Much-needed series win for the Red Sox, William Sloane's To Walk the Night (1937) and college football, the only way to get people to read now

Wednesday 8/19/26

The Red Sox got a much-needed series win last night against the Diamondbacks. Something is off with that Arizona team. You see the lack of focus. Unfortunately for the Red Sox, Ranger Suarez wasn't good again. He got the win, but that was because the offense put up runs.

With that win, he's 5-4. How was this guy an All-Star? Oh, I know--it's because people don't the know the game, and they just fixate on a given rate stat of the dashboard. He was okay for a few starts earlier this year, but he hasn't given the Red Sox close to what he was supposed to. There is still some time for him to get it figured out. They need him.

The Sox only struck out three times. This coming on the heels of their zero-strikeout performance from the night before.

Speaking of teams lacking focus: the Mariners lost last night by a score of 22-0 to the Brewers. The Mariners have been off all year. Since before the year started. I believe a lot of it has to do with Cal Raleigh. I don't like this player. I don't like his game. I don't like Kyle Schwarber's game either, but he's a lot better than Raleigh. The latter has pulled his team down. I also don't like players who aren't shape.

Late in the game, a Brewers batter flied out to center, and the Mariners' outfielder, forgetting how many outs there were, turned around and chucked the ball into the stands, allowing the 21 and 22nd runs to score. Fitting with that squad.

Having watched Jeff Hafley closely while he was the head coach of Boston College, I can't believe this guy is an NFL head coach. When I say "I can't believe" about anything in today's society, or especially publishing, I don't mean that I can't actually believe it. I expect it. But it's nothing that one should ever be able to expect, which is what I mean, I suppose, by I can't believe it.

Jayden Daniels will never be anything in the NFL. Remember that. This guy--and his mom--obsessing about his number being used at LSU should tell you everything you need to know. Winners aren't like that. That's not how a winner acts. It's how someone who could never be a winner acts. It's a guy who just doesn't get it and who won't. He'll never lead a team to anything. He's also not that good. What a distraction for a team. It's training camp, and this is the story hovering around your squad?

Say this about Drake Maye: you wouldn't see this behavior from him. I don't know how good he's ultimately going to be. I have reservations. How could you not after watching him in the playoffs last year? And also if you understand sports well enough to know that sometimes, for the course of a season, things just really come together for a player. It all lines up. There are all these examples of someone having this great year that they never come close to replicating. I wouldn't say he was great last year. I'd say that the year went very favorably and he helped it to do so.

But he has his head on straight. He's focused and there's no nonsense with him. He has his priorities in order as a player. That almost makes you what others would call "old fashioned" or "old school" now. He seems like a decent person. I think that matters, especially because a quarterback is the steward of your team in a way. If he's a mess, or scattered, it's hard for the team not to be.

I actually saw a post the other in which someone asked if Tom Brady just worked really hard or did he have talent. Again, for the umpteenth time: people don't know anything. They don't know how anything works, what they're seeing. They usually have no idea what they're hearing when they listen to music. Yeah...no talent, he just worked his ass off.

Again, I can't believe someone would say this, which really means, I totally understand how someone would in this world and with how we've devolved. I'm going to keep saying this: the single biggest problem in this world is that people can't tell what anything is. So then it's just about other stuff, not reality. That other stuff becomes the stand-in for reality. Unnatural order replaces the natural way of things, in terms of how we live. Everything then becomes "off." Hopelessly off. We live in some parallel world of un-reality within a world of reality.

Sports should be simple. You should be able to watch Tom Brady and easily see how ridiculously physically gifted he is. People think that being athletically gifted only means running fast and jumping high. If you're quarterback whose main strengths are things of that nature, you're not going to be a very good quarterback. You may wow people by juking around, but it will ultimately mean nothing.

Lamar Jackson isn't a good quarterback. Sorry. He just isn't. He's a dumb person's idea of a good quarterback. He's not someone who brings you back from 17 down early in the fourth quarter by throwing the ball when you gotta have it. He makes dumb people who don't know the game and don't know sports go, "Wow!" when they see a clip of him faking out two defenders on a run.

The MVPs don't mean much because the people voting on those awards also don't know now. In baseball, if people ever care again about baseball history, or somehow become smarter again, there will be a group of them who look back on the career of Mike Trout and will be utterly baffled how that player won the MVPs he did. Because he's basically going to be forgotten. No one will have spoken of him as an all-time great after his career is done, and the dashboard stats that people fixate on to say he's great now won't exist, or won't be taken seriously, or will have fallen out of favor, or been debunked.

WAR is kind of garbage, unless you believe that Teddy Higuera was better than Roger Clemens in 1986. Does anyone with a brain really think that? Did anyone playing at the time think that? You can give hundreds, thousands of examples like this.

