The season started with 4 new players: Japanese import Tadahito Iguchi at 2nd, relative unknown Scott Podsednik in left, former Royal and A's Jermaine Dye in right, and the infamous A.J. Pierzynski as catcher. The closer at the start of the season was Japanese import Shingo Takatsu, and at the end of the season the unknown Bobby Jenks would take that role. Also of note was Juan Uribe at shortstop.

I can't think of a single Sox fan who thought going into the season that a World Series was on tap, particularly with the unknown Podsednik replace the powerful Carlos Lee in left. Dan staked out the early ground of declaring that "no team with Juan Uribe at shortstop could win a World Series."

He may well have cried at the night they won it all because despite faltering at the end of the season (more like Cleveland didn't lose many in the last 40 games) the Sox put on a historic run to the championship going 11-1.

To be fair, I was spent more time listening up the dial as wearing his Sox pride on his sleeve was Dan McNeil, and his show was kicking B&B in the collective noots in all aspects.

Interesting to note was the next season was when DB began to embrace Sabre concepts thus allowing him to take on Sox fan favorites like Aaron Rowand (Fire & Passion are overrated), Scott Podsednik (he will revert to minor league form), as well a decrying Juan Uribe's skill as a shortstop (he would win another ring with the Giants).

It was also when the show took the turn of questioning fans intelligence in thinking a team could challenge and questioning who they proclaimed the next champion.

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DRINK BƎTTƎR. @theRIPH

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Good points, pittmike.

lol could have sworn I typed nicely done

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Elections have consequences.

They haven't had an infielder as good as Uribe since he left. Uribe is a fuckin' ballplayer.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

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Elections have consequences.

This article, "How the NBA became a league for snobs" seems somewhat relevant to the criticisms of Dan over the last week. The author mainly takes aim at ESPN, but the points about sports rationalism apply even more so to Bernstein: https://medium.com/sports-page/aa4afd698a2b

Edit: This part is especially applicable, though I think the stuff on Heat coverage is also on the money:

A thousand times yes. One of the things that bothers me about modern NBA fandom is that we're all supposed to have reverence for great players at all times. What fun is that? For all the back-patting and circle-jerking you see from hockey fans about sportsmanship and The Good Of The Game and all that jazz, the fans are relentless in tearing down other teams' star players, and short of Gretzky, you are under no pressure to simply recognize their greatness. Sidney Crosby is a flopping bitch who whines for calls. Ovechkin is a coach-killing flake and chain-smoking asshole who can't bother playing defense. Kane is a shitty human being, Toews is a glorified fourth-liner who coasts on being a stoic Canadian, the Sedins are not only women but possibly literally giant skating vaginas, Brodeur couldn't stop a beach ball without the NZT, on and on and on. Shit, even Gretzky, to hear it from some people, was an overrated sissy who just had great teammates and played in the right era. And even though deep down we know all these guys are really good (I think -- I mean, I know they're good), belittling everyone who's not in my team's sweater is what you do, and it's fun. I'll allow myself a moment of "recognizing transcendent metaphysical greatness" or whatever from elite guys (I've always had a weakness for Datsyuk), but even that's fleeting, and I get right back to the cruel sport of alleging that they suck and always sucked and the media should stop lying and admit they suck (or in Datsyuk's case, that he has a head shaped like a triangle, what a silly bastard, fuck him).

What makes basketball different? Why can't I call everyone else a fraud, a bitch, whatever? I know it's a game that's more about individuals than teams, but then why can't I just dislike the individuals?

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This

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Elections have consequences.

When I grew up loved the Lakers and hated the Celtics. Was not a problem at all this league did well.

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Elections have consequences.

Yep. I know a bunch of hardcore Hawk fans that used to bag on Gretzky for being a one-way player and insist that Savard was better. I thought that was silly, but being a fan is silly by its very nature.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I "sports rationalism" exclusive to just basketball, or is my judgment being clouded by Dan Bernstein? Because the baser half of me wants to draw all kinds of icky racial implications as to why Dan has adopted this viewpoint, even though the other half knows that this is probably just a result of his time in the CBA.

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[Stefon voice]Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. Yes.[/Stefon voice]

If I have to hear Bernstein (or Mike Breen, or Jeff Van Gundy, or any other smarmy white asshole) lecture me on how unreasonable I am for hating LeBron one more fucking time, I'm going to fucking scream.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

One thing I'll add on this is that if one is to be cosmopolitan about sports, I would much prefer it to be along the lines of Free Darko, which despite whatever its flaws did still celebrate specifically individual reactions and couch these in fairly provisional terms. This is in stark contrast to the stance of most metric heads (or poseurs like Bernstein) who simply urge the celebration of efficiency above all else, no matter what it looks like on the court

I suppose you could theorize that a liberal jewish person from means has a love for a league made up mostly of minorities in order to help themselves rationalize their better start in life, education and social standing. I myself would not think that but one could in point of fact theorize that.

