Broadcaster idiocy, couch zombies, obesity and football fandom, the Red Sox' title chances, the eye of the needle that is baseball's HOF, the worsening legacy of Bill Belichick, Arch Manning

Tuesday 9/2/25

There's an old baseball maxim that one should never make the first or third out of an inning at third base. But you know what? The second out isn't that much better. It's the worst base, on balance, to make an out at. This maxim exists because you want to on third so the fly ball can bring you home, but you must be sure to make good decisions when it comes to third base. Not that you ever want to make bad decisions.

The Red Sox can win the AL East. They can also do some postseason damage. What do you want me to say? They're playing well. They have a good mix. Three guys are getting it done at the front of the rotation, the closer has been phenomenal, Roman Anthony continues to ascend, the defense has been better, the strikeouts are down, they're winning one-run ballgames. I'd put their chances of winning it all at...10%. Didn't think I'd be saying that come early September.

Brayan Bello didn't have his best stuff yesterday--struggled some out there--but it was nice to see him get the win on a day when he had to grind. Once it got semi-shootout-y early on, I was very confident the Sox would find a way to win the game, especially at Fenway with the joint jazzed up.

Lucas Gialito got the win the day before to prevent the Sox from being swept at home by the Pirates, which would have been bad, and that wasn't easy for him given the poor umpiring behind the plate. Some obvious strikes were called balls, extending innings that he should have been out of.

Speaking of Aroldis Chapman: I'm a little surprised he resigned with the Red Sox yesterday. He's such a nomadic pitcher and I expected him to move on, especially with the great season he's had through 5/6; you know, really cash in with whatever organization paid him the most. Maybe he likes it here.

Too much was made of Payton Tolle's decent first start the other night. He was okay, with flashes. You'd think, given how the NESN crew talked about him, and the fans, that he'd twirled some three-hit, eleven-strikeout shutout. This is the way of the world now, because almost everyone in the world is stupid. We get further and further away from truth and reality.

But there's no denying that Tolle's rise through the ranks of professional baseball during his first year as a professional pitcher is most impressive. If he's good at the MLB level--as in, right here, right now--that could be a huge factor for the Sox.

Jarren Duran had a great game Sunday--and then wasn't in the line-up yesterday--which included an inside-the-park home run that didn't require a slide. He turns the bases as he runs about as well as anyone in the game. Textbook technique. With his speed, though, I'm confused why he doesn't steal more bags.

This year, it's seemed like he wants to be a player who drives the ball, which perhaps speaks to the amount of extra base hits he has--though he had loads of them last year, when he also seemed content to slap or chop a single.

As I've said before, he's going to have a strange final statistical line. Decent RBI total, lots of doubles and triples, but an average in the .250s, maybe low .260s. Overall, you'll be pleased with his campaign, but it will have been a strange and sometimes frustrating route to a season that will actually be better than it seemed as it was happening. Which is what I've written here for some months now.

Duran now has as many career inside-the-park home runs as the mighty Dave Kingman.

Saw a home run unlike any I'd seen previously during yesterday's game. It was hit by Trevor Story, who may get to 100 RBI now. He lifted a slicing fly to right that was looking to drop pretty much on the foul line near the Pesky Pole.

Remember--there's practically no foul territory there. The fence, the line, the fans, all come together as one almost. The ball went off the outfielder's glove, struck the pole; again, a blur, with everything jammed together. Story stood on second after the initial ruling of ground-rule double, before ultimately getting the home run signal and resuming his trot.

Some perspective: Cal Raleigh has 50 home runs, he may get to 60, he's going to win the AL MVP, and he's a catcher in his twenties. Kyle Schwarber became only the twenty-first player to hit four home runs in a game the other day. He has seven seasons of thirty plus homers, three of 46 or more homers, leads baseball in RBI, has led the league in homers before and leads the NL at present, and is in his age thirty-two season.

Both of these players have almost no shot of getting into the Hall of Fame, with Schwarber having the better chance.

Says a lot, doesn't it?

Mookie Betts has rebounded. He's saved his season in the sense that while it got too late for him to have a good one--given how long he'd been bad--it's no longer an embarrassing season. He stopped the bleeding. WAR loves Betts more than WAR should, so he'll finish somewhere around 4.2 there, and he'll have a nice total of runs scored, though not nearly like in the past.

Next season will be big for him in terms of determining if he's still what he was or this is the fading out portion of his career, which can take a long time. To wit: Nowhere close to the same caliber of player, obviously, but look at Walker Buehler. Sox release him, and a legit contender like the Phillies immediately picks him up. What's more, he's in their rotation now.

