Highlights and security blankets

Sunday 4/19/26

The number of people who evaluate a player--and this is a surefire sign it's NFL draft time--by their highlights and nothing else--speaks volumes about our world.

They are highlights. They mean little. The nature of a highlight is a cherry-picked point of favorablity. Sports are game in, game out. At-bat to at-bat. Shift to shift. Down to down. Possession to possession. Not highlight to highlight.

We lose sight of the "game" nature of sport. It's not how well you do this thing with your body, necessarily; it's how well you play the game. Which has these rules, these parameters. Mastering the game is very game specific. Whereas, highlights are usually body specific. This guy ran this fast and no defenders could catch him that time, etc. But there's more to mastering a game than that.

The best players are incredibly game specific. It's like a basketball player who can beat anyone one-on-one. Okay. That may look cool, but basketball isn't played one-on-one as a game. Tim Duncan is going to be better than that one-on-one virtuoso because of how he understands and plays the game as the game, getting the most out of its rules, parameters, stipulations. In effect, having those things work for him. Turning them into parts of his strengths.

The best players have a very specific utility as pertains to the in-the-bones nature of given game. Highlights are often akin to surface gloss, irregularly applied. They won't tell you the true make of a player.

And yet, how many times do I see someone say, "I've only seen highlights but..." There's nothing else for you to say there. You've already revealed yourself as a fool. Your input doesn't have any value. It's just hot air from someone who wants to put some more of it out there into the world so that they can feel "counted" or whatever.

I don't see what could be simpler than these truths. Every player, at a certain level, has highlights. If you went by highlights, Caleb Williams would be like the best football player ever.

You can't do this with current writers. They don't have highlights. I'm talking in their actual writing now. You know, the words on the page. The reality of their ability and what they got, what they created, what is really there. Not the bullshit of their reach-around societies with the grift and handouts and quid pro quo and classism and incest and farcical awards and conferments.

It's all the same kind of bad from most of them. It isn't like there are George Saunders highlights, for instance, that would make a prose off more competitive, because there is nothing anywhere in such a person's output of any quality whatsoever. You can't find a single paragraph. There isn't a line to locate because it doesn't exist.

But in DI sports, or professional sports, where you have to have ability, everyone has highlights. What matters is what happens the rest of the time. On balance. Can people really not understand this? Being great at a given sport is about consistency. You make one great play a week, you got yourself a highlight, even if you blow the rest of the time. One great play a month.

Shohei Ohtani reached base for the fiftieth straight game yesterday. Now this impresses me. Ted Williams has the record at 84 games, which occurred during his excellent 1949 season (one of the only times the writers allowed him to have the MVP he so obviously deserved). The games don't have to all come in the same season, of course.

1949 was a classic heartbreak year for Red Sox fans. Will this season end with a three-peat from the Dodgers? A Magic Eight Ball would likely tell you that this outcome looks favorable here on April 19, though it is, of course, only April 19. Those Dodgers pound home runs.

Ohtani can keep this going for a while. Opponents are scared of him. Big reason why Barry Bonds had a 58-game streak. On base streaks--like games-with-a-point streaks in hockey--interest me greatly, because they tend to say a lot about a play historically. You can have a career year like a Jarren Duran did in 2024, but Duran couldn't do something like this.

I saw that 43% of Boston Bruins fans predict that the Bruins will win their series against the Buffalo Sabres in six games. This is, of course, very predictable. Game 6 is at home. Fans of a team that is the underdog will typically pick their team in six. It's just how it works.

I'm the rare person who doesn't act as if he knows what the result of a playoff series, or anything in sports, really, will be. I have my reasons for thinking why things will go a certain way, but I don't talk with the surety of others like I'm Tiresias.

The Sabres in 6 seems more reasonable to me, but as I wrote the other day, the Bruins have a shot in this series. How good a shot? I don't know--call it 40 to 45% chance. Which isn't that far off from even.

They'll need Jeremy Swayman to steal them a game or two, and not to cost them any. You'll need production from Geekie, and it'd be nice if Pastrnak--who didn't even hit the 30-goal mark this year--finds his goal-scoring touch again, if he still has it, which I feel like there's real reason to doubt.

Bruins fans--also not surprisingly--spin this as something that's amazing about Pastrnak. These athletes are like stuffed animals to these people. Security blankets. But at least with Linus and his security blanket, it helped him think and process and deal in reality. Whereas, the parasocial relationships sports fans "build"--I think we need the quotes in this context--do the opposite.

The Bruins fans say, why, Pastrnak is so amazing, he's the most super playmaker around.

Whereas I find it very worrisome that a former great goal scorer has had his season totals continue to drop and is now a twenty-something goal-scorer. Plus, he's a wing. A wing who doesn't put the puck in the net isn't the same as a center who doesn't put the puck in the net and gets most of his points off of assists.

A large part of the job of being an offense-first--and, let's be frank, offense-only, in Pastrnak's case--wing is scoring goals. And though they count the same, the truth is that goals can be more valuable, especially on a team that doesn't have a lot of offensive firepower.

I know Geekie made a run on 40 goals this year, but that's some fool's gold. I don't expect him to come near that total again. He was very streaky, which usually means that you won't be producing those totals again. If Pastrnak was the superstar that Bruins fans claim he is, he'd be more of a 50 goal, 60 assist player. He also wouldn't turn the puck over like he does, but I don't think most of these people care much about that or notice it.

As I also wrote before, stats mean a lot to Pastrnak. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but to me it's more like he plays the game at times almost...glibly. But you kind of knew there it was unlikely he wouldn't get a point in that last game of the season to hit 100. And why shouldn't you want to achieve that milestone?

But all the same, the way he plays--not the kind of person he seems to be--can make it seem like his priorities aren't in maybe the order you'd like them to be. The Bruins' brass has long indulged him with his points chasing. That's why he's out there when the opponent's goalie has been pulled, despite being a less-than-dependable defensive player.

I will say this for Pastrnak: when the Bruins were gagging at home in Game 7 to the Panthers a few years ago during the 65-win season, he was one of the few players on the team who played desperate hockey. He threw his weight around, which he rarely does. But he was trying to hit every Panther every time he could. To jolt his team. They got back in the game, led the game, blew the lead, blew the game, blew the series.

Watching Tarik Skubal deal yesterday against the hapless Red Sox hitters--who were already hapless before he came along to make them more so--I thought there was a chance we'd see a no-hitter. Looked like it could be that kind of day on account of the combo of what Skubal had going on and how it's been going for the Sox' line-up. They're a punchless group thus far with only 12 home runs in 20 games.

Baseball no longer really being baseball as we recently discussed, you don't string hits together anymore. You hit the long ball. And you walk. Bases on balls, homer, deploy six pitchers, and that's the formula for wins. It's become such a barren game. Like a near-barren womb, but out comes a remnant of a human hand, rather than a full human person.

My point is that Skubal looked great, the Red Sox hitters looked like they had little chance, and yet Skubal went all of 6 innings.

I hate this. I mean...why have starters? Against this line-up, pitching like he was pitching, the best pitcher in baseball is pulled after 6. The pitcher is supposed to be the man. The man everyone most cares about at the start of that day because he's the guy heading out on a quest in the middle of it all. With all these potential plot points. Challenges to face.

But it's like erasing the Homeric hero out of his own story two-thirds (usually at most) of the way through. Why not just have starters start more and limit them to three innings per start? Why have starters at all as this concept that has mostly been abandoned anyway?

It makes the game less joyful. Strips it of a story aspect. The starting pitcher ought to be our protagonist. He used to be. And that was central to the game of baseball, a major source of its magic and what made it so compelling.