Thursday 4/13/23
* The baseball season is two weeks old to the day, and the Red Sox are eight games out. That's honestly kind of impressive.
* Sox have been swept twice already this season. They're a dropped pop-up away from being 4-9.
* Today I was working--I am writing much and well--and also working out, checking the score of the Sox game, since the Monument doesn't open until 1 and I was in Charlestown. They were leading each time I checked, and then I put the game on at the end--which wasn't that long after--and they were getting drilled and down to their last at-bat.
* This series--in which one team showed how much better they are than another team--reminded me of the four-game set the Red Sox played against the Oakland A's in August 2001 out in Oakland. The Red Sox were really chasing it those years. They had a big payroll, stars, but they didn't play crisp ball and they weren't consistent. I referred to them as the All-Stars. Lot of All-Stars, frustrating results. The A's crushed them. None of the games were competitive. It wasn't just that--you felt that that team was much better than your team, if you were a Red Sox supporter. That is how I felt watching what I did of this Rays series.
* The Rays play some nice ball. You have to admire them. It's a shame they don't get more people out to that ugly ballpark. They're pulling a Bruins right now.
* I am increasingly of the mind that the Rays may have been up to something with Chaim Bloom. That they wanted the Sox to hire this guy who they knew didn't really do that much with them, and that he'd screw up what a franchise like the Red Sox is or was: a big market team with big market money that gets after it to try and provide a winner for the fanbase. He's set the franchise back. Clearly I don't like Chris Sale, but Bloom is the Red Sox' biggest problem by far. His roster-building skills, or lack thereof. He doesn't know how to construct a team.
* Triston Casas--who is giving you nothing--worked a fourteen-pitch walk. Okay. He let a cookie go by, too, and he's scarcely been more productive for the Red Sox than I have been. Is he a stiff who has a good batting eye? Maybe that's all he is. Anyway, he works the walk, and then he screams in triumph and does this big bat flip. You walked. In Ring Lardner's baseball fiction, this is exactly the sort of act that gets a player labeled a busher. What are you doing? Why are you unleashing a victory scream for walking? This is embarrassing.
* I had to laugh that Cora himself laughed in the dugout after Casas' scream. I watched his postgame interview. He seems tired to me. There's no energy to the man. I don't think he wants to be there and he looks prematurely old.
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