Blow it up!

Friday 10/10/25

Baseball fans are too quick to say, "Blow it up!" and "Everyone must go!" and "This roster could never get it done!" when their team is eliminated from the postseason, as with the Yankees and the Phillies.

The other day I heard some Cubs "expert"--gotta love all of the experts who haven't a clue in the world about the subject they're supposed to know so much about--say that the Cubs were built to make the postseason, not win the World Series. The truth is, all of these teams are closely bunched. If you ran this tournament ten different times, you'd get five different winners or more. There are no great teams.

Anyone can win. Some are apt to think that's a good thing, others wouldn't. I'm in the latter camp. I find mediocrity a slog, and across the board mediocrity a total turnoff with whatever that thing is. You see it throughout the sports now. Look at the NFL. Eagles were pasted by the Giants last night. I saw a simulation before the MLB playoffs started. One of those programs that people who put stock in such things hype quite a bit, and which front offices use to make roster decisions, like whether it's worth it to add at the deadline or sell. This simulation had the Phillies and Red Sox in the World Series. The Red Sox were bounced in the Wild Card round, the Phillies in the NLDS, but that was as "good" a pick for a World Series as any. There's a lot of randomness and less separation in terms of quality.

It still feels strange to me that the Red Sox have four World Series titles this century to the Yankees' one. That really is a big difference here at the quarter century mark.

Giants coach Brian Daboll went into the medical ten last night to check on the status of quarterback Jaxson (these parents thinking they're creative with these names) Dart. Afterwards he said, "I apologized directly to our team physician. I just wanted his ass out there if he was okay. I'm like, 'Is he gonna be good or not?' I'm gonna call a timeout on fourth down and go for this son of a bitch."

What a gigantic meathead. (Looks the part, too; consider his actual head--it's like a big cube of bologna with all of the corners rounded away.) Reads like parody. Damn are most football people (on both sides of the television) dumb. America! Let's go for this son of a bitch!

Expecting Bill Belichick to be fired any day now. What I suspect is happening is that they're--his people, him, and maybe even UNC--looking for another gig for him, like on television. This guy just can't go away. I'll have more to say once he is relieved of his coaching duties in Chapel Hill. What pieces of garbage his sons must be, too. No shame. You raced to be with daddy? Bailed out on your other obligations to join daddy? I bet a big part of that was the will, too. Trying not to be left out of it or receive a smaller piece of the pie with however much going to the girlfriend.

I think when it's all over and it's legacy time, Bill Belichick will have the second biggest fall from grace in the history of American football, trailing only Joe Paterno, because how are you going to beat Paterno? You basically can't even say Paterno's name anymore. When was the last time you saw it outside of right now? The thing with Belichick is that he was such an asshole to so many people for so long. And it wasn't like they had done him wrong and he was having back at them in some just fashion.

There was always something wrong with this guy. Your legacy is synonymous with the winning you're doing, while you're doing it, even if you're someone who goes out of his way to be terrible to people, which is what Belichick has always done. But once you stop winning as somone like that, the knives come out. No one keeps the flame of that legacy lit. And if you're delivering truckloads of dirt to the site of that flame, then the people standing around it are going to use the shovels you've also provided to bury that sucker such that no one will ever know a candle was once there.

I wrote in these pages what Belichick should have done. He should have gone off and enjoyed his life, written a book about coaching strategies and/or coaching history through the eras of the NFL, and a book about his time on the sidelines--or multiple books about that--and had a new act as this reinvented TV, radio, podcast person--which he could have done remotely if he wanted to--and done talks in places like Symphony Hall in major cities because people eat that shit up, no matter how much you suck, how bad you are at anything, or what an evil, vile person you are, so long as you have the name, which is very rarely the result of being great at something. Look at David Sedaris. (We should also remember the charming, inebrious-with-anger--and perhaps actually perpetually soused--Joshua Boger--someone take that man's keys!--who also believes, going by our interaction and his avowed support of Sedaris's official views on the subject, that the disabled don't deserve to have jobs and should instead have to stay at home out of view of the rest of the public.) Think about this: The girlfriend thing has faded some into the background because Belichick is that much of a train wreck elsewhere. If ineptitude could qualify as impressive, here would be a bell cow of an example. I'd be shocked if it ever happens, but I kind of wanted to see Belichick coaching on the sidelines at Alumni Stadium. Because that would have been such a huge contrast with his former cock-of-the-walk status not to far away in Foxborough.

Mike Greenwell died. He was only sixty-two. If you were to ask me whether I'd rather have an MLB career in which I racked up 2000 hits and hit .278--let's say I had medium pop--or have 1400 hits and a .303 lifetime average--the exact numbers for Greenwell--I'd take the latter. I think it's awfully cool to be able to say you batted .300 in the big leagues for your career. Greenwell was a very good player who tends to be underrated because people just focus on his 1988 season, which was one of the great Red Sox seasons of all-time in my view. That was a fun year and Greenwell was a big part of the reason why. One of my favorite Red Sox teams ever.

That team is even in Buried on the Beaches, with the opening story taking place in the summer of 1988 (on Cape Cod, of course, as all the stories in the book do), when it seemed like everyone in New England was caught up in Morgan Magic. And indeed it felt magical--like a magical summer.

Which is funny, because outside of that run, those Red Sox didn't do much--they were otherwise a .500 team, and they were no match for the mighty Oakland Athletics in the playoffs. And you knew they wouldn't be, despite having Greenwell, Ellis Burks, Bruce Hurst, Roger Clemens, Dwight Evans, and Wade Boggs, who was even better than Greenwell that year. Looking back now, the Red Sox seem loaded themselves, but like I said, you thought they had no chance of getting to the World Series that year, and Oakland handled them easily.

Greenwell retired after his age thirty-two season. It's a little strange to think of him as a teammate of Tim Wakefield's on the 1995 division-winning Red Sox, another Sox squad that was exciting and perked up New England, but which you knew had no shot of getting past the formidable Indians that year.

A little strange to think of Wakefield and Clemens being Red Sox teammates, too. But baseball is like that. The other day I was looking over the stats of Mike Marshall--the Dodger first baseman and right fielder, not the Dodger relief pitcher--and saw he was on the 1991 Red Sox (for twenty-two games), which I have zero recollection of.

The Bruins are 2-0. Am I surprised? Mildly. The Blackhawks aren't good and the Caps outshot the Bruins nearly two-to-one. Each goalie got a start. I thought Jeremy Swayman was the man? No? Platooned out of the gate? (NB: Jeremy Swayman and Triston Casas could probably be good friends.) Pastrnak with three hits last night--however that's defined by the NHL--and McAvoy with one. McAvoy is pointless through two games, but he had five shots on net last night, which is like a shocking number from him. Normally that's two weeks' worth of shots.