Red Sox Reality Check

Describing the Boston Red Sox as a franchise with the Death of Accountability misrepresents reality. The players have collectively never owned accountability. In 1967 and 1975, the Sox got beaten by better teams, those with Bob Gibson and Lou Brock and the Big Red Machine. Let's forget about late-season baserunning in 1972. In 1986, it's hard not to represent defeat as the ugliest word in sports, choking. 2003 had a unique form of torture, and since then it's been Shangri-La, even when it isn't. Collective failure always belongs to ownership, the general manager, or the manager. Terry Francona wasn't the first to take the fall. Does anyone remember Grady Little? It's never the players who are responsible for their play or their behavior. They're our guys, in psychology, cloaked in endowment effect ...the coffee cup that you would sell at a yard sale for two dollars is only worth a dollar if you had to buy it. It's our cup, and dammit, it's speci...

Let's face it...we must fight the addiction. Why show undiminished love to an organization that treats us as though we're Cinderella and they're the evil sisters? We need our own ' program ' to help us break free from this enabling. Here are our nine steps toward intellectual freedom. We admitted we were powerless over being a fan, that our compulsion needed to be beaten. We had begun with Boston caps, and moved on to jackets, to blankets...like Jimmy Fallon, only worse.  Came to believe that NESN would only lead us to self-destruction.  Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of alternative life choices, playing with our children, walking, reading, and not listening to sports radio. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to the highest living Red Sox charismatic figure, Johnny Pesky, that we needed to change...channels. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortstop and fix our bullpen and lack of player accountability. Made a list of all the times we had bee...

In the movie "Swordfish", John Travolta comments about the importance of misdirection. He couldn't be more right about the current state of affairs of the Boston Red Sox. It seems misdirection comes from all sides, players with an entitlement mentality, absentee ownership, and a manager struggling to imprint his brand on a wayward ship. Even the hero in our story, Dustin Pedroia, reduces himself saying "that's not the way we do things here." In fact, that's exactly how we got to this disturbing place, players dismissing the manager, and ownership bringing a 'task-oriented' manager instead of a 'relationship oriented' skipper. We hear how players are concerned about 'snitches'. In other words, professionalism matters less than protecting each others' reputations. Nobody likes to be criticized. And worse than criticism of performance, impugning one's attitude or "commitment" gets our attention. The mana...

The saying goes, "you win 60, you lose 60, and what you do in the other 40 matters." Tonight, the ball bounced (literally) the right way as a Ryan Sweeney single to right scored @MacDime54 on a bad bounce to J.P. Arencibia. No, I don't think the Sox are a powerhouse, but at least we'll put the total collapse theory to bed tonight. Daniel Bard is a starter. Whatever happened to "I'll do whatever's best for the team?"  Evidently, in a league where the AVERAGE salary is almost 3.5 million dollars, the team doesn't matter? Felix (the Cat) Doubront looked good, although with the relative failure of economical pitching with over 100 pitches in five innings. His curveball looks better than it used to be, and Toronto made him work. As for the slogan for the 2012 season, what it won't be is "Eat More Chik'n"...