The high chance A.J. Brown's first season for the Patriots is a failure, Freddy Fritos, how the Red Sox can win the World Series, the MLB player who has cost his team the most in 2026

Friday 9/11/26

A.J. Brown is out for four weeks for the Patriots. You know what that means? Lost season. It means A.J. Brown is unlikely in a seventeen-game season to even clear 1000 yards receiving. Let's say he comes back in four games. How long before he feels right? How long before he's in sync with Drake Maye if he ever is?

This was your big, important move. This is what you staked so much of the upcoming season on. This guy. And already it's almost certain he won't work out in 2026. If you said when you signed this guy that he was going to finish 2026 with 750 receiving yards and six touchdowns, you'd have thought, "Ugh, that's not good," because that means you probably had a bad season.

Also: Brown is twenty-nine. He's also likely on the other side of the hill production-wise where numbers go down anyway. Which means his entire tenure in New England is likelier to be underwhelming than not. You might want to say, "It's just one game!" It's not one game. Things happen/change fast in sports. Brown came into the season with your typical Pats fan in Freddy Fritos saying, "Yeah, he's literally gonna get 1400 yards"--gotta have a "literally," or what are you doing?--and now there's a real chance he finishes with half of that. This team was banking on those numbers.

Some real problems brewing here. Watching that receiving corps the other night, I saw nothing. Romeo Doubs? I don't think it's going to work out for him in New England. The Patriots could end up being great. I don't know. But I saw Patriots fans scoffing over a suggestion that they could be one of the ten worst teams in the league this year. I wouldn't find that shocking.

The Kayshon Boutte move--and Mike Vrabel taking a shot at the guy on his way out of town saying he wouldn't even dress for games with the receivers the Patriots have--looks dumber already.

Similarly: NFL games in other parts of the world are stupid. They don't feel like the real deal. They're automatically less compelling before they begin than if they were held in an NFL team's stadium. They're commercials rather than a program. And to make teams travel to Australia for their first game of the year? Though I do think it's funny that the Rams showed up twenty-four hours before that game last night. Again, these jock morons believing they're smart and crafty and cutting edge in the brain department. "Yeah, I know what to have our team do, we'll leave when we ordinarily would and it'll be like we trick the globe into becoming smaller and we ain't going that far to play."

Miami beat Florida A&M 77-7 last night. Some of these early season games...it's like the Red Sox playing Northeastern but instead of during spring training it's in the actual season but worse because Northeastern and the Sox could be closer than Miami and Florida A&M. Texas and Ohio State play tomorrow. Credit there for scheduling/facing metal and early at that.

The fourth quarter of this Hurricanes game was shortened to ten minutes. I didn't even know that was an option, which it is if both coaches agree on it. Crazy that that's in play at this level. Little League, Pop Warner, sure. We're talking a professional sport, though, which is what college football now is, unfortunately. If you pay money to go to Fenway and the Sox are hammering the Twins, they don't get to choose not to play the last two innings.

Meanwhile, the Red Sox: just lost a series at home to the dreadful Anaheim Angels. They're going to the playoffs, though, and they'll do so as the second Wild Card team. We have some time yet, but it's hard to envision their positioning changing. They've recently had good starts from Ranger Suarez (finally), Sonny Gray, and Payton Tolle. The Red Sox can win the World Series. Yes, I'm being serious. Do I think they will? No. Who do I think will? I have no idea. I think the Yankees have a decent shot, unfortunately.

But I do know how the Red Sox could do it. With Garrett Crochet. An effective Garrett Crochet out of the bullpen. And by shortening games. Dramatically.

The Sox would need health. They'd need Willson Contreras back and back to his earlier form. They'd need a productive Roman. Anthony. Not .230-hitting/tons of strikeouts Roman Anthony. They'd need good starting pitching with Gray and Tolle as a kind of poor man's co-aces, and a reliable Jake Bennett and/or Ranger Suarez. But it would be that bullpen that put them over the top, with the Sox able to basically make a nine-inning game a five-inning affair for the opposition.

Think about it: Crochet, Erik Miller, Garrett Whitlock, Aroldis Chapman. Six, seven, eight, ninth innings. However the workload worked out from game to game. Whitlock has been as good, if not better than, Chapman this year. Miller walks guys, but he's been effective anyway.

There are obviously a lot of "ifs" here, and who knows if they even get Crochet back, never mind that he's then effective, to say nothing of dominant. I'm simply roadmapping how the Red Sox could win a championship this year. To my thinking, this is how they'd need to do it. Drastically shorten the games.

Re: that Angels series: the Sox' slim chance of catching the Yankees went down the drain when they dropped those last two games. The schedule was the Red Sox' friend. First they got the Angels, then the Royals. The Sox would have needed back-to-back sweeps to keep hope alive for that first Wild Card slot. Now it's about health and striking that balance between maintaining good habits and playing the right way and getting ready for the postseason.

No player in MLB has done more to hurt his team this year than Vlad Guerrero, Jr. of the Toronto Blue Jays. I suspect that I've written in this record that he isn't close to being the hitter that people think he is. There's something way off with this player. In 2021, he hit 48 homers to lead the league and hasn't come close.

This year--and he's going to end up with 500 plus at-bats--he has 8 homers. He's a banjo hitter. This is his age twenty-seven season, when he should be in his prime. And this guy--this big guy who is listed at 245 pounds but I'm sure is north of that--is a slap hitter? A singles hitter and nothing else? He doesn't hit doubles either. He singles.

Everyone was raving about this guy last October, but I was never fooled. I knew that postseason stretch wasn't close to indicative of who this guy is on the field. Fluke. Anyone can get hot and he did.

If the Blue Jays got anything from this player--even 15 homers--they'd be a playoff team. If they got star-level play from Guerrero, they'd probably be the division leader. He's killed that team. They were crazy to give him that contract. Stupid. It's one year, man. He's had one year. A few other years were fine. But like, Lloyd Moseby fine.