Sports fan adult diaper demo, the Red Sox' radio broadcast team, Jim Murray of 98.5, playoff B's and C's, a glorious piece of living history

Wednesday 4/22/26

As I was saying about sports.

Unfortunately, the Celtics did last night what they've been wont to do during the Tatum-Brown era, and that's make things harder on themselves by now having what we'll call that killer instinct, despite "instinct" being a term I'm loath to use with humans, given that we have free will (in theory, anyway).

They let the 76ers into the series, and now it likely goes at least six games. You let a team in (or hang around) and anything can happen in the end. Sure, that bad thing in the Celtics case probably won't happen here, but can we just go out and take care of business and win the first two games at home? I've felt this Celtics team is a bit different than those in recent years, but perhaps not.

I suggested that the Bruins would need to steal a came courtesy of their goalie, and that was more or less the case last night. I know what Bruins fans are thinking: "We should be up 2-0!" You can't think like that. What happened before in a series or game has a bearing on what happens next.

Why do sports fan never seem to know this? If the Sabres lost the opener, you almost certainly would have had a different Sabres team last night (and a different Bruins team). Somewhat.

In professional sports, "somewhat" makes all the difference. It isn't your kid's youth hockey game. It's half an inch here, half an inch there, and a sort of cumulative effect. Parts of what I'm speaking about aren't visible to the naked eye.

This is swell for the Bruins, though. Their fans were quite upset after the Game 1 collapse. I am a lifelong Bruins fan, of course--and this feels like an understatement--but how I feel about a team has no impact on my cognitive abilities. You have to keep things separate the best you can, lest you forfeit your brain, or parts of it. This, too, is a game of inches, in a manner of speaking.

I should qualify these remarks by saying even if I didn't have the life I have--the perma-state of which I described yesterday--and lived in bliss and not a torture chamber, where I could step back and say, "Hooray for my team!" my views regarding this Bruins team would be the same.

I'm surprised they made it to the postseason. I got that quite wrong. Didn't see them being here. And I think that's nice. They went above and beyond the quality of their roster. What more can you expect? Or realistically hope for?

So: You get at least four bonus games--five now--that have stakes. That's good, right? And hey, who knows. You never know. A run, or mini-run, would be cool. Say they got to the second round and bowed out in six games. They more than would have given their fans their money's worth.

On Patriots' Day, as I worked on "Dead Thomas," etc., I put on the radio broadcast of the Red Sox game at the desk intermittently. I hadn't listened to the Red Sox on the radio--barring historic broadcasts--since being in the car with Molly in 2011. Which is to say, I hadn't heard Will Flemming. I'd read about him. How great he is, all that. How much he "cares."

That typically warns me off. People are so desperate to have people be and sound like them. Whereas, I'm interested in you being good at what you do.

What you'll notice with sports media now is the constant toilet talk. These people often sound like first graders trying to be gross. It's mainstreamed into the parlance. And now you have all these commercials for male diapers.

Which makes sense. Think of the drooling knuckle dragger who is the typical American sports fan. Are there thinking person's sports fans? Pretty much...no. Those that fit that bill are the people interested in sports history. They are almost always older. The youngest will be in their mid-forties.

There's a guy on a hockey history site, for instance, who is a late forty-something academic who is teaching for a couple semesters or something in Japan. He's from Edmonton and will discuss the mid-1980s Oilers from a scholarly-ish angle.

But you'd (virtually) never see this person post on the "main" boards at this site, where you're smacked about the face by the lack of education, grammar, the most rudimentary of language skills. Where every post has the word "literally," and it's GOATED and rent free and anyways and "we" and "us" and no one knows the difference between "then" and "than." Monkeys with phones in their hands. But less pure of heart. Often insecure and over-compensatory.

(Jim Murray of 98.5 The Sports Hub here in Boston is a good example of this last part, though with more education/command of language, but that's mostly a surface effect and the rub-off factor that's come with visiting and hanging out in somewhat-more-often-the-beaten path types of spaces--like the kid who is familiar with the "edgy" comic book before most of the other kids. He's typical of the self-professed cool person who deals in "snark" and tries to think of himself a certain way by using--and overusing--the word schadenfreude. It's shtick and neuroses. Fear. Of course, he's more interesting in the rare moments when he allows himself to be real.)

If you're not an idiot yourself, if you understand middle school level English (I won't go so far as to say "mastered" it), then it feels like being assaulted by idiocy. It weighs on you. Grates. You can't take it. It feels like you need to get the hell out. Escape.

Which is how most things in our world that involve people now feel to the person of intelligence. And the more intelligent, the more so. (Also: these sports fans think it's moreso. Just like they think Super Bowl is one word. And high school. How do you spend four years in a place and not know the name of it?)

None of these people can read. None of them can think. None of them even know what's happening for real in these games they're watching.

I shouldn't have to say this, but I will, because I don't know when someone might be reading this, if anyone ever does. But right now, anyway, people are so quick to take offense. They're wired to try and take offense whenever possible. That's why the blandest people, with nothing to say, are the people they prefer to "follow," support, etc. Part of the reason why.

There are exceptions. If you're an exception, don't take offense. It's not you who was just described then, was it? Nor is I, the fellow who is writing 2000 words here about sports before the dawn on a day in which he has many thousands of words to write (and stairs to run). I am an exception. We're on the same side. It's better for everyone if we're all trying to be smart.

So there you go: Fat guys on couches in need of adult diapers, or lazy enough to think, "You know what would allow me not to have to get up as much..." and I'm only slightly joking--hell, I may not be joking at all--when I say that. Obviously the adult diaper makers think this is a worthy and fruitful demographic. Imagine people thinking that about you? And marketing specifically to you because you do fit that profile?

