pleasant series, right? Maybe Shank's onto something here with the early burial...

DHL Dan CXXXVII - Old Man

Shank leads off another Picked Up Pieces column about a dugout dustup:

Getting Dennis Eckersley’s take on the Tony La Russa flap, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while waiting for Fenway Park to be at full capacity next Saturday …

▪ Dennis Eckersley is the perfect baseball person to comment on Tony La Russa’s dustup with his own player in Minnesota this past week. It was a story replete with themes of old school vs. new, baseball’s “unwritten rules,” and social-media warheads bordering on ageism aimed at the 76-year-old Hall of Fame skipper.

Eck doesn’t necessarily agree with his former boss, but he thinks the barrage of criticism heaped on La Russa is rooted in the manager’s senior status.

“He’s getting killed,” said Eckersley. “I can’t help but think a lot of it is because he’s old. It’s the age we live in.”

Here’s the background: Leading, 15-4, in the top of the ninth inning of Monday’s game, White Sox manager La Russa gave the take sign to Yermin Mercedes as Mercedes prepared for a 3-and-0 pitch from position player Willians Astudillo, who’d been summoned to pitch for the Twins.

Mercedes, a 28-year-old rookie who’s batting .358, either missed the sign or ignored it, and swatted a home run. After the game, La Russa apologized to the Twins and called out his own player, saying Mercedes “made a mistake” and “there will be a consequence.”

Mercedes used the “I have to be me” defense and La Russa was buried from coast to coast, hearing complaints from players around baseball, even some White Sox (Lance Lynn and Tim Anderson).

I'm kind of surprised LaRussa's still around; of course, that might change any day now.

The Dreaded Play-In Game

The NBA has a new way to irritate its fans:

The Celtics took care of business in the dreaded play-in game. Now? It’s Kyrie Irving and the Nets

This was like an Oscar nominee showing up at a casting call for a small part in a B-list film, then being told he or she would have to read for the part. And maybe not even get the job.

The dreaded play-in game.

Nobody wanted the Celtics season to come to this.

The good news is that the Celtics passed the audition. Jayson Tatum, who earlier in the day said, “We believe in ourselves, still,’’ exploded for 23 third-quarter points en route to a 50-point night and led the Celtics to a 118-100 victory over the Wizards to push Boston into a first-round, best-of-seven series with Kyrie Irving, Kevin Durant, James Harden, and the second-seeded Brooklyn Nets. The Celtics were swept by the Nets during the regular season, losing three games by an average of 17 points.

'Thank you, sir may I have another?'

DHL Dan CXXXVI - Late Festivus

Shank says he's not too happy with the Boston Celtics, so he takes his concerns to Danny Ainge:

Airing some Celtics grievances to Danny Ainge, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while hoping Ed Davis can crack the case at Churchill Downs …

▪ I had an awkward conversation with Danny Ainge Friday morning. In an effort to represent what I consider a large segment of the Celtics fan base (good luck with that! - ed), I started our interview by telling Ainge that I hate the way his team plays. I can’t stand the way they come out flat, fall behind, rally to make it close, then ultimately capitulate.

I told him I don’t believe his players are doing what Brad Stevens asks them to do. Apologizing for my rudeness, I asked him if he felt we’d been too rough on the underachieving 2020-21 Celtics.

“I wish we competed out of the gate more,” the president of basketball operations acknowledged. “I wish our defensive efforts were more consistent. Absolutely. I understand all of those critiques, absolutely. So I think it’s a fair critique.”

What is his level of disappointment in this .500 team that will now have to participate in the “play-in” round just to get into the NBA playoffs?

The Payton Pritchard Column

I haven't been watching too much basketball this year; largely out of a reaction to the left-wing pro domestic terrorist hyping of the Black Lives Matter 'movement'(the organization, not the notion) where, true to form, Eric Hoffer is proven right once again. Anyways, the times I was watching them, especially earlier in the year, Pritchard was on fire with three point shooting and being a pain in the ass whenever possible. Here's Shank on that stuff:

Candid interviews with Celtics are sometimes shown on the video board during timeouts at TD Garden. At one recent game, players were naming celebrities they had been mistaken for in public. Most picked other NBA players. Some chose actors or musicians. Then the baby-faced rookie, Payton Pritchard, appeared on the screen. He was last.

