Lane Kiffin and Dave Portnoy, how the Red Sox organization grows DHs, a chorus of "Sweet Caroline," Vermont farmers, Ozempic, America, and football, and more

Wednesday 4/8/26

The Red Sox won last night to improve--that verb feels ironic here--to 3-8, mostly because Garrett Crochet had the start. They continued to make mental errors, though, and Alex Cora was once again asleep at the managerial wheel. Trevor Story, of all people, provided the big hit. Prior to last night's game, he had an OPS+ of 0, which I can't recall having seen before. I'm waiting for his first walk of the year and wondering how much longer he can go without managing to get one.

On Monday, the Fenway crowd--on a miserable weather night that, along with the state of the team, resulted in many empty seats--broke out with a "Sell the team!" chant, which is a new one. I was mildly surprised. Red Sox fans aren't what they used to be. Most of them don't even care about baseball. It's like all the people who say they're a writer so they can have this thing that makes them "special." That's what many current baseball fans do.

"My fandom of this team is my special thing! It's my identity! I have a community I belong to on a subReddit! I call Roman Anthony by his first name in my social media posts like we are buds and I say 'we' and 'us' when I talk about the team like I am on it! I have never achieved anything! Hooray! I don't know how 'then' and 'than' work and I think it's 'anyways' and I type lolololol because I'm vapid and barely technically literate! Go Sox and give me and my sense of self and my self-esteem upvotes! Sweet Caroline! Whoa Whoa Whoa!"

Those people don't do this with football because football fandom is this gigantic, sprawling thing in idiot America and it's harder to do the fake community thing because you need the niche hole to get yourself inside of with your fellow denizens. Fake communities often require this niche aspect, and/or an incestuous subculture aspect. (There are exceptions: for example, the Republican party, or the performative "I'm one of the good ones so give me points" liberal thing. These are homegrown niche holes expanded to planet-swallowing size. Terrestrial ouroboros!) Look at publishing.

Something sprawling and numbering in the hundreds of millions is harder if you're looking to be a hole-denizen person, so that's why this kind of person will pick baseball. It has little to nothing to do with the game which these people don't understand that well as is obvious from the way they talk and write about it.

They'll never know anything about its history, which someone who actually loved baseball would, because truly loving baseball is truly loving its history which is a huge part of baseball and its joys; they're not interested in that history, because it doesn't help them meet their needs as being, and in being, a hole-denizen; they'd have to actually care about baseball as baseball to learn about its history, and this, like just about everything in life, especially now, is about...other things...and not the actual purported thing.

Many of these people will call the manager the coach, which is all you need to hear or see from someone to know that they have no clue about baseball. Connie Mack was a manager, he wasn't a coach. There's a big difference, and in baseball, the manager manages, the coaches coach, and if you don't understand the difference, you don't know baseball. Then you have all the Red Sox fans who don't know "Red Sox" is two words.

Americans are going to love the dumbest, most intellectually reductive sport, and baseball is much more of a thinking person's game than football, which is this Captain (Man) Cave Person TV tribalism event-based thing with lots of artery-clogging foods, and fast-assed Americans can't get enough of that, so baseball can't be what it once was in today's world even if the game was better than it ever was, whereas the truth is it's as bad it has ever been. Baseball isn't even very baseball-y right now.

And hell, if you don't want to be fat, all you gotta do is get on that Ozempic! That's the only way to drop weight, right? What? Exercise? Discipline? Better choices? Fuck you!!!!! America!!!!! Football!!!!! Meats!!!!!!!

Sometimes I picture Uncle Sam dressed like a doctor at his staggeringly successful practice, and an endless line of these guys outside his door, with each of them saying, "I don't care what you gotta do, Doc, just make me bigger and dumber" once they get in the room in that thick-tongue Cro-Magnon voice, and walking out with a prescription of donuts, ChatGPT, social media, Barstool, the kids' Easter candy, Netflix, cold cuts, memes, awards shows, and Stephen A. Smith.

The best kind of Red Sox fan is typified by a dour, straight-shooting, crusty, but somewhat witty and fundamentally accurate bitter seventy-something in like Vermont who will still reference Dick Williams but knows shit when he sees shit in the here and now. The Vermont farmer version of a Red Sox fan, I guess you could say who's used to having to deal with rocks but can make the land work for him even if it's not like the land in Iowa.

This person will be someone who reads a few books a year, even if they're all about WWII and some biographies of Dead Ball era players mixed in that they got for Christmas. In our society, this makes you a leading intellectual and someone with more wisdom, as such, than just about everyone else, and someone who thinks, at least a little, and who can use their eyes and their brain in tandem, again, at least a little.

It's telling how often this kind of person will be correct in assessing a player's shortcomings or that of a ball club as that ballplayer's career, or that team's season, play out. Very gruff, these people. Prickly. But there's some charm in it. If you yourself aren't too soft.

I am now of the belief that the Red Sox grow designated hitters. Their system doesn't produce baseball players but rather DHs.

Roman Anthony is twenty-two. He isn't some pig man. But he can't play the field. He's a twenty-two-year-old DH. The other night, I saw something I know I've never seen before, which I wouldn't have thought was possible.