Bill Belichick looks increasingly like someone who will be thought of--and essentially tossed aside--as being a product of Tom Brady. To a smarter person, he'll be a reminder that nepotism and cronyism ought not to be the de facto approaches in anything that is competition and merit based; in terms of results, I mean. Very little in our world has anything to do with merit, which is how almost everyone needs it to be, given that they have no skill and offer nothing and are no different from anyone else in this regard (and, frankly, every regard).

The 48 points that TCU hung on UNC last night were the most ever allowed by a Belichick coached team. How's that for a start to your college career that has begun at the end of your seventies after no organization in the NFL wanted anything to do with you?

It was evident that Belichick was told to get his embarrassing transactional "relationship" thing/fiasco under tighter wraps, because you haven't heard nearly as much about that in recent months after it reached that crescendo of tabloid-readiness back in the spring or whenever, and I thought there was a real chance he'd be let go before he got a chance to stand on the UNC sideline, but man...talk about the mighty having fallen.

The score wasn't even as "close" as looked; wasn't like TCU was up two or three scores late and then really put it away. They had 41 unanswered points. Hell, UNC scored on their first drive. Then they got eviscerated until tacking on another TD late. Last year's UNC team would have fared better. How could you not?

But okay, it's one game. Didn't feel like one game, though.

Belichick used to say--and he meant to be insulting--that he didn't want to be Marv Levy; the inference being that Levy was some old man standing on the sideline of a sport that had passed him by. Levy was seventy-two in his final season with the Bills; he's 100 now and still with us. Belichick is older at present than Levy was then.

Levy wasn't far removed from his four consecutive Super Bowl appearances at the time of his retirement, and had led the Bills to the playoffs the season before. You didn't think the game had passed him by. Belichick clearly just didn't like him, and did what Belichick does--made some childish, passive aggressive comments, which is also why--well, it's among the reasons why--no one will have sympathy for Belichick if he continues to falter, embarrass himself, come apart. He does look like a confused old man who doesn't have any idea anymore about what's what and what things need to be.

If Tom Brady wanted revenge against Bill Belichick for how he was treated, talked to, and referred to over the years, and ultimately let go, in effect--and I expect that his thoughts and feelings regarding his old coach are more complicated than that--then he could have none better than what will, in my estimation, continue to happen with their respective legacies.

Brady can and will be brought up singularly; positive Belichick discussion will involve much talk about Brady, as well as caveats, qualifiers, and a certain amount of incredulity as to Belichick's own abilities. I'm not saying that's right--I'm saying that's how it will be.

As a general rule anyway: Players look better over time in the collective hagiography, coaches look worse. Tom Landry, Don Shula, and whomever else aren't talked about the way they were when they were active. The shine comes off. But look at Jim Brown. Like a mythical figure. Or even John Elway. The latter was nowhere near as good as you'll hear him casually described as these days, but you'd think he was right there with Joe Montana on that level below Brady.

I think this is a make or break it year for Patrick Mahomes. He's been sliding--getting worse--for years. I don't think he's that serious about being great for as long as possible. Hype and ignorance has carried his reputation for some time now. Whereas, I see the numbers for what they are, and I see quite a few guys in the league who have been better than him for a while.

Regarding the Patriots: I don't believe in Mike Vrabel, Drake Maye, or Christian Gonzalez. I could. But I don't as of yet, and I'm much less bearish about this season than other Patriots fans are, and yes, I get that every single year every other Patriots fan has this expectation that "We're back" and all of that, a notion they're disabused of by like October, but which they forget all about every having, such that they learn nothing from their mistake and make the same pronouncement, with the same expectation, for little or no real reason, when the next off-season gets underway.

Robert Kraft says he wants to win another Super Bowl before he dies. I don't think there's any way that happens. I'd be utterly shocked.

The Patriots better win that first game, which is at home against the Raiders. Given the Tom Brady affiliation, it's a wonder the Krafts aren't having yet another ceremony looking back to the past, which is where they like to live.

Whenever I see and hear LSU coach Brian Kelly, I end up thinking he's such conniving garbage. In his brief on-field interview after the Tigers beat Clemson on Saturday, he must have said, "We beat a top five team on the road" or some variation thereof five times. Force feeding the voters. Straight hucksterism. Strikes me as someone capable of caring only about himself and doesn't care how fake and manipulative he needs to be to get what he wants. Clemson was rated too high to start the year anyway.

Alabama is cooked. Remember when Florida State got bad after their run of dominance? And Miami? That's where Alabama is now at. This is that period of their history. Teams should enjoy beating them.

Can you be more overrated than Arch Manning? If he had a different name, you'd virtually never hear about him. But if he was so great, he would have been the man long before now. And now that he is the man, he couldn't do anything out there against Ohio State, but the announcers sure kept puffing him up--or make that puffing up his family name. I'm not expecting him to be much of anything in college or the NFL. Could be wrong, of course, but I just think there'd be a lot more showing out than there has been to date, and it wouldn't be only now that he's the starter.

