Go-along-with think

Wednesday 5/20/26

Like most residents of New England, I was up late last night waiting to see if the Red Sox could score more than three runs for the first time in nine games. They were up on Kansas City 3-1 in the top of the ninth when they had a runner thrown out at the plate Jarren Duran came up and was down two strikes. The next pitch was a ball, which was when I went to bed. Awoke to see a 7-1 score, which I figured meant Duran homered, and sure enough he did. His best game of the year. Had a couple nice catches, too.

Basically, when the Red Sox score 3 runs, they win. Which is an odd as hell thing to be able to say about them. Because if all you need to do most of the time to win is get to 3 runs, you'd think that team was really good. Elite. I was a little surprised that their team ERA was something like seventh or eighth best in baseball, but that's mostly, I'm sure, because of Brayan Bello. And Garrett Crochet, actually. The other starters have been excellent. Chapman's been as good as he was last year in his role, but he doesn't throw enough innings to make some big impact on team ERA.

Despite last night's final score, it was a close ball game until that final frame. The Sox don't have many easy wins, or going-away wins. Each victory is a grind-it-out kind of affair--for the pitchers. High-leverage situations and pitches. Little margin for error. What you'll see with most good teams is that they find ways to separate during regular season games. They add on. Then they finish up the game and move on to the next. You wouldn't find a good team whose regular season specialty is 3-2 wins.

I don't see this Sox line-up improving much or what can be done to give it more punch this year. They're saddled with who they got. Fans often act like there are these replacements-in-waiting, but usually any replacements will be worse than who you already have, and in the Sox' case, that mostly means players who won't be long-term big leaguers if they're big leaguers at all.

Somewhat on that note: I don't think Marcelo Mayer can hit. The Red Sox brass really pushed that idea of homegrown talent as these inevitable stars. Someone responded a couple days ago to something I'd posted about the team saying that said homegrown players weren't as good as the team led us to believe.

First of all, I'm not a member of your "us." Secondly, this person's attitude--and he was probably sixty, I'd say--underscores how readily and pretty much automatically people go along with what someone else is telling them to think. People's mental marching orders come from, well, a superior, to keep the military analogy intact.

Over time, they may become disabused of this idea that they think they think without actually thinking it, but not when they should. There's a dilatory period, a lag period. If something's there front and obvious to be seen on a Monday, they don't accept it as seen until Sunday, if you follow me. Which is further proof that people can't think for themselves, won't think for themselves, aren't wired to think for themselves especially as they've been rewired, and allowed themselves to be rewired, in this age with its mentally debilitating mores.

This is where most "truths" come from, though. Go-along-with think, which in turn becomes group think, but group think is really group repetition, like chanting. The statements and the echoes become indistinguishable. It's all must noise bouncing off the walls of a single room. It can be a very large room holding many people. Millions and millions.

But people don't step outside of that room on their own for a different perspective. You know, to see what else there is to be seen. They stay in the room, and, maybe, in time, the people in the room disperse because it is Sunday now in keeping with our analogy. They don't learn a lesson. They don't even recall having been in that room. Whatever the theme of that room is. Some politician, a trending streaming series, the Beatles, something in sports. They've moved on to another room where everything functions exactly the same way, often with the same people.

People don't know anything in real time. They only know, insofar as they know, way later, but by then, they're checked out and they've moved on to something else they don't know and can only know way later, if they ever even technically know it at all. And for them to know it, even as this blip of truth that isn't long for their brains, and then forgotten forever, many other people have to also know it and be saying it. Everything must proceed group-wise. People can't go out on their own into the forest of thought to be all King's Quest-y about it.

What's also striking is that people seem to have no idea this is how they "think." It's reflexive. And indicative that they don't even really know what thinking...means. Everyone uses the word(s). "I think..." But the variations of this word are just things people say. They might as well say "banana" when they mean "fire hydrant."

The disconnect between what thinking means and how people act as though it means is vast. It's an ocean that can't be seen across, with God knows what on the other side, because no one's been there to map it out. If you stand at the edge of Cape Cod and you've never left the state of Massachusetts, you know that on the other side of that water at your feet is England if you head straight. The very concept of thinking is uncharted territory stuff to most people. An abstract in the extreme. But they're deceived into believing they're doing it. That it's was is second nature. The given, the natural state. They can't parse what's really happening. What they're actually doing.

I wasn't just watching the Red Sox game. Was making notes and also watching a couple films: The Return of the Living Dead (1985) which makes the final cut for my piece on summer horror films--it's really smart and stylish and well done top to bottom--and Super Dark Times (2017) which I'll write a piece on for Christmas. Then was back up at four AM to start again.