Sports now

Friday 11/6/26

Patchy Patriots win Sunday against the lowly Dolphins, but a necessary one considering how much a loss in that game could have meant. No A.J. Brown, but there hasn't been much A.J. Brown when there is A.J. Brown. I can't imagine Drake Maye likes this, but he's performed much better when he is, indeed, Checkdown Charlie, though one might say that's also being judicious enough to take what the defense gives you.

Maye was pretty much the lone reason for the victory. His teammates were no-shows. His numbers have rebounded. A quick turnaround. What I'd say, though, is Maye is a different player against bad teams. He gets fat on them. Fat in terms of his completion percentage. He doesn't throw for a lot of yards and appears to be at his best when his passing attempts are lower. I'm unsure if he can be someone who plays at a high level if he needs to throw it 47 times, rack up the yards, and limit the mistakes.

This Patriots cupboard appears rather bare-ish to me, especially on offense. The Brown signing is looking like a bad mistake. Could be that he's lost it and won't be getting it back.

Today I heard a Boston sports radio host state that Patrick Mahomes isn't the same Patrick Mahomes this year. These people know nothing about sports. They don't know about current sports, they don't know about sports history, they don't know how the games of today fit within the historical montage of that sport, they don't know how the games are played and what makes what what, they can't tell how good someone is or isn't.

They're your cousin at a family reunion going off when he gets you hostage in a corner or it's come to that time of the proceedings where you have to talk to him before moving on to someone else making those painful rounds if you are instead a person of intelligence. It's your barber with maybe better inflection (your barber might struggle to read the full sentences of the advertising copy between segments) or your Uber driver.

As I've written here several times, Patrick Mahomes hasn't been who people think Patrick Mahomes is since 2022. His career got as high as it was ever going to get during his age twenty-seven season. He's been okay-not-great since, no world beater; a top twelve quarterback, but not the best guy in the league or really that close to it.

He hasn't mean Brady or Manning-like--that kind of guy--since 2022 and if he ever is again that would be unprecedented after four years of not being that guy. I doubt he'll ever win another Super Bowl, he is no threat to Brady historically, he's not going to come anywhere close in terms of winning, personal achievements/awards, or stats.

Can people not understand the numbers? Allowing that they can't tell from watching. Do they not look at the numbers? Are they unaware numbers exist and you can just...peruse them? You can know nothing now in any field, which feels like too generous a term here, but all the same I'll say it. You needn't know sports at all, in any of the manners we discussed above, let all all of them, to make your living and a lucrative one at that in some cases talking about sports.

Take age out of it--in other words, pretend they're the same age--and I'd rather have 2026 Drake Maye than 2026 Patrick Mahomes and, as I think is also clear, I'm not a huge Maye guy. Maye won't ever do what Mahomes did in a couple seasons of his career, but that's over.

I think it's rich that a few years back people were talking about Mahomes as this possible threat to Brady's status as the game's greatest quarterback (and player). I'm unsure if Mahomes will be seen as better than John Elway, and Elway did more with less for a good chunk of years. Mahomes is helped by the three titles.

These current Chiefs remind me somewhat of the mid-1980s Islanders. The big guns were still there--Bossy, Trottier, Potvin, even Billy Smith (he was with them longer than most hockey history buffs are probably aware)--and Al Arbour stood behind the bench, but the championship days were kaput. Watch the Chiefs now go out and win it this year with Mahomes dominating. But hey, that's sports, right?

Speaking of Brady: people don't like this idea, but Brady is just about the best color commentator working right now. Who's better? He was shaky at first but obviously worked at getting better, which I hadn't really expected. Why is he better? He's smarter and can talk without the word modules that everyone else relies on and which we've called attention to so many times in these pages. End of the day, hill to die on, etc. However many there are--seventy-five, 100.

People don't have words of their own; they're entirely dependent on the modules which they insert as if this was their voice, but the truth is no one has a voice anymore. No one has their own way of speaking. No writer has their own way of writing, let alone their own ways. Listening to Brady call a game you get a sense of why he was so successful on the field.

These guys are often idiots. Straight up meatheads. He's many cuts above. I'm talking within the football realm. He speaks with conviction in a steady stream. He doesn't do "You know, you know, you know," doesn't do the gaps, doesn't um and ah; plants that back foot and fires, verbally speaking. Of course he knows the game in a truer, more thoughtful way. I mean, he's Brady.

The Bills were on one station recently and the NFC game was on Fox. I had more of an on-field interest in the Bills game, being the Patriots' division rival and I'm always curious to see Josh Allen, but I put the NFC game on instead because of Brady.

There aren't many of us who care about Boston College football--understandably one might say, and I get that--but that 47-2 drubbing last Saturday at the hands of Duke could be the new nadir. That Bill O'Brien has the CV he does speaks to how so much has to do with other things rather than one's ability or competence.