“I don’t know if I’ve been mistaken for anybody,” the 6-foot-1-inch point guard said. “But when I walked into a gym sometimes, especially at Oregon, they would think that I was the manager.”

Some pro athletes would be bothered by such slights, or at least unwilling to reveal them. But Pritchard has never cared how others view his dreams. He is not here because of them.

It winds up being a pretty good story - check it out.

Bandwagon Dan Comes Alive!

The NFL schedule came out a few days ago. Shank once again rips off the Felger & Mazz show from Thursday and gives us this column:

We’ve known that this moment was coming. Now we know exactly when.

Tom Brady and the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers will be in Foxborough Sunday night, Oct. 3, to play the Patriots on NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.”

Save-the-date cards are in the mail. Oct. 3 is circled on every New England calendar. Alerts are set on cellphones. Days off from work are being scheduled for Monday, Oct. 4. Game tickets are going for one million dollars. Steve Burton and Dan Roche are planning to live in a trailer on Patriot Place for the week leading up to the game, delivering live “Tom is Back” updates three times per hour.

You know the rest - more forced 'jokes', inane comparisons with other local sporting events, etc. The only things missing are 'Sons of Bill Belichick' and an Elvis / Larry Bird reference.

When Unlikables Collide

After a loss to a potential playoff rival, Shank throws a proverbial monkey wrench at the Boston Celtics:

These Celtics have emerged as one of the truly unlikable teams in Boston sports lore

Only the 2020-21 Celtics could take a nice idea like “Tommy Heinsohn Day” and turn it into “Rick Pitino Day” or “Sidney Wicks Day” with a disgraceful effort on national television in the most important game of the season.

In a game with vital playoff seeding at stake, Boston’s entitled AAU Warriors came out sleepwalking and allowed the hungry Miami Heat to score 79 first-half points Sunday afternoon. The Boston Celtics have been around since 1946 and had never allowed that many points in the first half at home. Boston lost, 130-124.

With 68 regular-season games in the books and four left (including Tuesday night at home again with Miami), these Celtics have emerged as one of the truly unlikable teams in Boston sports lore. And now it turns out that Jaylen Brown, probably their best player, needs season-ending wrist surgery. Yeesh.

I felt like blowing this column off as the usual pre-burial of a local pro sports team before their eventual short and early playoff demise, but he says something interesting, or at least notable:

The team has stars, but no leadership. Players push back when they get criticized and say they don’t listen to their critics. Former Celtic champion Kendrick Perkins says maybe these players should start listening to the critics. Because the criticism is legit.

I'm not too keen on this 'play-in' system for the playoffs, but we'll see how it all sorts out.

On The Road Again?

Shank's wondering about the availability of the Boston Red Sox TV broadcasting crew (NESN) when they're on the road:

You watch the Red Sox on TV and hear the commentators, and it warms you knowing that Dave O’Brien, Jerry Remy, and Dennis Eckersley are ensconced in the broadcast booth at Fenway Park, describing what is unfolding on the great green lawn below. In the tradition of Curt Gowdy, Ned Martin, Ken Coleman, Dick Stockton, Sean McDonough, and Don Orsillo, they are your eyes and ears. They are your boots on the ground at Fenway.

Except during the COVID-19 era, when the Sox broadcasters have been bunkered in Watertown, watching monitors, trying to describe the action unfolding at Fenway or in Fort Myers, Baltimore, and Arlington, Texas.

Summary - it's awkward, the game still sucks with nearly empty stadiums, and they'll be doing road games from the Watertown studios for a while.

Remember - we read him so you won't have to!

The First 60 Point Game By A Member Of The Celtics

Jayson Tatum scored 60 points against the San Antonio Spurs last week, which also capped off a 32 point comeback. This amazing feat ties the Boston Celtics' record of sixty points, set by Shank's buddy, Larry Bird:

Unstoppable and unforgettable: Recalling Larry Bird’s 60-point night in 1985

It was March 12, 1985. Lakefront Arena on the campus of the University of New Orleans. The night Larry Bird scored 60 points in a single game for the Celtics.

Kevin McHale was there. Nine days earlier, he had scored 56 against the Pistons in a Sunday matinee at the old Boston Garden. When McHale went to the bench with a few ticks still left on the clock, Bird urged him to stay on the court. The record might not last long, Larry insisted.

