Some Texan wrote an article for mlb.com (which is "not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs" stating the following:

First, let's remember the mess the Boston Red Sox were in around the middle of last season. They were a bad baseball club. They were also an unhappy baseball team. [...]

Attitude? Let's just say the Red Sox were a tough club to love.


Middle of last season, eh? After 81 games, the Red Sox were above .500, one game out of a playoff spot, with the same guys who put up an incredible record the season before, right up to the tragic collapse of 9/11. They were three games off the pace of the team that would win the World Series. In fact, only three teams in all of baseball were more than three games ahead of them at the midpoint in 2012. So, despite the massive fall-apart that came later, it would be incorrect to say the Red Sox were a bad baseball club "around the middle of last season." (But hey, he's just going by what he heard, right?)

Point number two, the team was "unhappy." Fine, go ahead and think you know people's inner emotions. Be a stupid ass. And assume that you know the emotions of every player on the team, and that every one of them was unhappy. Moving on.

A tough club to love. Man, this guy must've listened to a lot of sports radio. And isn't that what makes a journalist, instead of actually paying attention and knowing what the hell is going on? Apparently it's hard to love the team you love. Ortiz? Horrible guy. Pedroia? I'm more a fan of lazy players who aren't good. Instead of running through the whole list, I'll just point out that even if you believe everything the radio told you, you still have to admit that there were only a few guys they brainwashed you into hating, as opposed to the whole club. I mean we all have guys we don't like. I'm not sure I've met anyone who likes Lackey. And what matters even more is that if the team had been 15 games in first place, nobody would have given a shit about the ratings-grabbing "attitude problems."

We've been over this before. I just thought it was kinda funny how some outsider basically came in and acted like he knows what was going on, but based it on the gossip and rumors that the public got from not actually paying attention, but to eating up everything the Internet tells them.

(Granted, this was a positive article about what a great job Cherington has done, but terrible job by that Texan throwing in the same-old same-old hype-driven lines.)

Speaking of Texans...check out Mike "I think he's gonna be on our team soon but who really knows" Napoli after his sister threw flour on his face.

I was on mlb.com the other day and I noticed an ad for a T-shirt company. It showed a young boob-tastic girl wearing a shirt that says "Admit It, You'd go to Jail for This." Okay, then. I can hear the conversation now....

Son: Dad, what does this shirt mean?

Dad: Well, Mel, we all want to bone chicks, right?

Son: Sure!

Dad: Well, sometimes we want to have sex with little underage girls, and that's a perfectly normal feeling. But if we follow through with our urges, even if the bitch...uh, the girl says "yes," we put ourselves at risk for arrest and a potential prison term.

Son: But...it feels so good that...it's worth it?

Dad: You catch on fast, son. Now go out there and do what ya gotta do. High five!


Is there anything else this shirt could mean? They're talking about either rape or statutory rape. And not only is the female wearer of the shirt meant to be saying "it's okay to rape me," but she's not even considering herself a person, only a "this."

This is one of those Google "ad choices" ads, meaning they pop up based on what each user has recently searched. Presumably.* And there's yet another reason why having ads on your site is stupid. You don't know what you're gonna get. I doubt MLB would want this ad for their family-friendly site, but some people are seeing it. You'd think, though, that companies would check the list of companies on the "ad choices" Rolodex before signing up.

I clicked the ad and found out that the company is even lamer than I thought. There are dumb-ass shirts about killing pets and sending Mexicans back to Mexico and stuff like that, and the idiotic text at the bottom of the page includes such gems as:

Do a keg stand with our party t shirts. Beer drinkers, weed smokers and more will find exactly what they're after to show their partying spirit. Doing a keg stand is the way to kick back and relax. No more than a little beer pong can you get the party started.

and

Our funny offensive t shirts come in sizes up to 5xl and don't forget sometime you need to push away from the table. Our anti obama t shirts are among the best and sometime they call us racist but know that everyone love free speech!

and

Fun t shirts can make or break a night out. Getting shirts for a batchelor party is the best party of the trip. Political t shirts can do a tea party rally just and bring home the bacon.

and

Humor makes people laugh and we try to be a great tshirt online store. Remember, if it is inappropriate or just plain damn sexy, we have you shirts! These are some party t shirts and get the groove on when you get nasty!


How bootleg is that? The "buy 3, get SIX free" offer must mean the end is fortunately near for this rag-tag operation.


*(I must have been doing extensive research on rape or shitty-ass T-shirt companies just before this. Actually, I think it's based on cookies and I have them off or something--reloading the page over and over gets me ads on investing, social marketing, TV shows I've never heard of, etc., so it's probably just a random group of ads. In other words, the rape ad could be going out to anybody.)

