Bush league

Sunday 2/15/26

Jeremy "Sieve" Swayman was up to his usual tricks yesterday, doing his best to help Team USA hand a win over to a much less talented Denmark team. This guy is brutal. First goal the puck was loose in the crease, and it squeaks in. Shouldn't have happened. But then there was the second goal, in which a Danish player beat Swayman on a dump-in from just inside the red line.

And then in the second period, Swayman got beaten on a slapshot from the point without a screen with three seconds left. I've written this here for years, but he sucks. Full of himself and sucks. He won't dress again for Team USA. I would have pulled his ass after that first period. Jeremy "Can We Hug Because I'd Rather Do that Than Compete" Swayman also works.

Connor McDavid is lighting it up so far in Team Canada's first two games--three points in each of them. Seems like a man on a mission.

I've been watching Cale Makar. His play has fallen off as the season goes along. Or certainly his production. Points in each of these first two games, though.

Macklin Celebrini looks like he's been shot out of a cannon sometimes.

I think for some of these guys this means even more because they don't get the chance to win big games very often or they haven't won the biggest games they've wanted to. You see that with McDavid. Guy is locked in. I don't know how you beat this Canadian team. So many great players and a lot of speed.

Both Canada and the US will likely pummel their opponents (France and Germany respectively) today.

All-Star games are garbage now. They used to be really entertaining. An NBA All-Star game in the 1980s was the stuff. Same with NHL All-Star games. Baseball All-Star games were better than they are now because you might see the starting pitcher go for three innings if he was having a special kind of year and was dealing in the game and that was cool. You know, Pedro Martinez vs. that National League line-up in 1999 and Roger Clemens in 1986. Now it feels like you're watching players put in an appearance rather than play a game.

I saw where some college football player was granted a ninth year of eligibility. Train wreck of a system right now which also caters to Peter Pan syndrome. I don't want to grow up! I want to stay a real boy! You gotta move. Bigger problem is that you have a sport where everyone in it is on a one-year contract and then they jump to another school and sign a one-year contract there.

It's very Hessian-y. There are no allegiances. Programs and cultures aren't so much built up as guys are flown in and come a year later are apt to be gone and replaced by another temp. Which is another way of looking at it--everyone's a temp. You want things to be ingrained with college football. The Ole Miss quarterback got another year of eligibility, too. I saw video of him in court. In court. Doesn't that sound crazy? In court for football eligibility?

My number one wish for the Red Sox this season: Good defense. Their defense has been poor for quite a few years now. Average defense would be a big step up. I can't see their defense being good, though. Too many holes, a limited player defensively at such an important position like shortstop, too many guys moving from position to position, too much inexperience.

No one is talking about Triston Casas this year. He'll be back in May, right? Last year everyone had him penciled in for 35 homers and 110 RBI and now there's not a peep? Goes to show that people just say things. An idea (half-assed thought) gets up their in the cultural jet stream and it keeps getting blown along. Then once it comes down, that's it.

Sounds like Jayson Tatum is pretty hesitant about coming back this year. I find this somewhat perplexing. He might not feel like he'll be healthy enough. I wonder, too, how much Jaylen Brown is a factor. He's asserted himself. It's strange, though, if Tatum would be uncomfortable playing second fiddle for what remains of this season...he wouldn't even be second fiddle in all probability, actually.

Maybe he'd come off the bench, maybe he'd be a twenty to twenty-five minute a night player...it's the nature of the injury and the layoff. As far as this notion of disrupting team chemistry, which he suggested...I find that absurd. And not how a competitor thinks or talks. This team can make the Finals. I don't think they will, but they could. Tatum isn't the guy you want him to be. He never has been. The dagger guy. The "You can't hold me back!" guy. Don't sleep on these Celtics. They're an interesting team and they're having a nice year.