“We had a lot of guys on that team who could get hot like that,” McHale said from his home in Arizona this week. “Max. Tiny. Robert. Larry. And when a guy got hot, we’d get him the ball. That’s what Larry did for me when I set the record, and we were all helping him that night in New Orleans.”

Interesting side note to the story - Bird only hit one three-point shot in that game.

Mystery Solved

I was trying to figure out why Shank tweeted out an ancient column about Ernie Adams, the Patriots' director of football research:

Mysterious Ernie Adams is Patriots’ man behind the curtain https://t.co/31ixIpr1xm via @BostonGlobe

— Dan Shaughnessy (@Dan_Shaughnessy) May 4, 2021

That's because he's now the Patriots' former director of football research:

Longtime Patriots director of football research Ernie Adams announced his retirement from the organization in a brief statement Monday night. Here’s how the statement reads, via ESPN’s Mike Reiss on Twitter:

“The last 21 seasons with the New England Patriots have been extraordinary for me. I am fortunate to have been part of a team with Bill Belichick, outstanding colleagues, patient owners, and a lot of great players. It is time for me to stop working and join the many wonderful fans who have been here for this run.”

Adams’ first job in the NFL came in New England as an administrative assistant from 1975-78. A longtime colleague and friend of Belichick’s, he served in various roles under Belichick for the New York Giants and Cleveland Browns before heading back to the Patriots as Belichick’s football research director in 2000. Belichick announced on Saturday that the 2021 NFL Draft was Adams’ final one with the team, and allowed him to make the team’s seventh-round selection, Central Florida wide receiver Tre Nixon.

Known for his mysterious nature and football intelligence, Adams was described as a “mythical creature” by Patriots center David Andrews on Tuesday. Belichick heavily credited Adams with having a major role in the Patriots’ draft process over the years.

DHL Dan CXXXV - Making An Obvious Point?

$10 says Shank picked this one up from Felger & Mazz's radio show yesterday:

Expect Bill Belichick to stubbornly stand by Cam Newton, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while shedding a tear and closing the book on Jimmy G …

▪ It took Bill Belichick less than a minute to kill the great buzz that accompanied his fortunate and meaningful selection of Alabama quarterback Mac Jones in the first round of Thursday night’s draft.

Before he was even asked a question, Belichick made it clear that “Cam’s our quarterback.”

So here we go. After 10 billion words about Garoppolo, Zach Wilson, Justin Fields, Trey Lance, Mac Jones, Mac Davis, Zac Efron, Teddy Bridgewater, Bridgewater State University, and Mrs. Fields Cookies, prepare yourselves for obtuse and obstinate repetitions of “Cam’s our quarterback” for the next six or eight months.

It will not matter if Jones arrives with the skill sets of Bart Starr, Joe Namath, and Tom Brady. It will not matter if Cam Newton takes the Patriots to a 1-3 start, throwing passes that die in the dirt or get run back for touchdowns by assorted Bills and Dolphins. It will not matter if Rodney Harrison goes on TV and again says that Newton can no longer play in the NFL.

Hold that thought for a minute...

One of the reporters tried, following up on Bill’s unsolicited declaration of love for Newton Thursday night:

Q. “Going back to your comments off the top, you said that ‘Cam’s our quarterback.’ What exactly does that mean?” (Wow. Talk about walking into one.)

A. “Just what I said.”

The battered, intrepid reporter came back with, “How long does that last for?”

“I don’t know,” said Belichick. “Somebody would have to play better than he does.”

Isn't there a contradiction with this last sentence and Shank trying to tell us Cam Newton would still be the starting quarterback if they went 1-3 in their first four games?

On This Day In History

Shank commemorates the 20 strikeout game by Roger Clemens 35 years ago:

It was 35 years ago, April 29, 1986, and the big story of the day/night was Celtics vs. Hawks at the old Boston Garden in the second round of the playoffs. Those Bird-Walton-Parish-McHale Celtics were en route to a 50-1 home record (including playoffs), qualifying as perhaps the greatest basketball team of all time.