Boston College beat Fordham by a lot, which means nothing in and of itself. The takeaway from that game--really all that I cared about--is that BC couldn't run the ball. Against Fordham. So that, to me, means it was a bad game, a concerning game, regardless of the 66-14 score which, again, means little. But not being able to move the ball on the ground means something, and potentially quite a bit. We shall see.

As Americans get stupider, football gets more popular.

I'm sure it's a coincidence.

Wait--there are no coincidences.

There are people who like to say that, anyway.

Of course there are coincidences. W.F. Harvey's "August Heat" could be all about a coincidence. But this is not a coincidence.

As football gets more popular, Americans also get fatter. Not a coincidence either, though less directly related.

Does anyone watch football and drink a glass of water or a black coffee? Pretty much no, right? People eat and drink the whole time. Off and on, but you know what I mean. Down the gullet many things are made to go. While that person sits there. They're not running on the treadmill as they watch.

I was going back and forth between a couple games on Sunday morning. It was after two, and games were still on. One was on Fox. A major network. It wasn't some obscure station covering a game in Hawaii. And I thought about how this stuff goes from like nine in the morning or whenever the pregame shows get rolling, to here at two in the AM of the next day.

Is this necessary? We're that gluttonous? All of these games have to be on? Because you know there are many, many, many people out there just sitting there, for the duration, not thinking, not doing, not living, stuff their fat bodies. Couch zombies. The thing about a couch zombie is, they remain a zombie when they have to rise from the couch and go through the motions of living.

I'm honestly unsure if anyone else in the world knows this, including anyone at any media outlet, so I'm just going to put this here:

The Patriots will kick off.

The kickoff of the Patriots game is at 1.

See how that works? It's not always one word, like apparently everyone else who follows or writes about football thinks.

It's kind of like all of these people who bill themselves as fitness coaches and have no clue that there's a difference between "work out" and "workout."

I listen to these announcers and it's just more and more obvious that no one is good at anything and no one owes their job to their ability. How can you make your living with words and not know that "anyway" isn't plural?

Look at sexual harassment buff Mike Tirico. Lauded. Awarded. Worshiped in that industry. I remember last year he said that the Lions still hadn't made it to the penultimate game, because he thinks the word means extra super duper ultimate.

So does Mike Felger, who called Steph Curry the penultimate winner. He's the second-to-last winner, baby! Felger is the kind of dumb guy who learns a word somewhere and then beats the usage of that word to death. For instance, he learned "bollixed" recently, so that's the word he was doing it with over the summer. Felger will ask his co-host Tony Massarotti what some words mean, and they'll make fun of someone who uses a word they don't know. But then Felger will say "ancillary," while not knowing any other words that someone who uses the word "ancillary" would know, because he obviously takes the word-of-the-day approach to language and then grinds and grinds on that word kind of like how a stupid person listens to another stupid person like Joe Rogan and repeats the "talking points" as his main go-to points in life. I'm sure there is no one else who would pick up on this--who could?--but a person having encountered this observation and then listening to that show, would think, "Oh, yeah, that is exactly what Felger's doing." Both of these guys wrote professionally--Massarotti for the Boston Globe, Felger for the Herald. Massarotti went to Tufts, Felger to BU.

All of these men are men in their fifties. Not fifteen-year-olds fresh off seventeen straight hours of TikTok videos. Top of their profession. Rich as hell.

And total idiots.

Idiot after idiot after idiot.

In a game over the weekend, I heard an announcer say, "Obviously they have a microscope on them."

Do you really not know how microscopes work?

But you know what? Everyone else is so dumb that they don't know what's dumb. People can't tell anything, which is the single worst problem in the society, because it makes all of the others possible, and makes it impossible to stop them, overturn them, or right them. Really, to do anything about them save facilitate them and make them the norm, so that there's the total takeover of stupidity and cluelessness in every last phase and sector of human--which is really post-human--existence.

And obviously, huh?

There are so many of these commercials where it's some guy I think is a comedian--you wouldn't know for sure, because none of these people are funny--and LeBron James, and the maybe-comedian, whose shtick is that he talks in this staccato, bumptious manner, starts riffing--and I'm sure he's the kind of guy who'd think of it that way--on Abraham Lincoln, referencing a log cabin, a stovepipe hat. And then he makes this pun about the Gettysburg Address, and it's precisely at this moment that LeBron James throws his head back and laughs uproariously because that's such a killer joke, that's the one that nailed it, and there is no way you could get me to believe that LeBron James would ever get something like that.