And while we're at it, Mookie Betts was never that great either. He'll also look lesser and lesser as time goes on, and like Trout he'll just be some guy who should be in the Hall of Fame--although I wouldn't put either of them in, personally--whose career looks awfully thin if you look at the numbers and production. You're not going to see all these amazing years of greatness.

While we're on the subject of Betts, I'll add as I've been meaning to that this guy really overrated himself and people enabled him. The whole "I can be a shortstop, I'm so amazing" thing killed off his productivity. Once he got to the infield, he couldn't hit like even a minor star anymore, and he was young. He's still young-ish. Looks done to me as a key offensive player. Betts and Trouts both hit their early thirties and were cooked. Great players aren't cooked by their early thirties. Certainly not all-time greats, which is what these guys are said to be by everyone who isn't me.

Christian Gonzalez still hasn't signed his deal with the Patriots. If this goes on much longer, you'll see a rusty player for the first few weeks of the year. He may also get injured. Could be one of those nagging injuries that persists throughout the season. A word to the wise: he wasn't nearly as good in the Super Bowl as people think. Those amazing plays of his? They were recovery plays after he'd already been beat. It's better not to be beat in the first place.

I saw someone asking yesterday about how BC men's hockey has done on the recruiting trail going into the upcoming season. Someone else said that BU has a top-ranked class, and this became a discussion about money and BC not having the funds to pay kids.

What a disaster this is. You like this? Everything becomes corporate. Soulless. Inorganic. When fall gets here, I'll probably reread William Sloane's To Walk the Night again as I do most years. My favorite book and the best novel I've ever read. It has the best football scene in all of literature. That scene--the set-up of it, I mean--could never happen today. It's just the purest expression of college football and love of one's school. The whole feel of it. The stadium, the stakes, the passion. Alumni pride. Going back without staying in the past. The players had to care about the school. They were also student-athletes.

I got season tickets this year for BC football. I do most years, because they're cheap. I didn't last year because they jacked the prices. But then BC was awful, and they had to eat some humble pie and lower them. I get whatever is cheapest. This year that meant I have a different seat for each game. The games I attend, though, are the nothing games where the place isn't even half full, which is most of the games at Alumni Stadium.

Then I go up to my usual spot on the side with the Plex or whatever it is called now high above the field. I bring a book like Sloane's To Walk the Night. The season tickets are cheap enough that you don't feel bad opting out of a game. There's no pressure. If something is outstanding is playing at the Brattle that day that I've never had the chance to see on the big screen and might not again for a long time, I can go to that without any guilt.

You're bombarded with sound. Artificial sound. The speakers blare crap at you the whole time. It's like we can't let anything breathe. Or be. I want to hear the sounds of the stadium. Is that too much to ask? Shouldn't it be that way? Why do we have to make everything dumber? Why do we have to treat ourselves like we're moronic children? We can never have thoughts? There can't be silence or relative silence? There can't be gaps and deep breaths?

It's so artificial, too. Push, push, push, push, push. Like you can't get anywhere on your own. I hate the artifice of everything now. Non-stop artifice. It's like with anything we read. We won't read it if we have to go to that thing. We will only read that which is made to end up under our noses, in front of our eyes. For instance: something can pop up in someone's feed. They didn't mean to see it, but there it was. They read it. They like it. That bite-sized thing. Maybe they found it fascinating.

Now let's say that a link to more writing by that same person who post this other person thought was so interesting pops up in their feed. They're not going to click on the link. The link that probably has more stuff they'll really like. They just won't. People won't even do that. That's too much effort. In order for them to read anything, it basically has to happen as if by accident. Like when you're on your phone, you get a text, the text pops up, you read it without trying to, because there it was and you didn't avert your eyes.

I don't go to the games that are sold out usually because I'm alone. But being alone isn't such a big deal when you have most of a section to yourself anyway. I'm really going to go. That is, to get out. To try and keep myself going by doing something other than working (for no point, of course) and creating the great art that will never be seen by anyone, and running stairs in order to, ironically, be able to keep creating that great art that won't ever be seen by four people in the world, let alone the world generally speaking. I read, I think, I watch the game, I visit my father's bench.

Facebook, Amazon, college football. Whatever. It's all the same now. There's less and less humanness in all aspects of what we ironically call life. Looking back on it from this time period, it's shocking that a school like Boston College could have had a Heisman trophy winner. It wasn't shocking then. Yes, it had a little-engine-that-could quality to it, but it was a natural and organic college football story. Flutie's Heisman, of course.

Impossible now. A half-wit wishing to oppose the smarter person--you see this frequently with lit bro types, too--because they've been made to feel even more insecure than they already are would say, "What about Indiana!" but Indiana was and is largely about money. Deep pockets. And good coaching, yes. But the latter doesn't matter without the former. Or only so much. And definitely not that much.