The Celtics-Hawks playoff game started hours after the first round of the NFL Draft, in which the defending AFC champion Patriots selected SMU running back Reggie Dupard. New England’s selection of Dupard was not preceded by one million hours of useless sports radio commentary by fantasy geeks and wannabe GMs. Nobody had ever heard of Jimmy G.

That's because he wasn't born yet, asshole...

Boston’s “minor” sports story of April 29, 1986, figured to be the baseball game at Fenway Park, where the mediocre John McNamara Red Sox (81-81 in 1985) were playing the moribund Seattle Mariners on Yawkey Way before it was haunted. Social distancing was no issue at Fenway that night, as only 13,414 turned out for Sox-Mariners. Because of a conflict with the Celtics broadcast, the Sox game could not be found on AM radio.

While most of this newspaper’s sports staff focused on the Celtics and the draft, I was the Globe’s only reporter at Fenway that night. No photographer was assigned. Everybody was at the Garden. Globe baseball scribe Larry Whiteside had the night off, scored a ticket for the Celtics game, and — in the tradition of all great baseball writers — stopped by Fenway for a free meal on his way to North Station. Sides even stuck around to watch 23-year-old Roger Clemens pitch a couple of innings.

He Has His Doubts

New York Mets pitching ace Jacob deGrom came to Fenway Park last night, and Shank writes a pretty good column about him, albeit in his trademark negative style:

The vaunted Red Sox lineup will face the best pitcher in baseball Wednesday night at Citi Field in New York. It’ll be Boston’s turn to take a shot at the Mets’ Jacob deGrom, a two-time Cy Young Award winner who’ll come into the game with an ERA of 0.31 and 50 strikeouts to go with only three walks in his first 29 innings of 2021.

Reminds me of when Oakland’s 10-1, soon-to-be-anointed MVP and Cy Young winner Vida Blue faced the Red Sox at Fenway Park in May of 1971 (a year in which Blue went 24-8 with a 1.82 ERA and 301 strikeouts). J.D. Martinez better have his iPad fully charged for this one.

Acting Mets general manager Zack Scott says deGrom is the best he’s seen since Pedro Martinez. Former batting champ Keith Hernandez says deGrom is the best he’s seen since Randy Johnson.

It’s heady stuff. It’s must-see TV. And like everything in New York, it’s larger than life. Perhaps even, dare we say, a little overrated?

Don’t get me wrong, sports fans. DeGrom is on fire, and for all we know, he might no-hit the slugging Sox. But as I sift through the numbers and press clippings, I can’t get past the nagging notion that hungry-for-a-superstar New Yorkers have gotten carried away with deGrom’s meteoric start.

DHL Dan CXXXIV - Column Template Time

Three weeks ago, Shank trashed the Red Sox for an opening day loss, then ragged on them a few more times until they ran off a bunch of wins. Now it's the New York Yankees turn:

Picked-up pieces while counting the minutes to when Bill Belichick trades down for better value …

▪ Are you taking joy in the Yankees’ horrible start? Picked to win the AL East by almost everyone, the Bronx Bombers lost 11 of their first 18, their worst start since the Stump Merrill days of the early 1990s.

The Yankees went into the weekend in last place in the AL East, ranked 13th in batting (.211) and 12th in fielding percentage. They also had the worst slugging percentage in the majors.

New York’s awful April featured shortstop Gleyber Torres jogging out ground balls, plus epic slumps by Torres, Gary Sanchez, Giancarlo Stanton, Clint Frazier, and Aaron Hicks. They also have the assorted injuries that annually make a mockery of their $210 million payroll. George Steinbrenner would have fired the entire training staff by now.

We know one person enjoying that horrible start, don't we?

You'll Never Walk Alone

Those of you who are familiar with the Boston Red Sox know that the club is primarily owned by John Henry, who also happens to own what's left of the Boston Globe as well as Liverpool Football Club of the English Premier League. A bunch of the top clubs in the English Premier League and a few other European leagues tried to form a semi-breakaway league called the Super League, which is primarily a vehicle for these selected clubs (and only them) to play each other and rake in big bucks. It was shot down after two days due to furious fan / supporter backlash from across the pond, there were a few ceremonial firings in the process, and it wound up leaving John Henry looking like a greedy chump.