The Brewers had runners on first and second. Guy hits a single to left, where Anthony was stationed. Both runners scored. On a single. To left. At Fenway Park.

I've watched a number of times now as Anthony struggles to reach the infield with his throws. I'm convinced that the Red Sox organization is all about launch angle and whatever en vogue Yale-approved metrics are replacing thinking and, you know, the actual efficacious playing and winning of baseball games.

These Red Sox farm products don't have positions. They're all DHs. And I don't know that any of them can even hit well enough to be DHs. I don't know that Roman Anthony is this great star in the inevitable making.

I know what I was told about Kristian Campbell and his big league career may be done already. He doesn't have a position either. Hell, he has even less of one than Anthony.

If you can't stash a guy at left field in Fenway Park, you can't hide him anywhere defensively.

Why does it seem like it's impossible for Jarren Duran to go so much as a single game without striking out? How many times a year does that happen? If he plays 140 games, he's striking out at least once in 120 of them.

I understand why the Bruins didn't name a captain. Neither David Pastrnak nor Charlie McAvoy are captain material. The former is a frustrating player. It's like he ha no problem turning the puck over and says, Fuck it, man/YOLO!

No respect for maintaining possession, no matter the situation. It's like it doesn't occur to him or isn't worth considering if that means not throwing some blind pass wherever he wants to throw it or trying to dipsy-doodle through two men.

McAvoy has no hockey sense, he isn't a leader, he's an excuse maker, he's mentally weak. His offensive game has picked up this season simply because he decided to do some things differently. It was mental. He complains about calls even after he wacks a guy in the head with his stick as if he's somehow been done the injustice.

He also isn't that committed to his job as a Bruins defenseman. International tournaments mean more to him, and after he got paid he stopped trying and caring as much, and he wasn't that good to begin with. It's going to irk me to see him getting--because he will--after-the-season All-Star votes. He won't make it, but he'll finish fifth, sixth, or seventh, somewhere in there.

The Bruins are limping into the playoffs. They lose, lose again, pick up a point in an OT loss here, a point in a shootout loss there. They're getting in--they built up enough of a cushion--but I'll be surprised if they're not swept right out or near about.

Sieve Swayman let in another unscreened shot from distance the other day, like he did at the Olympics, and then said after he didn't want to talk about it because it was negative and he wanted to focus on all of the wonderful positive things in the team's...loss.

Yeah, that was some beautiful thing. Are you on your healing journey, chief? Protecting that peace?

Jeremy Swayman isn't an accountability person. And people who aren't accountability people suck.

It's also going to bother me to see SS get Vezina votes, which he will. There's even a chance he could end up the second team All-Star goalie, though it's more likely he'll finish somewhere between three and six. Three and five, I'd say.

Until the last couple of games, the Bruins couldn't score, and yet, Matt Poitras remains in Providence, which says so much about that player. He'll never be anything, and I recall being told what an offensive whiz he was. But I've also been told that James Hagens is a future NHL star.

I could be wrong--you can always be wrong with these things--but I think Bruins fans are in for a rude awakening with James Hagens. I watched him for two years at Boston College and I was never impressed by this player. I'd be surprised if he's an NHL star, and I'll so far as to say I'll be somewhat surprised if he's more than an average NHL player. I don't see elite talent here.

Then again, I didn't expect Macklin Celebrini to win the Hart his second year in the league, as he deserves to. Celebrini has nearly twice as many points as the next closest guy on the Sharks. He is your league MVP. I don't want to do the normal thing with the overrated Connor McDavid that the people who determine awards are so in love with doing. The Hart should be Celebrini's, with Kucherov the runner-up.

My guess is the Bruins won't use Hagens this year, and if they don't, I think that's telling. They need the help. They had that aforesaid playoff cushion and could have worked him into the line-up without much risk. I wouldn't think they want him to debut in an NHL line-up in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and you're almost out of regular season games now and it feels too late. But we'll see.

He only lasts a few years at each of his jobs because he's a hard ass and the modern athlete is soft and pampered, but the Toronto Maple Leafs should hire the recently disposed Bruce Cassidy. He wins. Takes away the excuses, which players, of course, typically hate. That kind of late-season firing isn't that uncommon in hockey. Felt like the Devils used to do it every other year.

Boston College baseball is ranked in the top twenty-five. That's cool. I should see about getting out there for a game. I think they play on that "new" part of campus now on Comm Ave that isn't actually new. I believe that's where the art museum is now housed, too. I should go to both. I went to a very nice Jack Yeats exhibit back when the art museum was in Devlin Hall. That was much easier.

Lane Kiffin strikes me as the Dave Portnoy of college football coaches. Pure sleaze, but in better shape. Portnoy looks like someone who'd have a heart attack in their early fifties save that the Devil or whomever runs these things always seems to keep guys like this--look at Trump--around for the duration, but I think that's all that protects him. He's on the verge of wheezing every time he talks.

Kiffin, meanwhile, is basically like, "Look at all the college girls I'm banging at my latest new job! Would love to get my hands on your daughter! Any of you LSU boosters up for some Droit du seigneur!"

Yes, I know no one is going to get that. They could look it up. And yes, I know they won't.

America!!!!! Fuck yeah!!!!!! Pass the Ozempic!!!!!!