If you’re David Ortiz, you get to say what everyone else is thinking.
And the FCC doesn’t have a problem. The chairman tweets:
David Ortiz spoke from the heart at today’s Red Sox game. I stand with Big Papi and the people of Boston.
The recent release of the movie 42 reminds us of the shameful history of the Red Sox and black baseball players. Now this guy from Santo Domingo is the heart of the team and the city.
After Mr. Ortiz’s oration, Mr. Nava gave the Red Sox their seventh straight win. Didn’t I say the Red Sox were going to have a great season?
Okay, so I’ll leave Fenway Park as my header image for a couple more days. The Red Sox have been been providing us with everything we could ask for: good pitching, good hitting, good fielding, no tantrums. A bunch of players have been playing beyond what we expected from them–Iglesias, Nava, Middlebrooks; and others have returned to form–Lester, Buchholz, Ellsbury. And we haven’t even seen Ortiz and Drew yet. I’m not expecting this to last. Because I’m a Red Sox fan, that’s why.
The 2012 was a debacle and an atrocity, topped in recent times only by the debacle and atrocity that was the 2011 season. The 2013 season has got to be better, if only because we won’t have to put up with Carl Crawford swinging and missing at pitches down around his ankles, with Dice-K nibbling at the corners and reaching 100 pitches by the fourth inning, with Adrian Gonzalez failing to deliver in clutch situations… And there’s every hope that Jon Lester will quit being such a grouch, and Ellsbury will quit being injured, and Stephen Drew will turn out to have a little more life in him than his older brother…
Still, there’s precious little reason to think the Red Sox are going to create much excitement this season. Mike Napoli and Ryan Dempster and Jonny Gomes may be good players and good guys in the locker room, but they aren’t going to sell tickets and make you turn on NESN.
Here’s the guy who is going to sell tickets:
That would be Jackie Bradley Jr. Is it too much to hope that he will give us reason to hope? Probably. Still, I’ve changed my header image, at least till the home opener. It happens every spring.
I’m beginning to think so. Here I looked at the mid-season stories and concluded there were more bad stories than good ones. Three weeks later I think the situation has actually gotten worse: there are no interesting stories at all.
I went to the Red Sox-Twins game on Thursday night. Around the ball park, scalpers were offering tickets at half price. The House of Blues across the street appeared to be livelier than Fenway:
Slash was playing. Wikipedia tells me his latest album is Apocalyptic Love. I am not familiar with Mr. Slash’s oeuvre, but the line for his show snaked around the corner.
Inside Fenway, the Red Sox managed two hits (both by Gonzalez) against three pitchers no one had ever heard of. Lester pitched well (better than he’s pitched lately), but not quite well enough. The biggest cheer of the night was when the Jumbotron showed the the US ahead of China in the Olympic medal count. Mercifully, the game didn’t take long to play (Lester didn’t walk anyone, and there were no within-inning pitching changes.) Here is the view from my seat. There’s a runner on third, so the infield is playing in:
Lester got out of that jam, but it wasn’t good enough; the Sox lost 5-0. The next night they got 14 hits but managed to blow a four-run lead and lost in 10, 6-5. To the Twins.
A team can be fun to watch even when it’s not very good. Sometimes all you need is an interesting player or two — you’d stick around an extra inning to see Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz hit. But right now Ortiz is still injured. Gonzalez is playing well, but he has zero charisma. Nobody on the team has any charisma. Jon Lester trudges glumly off the mound like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders–which he probably does. Carl Crawford swings at bad pitch after bad pitch and grounds out meekly to second. Ellsbury isn’t doing anything, and neither is Pedroia. Pedro Ciriaco seems to be quickly falling back to reality after a great start.
The couple next to us was from Cincinnati. They stuck around for “Sweet Caroline” at the top of the eighth, and then headed out. They weren’t alone.
Sports, especially baseball, is about stories. Everything has a story: the season, the team, each player, each game. A good season has lots of good stories; a great season has stories you wish your parents were alive to experience. Like this one:
So where we are with the Red Sox at midseason?
The Good Stories
David Ortiz is having an all-star year, when we were afraid he was on the downhill side.
Jarrod Saltalamacchia has turned into a pretty good player.
Daniel Nava has come back from the bottom of the depth chart to become a pretty good player. (He was a one-play good story in 2010, when he hit the first pitch he saw in the big leagues for a grand slam.)
Will Middlebrooks and Felix Doubront look like pretty good young players.
And, um, that’s about it.
The Bad Stories
In no particular order:
The team with the third-highest payroll in the majors has a 43-43 record.
The Yankees came back from a nine-run deficit and beat the Red Sox by six.
Josh Beckett sucks for a front-line pitcher.
John Lester sucks for a front-line pitcher.
Clay Buchholz sucks for a front-line pitcher.
Daniel Bard sucked so bad they had to send him to the minors, where he continues to suck.
Dice-K finally came back from his injury, turned out to be the same old Dice-K, then got injured again.
Adrian Gonzalez sucks for a guy getting paid $20 million a year.
Kevin Youkilis sucked, got hurt, came back and sucked some more, then got traded.
Jacoby Ellsbury has missed half the season with an injury.
Carl Crawford has missed half the season with an injury.
I don’t like the way Bobby Valentine chews gum.
I may have missed a few, but I’m thinking the ratio of bad stories to good is about three to one. Things could turn around starting tomorrow, but this doesn’t bode well for my summer.
So, in case things don’t get any better, here’s another memory:
Great weather! Great seats! Great excitement, as the Red Sox have all New England a-twitter after a wonderful start in their first six road games!
OK, that last sentence was a lie, but the first two weren’t.
Getting There
Had to park far away. They seemed to be preparing for a running competition of some sort. Lots of fit-looking folks in track suits wandering around Copley Squere.
They were even preparing to pray for the runners:
Old South Church bills itself as the “church of the finish line.”
Here’s a guy celebrating a pitcher of yesteryear:
Here’s the Muddy River, which looks a lot better in a photograph:
Outside the Park
The 100-year anniversary celebration is next Friday:
Where is our third-place banner from 2011?
Buddy? Who’s Buddy? Even the lady holding the sign doesn’t seem sure:
Here is the handsome, conservative junior senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown:
He is locked in a tough reelection fight against a popular Democratic opponent. Hey, there might be a novel in that!
Inside the Park
The seats were ten rows back — the fancy seats where the vendors actually bring beer to you. Here’s the view:
Fenway now has three Jumbotrons; each displays player statistics with a faux Fenway scoreboard background. On the John Hancock scoreboard, we’re looking at a video of the immortal Dave Morehead.
Here’s the aftermath of the injury to Ellsbury. It didn’t look that bad from far behind home plate:
They flash the words to “Sweet Caroline” on the scoreboard. Have they always done that? Why bother? (Well, they flashed the words to “God Bless America” as well, but the girl singing it still had problems.)
Here are the crazed throngs giving their Neil Diamond salute to “So good! So good! So good!”
The Game
Oh, the game. Beckett was very efficient — only struck out one, but got the Rays to hit a lot of fly balls. David Price for Tampa Bay was extremely inefficient, despite consistently hitting 97 mph on the gun. He was gone after three innings. The hitting star for the Red Sox was the immortal Kelly Shoppach; he even managed to steal the first base of his career on a weird delayed steal. The Red Sox put ten men on in a row in the bottom of the eighth and scored eight runs to seal the victory. Final score: 12-2.
The Return
I was tired of taking photographs. Here’s Trinity Church with the Hancock Building in the background:
Richard Bowker 