When I first spotted this column, I half thought 'Oh, boy - Shank's gonna try and talk about soccer' but soccer's the sidebar here. There is something to be said of Shank's ability to write a decent, engaging column when he's able to blowtorch the subject of the column at hand:

A huge victory for soccer fans, a huge setback for John Henry

You’ll never walk alone.

This is the anthem for the Liverpool Football Club. It speaks to fans’ hopes when all seems lost. And defiance in the face of adversity.

Red Sox/Globe owner John Henry has found great riches and success as owner of Liverpool FC since 2010, but today he walks alone at Anfield in the wake of his role in a botched attempt to form a European Super League.

Plans for the elitist, money-grabbing league were unveiled Sunday night, triggering universal condemnation and galvanizing fans against the 12 owners who proposed the tone-deaf breakaway. In Liverpool, Henry endured a fan-driven pummeling 100 times rougher than what happened in Red Sox Nation after he traded Mookie Betts.

The Super League collapsed under the weight of its own greed less than 48 hours after it was introduced, and Henry posted an apology video hours later in which he said, “The project put forward was never going to stand without the support of the fans. No one ever thought differently in England. Over these 48 hours you were very clear that it would not stand. We heard you. I heard you.”

I saw one Twitter comment about that video - 'Turn the sound down - it looks like a hostage video'.

Check out the rest of the column; it's well worth it.

The Self-Explanatory Column

Occasionally, you can figure out right away why a column was written or not:

April has been anything but cruel for the Bruins, Celtics, and Red Sox

It is April of 2021 and the pandemic is reluctant to loosen its grip, but things are looking better for three local sports teams who are in season.

Bruins. Celtics. Red Sox.

So good. So good. So good.

Since the local teams are doing well, that means Shank has fewer things to bitch about, right?

It adds up to so … much … winning. Almost as if there’s nothing to complain about. I think it has me a little off my game.

Bingo!

DHL Dan CXXXIII - The Long Game

At last - some interesting material for the latest Picked Up Pieces column:

Recalling a baseball marathon and a win streak with Joe Morgan, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while begging for April 29 and the NFL Draft to finally get here so everyone can stop talking about it …

▪ April 18 is the 40th anniversary of the Rochester Red Wings vs. Pawtucket Red Sox 33-inning game, still the longest game in professional baseball history.

Walpole’s Joe Morgan managed a PawSox team that included Wade Boggs, Marty Barrett, Rich Gedman, Bruce Hurst, and Bobby Ojeda, all of whom later played big roles in the epic 1986 Red Sox-Mets World Series. Rochester featured a 20-year-old third baseman named Cal Ripken Jr., who would begin his streak of 2,632 consecutive big league games one year later.

The game started at 8:25 Saturday night (delayed because of a problem with the McCoy Stadium lights) and was suspended at 4:07 a.m. on Easter Sunday with the score tied, 2-2. There were 19 fans left in the stands when the game was suspended, but 5,746 (plus 140 media members) filled McCoy when the game was resumed June 23 in the middle of MLB’s 50-day work stoppage of 1981.

Shank Loves Alex Cora!

Now that the Boston Red Sox are enjoying a good recent run, here's Shank to jump on at least one bandwagon:

It’s clear that rehiring Alex Cora was the right move by the Red Sox

There are still pockets of Red Sox Nation where folks are upset that Alex Cora was brought back to manage. Cora is a convicted cheater, and I’ve heard from dozens of loyal Sox fans who are offended and outraged that the Sox rehired him after he served a one-year MLB suspension for his role in the Astros sign-stealing scandal.

Not me. I can be the pearl-clutching “get off my lawn” guy when it comes to PED users applying for admission to the Baseball Hall of Fame, or John Calipari vacating Final Four appearances, but bringing back Cora to manage was always the best move for the Sox.

A reminder - Shank also called Cora a cheater, just six months ago, and now everything's cool.

Forgive and forget, and / or just win baby?

Guilty Conscience?

Nearly two full days after it happened, Shank gets around to one of the most insincere 'congratulations' columns he's ever written, this one involving the University of Massachusetts - Amherst men's college hockey champions of 2021:

A well-deserved salute to UMass athletics and the recently crowned men’s hockey champs

Congratulations to the University of Massachusetts men’s hockey team, which won the NCAA championship, defeating St. Cloud State, 5-0, Saturday night in the final game of the Frozen Four at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh.