Yes, I understand there are elderly people (or not so elderly people) with incontinence issues. But ramming nachos down your throat at a speed that causes your hand to blur as you get bigger and dumber and scream for your team as food particles are launched from your mouth does make you a viable customer for these companies, does it not?

I'd be embarrassed and want to do something about myself, but you could likely count the number of people in the world about whom that would be true in the amount of time it takes to watch a hockey game.

But back to the Red Sox radio broadcast: Flemming was nothing special with the play-by-play. He wasn't bad, just regular. His tone, though...and some of the things he said...he sounded as if he was riding to the funeral of a loved one. So put upon.

The Red Sox fell behind by a run--in a game they eventually won--and he started talking about the season like it was a tragedy and it was game number 160 and the Sox were thirty games out and had in effect been playing out the string since May Day. The Titanic was going down...again.

I don't find this good broadcasting. It's misleading, so there's that. But it felt both shtick-y and unprofessional. Will Middlebrooks was doing the color. All you need to do is log a single at-bat or throw a single pitch for the Red Sox, and NESN will hire you to be a part of their broadcast team. In the early days of NESN, you had real talent in the booth. Ned Martin and Bob Montgomery. Sean McDonough.

McDonough was good on Red Sox games. Ned Martin is an inner circle broadcast Hall of Famer type in my book. He impacted how I thought about words. I was already in a words-based journey, a storyteller's journey, from the jump, but I paid attention to this man, as I paid attention--and pay attention--to many things.

The Jefferson Airplane advised one to feed your head, and that's about as salient a piece of advice as there is for a would-be writer. They didn't say, "Feed your head with this type of thing." A real writer would get more from non-book things anyway. Copyists are different. Imitators.

Middlebrooks' claim to Boston fame was dating and then marrying a NESN reporter. Okay. But that, combined with his distinctive last name, is the only reason anyone knows who he is. That will get you hired by NESN, though. It's more than enough.

Middlebrooks doesn't say anything much of value. You can tell, though, what he's thinking by how he reacts. Sometimes audibly with a non-word, or in delaying his answer about something Flemming has put to him. There's a disconnect between his brain and mouth. Maybe he doesn't want to say what he thinks.

Suffice it to say, the Sox were blanked 4-0 by the Yankees last night, and it feels like it's going to be an uphill battle trying to get to .500 for the season, like that could end up being the theme. This offense is bad. The season isn't a month old, so there is that, but they just don't have many, if any, top offensive players, or even very good offensive players, and it could be that they don't have any good offensive players.

Garrett Crochet has been a mess and he'll have to string together a bunch of good starts just to get his ERA into the 4s.

Jarren Duran doesn't look like he belongs in the Majors right now. That's not me saying, "Send him down!" But you could give him a compass that never fails and he still wouldn't be able to make his way north, that's how lost he looks. I thought he'd get off to a good start and have a good year, so I was obviously wrong about the first part, and the longer this goes on, the less likely the second part becomes.

Who can you count on? Abreu? He had his little flash, but I don't think there's more to this player than what he's been thus far in his career. Trevor Story is...not good. I talked about the RBI, but he's had opportunities and they run him out there every day.

The holes in his game at this juncture of his career are very pronounced. Holes in his swing, his strike zone command, his defense. A routine grounder becomes a mini-adventure. He doesn't plant and throw. Everything it seems like is done on the run, like that's how he has to do it, which is kind of yip-y. He bounces a lot of balls to first.

Wouldn't surprise me if this is his last year as a regular in the big leagues, and he's only that right now because of the team he's on. This guy was your best hitter last year. Arguably. And he's sloppy. Unreliable. They actually came into this season with him as their planned top guy again, or close to it, depending on what happened with Roman Anthony, who also looks terrible, but less sloppy doing it. Which isn't much better, if any.

I've seen Red Sox fans saying that the front office built this team around pitching and defense, and because they've faltered in those areas, they're not getting the wins.

First of all, the Red Sox organization couldn't care less about defense. Someone from Yale with a spreadsheet got them to believe that defense doesn't matter, and the front office hues to this belief with the devotion of flat earthers and dinosaur deniers. They really got this idea lodged down deep in the old gray matter.

Secondly, this team wasn't built around anything. There isn't some leading thesis here. A thrust. It wasn't a good plan. And that's if you want to think they were trying for a plan at all, whereas I'd suggest that a plan means you're acting in somewhat good faith, and I don't believe that that's what the Sox organization has done in a while. Close to a decade. And even then, they weren't going for it hard like they were going for it in 2003 and 2004. The operation had a totally different feel, if you want to put it in those terms.

It's like when you know someone is drifting away from you. She isn't interested in you. Or she has all these issues and she pulls away. She might say certain words attesting otherwise, but when you know, you know, don't you? Now, this doesn't mean you take your own marching orders from what you know. Unfortunately. You probably stick around and get hurt all the more when things go as they inevitably will. But you knew.

Same idea with these Red Sox.

The other day I found a recording, and was able to download it, of a radio broadcast of the famed (infamous here) October 2, 1978 Red Sox-Yankees playoff game at Fenway with Ned Martin on the call. That's the stuff. There's such gravity in this broadcast from its opening moment.

The stakes feel huge, but in this believable, not manufactured way. It's just so New England. Ancient and modern. Past and present. As eternal as the seasons. I guess seasons aren't necessarily eternal. But one knows what I mean. You can feel a region holding its collective breath from the first notes--and I think that's an apt term here--of this broadcast. What living history. Love it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0VGRUM9AJA