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The now-bordering on disgraceful 2024 Boston Red Sox, the great push to make every last thing stupider and worse, and how humans detest being human

Tuesday 8/27/24

Did I pinpoint exactly when the 2024 Boston Red Sox were done or did I pinpoint exactly when the 2024 Boston Red Sox were done? I feel like I could not have been more accurate than back when I said as much in these pages. They have now lost five games in a row, are five back for the third and final Wild Card Spot, and sport a home record of 29-37 and an overall record of 67-64.


That record at Fenway is disgraceful. There is no excuse for that. That's an ill-prepared team that is not ready to go and a chunk of that is on the manager they just signed for three more years. When did the season--which rose no higher than being a slight success through any point--really come apart? When Alex Cora got that deal. Is that a coincidence? No, it is not. Something changed, and one of those things was this team began to play with no energy, no urgency. The Red Sox are much likelier to finish under .500 than they are to make the playoffs.


But tell me how you can be over .500 overall--at least for now--and eight games below .500 with Fenway Park as your home park. I don't know this for certain, but I am almost positive that no Red Sox team in the nearly 125 years of the club's existence has had a record over .500 and a home record well under, or under at all.


So what was the season then? The season was being in the final Wild Card spot for a spell before the All-Star break. That's your high point? That was as good as it got? And back in July. For a bit. This is inexcusable. We're bordering on disgraceful now. 29-37 at Fenway Park. Swept by Arizona, then frogmarched off your own field in a strange variant on a doubleheader (because of the continued game) by the Toronto Blue Jays, who have nothing going on or to play for.


I didn't even see any of the game the other day when Tanner Houck was pitching and he hadn't allowed any runs through three, but I knew he was going to give it up and get rocked, because I looked at the box score on my phone and I saw that he'd walked three guys and hit a batter. It's only a matter of time before he gives it up when the command is not there. His ERA dropped down to, I think, 2.97, during the game, or maybe it it was 2.93, and by the end of his outing it was at 3.23. That's getting rocked.


I heard people who don't know baseball who make a lot of money talking about sports tell their audience that when Houck struggled in Colorado around the time of the All-Star game it was because of the air there and how you can't spin the baseball or some such rot, but who was the only person who made any mention of him getting lit up at the All-Star Game? I saw all of this coming and wrote about it. He lost his command. When Houck doesn't have command, he just has stuff, and stuff isn't enough to get it done when you don't know where the ball is going. Stuff will get you through three innings unscathed, maybe, but then you will get hammered. You'll walk people, and someone will crank one over the wall. Watch what percentage of strikes Houck is throwing. That's going to tell you the eventual result of his outing.


Other baseball things: Can we stop calling a slider a sweeper? No one says slider now. It's sweeper. You know what this was? Marketing. Everything in our world gets worse, everything gets stupider. People get worse, they get stupider, and everyone goes along with the game plan of getting worse and stupider. Everyone lining up to circle the drain and go down it. Wonderful.


An idiot or collection of idiots in baseball decided that it'd be better to sound stupider, so let's all call a slider a sweeper because that's stupid. Hooray. Stupid sells. Stupid is cool. No one is too stupid for stupid. Now I have to listen to guys who are like sixty and played baseball professionally and never used the term sweeper for a slider do just that on the broadcast of a game like they'd done so all along just so they can sounder stupider because everything now has to be stupid. Lou Merloni: Stop. Not once in your playing life did you say to someone, "That pitcher has a great sweeper," so why do you have to do it now? Because a memo came from the commissioner's office? It sounds like the pitcher is about to go off and clean a chimney.


Jonathan Papelbon is the Red Sox' version of Rob Gronkowski, but like Gronkowski, he isn't as dumb as people think and sometimes he makes a comment that is spot on. The other day he was talking about analytics and how this pre-determined insistence on how the game is going to be played--because the numbers say so--can result in losses. He's dead right. What he said was that teams and players refuse to adjust. A game is going a certain way because a given game is a certain way. And rather than take that into account and proceed accordingly--that is, reading the game--there's no flexibility. No understanding. No attempt at a solution for a better outcome.


Analytics says, "If you do this, then this percentage of the time you will get this result." It's like AI. There is no human element. I thought humans could be great? No? We're not doing that? We can't change things up, adjust, deal with, find a way to prevail and/or thrive? Guess not. Get that out of our culture, too. Can't have human greatness. Robotic human-like behavior? That's fine. But no great humanness. So, if there's no way what you're doing is going to work that day because of what, let's say, the pitcher is doing, you keep doing it anyway, all throughout your line-up, even if that means you're only going to scratch out two singles and put up a zero on the scoreboard, because you do what you do, says the numbers/analytics, and you don't change.


This is a horrible way to do anything. To play a baseball game, live a life, have a relationship, write a story, bang a college girl. No, I'm kidding about that last part. Relax. Changed it up on you. We can have a joke.


The point is that we treat our humanness as if we hate it and hate being human. We didn't used to. It's not a generational thing, or a perspective thing. This is reality now. Humans try not to be human. Humans can't be human. That's not a paradox. Being a human biologically and being a human truly are different things. And I used to think that sports would remain untouched by this. Level playing field, humans against humans. Skill, dedication, would win out. But sports are being ruined now, too, along with everything else. It's more drain-circling.



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