Slumping Red Sox, grating Will Flemming, Adam Vinatieri and the trash that is the Krafts

Wednesday 8/12/26

The 2026 Boston Red Sox are a hard team to understand.

They lost again last night, bringing their losing streak to four games.

Rough night for Caleb Durbin going 0-for-4 with two strikeouts and an error. It happens. Adley Rutschman had a decent game, going 1-for-3 with an infield hit and walking a couple times. I'd caution Red Sox fans with this player. He's been on the decline for some years now. This isn't the second coming of Carlton Fisk. He isn't even the second coming of Rich Gedman. Rafaela and Abreau homered. They're the team's power sources right now.

Willson Contreras has been struggling. They need him to turn it around and starting hitting. He was having his best season, but that can end up just being another season if your production falls off too early. Patrick Sandoval was okay. Gave up two earned runs in six, but surrendered 8 hits and 3 walks, which meant a lot of traffic on the base paths. But yeah, four game losing streak. See how quick that happened? Makes you appreciate how amazing the 2013 and 2018 Red Sox were for never losing more than three in a row.

The playoffs, as I've said, are no given. There's a long way to go. The Red Sox were a bad baseball team. They had a historic run of five weeks. Are they a bad baseball team again? I wouldn't say they've been bad, exactly. But they have been ineffectual and lethargic and sloppy. They also look to me like a tired baseball team.

People will say that someone or something is outstanding, but when you check out whatever or whomever that is, you find, if you are intelligent and can tell what things are, that it or they aren't very good at all.

For instance, a film like The Odyssey. You know who thinks that's good? People who don't know cinema. People who haven't gotten out much cinematically. People of limited experience with film and art. Uncultured people. It's like if you eat nothing but bologna sandwiches. You have an undeveloped palate. You don't know any better and you don't know what you don't know, which is to say, just how good things can be, and what goes into making those things that way.

People talk about Red Sox radio play-by-play announcer Will Flemming as this true talent. He is so limited in what he can say. He has no gift for language. He paints no scene in the viewer's mind. He relies on the same two or three adjectives over and over. Then he's also someone who praises the likes of Pat McAfee and Charlie Kirk. On the Red Sox broadcast.

Now, if these are people you think well of and look up to, you're a moron. And chances are nil that you aren't also an awful person. In your life, separate from your call of a baseball game. But you're working this into that call? As you say the word "awesome" for the umpteenth time because you are horribly inarticulate? This is a master broadcaster, huh? Can we really not know anything? No matter how plain it is? How right there, out-in-the-open it is? Can we discern nothing? Seems that way.

If you listen to old baseball radio broadcasts, you'll hear scores of play-by-play guys on many, many levels above and beyond the likes of Will Flemming. Broadcasters with talent, who were richly evocative, and made the games like fascinating radio plays, with poetic aspects, while placing you in the grandstand as though you were there simply by closing your eyes and listening, a kind of romantic realism.

There are no standards now because hardly anyone is good at anything. But someone has to have that job, that gig, get that award, be the "star." It's entirely about other things. Not anyone's actual ability.

Adam Vinatieri went into the Pro Football Hall of Fame the other day, and made a rather gauche speech that ought to have been beneath him. Kind of a roast-y speech. I thought it made him look low class. Not a huge deal, I guess. Isn't like I expect much more. What I did think was especially pathetic, though, was Robert and Jonathan Kraft not being there.

These two bozos owe Vinatieri a lot. Maybe not that far off from everything. He doesn't make that kick in the snow to tie it against the Raiders, and I don't know what happens for the franchise going forward after that, but I bet it's not six Super Bowl victories. And of course that wasn't his only big kick. That may have been the most impactful play in the history of the NFL, though.

Then you have all this success. Vinatieri eventually moves on because you didn't want to pay him what he was able to get elsewhere, and so now you're going to not show up for his Hall of Fame induction because you're a bitter, grudge-manufacturing loser? Robert Kraft has made himself a clown begging to get into the Hall.

He's such a garbage human and I'm sure his son is at least as bad. Robert Kraft only has money because his late wife's family hooked him up. He's not some amazing businessman. That has nothing to do with it. And he's such unethical slime. I just think he's a horrible human being.

But you can't be the "big man" and go to Canton for the big day of this guy who meant so much to your franchise, your life, your legacy, for lack of a better word, and your region? Because you're upset he signed elsewhere? And because you haven't been elected to the Hall of Fame? You don't deserve to be in the Hall of Fame, for one thing. But you're such an insecure, petty little man that can't get on your private plane and sit in the crowd for a couple hours and clap along?

This is why people don't like Kraft and how even dense people who aren't skilled at discernment can often see him for the phony that he is. This is something he has in common with his former coach, too, in Bill Belichick. Poor losers, if you want to call this is a relevant case. It comes off that way because Kraft is such a pouty bitch.

And such a dumb guy himself. Works against his own cause. Because if he showed up, was gracious, smiled, clapped, looked like he was happy for this former player who helped make a sports dynasty, and the best the NFL has ever seen, that would have helped him out. The optics would have helped him out. Some people would have said, "Maybe he's not a total dick."

Was he doing something better? What's a guy like that do? Pay for hand jobs at strip malls? Such a nasty man. Nasty in terms of "ugh, gross." But also nasty in terms of pettiness and spite. Same guy who hired a coach simply because of how much he kissed his ass, which is what Kraft demands. Vinatieri never did this, so it's like payback time for a person like Bob Kraft.

Also, if the Patriots had signed Vinatieri, they may have very well won in 2007 and gotten their undefeated season, because they kicker they did have was a factor in killing them that day. I wasn't that bothered by the loss, because it's sports, and sports really don't matter in the grand scheme of things, and if think they do, or they impact you as if they do, you need to take a good look at yourself because you're not going about life the right way, but also because I didn't think that team was some world-beating enterprise. They were a one-note "chuck it" operation, or two, if you prefer: heave it deep to Moss, throw it in the slot to Welker. Old defense, no playmakers, and it caught up to them, which wasn't surprising. The 2004 Patriots would have beat them (and beat them up) by 17.