Shades of that rainy, late October game against Army at Alumni Stadium when the Cadets were up 42-0 at the half. Standing in the student section and watching that was something else. I recall the grayness of that day, which deepened, or become more persistent, as the place emptied out and the metal bleachers with the water atop them appeared to partner with the sky. The Cadets ran on like every play, too. There wasn't mystery to what they were going to do. That BC team had beaten Notre Dame at Alumni the year before, and obviously in South Bend in 1993 in one of the greatest college football games ever played.

BC men's hockey is becoming an also-ran, too, the heights--kind of a pun--from which they've fallen having been much higher, though, than the football program's. They played a home-and-home against Northeastern last weekend, which is the technically correct term even if both games were at BC on account of Northeastern not having a rink at the moment. BC won the first game in OT and lost the other in the same fashion.

There were only 1500 in attendance at the second game. This was the "road" contest for BC, so season ticket holders didn't get the game included in their package, but 1500 people is still 1500 people. I doubt BC sports have ever been met with so much apathy. There's no buzz, no school spirit. I guess the latter is a quaint notion in this soulless, disinterested, uncommitted world; we're not talking the Beach Boys up on stage in 1964 singing "Be True to Your School."

BC was then thumped 5-2 by Vermont on Thursday night, also at Kelley Rink. College is better when the sports teams are successful. It makes for good bonding activities. Fun things to do before you do other things. College without that is a lot different than college with it. It's as if BC chooses to weaken its own appeal and lessen the experience of attending with the school's apparent indifference to an athletic program that it formerly could have been proud of while not selling out to it. (This I say as someone who absolutely despised his time at BC on the academic side with professors who had nothing to nothing to teach me and nursed grudges and dispensed petty slights borne of their own insecurities and failings.)

The Bruins had dropped a couple in a row and then didn't look so great against the Blackhawks at the Garden. They were down two goals with, I want to say, less than eight minutes to go in the game, before rallying to tie and then prevailing in overtime. After that, they beat the Golden Knights at home in a shootout and then handled the Penguins rather easily Thursday night save for a bad stretch to begin the second period. If you tuned in then and only watched that, you'd expect to see a lopsided score afterwards in the Pens' favor. Don't look now--and less than twenty games have been played--but there's only one team in the NHL that currently has more points than the Bruins, and that's the defending Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes.

Swayman is playing less. I thought maybe this would be the year that they really try to make him the guy, but that's sports and life now; everything is watered down and is about doing less rather than more, unless it's working like a pack mule. The "star" goalie plays 55 games in the regular season, the "ace" pitcher throws a heroic 5.2 innings. Lame, boring, uninspiring.

Meanwhile, the Celtics are busy trying to get Jayson Tatum his MVP award. Can't have that missing from the brand. Big hole. Gotta fill it. I'm convinced that someone like Tatum was only ever concerned with winning one title so that he could say he won a title as part of said brand. You win won, you win three, and either way, you get called a champion. But without a championship, you have one of those brand holes. I'm not a big admirer of this player. Mr. Tuesday Night in Toronto. He'll pour in the points then. That's his time to shine.

Sonny Gray is a free agent, as to be expected, and his Red Sox career is almost certainly complete, as to be expected. I never thought he’d be here for more than a year—especially once he started pitching so well—but I’d be shocked if he returned after what happened in his last start with the team.

He's cooled off some, but Connor McDavid keeps putting up points. He's up to seventeen straight games to start the season. Is Wayne Gretzky's record of fifty-one games in danger? If anyone could do it in today's game, it's McDavid, but I'm not enthralled by this player. How can you say such a thing? I've written in here about the lack of completeness to his game. But to me, if you're going to be seriously deserving of a place alongside Gretzky and a very few others, you need to score more goals as a forward than McDavid does. This is his age-thirty season. He was one 50-goal campaign, when he went for 64.

You're supposed to be this greatest ever forward, or close to it, and you can't put up 50-goal seasons? You're second highest total is in the 40s? That doesn't look to weird to you? A guy can score 64 but can't get to 50 any other time? But he's the best ever? That's absurd. You can be like, "Assists, goals, what's the difference, same thing."

They're not. Just like hits and walks aren't the same, despite what every Little League coach ever has always said. Let's say you go off and have this mad year and score 150 points. You're more valuable to your team doing that with 60 goals than 45. In baseball, a hit can accomplish more than a walk. There's a guy on first. You single. There's a guy on third now. You walk, he merely went to second. These things add up. The alleged third best offensive player in hockey history shouldn't have one 50-goal season as he gets into his thirties.

I didn't say much about the baseball postseason as it was unfolding because it was just so ho-hum to me. The game is bland. Once one's team is removed from the mix, you're left with blandness, which is different than blandness counterattacked to some extent, in theory, by a rooting interest in a squad.

