Liminal funk and thinking bugbear

Sunday 9/13/26

Ranger Suarez was good for the Red Sox for his second start in a row. The team has been in what I'll call a liminal funk, existing in this state somewhere between locked-in-positional place re: postseason seeding and the start of said postseason. Now, you can always collapse until you can't (that is, magic number is gone), but that feels especially unlikely given this is now a league of middlers. Look, for instance, at the Toronto Blue Jays, who only need to be a .500 ball club to reach October and can't get their house and act in order enough to do even that. Suarez is potentially the Sox' third starter in the postseason. If he's right and effective, that shapes up as big.

Willson Contreras was rehabbing up in Maine yesterday for the Portland ball club when he asked for time during an at-bat to get some pine tar. The umpire refused, so Contreras just stood in the box staging a noncompetitive at-bat. After he was retired on a call third strike--of course--he walked away wordlessly, flipping the bat in the direction of the plate. This doesn't bother me. As I've written before, Contreras is the good kind of crazy which can be helpful for a team. And his crazy is usually in control and even somewhat artful, as was the case here. Guys like this can't play "flat." They need some vinegar along with their blood in the veins.

Boston College edged Rutgers Friday night in the Red Bandana Game, but it wasn't encouraging in the slightest from the Eagles. The contest was effectively a battle to determine who is the worst team--or a strong contender for this dismal spot--in a Power Four conference, and that looks to be you, Scarlet Knights, who'd already gotten shellacked by UMass (who also trounced Sacred Heart yesterday; I wouldn't mind if UMass made a little noise in their way and were a program on the rise).

I saw some of the Oregon-Oklahoma State game yesterday, which Oregon lost. They had it coming. You knew after their narrow first-week win against Boise, and then you knew it all the more with the start of yesterday's tilt. They didn't look like they were there to win. OSU carried the play throughout the day.

The other big game was the Texas-Ohio State affair in Austin. Metal against metal in the early season. There was a time when losing such a game--even here in week two--would have mostly scrubbed your national title aspirations. This is, of course, before any forms of playoffs, unless one counts bowl games, and that doesn't make sense because it wasn't head-to-head. I preferred this. A far greater urgency to each week. A semi-playoff atmosphere throughout. Upsets meant more. A bad upset was catastrophic. Now they don't matter much.

The social media consensus--which is a silly word here, because consensus implies people thinking, and people can't and don't think--was that Arch Manning is terrible, etc. It's better to wait until the game is over to say what one wishes to say. (Or decide what is better said. But, again, there's that whole "thinking" bugbear.) Ohio State led 23-3 before Texas came back with 21 unanswered points in the fourth. You'd think Manning played a big role here, but he didn't. This wasn't some Heisman-legend-in-the-making performance, like Doug Flutie down in Miami in 1984. As I've written here, I don't think he'll ever be some great quarterback at any post-high school level. I guess you could say he was okay yesterday, though, and didn't lose the Longhorns the game.