A thought about the Super Bowl...it's this big party, right? It seems odd to me to have it air in the day. I know that it wasn't daytime in much of the country, and out east, the part of the country that matters most to TV. But the last outdoor World Series day game was in 1984. I'm saying that if you insist on doing it this way, having the sun out and the blue sky for most of the game looks less dramatic. In terms of the presentation. It looks like a matinee rather than the big event to top off the night. I'd be all for a day game start time across the country.

I was telling someone recently how kids were at school when Game 7 of the 1960 World Series was played. You know, maybe the greatest game in baseball history. A game which had the biggest home run in baseball history. I've read accounts from people talking about how their teachers put the game on on the radio during class, and then racing home after school to watch the game. The game started at one o'clock in the afternoon on a Thursday.

The world was a better place back then. Do you know how big baseball was? It was like football is now. Your average baseball fan is smarter than your average football fan. Football fans on balance are more LCD. You're going to have a smarter populace when baseball is more popular than football. Baseball asks you to think more than football does. And for all the peanuts and Crackerjack and a hot dog at the game stuff with baseball, football really lends itself to stuffing yourself with shit and Americans love that. You don't grill massive quantities of meat with baseball, but it's part of the day/ritual with football.

Asante Samuel has some real issues. You're so far gone that you're never coming back once you become a troll. A troll is a troll in all areas of their life. You don't have a troll switch you flip on and off. That's your identity. It's who you are. Takes you over. Then it's game over for you as a person.

I didn't like how the Patriots brought out Malcolm Butler to shake his ass and ring the bell or whatever stupid thing that was before the Super Bowl. I don't like Malcolm Butler. He was a part of the greatest play in NFL history. I won't call him the author of the play, because I think there was a lot that went into it, in terms of coaches and prep work and how Belichick waited out Pete Carroll by not calling a timeout and coercing Carroll into going with the pass. Butler seems shady to me.

He isn't a Patriots all-time great. He won't be in the Patriots' Hall of Fame, unless it's for one play, which would be silly, though I've seen sillier. (Looking how long Don Larsen remained on the baseball Hall of Fame ballot...all because of one game.) That was New England showing up Seattle. Or trying to. For something that happened over ten years ago. I don't know...when you're doing shit like that and you get beat, it's like you were asking for it.

I don't think it's a good way to carry yourself. I know that like Drake Maye didn't have some say in this or the players. But it's unwise and needless to me and stupidly shit-stirring. Bush league. Which is a great phrase from the early days of baseball that you still sometimes see kicking around. But yeah, that was bush league. Jack Keefe in Ring Lardner's 1916 baseball novel, You Know Me Al, was a bush leaguer who pulled bush league stuff.

The Boston College men's hockey team split their weekend series with Merrimack. They lost Friday night and came from behind last night, and if they hadn't I think that would have stopped them from making the NCAA tournament. As it is, they're right on the bubble. I keep going back to their blowout loss at home to a weak Vermont game right before the Beanpot final. Next weekend they have two against UConn, who is also on the bubble. Lose both and BC is done. Unless they win the Hockey East championship, which I don't expect them to do.

I saw this dual selfie the other day of these two guys that one of them had posted on social media. They were at the USA-Latvia game, and the guy had written, "We didn't even know Latvia was a country lol."

Dumb ass Americans. Isn't it amazing how just by looking at an American you can usually tell it's an American? That bovine body (but like there's wet cement inside) with a beaver's head if the beaver had the profile of one you'd expect to finish last in its class with the lower jaw jutting out that extra bit. These guys had the spare chins, that graying neck beard shit of not shaving for six days like this conveys that they "have zero fucks to give" and also with the silently nursed hope that it obscures how rounded their former jawlines are. That look of a moronic dump. And it's just so American to basically boast about how stupid and uneducated you are without being smart enough to understand just how stupid you're making yourself look because you're stupid on these different levels at once. "HA HA HA HA HA I didn't even know this HA HA HA." And the gross nationalism. It's embarrassing. You can always spot the American.