I didn't used to be like this and it's not only the state of my life that is the reason. The culprit. One is told, for instance, how amazing Jacob Misiorowski is. You know how many times he went six innings or more this past postseason as the ace of the World Series-winning Milwaukee Brewers? That would be zero times.

You like that? The best pitchers in the game can't go past five? You had that big Game 1 match-up in the NLCS between the Brewers and Dodgers, Misiorowski vs. Tarik Skubal. The former went 4.1 and the latter 5. And it was a 2-1 game! You'd think (well, once you would have; now I'd say this is to be expected, practically a given) with two of the best pitchers in the world and a 2-1 postseason score that they dueled until the end, or damn close to it. Nah. Gone by mid-game. Got stuff to do. Errands. You know how it is.

I'm being facetious of course, but it is ridiculous. Starting pitchers can no longer be great anymore because they aren't out there enough and when they are out there they don't pitch. They rear back. It's so artless. So unthinking. So...un-pitcherly. And, again, lame, boring, uninspiring.

14 won't stop you from copping a Cy Young award. These piddling stats and the emphasis on rate stats. How about being out there and succeeding rather than having to prorate succeeding? But the hitters have boring numbers as well. It's a numbers game. A volume numbers game. Fundamentally. That's just baseball at its heart. Don't get mad at me. That's the game. The game isn't, "Oh, look at those rate stats." They tell a part of a story, but they should complement numbers, rather than function as the sole numbers.

Which brings me to the three finalists for the A.L. MVP. To start, it's stupid to make this kind of prescriptive predetermination. How about people just vote? You need these restrictions? Must cut down on the thinking, right? Less is always better. Less hits for hitters, less wins for pitchers, and less thinking for all of us.

You can have no pop, produce meager totals, and you'll be lauded for walking a lot and registering that .813 that is of a diminished value because so many guys are swinging for the fences when they do swing. Consider OPS+. That stat isn't created equal from era to era like you think. Play with some brains right now, and it's easier to have a higher OPS+ because of the robotic approach everyone else takes and is told to take and has it drilled into them to take. You practically have to be a visionary these days to play baseball by...gulp...playing actual baseball.

Bobby Witt, Jr. is one of the tree A.L. MVP finalists. He hit 18 homers with 54 RBI and a .281 batting average on a team that won less than 70 games. That's an MVP finalist, eh? What are we doing? Are we completely incapable of thought and reason? I know what it is. Of course I know what it is. It's WAR. No reasoning, no context, no basic logic. It's the 6.7 WAR.

This is dashboard culture. Where we fixate on the single metric at the cost of everything else, including those aforesaid things like reason, logic, context. This isn't how baseball works. It isn't how life works. Things in both are...get ready to gasp again...interwoven. Intertwined. Not separate. You can't isolate the one number which is also a flawed number. He's a good fielder, but I don't care if he was Ozzie Smith at his absolute best. That's not a remotely special year.

Pete Alonso led the A.L. in homers and RBI. He hit for a respectable average. His team, the Orioles, wasn't good, but it was better than the Royals. He had a 149 OPS+ which was considerably better than Witt's 125. But let's look at the WAR! And 5 WAR is lower than 6.7 WAR.

Honestly, how simple in our thinking do we need to be? It's a travesty that Witt is a finalist for this award. A joke. Aaron Judge goes down for the Yankees, Ben Rice steps up in a big way, but he's a DH with a WAR of 3.7. Cam Schlittler? Had tales of this guy's greatness rammed down my throat all season. They don't want to give it to a pitcher, though, which doesn't bother me in this case because I already think it's ridiculous enough that a pitcher with 14 wins is going to win the Cy Young and could well do so unanimously.

If we're not doing the "needs to be on a contender" thing--and let's face it, wins don't mean what they used to either--then it really should be Alonso instead of Witt in that group. I bet Witt doesn't feel like he had a big year. I'd guess he was disappointed in his performance and numbers. Whereas, Alonso wouldn't be.

You now have a sport where the pitchers have blah numbers and the hitters have blah numbers. Everyone has blah numbers. At least during unbalanced eras--like the early 1930s with hitting or the late 1960s and on really through 1976 with pitching--you'd have guys put up the cool stats. Now you hit .272 and you're eighth in the league in batting average and 97 RBI puts you fourth and 11 wins is like what 18 used to be.

How do you get excited for that? This trending to blandness, to homogeneity permeates everything in our society. Art, entertainment, language, so-called writing which is just AI anyway, and even sports. It all just gets worse. Do people not realize that eventually Hall of Fame pitchers are going to have 103 career wins? I can't believe a guy on a 69-win team with 18 homers and 54 RBI is considered one of the three most valuable players in the league for a whole season.