My friend John Quinn notified me that my picture is in a crowd shot in the book "Fenway at 100." He then sent me a picture he took of the page in question. I was expecting my face among hundreds of other fans, but as you can see, I'm pretty noticeable! I'm the guy at left, in the red "Marzipan" t-shirt I got in 2005.

I figured out which game it was--the Padres one in June 2011 where I met Zack Hample. Photo gallery here.

About the crowd around me at the far edge of the first bleacher section next to the camera well, I said at the time:

"It was great. The back wall behind me, nobody but the two cameramen to the right of me, a quiet father/teen son in front of me, and an empty seat on my left, followed by teen boys who just talked about stats all night. And, like I said, short-sleeve weather."

And there they all are! Along with me, on page 54. And in the link above, you see me and Zack, with me in the Marzipan shirt. I love that I get to revisit that moment through someone else's lens.

I only vaguely have a memory of a guy taking pics from right next to me in the aisle between section 34 and the camera well.

What we're reacting to is probably David Ortiz's first at bat, a single to left where a run came in from third but the other runners were held up. I don't know what the hell I'm doing with that hand, either grabbing for the seat or my camera or something, but I seem really into it, wondering if we're gonna send that second runner.

Anyway, I love that I'm in that book. Whenever I see Fenway crowd shots, I look for myself or people I know--and here I am all close-up-like. Awesome. Thanks again to John for spotting this.

"'Oh, he's as brittle as J.D.,' No that's crazy."

That's J.D. Drew talking about the newest Red Socker, his brother Stephen. I like this quote. J.D. admits he's brittle while letting us know that his brother is nothing like him. Woohoo!

I forgot Aviles was in the trade for John Farrell. The Blue Jays ended up trading Mike to the Indians after that.

I noticed all the MLB team sites have a little Newtown logo. Except for the Angels! Weird.

A decade ago when I lived in Danbury, Connecticut, the word "Newtown" referred to one thing: Newtown Teen Center, unofficial home of my old band, The Pac-Men. We weren't teens, but our fans were. It was a great room. No stage. Just an all-inclusive place to see local bands at a low price, without the "bar" atmosphere, a town over from where I lived and two over from where I grew up in Ridgefield.

We played our first show there and it was like a homecoming every time we played there after that. We had our "anniversary show" there, where globs of cake flew through the air like tasty, sluggish butterflies. What?

We had a show that doubled as a Ms. Pac-Man competition where we brought in stand-up arcade games (Brian, our singer, said that if he should die before the show happens, to go ahead with it anyway, as it was his lifelong dream--who the hell would have sang, Brian?). Atom & His Package came up from Philly and headlined that night.



We played a Halloween show there, where every band had to dress as, and play the songs of, another band. Opting against the predictable Ramones/Dead Kennedys/Sex Pistols ideas, we showed up dressed as the Spice Girls and wowed the unsuspecting audience with brilliant renditions of several of the group's hits. Our drummer's tween sister was thrilled that these four dudes who played ear-blistering punk rock in her basement once a week wanted to borrow her Spice Girls cd to "rehearse."

On top of that, I have friends from Newtown, I dated a girl from there (was with her when Columbine happened and I remember how distraught she was, I can't imagine how she's feeling now), my sister's boyfriend lives there, and when I first met Rebecca, who you may remember from her blog and the times we hung out with the Red Sox on the streets of Manhattan, she was living in Newtown, and currently has nieces/nephews in Newtown elementary schools.

And what I didn't know until later in the day Friday was that my mom's new husband's grandson is a second-grader at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He is okay. I still have a step-nephew.

So I have a lot of Newtown connections, and I keep thinking of how all these people are directly affected by this. All those kids who came out to see my band probably know the family of someone who was killed senselessly. Some of them might even be the parents of those kids, for all I know. The shooter's brother would have been a teenager back when we were playing those shows and might have seen us play. (Or at least heard his friends talking about how incredibly awesome those stupid Pac-Men are....)

We lost a big group of future Newtown Teen Center (or whatever the all-ages music venue is there these days) concert-goers, and that's really sad. Two of them were pronounced dead at the hospital where I was born.

But I have to say, even without these connections, even if this was in California or something, it hits home. Even if you're not a parent, you certainly were once a first-grader.

To the gun owners, no one's trying to take your guns away. But maybe it's time to think about voluntarily getting rid of them yourselves. What is the point? Are you so scared of roaming packs of first-graders that you need to be able to massacre them all at once? It's hard to not blame the shooter, but I'll gladly put most of the blame on his mother. I almost wish she'd lived just so she could see exactly what her guns could do. Of course, she'd probably claim her son was evoking his second amendment right and that the class of little kids collectively lunged at him first.