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Elections have consequences.

I don't really think that's it. Basketball has always been a popular sport among Jews and at one time there were many top Jewish players.

Basketball is the simplest of all the major sports. It's a perfect vehicle for a guy who doesn't really know shit to play the big intellectual. They run a ton of stuff.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I believe just reading the NBA section here on the board would suggest that mindset is obviously not indicitave of NBA fandom.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Unless you go to the actual game.

As a huge fan of 80's live puck era hockey I almost started to type you could make a case for that. Was thinking that if they had switched teams, Savard would put up numbers, and he would've. Just no fucking way hes even going to approach what Gretzky did. In my hockey world, theres Gretzky, Bobby Orr and everyone else. Those 2 guys are just on a different level .An in his prime Lemiuex would be the only other one Id consider close.

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

Gretzky had a preternatural ability to see how a play would develop. Would Savard have put up big numbers with Messier and Kurri? Yeah. Would he have gone on to have more assists than anyone else had points, or 1,000 more points than the second-best guy? Fuuuuck no. Only Gretzky could have been Gretzky; to say otherwise is not to realize just what a spatial prodigy he was. I wonder what he would have been successful in if it hadn't been playing hockey. Sure wasn't coaching it.

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Nailing gymnasts/ wanna be starlets in their prime ?

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

This reminds me of this part of the article,



which in turn reminds me of DFW's tennis writing, where he expressed a burning, burning contempt for Andre Agassi. He talked about how there used to be the uptempo serve-and-volley style or the conservative baseline rally style, but that a "power-baseline" game had emerged through better training and carbon racquets, where a player could just hang back and crush winners without rushing the net, eliminating the respective risks and beauties of both prevailing styles: the speed and finesse of serve and volley, the cerebral chess matches of long rallies. He compared Agassi to footage of the Soviet Union putting down rebellions, crushing everyone with awesome power, but with a dull facelessness about it that rendered its power somehow empty. If I didn't know better, I'd say the author's read the same stuff I have, but of course I do know better, wink-wink.

But that's kind of where we are with LeBron James. The dominance from Jordan and Kobe is compelling because it arises (I'd say "arose" from Jordan if he weren't still at it in life) from their twisted sociopathy of taking the vaunted Competitive Spirit and reducing it to absurdity like the awe-inspiring but inherently broken people they are. Shaq was all brute force, but his foul-line Achilles' heel and his dopey Hollywood aspirations humanized him. LeBron is just too good at everything, and his manchild act off the court doesn't make him a sympathetic figure so much as it aggravates the fact that there's really nothing to this person other than objective achievement. I had sorta been put off in the same weird way about Dirk Nowitzki and how he's a seven-foot white guy who drains threes like some suburban kid's Create-A-Player with unlimited attribute points, but I guess that time he went on a vision quest or something after his championship was sort of interesting, (sigh), I guess.

* * *



I'd rank the four sports hockey > baseball > football > basketball in terms of the acceptability of affecting all-consuming hatred for those outside your tribe: we've covered the ends, but I'll add that while allowing for moments of revering historic greatness will always have its place in a sport that so cherishes its records, baseball still has you in it for the long haul with pennant races and farm systems, and so you can't just stand slack-jawed at Pujols and Doc all the time when you want your goddamn team you follow every day for six months to win. The NFL, with the national games and fantasy implications, kind of forces you to admire around the league, or at least be cognizant of the dubious legends being written sixteen times a week, every week, every year -- Most yards-after-carry by a tight end for an AFC team on the road in New Orleans in NFL history!

I could add that there's something about basketball that makes it suited for "rationalism" in ways other sports aren't. The pace, the abstraction, the vaguely claustrophobic feel all lend themselves to a more measured perspective than you can get from other sports. Entering the field of play. You don't just jump over a wall and start running around like you know what's going on, you check in at the scorer's table like you're being buzzed into someone's apartment building. You can't just go up to someone and hit him. That's a personal foul. You have done something that is foul on a personal level. When someone gets to make up for a lost scoring chance, everyone lines right up in a tidy little order and waits patiently for the person to shoot. And timeouts. Lots and lots of timeouts! Everyone gets to huddle up and receive their well-planned instructions, not whenever, but a certain number of times before and after a certain point. Football is just as abstracted and byzantine (if not more so) and stop-start as basketball, but at its core it's still just a bunch of guys trying to kill and maim the other guys so badly that we have to cut to a beer commercial while they sew some poor bastard's leg back on, and you can only be so dispassionate and thoughtful before it all inevitably rouses and sates your bloodlust. Compared to other team sports, basketball is practically parliamentary. As for the icky racial implications of this, one could argue basketball represents a triumph of getting an angry and marginalized group to flourish once they abide by rules, order, and orders, which again, yeah football too what with the coach worship, but again, the utter lack of civility inherent to that game.