Congrats to coach Greg Carvel, goalie Filip Lindberg, skaters Bobby Trivigno, Anthony Del Gaizo, Zac Jones, Matthew Kessel, Matt Murray, Carson Gicewicz, Jake Gaudet, Oliver Chau, Aaron Bohlinger, Ryan Sullivan, athletic director Ryan Bamford, school president Marty Meehan, chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy and all the other players, coaches, trainers, support staff, alums, and fans of UMass hockey.

Hope you're sitting down for this next part:

Before we go any further, let me also apologize to every member of the UMass Amherst community who feels you guys never get enough coverage or credit. Through the years, hundreds of friends and correspondents from UMass have made it clear they regularly feel disrespected by the Boston sports media, particularly the Globe. We (I) have routinely mocked them as Hooterville, embarrassingly beholden to the corrupt regime of John Calipari, and in 2021 obtusely tolerant of a foolish foray into big-time college football.

Not today.

Today we toast all that is good about UMass sports. We salute UMass’s national champions, skaters who are part of a program that won a Division 2 championship in 1972, was disbanded in 1979, and did not resurface until the Mullins Center opened in 1993. Until this weekend, goalie Jonathan Quick was UMass’s greatest contribution to the sport.

What a fucking gutless weasel. Shank has indeed spent many a column over a great length of time trashing John Calipari (and by extension the University) and he attempts to absolve himself with the use of a single letter (I).It's entirely possible Shank has done the majority or all of the 'disrespecting' of that university in his newspaper. For that, I'd need to a) give a shit about other Globies and b) waste time reading them to know for sure.

My final point - you and I know that at some point down the road, say when Calipari steps in some dog crap again, he'll go right back to 'disrespecting' the school. It's tough to teach an old dog new tricks.

UPDATE at 6:05 PM - Opening sentence was clunky, threw in some words to make it clearer.

DHL Dan CXXXII - Go Through The Motions Much?

Oh, look - Shank bangs out another Picked up Pieces column. How original!

Quinn Buckner of the NCAA’s last perfect men’s basketball team wasn’t rooting against Gonzaga, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while outfitting the entire family in yellow and blue City Connect Red Sox uniforms . . .

▪ Former Celtics guard Quinn Buckner was cocaptain of Bobby Knight’s 1976 Indiana Hoosiers, the last NCAA team to run the table. Buckner started alongside Scott May, Kent Benson, Bobby Wilkerson, and Tom Abernathy, all of whom went on to NBA careers. Two others players on the Indiana team were drafted by NBA teams. When undefeated Gonzaga took on Baylor in the NCAA championship game Monday, I wondered if Buckner and his teammates are like Mercury Morris and the 1972 Miami Dolphins, openly rooting against any team with a chance to go undefeated.

“I don’t know how my teammates feel about it, but I would have been OK with Gonzaga winning,’’ said Buckner, who works as a color commentator for Indiana Pacers broadcasts these days. “But I will tell you that I have family members who were pulling hard for Baylor to win. Not me. Gonzaga winning wouldn’t change anything for us. We would no longer be the last team to do it, but it’s still there.’'

I don't have the patience to read this garbage - proceed at your own peril.

Definitely A Glass Is Half Empty Guy

The Red Sox have won four games in a row. Here comes Shank to nonetheless take a piss on them:

Red Sox go worst to first? Great! Let’s see where they stand down the road

How could we ever have doubted them?

Worst-to-first. In four short days.

We were ready to run the Red Sox out of New England after they were swept by the Orioles. Drubbed, 11-3, Sunday at Fenway. Before playing their fourth game of the season, the Sox walked a line between ridicule and irrelevance, losing three to the Zer-O’s by an aggregate 18-5.

Thursday afternoon at Camden Yards, the Sons of Alex Cora beat those same Orioles, 7-3, to move into a first-place tie with them in the American League East. The Red Sox have won four straight, which did not happen once in their embarrassing 2020 season.

Shank's been trying to 'run them out of New England' ever since the first pitch was thrown in spring training. Dishonest barely begins to describe this bullshit.

Straight Daddy Ball

Shank's doing what Shank does best - writing a Celtics column after a loss:

Larry Bird vs. Dr. J this is not; Celtics-76ers rivalry is now one-sided

Boston vs. Philadelphia has given us Bill Russell vs. Wilt Chamberlain and Larry Bird vs. Julius Erving. Tuesday at the Garden we got Tacko Fall vs. Joel Embiid. Yikes.

