Sunday 10/31/21
I saw that Jerry Remy died. My thoughts on Remy are principally two-fold: 1. Don't enable people to murder young women and 2. Don't smoke.
I don't have many other thoughts beyond those. For many years, Remy wasn't that good at his job. NESN carried him. He mailed it in for the better part of a decade. People "liked" him--I say it that way, because it's not really liking someone or something--because he was mediocre, he was familiar, he was like a security blanket, a cuddly cartoon figure. Eckersely is better at the job, and Remy was at his best in the last couple of years when he was working with Eckersely, who made Remy better. Not the other way around.
People don't want insight, acumen, talent. That makes them feel insecure and threatened. Diminished. There's nothing worse with the modern world than this truism. It explains why there is no growth and why we only devolve. They want the security and the mascot. A human-as-a-mascot. That's why a Matt Walsh has a following, and a Roxane Gay. And a Jerry Remy.
I don't need to go into what happened with his kid and how Remy's parenting helped lead to a woman's death. One can look into that elsewhere. Those are simply my thoughts on the man. Sometimes, the Reaper takes you out with a clean, hard slide at second, one that you helped bring upon yourself. I don't have a lot of sympathy. I don't hope he suffered or anything like that, and it was sad to see him at Fenway in the condition he was in earlier this month, before the Wild Card game. This is what I think and feel, having learned what I learned, and after listening to him for many years. I know you are only supposed to pretend and do Kumbaya these days, as we in truth become more toxic and slithery in other ways--the ways that count the most--but I am and will remain a reality man.
I enjoyed watching him play as a kid, when the Red Sox were not that good. There was a photo of him either on the cover of a yearbook on in a yearbook where he was leaping high to catch a throw or a line drive, and I thought he had surprising ups.
A neat Jerry Remy stat is that he appeared in exactly one game as a teammate of Roger Clemens. I'll look it up again, but I think he either left that game early or was a pinch hitter. But they just had this passing Red Sox career.
I recall pulling this card out of many wax packs as a seven-year-old and not understanding what was happening in it.