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Please forgive me for going off on a tangent on how uninspiring I find tennis these days. I could understand DFW's perspective on Agassi and before him Lendl ushering in this particular age, especially thanks to changes in string technology. The thing with those two though is that they did exist in a world of heterogeneous playing styles and made for interesting stylistic contrasts to their contemporary rivals. Beyond this though, the power baseline game when those guys played still had a particular emphasis on power and offense; no one would ever confuse Agassi or Lendl (well at least off of clay) for being unable to actually hit winners. Unfortunately the next step in this evolution has seen a reversion largely to conservative baselining at the top of the game. Now rather than attempting to create offense (or trying too hard to do so), the top guys largely stay back and can count on their fitness to sooner or later induce an error or short ball from the opponent. The next tier of guys, the Tsongas, Del Potros, and Berdyches are power baseliners in the Agassi mold, but unfortunately lack Agassi's vision, fitness, and consistency, and are mainly notable for simply hitting the ball really hard. With both styles, there's no semblance of point construction in the way there was with preceding generations.

While it may have been the case that the game was destined to stay on the baseline thanks to technological changes, the ATP and ITF have certainly sped up this process by making the surfaces resemble each other more and more. I've heard so many times this week about how the "baseline rallies at this year's Wimbledon have been so great to watch!" And I just find a statement like that completely appalling; why in the world should we be celebrating the fact that Wimbledon now resembles every hardcourt tournament on tour, which in turn resemble every claycourt tournament on tour? As a result the same guys play in largely the same manner the whole year round with mainly the same results. Borg had to switch from a baseliner to a serve-and-volleyer in just a few weeks' time to win the French-Wimbledon double in the 1970s, but I'm supposed to be equally impressed by the drastic change of moving 1 inch closer to the baseline that Nadal and Federer made in repeating that feat?

I will say that while I think Federer has been far more of a beneficiary of these changes than Foster Wallace and many of his fans like to let on, he at least did show some genuine all-court brilliance during the early part of his dominance. Further, he's the one guy in the top 5 who has largely remained committed to playing offensive tennis, though in a manner far more creative than the ballbashers of the next generation. I think the play at the top is going to look pretty dire once he retires or falls off for good, particularly since I'm not one inclined to automatically be impressed by 20+ shot rallies or 4-hour pushathon matches.

I agree with you, but I think Gordie Howe has to be in that conversation too. The thing about Bobby Orr is, there's never been anyone else who was like him. He really doesn't have a comparison.

Arguing this stuff is what sports is all about. I'm pretty sure an inordinate amount of Gretzky's assists came at home, which might lead one to believe that friendly official scorers were pumping up the numbers.

And I believe Mike Bossy scored more per game than anyone.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Great article, though pretty obvious. We've been saying it on here for some time. I hate Lebron James because I want to. I don't buy the whole sport-specific culture idea. There may be certain announcers or Bernsteins of the world who say you "have" to like someone, but the fans arent that way. I don't talk to many people who don't hate the Heat, for example.

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I have a similar feeling about bowling. Guys used to make physical adjustments whereas now they largely stand in the same spot and use the same motion while allowing a large rack of differently constructed balls to do all the work. I think bowling would be eminently more interesting- though lower scoring- if competitors were forced to use a single ball per tournament.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

besides the technical play of tennis, what brought tennis out of sports obscurity and into mainstream was the attitude of some of the notable players, too. tennis was badass in the late 70's/early 80's and even into the agassi era. all of that was drained by sampras in the 90's. his dominance was as entertaining as watching paint dry. just kill, kill, kill. he was clinical, like a terminator. agassi would have outbursts, had an image, and had versatility. he won a career grand slam. and while he faked some of his image and some of his tennis, he couldn't fake the passion to win.

federer hadn't had a formidable opponent during his dominance, and a lot of the second tier guys just came off as completely tennis educated students. eternal quarterfinalists. there's no drama in that, and tennis begs of drama. it's like boxing. you have 2 people and a court. there has to be personality there.

wimbledon creates a new dynamic because the court itself is a personality. it's organic. there's wear and tear. that's why i still think it's the most appealing tournament of tennis, regardless of who's playing. but i have gotten more into the sport as of late because of the emergence of murray, and a personality-type in djokovic.

you can keep the rest of the field. and nadal, when he is able to compete on it again.

I dunno about the personality stuff. These guys are all so ridiculously image-conscious these days that most personality differences seem marginal at best. I was actually pulling for Djokovic to change that early in his career when it seemed like he kind of enjoyed playing the villain, but after the US Open crowd turned on him a few years ago, he now just comes across as another guy who tries to say all the right things. Murray is slightly different from the other 3, but I don't find him significantly more compelling on that basis.

Also I think if Safin had remained healthy and had his head on straight he would have been an awesome counterpart to the Federer era, both in terms of style and personality. Their Australian Open match is still one of my favorites.

This.

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