Thursday 5/2/24
If you want to be impressed sometime, take a look at Frank Robinson's OPS+ for every single year of his career.
If the curse of the 65 wins holds, the Bruins will lose tonight in regulation. Do I think they will? I have no idea. I have more confidence in them in this game than I would if they were at home. What I know about the Bruins is that the pressure gets to them. They do less well at home where they feel the pressure more. Game 7 of the 2019 Finals, for example. The three home losses to the Panthers last year. I think they're a mentally weak team, and the Bruins, throughout their history, have been that way. Some might point to 2011, but I will instead point to one guy: Tim Thomas. Lover of pressure. To me, the Bruins are playing for one thing: coach Jim Montgomery's job. They lose this series, he's gone. They advance and lose to the Panthers again, and he probably stays. Hard to see the Bruins going much further than the second round.
People won't like me saying this, but part of the problem with these Bruins is their "culture." It's all about hugs and positivity and being friends and feelings and love, etc. You won't win when that's what it's about for you. I think it's more about the hugs and the love and the feelings than it is the winning. Perhaps that's how I should put it.
The greatest winners are merciless killers. Not literally. Obviously. But they want to end you. They're driven to end you. They exist, it seems, to end you. To prevail. They thrive on beating your ass. Making you not want to continue on. Cutting out your heart and showing it to you so that you can't even cope and you might never be the same again.
I love that. People also won't like me saying this, but the greatest winners in sports are the people least like the people in society now with its safe spaces and trigger warnings and feelings above all and everything is good and we're all awesome, etc.
Patrick Mahomes, Tom Brady, Kobe Bryant, David Ortiz, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird: All of these guys as competitors run counter to how the world works now. The biggest winners in current sports run counter to how the world works now. That's a big part of why they are, or were, successful. And it's why Linus Ullmark is not. These guys are crazy. In a good way. No hugs, no love, no feelings--they live to obliterate anything that stands between them and their goal.
People at this level of sports are so similar physically. No one in the NHL skates seven miles per hour faster than anyone else. It's this extra stuff that determines so much.
Mike Gorman called his last game. I'll miss listening to him. This reheated Syracuse pod person they have taking over next year will drive me away from the TV broadcast. I won't listen to him. I won't be able to take it. I think he's execrable. So that means the radio broadcast.
I have been reading all of these testimonials about Gorman, and many of them say he's the best ever, along with the likes of Don Orsillo--which is both a bizarre and incorrect statement--but you know what you see? People just talking about who they heard in their life.
You can be like, "But Colin! Why would someone mention an announcer from before they were born?"
I don't know--because people don't have to be helpless and ignorant? It's not just that. It's how people arrogantly act like the world began when they became ten-years-old. We have the internet now. You can go watch whole games. You can use Google and learn some things. It's this built-in hubris that helps make society so stupid as a whole.
Let's think about this for a second. People do this kind of thing, like I said, where the world begins when they were ten-years-old. That's when a lot of people first remember following a sport, but it's not just sports. It's a lot of stuff. Then someone lives until they're eighty. So all that there is, then, is what happened in those seventy years? We've been here for all of this time, and you're going to be like, "Fuck that, it's just these seventy years that count, nothing else, might as well not have happened."
And no one can see the problem in thinking like that? Just automatically being that way? Does that seem like a good way to be? A smart way? Does it seem like a wise way? So all that has ever really mattered--or counted--is what you personally witnessed. In your blink of an existence.
That's kind of dumb, right? Pretty much the definition of ignorant, no? But willfully ignorant. Hubristically ignorant.
A life is like the snap of the fingers. All the more so if one knows nothing and doesn't look beyond what one witnesses. I can't conceive of not knowing everything about the Civil War or the fall of Rome or the lives of the pharaohs or, if I was going to discuss the best Boston broadcasters, not knowing Curt Gowdy, to name one name. Was before my time, too, man. So was Thomas fucking Jefferson. So were the Beatles. So was fire.
It's mind-boggling to me. The tone is what gets me the most, like that person honestly has no idea that there was life before their own life. They don't even allow for the possibility. Like, what? Bobby in Scituate is the godhead? Everyone is the godhead?
And along with that is this idea that everyone else's life started when that other person's life did. We are so casually narcissistic now. It's like the default setting. When I was five, I learned my ass off. I thrilled to it. I'm sitting there reading books about the Revolutionary War and Sandy Koufax and learning everything about animals and nature that I could, and shortly after it was on to Dickens and his London and reading about the early days of horror films. I was five, six, seven, and at no point did I think anything began with my entry into the world. I knew that if I confined myself to the calendrical period of my life, that I would be an uneducated dumbass. I would be doing myself a disservice. I'd be at a disadvantage because I'd have less to draw on. I'd have less to inform my thinking. To help me in the decisions I made. To know what was what. (And that was before I got into everything with my art.)
As I type this, I feel just how much this is amongst the most basic of basic things, or it ought to be. That it should be everyone's baseline. The bare minimum. Nah.
What do people do when they're less of a dumbass and they learn the occasional thing? They call themselves a nerd. We single out--with a term--or self-single out, someone who makes a very slight attempt to be less ignorant. Why would you choose to be clueless? Why would you choose to be in the dark about...life. The world. Us. Why would you do that to yourself? It's like, "Here's some light" and someone responds, "No, fuck it, it's the dark for me, I'm sure this cave comes out somewhere or other eventually, maybe."
Does it?
Things like this really get me down. I see evidence of a race that's a veritable lost cause everywhere I turn. I'd be very anxious if I didn't have a clue about the world. I certainly wouldn't pop off like I was some expert on a subject, a great deal of which had played out before I was alive. Not just the world now, but the world in general. The world as it's been. The world as it's been is crucial to understanding the world now. Our world, my world, your world.
