Staggering sports stupidity

Thursday 9/3/26

Sports are simple. You should be able to understand them if they're something you follow. I don't mean if they're something that constitute the whole of your interests as such because you're that underdeveloped as a person and your mind as a functioning apparatus is on the level of a blinking light bulb, which is the case with so many people.

And yet, somehow, these people often have no clue about the most basic aspects of those sports, never mind their histories. They watch obliviously, mostly so they can live vicariously through men who play children's games, and in order to measure the total of their own life in terms of "Hooray, my team won" or "Damn, my team lost."

Some examples. I saw the other day where a supporter of Red Sox left fielder Jarren Duran--what we, in our society of ceaseless imbecility would call a Jarren Duran "stan," which it embarrasses me to write here even in quotes by way of reportage--said that Duran was a better fielder than Red Sox third baseman because Duran had far fewer errors than Durbin.

How can you be this clueless? I look at people and it's like they're trying to be stupid, because it wouldn't be possible to actually be that stupid. It's like all of the illiterate people who write, "I be..." Why are you doing that? It's like flaunting your illiteracy.

That started out as deliberate. It isn't now. People start doing something, it becomes pervasive, and people can no longer tell what's correct anymore. Multiple that by several million quantities and you have our mindless, ignorant society in which humans devolve more by the day, and become ever less incapable of thought, as they're replaced by AI.

You can be an outfielder and make zero errors on the season. You can't be a third baseman, a shortstop, a second baseman, and make zero errors. I suppose it's possible for a first baseman, but you're going to make a bunch even if you're Keith Hernandez.

You throw in the infield. Certainly a lot more than you throw in the outfield. Balls are coming to you harder in the infield than the outfield. Ozzie Smith at shortstop could be the best fielder the world has ever seen in a year in which he made fourteen errors, whereas an outfielder who made fourteen errors in a season would be a Little League outfielder.

Good infielders tend to make more errors than less talented infielders because they get to more balls. This isn't always the case, but it's why you wouldn't have automatically been alarmed if Luis Aparicio had more errors than most shortstops in the league. He was also getting to balls that most guys wouldn't have had a play on to mess up in the first place.

If you're in the outfield and you take a terrible route on a ball and it soars over your head as a result, when it ought to have been a ball you caught easily, and the runner ends up on third, how is that scored?

It's a triple. You didn't touch the ball. You don't get an error in the outfield on that play. In order to get an error in the outfield, you have to drop a fly or a line drive, boot a ball, throw the ball away. You don't need to have your throw be all that close to the base.

If an accurate throw to second would have resulted in the guy trying to stretch a single into a double being out and you instead threw it ten feet wide of the bag, or threw a six-hopper, you don't get an error. That's a double.

You can be a poor outfielder, play 150 games out in left, and finish the season with two errors. You can be fat, have no range, a popgun arm. But if you don't drop fly balls, you don't kick balls in the corner and just pick them up instead, and you hit the cutoff man, you can be a low error guy, which doesn't mean you're not a guy who doesn't cost your team. You could be the reason for six losses alone that year with your defensive play.

If Caleb Durbin ranges to his left, makes a nice pick of a sharply hit ball, and throws wide to first so that the first baseman needs to come off the bag to field the ball and the runner is safe, that's an error.

This is kindergarten baseball stuff.

Then I saw someone who said that the catcher framing the ball constitutes cheating. Again, I don't know how such a person even figures out breathing. I'm being literal. A catcher receives the pitch from the pitcher. How he catches that ball can influence whether the umpire calls the pitch a strike or a ball.

if the catcher slaps at everything, like he's Animal from the Muppets back there, screaming, "Roar!" as he swings at the pitch as if his glove were a bat, well, that's not really conducive to the umpire calling those pitches a strike now, is it, even if they are strikes?

You can turn your wrist in such a way that the presentation is better. The same as stabbing at the ball makes the presentation worse. This isn't cheating. It's catching. It is the actual act of catching a ball well.

The person said, "It's an attempt to deceive!" as they probably choked because, once again, they'd forgotten how to breathe and hadn't yet watched a YouTube tutorial video to help them figure it out again.

Along these same lines of pitch framing, I'd written something about how this has become a lost art today, and catchers usually just lift the ball up six inches after they've caught it, whereas someone like Bob Boone had been a master of pitch framing.

Another genius chimed in by saying that pitch framing doesn't matter in today's game, because of ABS.

Ugh...

