Wednesday 7/24/24
Yesterday I saw some people on a hockey history discussion forum partaking of a fun activity: Trying to determine the best baseball equivalents for certain hockey players. A spot on one was Gordie Howe and Hank Aaron. I started thinking about who would be the hockey equivalent of Dave Kingman. My answer was Al Iafrate.
People talk about Caitlin Clark like she's struggling. I looked at her stats yesterday. She has turned the ball over too much, yes, but that will come down. She's changed her game for the time being, becoming more of a passer than a scorer. Three-point percentage is often low, but she's racking up the assists. I'd expect that she'll be dominant fairly soon--perhaps by next year.
The chatter I hear from Patriots fans around here is that Jacoby Brissett will be the quarterback to start the season but that Drake Maye will have the job by the mid-point or so. I don't know. I think Maye has an equal shot to be the starter week one. Brissett really isn't much as a player. When I hear a Jerod Mayo interview I think he talks too much. He sounds unprofessional and not like a guy who knows what he's doing or understands the gig. Ill-prepared. A guy who shouldn't have this post at present. Confidence, for me anyway, is very low with this team, this staff, the whole operation, from ownership on down. I don't think the Patriots are going to make life very hard on many teams this upcoming season.
It's not for nothing that the increasing popularity of football--no sport comes close to rivaling it for Americans--has coincided with Americans getting stupider, and stupider, and stupider. Football isn't a thinking watcher's sport. But it does pair well with those who'd have to be reminded to lift their knuckles off the ground.
A friend mentioned to me yesterday that all around him the fantasy football stuff was starting up. Meatheads conflate their fantasy leagues with reality; that is, it's as if they think they're a real NFL general manager. I said to my friend that people, in essence, treat life as a post-reality world. That is, a fantasy world.
Look at writing. You have millions of people writing meaninglessness that no one wants, for which there is no market, and for which there could never be a market because it's impossible for anyone to like it. It's like having millions of people make buggies to be pulled by horses--but with square wheels, and which fall apart the second anyone touches them.
So why do they do it? Because it's fantasy. They can't live in or deal with reality. The thing about reality, though, is that it can't actually be gotten rid of. Can't be overridden. It's in the attempt to do so, though, that people fuck themselves up even more.
You know how people who know nothing about baseball, who are paid a lot of money to talk about baseball, talk about baseball now? "The Red Sox have a 34.7% chance to make the playoffs." They'll say that rather than "The Red Sox are two games out of the last Wild Card spot."
The latter is reality. The former isn't. It's just a statistical probability. But what you have now is teams in sports making decisions based on the non-reality--that theoretical percentage. They're deciding not to go for it, not to make a trade to help the team, because of that percentage. In other words, they're reducing the human component of sports. Even here the computers are taking over. Rather than make a push, or try to, a team will lose instead, and get the draft picks. Magic is being taken away--the magic of possibility.
The Red Sox broke their four-game losing streak yesterday. I thought it was close a must-win game for them, and I feel similarly about today's game. They'd lost every game since the All-Star break, including the first in their series to the lowly Rockies after being swept by the Dodgers. The margin for error here isn't that big. One bad week at this time of the year with where this team is in the standings--they'd be out of the playoffs right now--and that can be it.
Plus, we have the trade deadline coming up in a few days, and ownership would like nothing better than to do nothing to help this team, which becomes easier for ownership to get away with doing as the losses mount. Thought that was a very disappointing start from Tanner Houck in the first game of this series out in Colorado. You just got swept, your team is falling in the standings, and you're supposed to be what used to be called the stopper--the starting pitcher who halts losing streaks, puts an end to all of that, gets a team back on track. And he comes out and puts him team in a four-run hole. They battled back--this team doesn't quit--but lost again in extras.
Tyler O'Neill hit two home runs in the victory yesterday, which gives him 20 on the season...with 38 RBI. What the hell, man? How do you have 20 home runs and only 38 RBI? This guy could end up with 30 home runs and 61 RBI or something like that. The Red Sox need this game today because they come back to Fenway with the Yankees waiting for them.
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