Embiid (35 points) and the conference-leading Sixers beat the Fool’s Gold Celtics, 106-96, at the Garden Tuesday to sweep the season series from the overrated, back-under-.500 Green Team. There was talk of a Celtic “winning streak” after victories over horrible Houston and depleted Charlotte, but we should all know not to take the cheese on the Brad Stevens Five.

Robert Williams got the start vs. Embiid (115 points in three games vs. Boston this year) and his foul trouble led to Celtic trouble in the first half. With Williams on the pine and poor Luke Kornet getting rag-dolled by Embiid, Philly went on a 21-2 run and Stevens called for Tacko to guard Philadelphia’s behemoth center. It’s never a good sign when it’s Tacko Time in the first half against a team with a 35-16 record. The Sixers are legit now that Doc Rivers is calling the shots from the bench. And Embiid is Philly’s new Chamberlain. Boston’s Time Lord scored 4 points and fouled out in 14 minutes.

Read on if you want to read about Celtics - Sixers from previous decades.

DHL Dan CXXXI - Want Some Politics With Your Baseball?

The state house in Georgia passed a bill this week designed to prevent Democrats from stealing future elections in that state. Major League Baseball has responded by pulling this year's All-Star game from the host city of Atlanta, and Shank's on board with it:

Baseball surprisingly acted quickly in pulling All-Star Game out of Atlanta, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while filling out an expense account for the first time in 13 months . . .

Major League Baseball’s decision to pull this summer’s All-Star Game out of Atlanta — a swift reaction to Georgia’s new voting law that many view as voter suppression targeting minorities — was stunning. MLB traditionally moves slower than other professional sports leagues regarding issues of politics and controversy. Not this time. After lobbying by civil rights groups and the MLB Players Association, commissioner Rob Manfred acted quickly.

It’s risky business for a commissioner who rarely takes risks. The decision is bound to offend a portion of baseball’s dwindling fan base — a group older, whiter, and likely more conservative than the fan bases of the NFL and NBA. Corporate pressures will be another matter altogether. Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola voiced displeasure to Georgia’s legislation, but not until after the law was changed.

I'll bet it's a fair bit bigger than a mere 'portion'; at some point everybody gets sick of politics in sports. Any of these commissioners that think viewership (say, in the NBA and especially in MLB) will magically rebound any time soon is misreading their fan base, and now they just threw some more gas on the fire.

Political backlash was immediate. Accusing Manfred of succumbing to “cancel culture and woke political activists,’’ Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, stated, “Major League Baseball caved to fear, political opportunism, and liberal lies.’’ The Braves issued a statement (embossed with their tomahawk logo) in which they said they were “deeply disappointed’’ the All-Star Game was being pulled from Atlanta. Saturday’s Wall Street Journal featured an editorial headlined “The Biden Baseball League,’' stating that MLB “has smeared Georgia’s elected majority as racist and anti-democratic,’’ concluding, “Welcome to the Democratic Baseball League.’’

So, here we go. Manfred and MLB have jumped feetfirst into America’s raging political divide. It’s going to be tough sledding from here on in. There’s a voting law bill on deck in Texas. You know Florida can’t be far behind.

Welcome to the political arena, MLB! Hope you get it, good and hard.

From there, it's the usual grab bag of semi-useless tidbit sized bullshit.

The Obligatory Red Sox Opening Day Column

You knew Shank would trash the team after an Opening Day loss, didn't you?

Baseball. Fans. Sunshine. Peanuts. Beer. Masks. “Sweet Caroline.” Abundances of caution … and another day at the bottom of the American League East for your Boston Red Sox.

On the heels of their last-place disgrace of 2020, the Sox returned to frosty Fenway (37 degrees at game time) and kicked off their 121st big league season Friday with a 3-0 loss to the moribund Baltimore Orioles in front of 4,452 Hub hardball enthusiasts.

Alex Cora’s return to the dugout as manager was spoiled by a lineup power outage (two hits) and shaky defense that betrayed Nate Eovaldi and broke open a scoreless duel in the sixth.

From there it's the expanded game recap, sprinkled with sarcasm.

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?