Friday, October 16, 2009

My thoughts on Joe Torre, Jonathan Papelbon, and MLB playoffs

I've written a bunch of articles for The Faster Times this week about what's going on in the MLB playoffs. Here are the links for them, if you'd like to check them out:

First up, Joe Torre snoozed in the dugout while Clayton Kershaw struggled against the Phillies last night. What a shocker!

Then, I actually defended Jonathan Papelbon against the Boston boobirds. To me, the only reason to boo your own player is lack of effort. Papelbon was showing effort; he just stunk. 

I also took a look at the four teams left in the playoffs, and what question marks each team had.

And, if you haven't seen it, I dissed Boston for dredging up that whole Dave Henderson-Donnie Moore unpleasantness.


What do you think? Tell us about it!

4 comments:

Uncle Mike said...

Boston. The chavviest city in America. These people don't deserve a baseball team, let alone a good one. If you don't know what a "chav" is, YouTube it, and you'll recognize these kids from England as the barely-human detritus often seen outside suburban shopping malls... or lurching out of Kenmore Square bars. I know most Red Sox fans aren't like that, but the ones we tend to see the most are.

As for Papelbon: He does deserve to be booed. For his personality. We're not talking about a respectable opponent such as Tom Seaver, or a fun one like Luis Tiant. He's more like Bill Lee, only his mind was already warped without the marijuana.

I know effort is something to be cheered, but fans do have the right to boo, as much as to cheer, their own players. Quantity of effort is not enough. The quality should be there as well. If they try, and the other team is just better, fine, you have to live with it. But if the effort is incompetent, and the other teams gleefully takes advantage, I say boo away.

Paging Bobby Meacham. Paging Dan Pasqua. Paging Randy Velarde. Paging Jeff Weaver. Paging Scott Proctor. Paging Kyle Farnsworth.

Sully said...

As a die hard Red Sox fan, I just wave my hand at the venom just spewed by Uncle Mike. There are bad Red Sox fans and bad Yankee fans. Most Red Sox fans are great as are Yankee fan.

As for the Dave Henderson/Donnie Moore connection, I disagree with the self righteousness of the article.

It was there to pump the fans up and remember a great Red Sox/Angels comeback.

As for Donnie Moore's death, yes it is sexy to blame Hendu's homer for his suicide. But there were a lot more demons other than a homer that were going on in a man who shot his own wife and himself in front of his children.

By the way, before Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS (remember that?) do you remember who threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium?

Bucky Dent.

I can only assume when the Yankees dragged him out, you wrote how classless that was for the organization.

(By the way, thanks for the support of Sully Baseball. I truly and sincerely appreciate it)

Uncle Mike said...

Sully, did you weep at the suicide of Mike Torrez? No, you didn't. Becuase Torrez is alive, and well, and has a World Series ring from 1977 to fall back on. That, and, like Mitch Williams but unlike Donnie Moore, he managed to figure out that his team didn't lose solely because of him, and that they wouldn't have gotten that far without him.

I give Red Sox fans credit for this: They seem to have avoided making Torrez a scapegoat for 1978. They've never treated him the way they treated Bill Buckner.

Then again, I guess it's a whole lot easier to blame a funny-looking manager than to say Captain Carl choked in the clutch, or that said manager would have trusted Bill Lee if he'd kept his fat mouth shut, or that, hey, the other team was simply better.

And, yes, the way they treated Buckner was inexcusable. I've seen Ralph Branca at Met games, and he always gets cheered. Maybe that's because it's been so long, and the team he pitched for no longer exists. But Buckner was treated as if he was driving the buses full of black kids onto the grounds of South Boston High. And that guy didn't deserve it, either!

My opinion of Red Sox fans stands: The ones who end up on TV, the ones parodied by Jimmy Fallon on SNL (before he did it in some movie), ruin it for the Mike Barnicles and the Doris Kearns Goodwins. Even Denis Leary, who pushes the envelope sometimes and enjoys doing so, has class by comparison.

Subway Squawkers said...

Sully, I mentioned that very Bucky Dent point in the article. I was at that game, and thought at the time that it was very bad luck for the Yanks. Unfortunately, I was right.

http://thefastertimes.com/mlb/2009/10/12/stay-classy-boston-how-the-red-sox-dissed-the-angels/

It's just not productive to do something that can rile up the opposition on the day of the game. The Sox were at the short end of that in 2004, so they should have known better.

Oh, and everybody, if you haven't checked out Sully's blog:

http://sullybaseball.blogspot.com/

please do so. Uncle Mike, of course, also has a cool blog as well:

http://unclemikesmusings.blogspot.com/

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