What is comparable to this? Having a kid in your twelfth grade class who is at the educational level of a first grader?

You start out with two ABS challenges a game. Make a challenge, get it right, and you keep the challenge. Get it wrong, you lose the challenge. Teams will be out of challenges whenever. Early, mid-game, late. You don't challenge everything. You don't challenge most things. Usually, it's still the umpires. You may think something went against you, but it was close or borderline, it's the first pitch of the at-bat, and you're not going to challenge.

So of course pitch framing can pretty much play the same role it played back in Bob Boone's days of the 1970s and 1980s, or Gabby Hartnett's of the 1930s. You always want the call when you're the catcher. I mean, what, 98% aren't going to be challenged? Whatever the number is. So because it's 98% instead of 100% this now isn't a factor?

Honestly, how stupid do you have to be to come to such a conclusion? Do you stand in front of your microwave for the thirtieth time that week cowed by its intricacies as you try and recall how to ready that plate of four pepperoni pizza Hot Pockets?

People will post things like the above on my Threads page. Like they're taking me on or educating me. These utter imbeciles. People for whom sports are their whole lives. It's not like they dash over to catch a few innings or a second half now and again in between their studies of Beethoven's late quartets and Henry James's travel writings.

Then you have these people who go around as the miserable, ignorant blights on life that they are, like they're swollen cops with a truncheon they want to bring down on your head for...gasp...thinking and knowing, and not just doing rah-rah for the home team.

The Red Sox looked awful in the Bronx against the Yankees last weekend, dropping three out of four games. That last game, which was among the most important of the season, because if you won, you had that much more of a shot for the first Wild Card, which meant playing at home, and if you lost, your chances weren't totally sayonara, but close to it. The Sox were thrashed 16-1, and were reduced to having a position player mopping up.

They came home to play a lowly Mariners team. A team that has been off all year long, in large part because of the ripple effect of their catcher's all-time disaster of a season after his big year last year, which I correctly said was a fake big year and wasn't nearly as impressive as everyone else maintained. Cal Raleigh in 2025 wasn't as good as Carlton Fisk in his rookie year of 1972.

What does a good team do when they get back home like that and they're playing a weak opponent? They get right. They hammer that weaker team. They've bandaged the wounds and now they're having at it again.

Instead, it took everything the Sox had to pull out a comeback victory. Further Payton Tolle, who is looking more and more like your number one starter in the playoffs, if the Sox get there, because something wrong with Sonny Gray, and Ranger Suarez has been more bad than good this year, and hasn't been good at all for a long time now, regressed again. He's inconsistent. You don't know what Payton Tolle you're getting when he gets the ball.

But baseball is baseball. Bad teams beat good teams. A bad team plays a good team for three games and the bad teams wins once. Still, this was concerning. You'll take the victory, obviously. Some mettle was shown. You see what I'm saying, though? You see the expertise? The understanding? The feel for the game?

This was troubling to me, and rightfully so, because the Sox then lost the next two games to the Mariners, dropping the series, and now they're more games behind the Yankees than the Guardians, who occupy the third Wild Card spot, are behind the Red Sox.

That third spot might be better, because you'd be playing a weaker opponent in the first round, but that's probably moot if it's the Red Sox in that third spot, because that would mean they came apart and were playing bad baseball.

It's also not some given that they're going to make the playoffs. Sure, most teams are just rotten and the Sox would need to lose quite a few games in a row to finish the season under .500 like those teams that are out of the Wild Card but in the race at the moment.

For thinking, processing, understanding, applying experience and expertise, I was castigated in one case by this condescending rabbi--seriously--you could tell was just this hubristic, trash human, who goes around making his finger-wagging speeches on the mount, and this crusty, miserable old fuck whose entire reason for existing at this point and not give up the ghost of life is to harangue people on the internet for not being positive enough about the sports teams he roots for.

And if I choose to reply, how do you think that works out for these people? It's easier than squashing a bug that can't stop itself from landing on the computer screen in what's otherwise the darkness.

You're allowed to think, you know. You're supposed to think. Clearly, I root for the Red Sox. But I'm also not an idiot. Thinking isn't bad. Knowing isn't bad. Having a clue and not talking out of your ass isn't bad.

Then again, this is the world we've made, in which everything is inverted. Good is bad, right is wrong, not funny is funny, that which makes our lives worse is better than what makes it better, etc.

But holy shit are people stupid. Eh, nothing another six hours' worth of games on the couch and a fresh plate of Hot Pockets can't make right.