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Thursday, September 19, 2013

Attention Must Be Paid !!



The Red Devil Sox are laying down for Baltimore.

We will pay them back.

Someday.

Somehow.

16 comments:

Buck "Soon to be playing in the Wild Card" Showalter said...

An American League East team rolls over out of simple hate for the Yankees? Nnnooo!

Anonymous said...

I'm a firm believer that is what we did for Tampa Bay in game 162 two years ago...I call it the batting practice game.

Anonymous said...

I'm a firm believer that is what we did for Tampa Bay in game 162 two years ago...I call it the batting practice game.

SDB said...

So the Sox turn a good part of their "honoring" ceremony for Mo into circlejerking for Ortiz, Pedroia and Uehara. And now seem to miraculously drop a couple of irrelevant (for them) games against a team fighting the Yankees for a WC slot.

What comes around, goes around.

I will look forward to all of this biting them in the ass at some point in the postseason. I just wonder what may be the most perfect poetic justice.

The Red Sox being swept by the winner of the Wild card game in the ALDS? Beaten in the ALCS, perhaps after taking a 3-0 lead?

Thrashed by the Pirates in the World Series? Or better yet, seeing Crawford, Punto, Gonzalez and any other former Sox on the Dodgers crushing them as the NL wins another one?

Anonymous said...

Did it ever occur to Alphonso that the Orioles are a good team and that the Yankees suck, thanks mainly to the Orioles having a superior front-office and on-field coaching staff that has fielded superior and far younger talent than the Yankees have? (For example--compare 22-year-old Gausman striking out Ortiz on a 99 mph fastball to the Yankee bullpen collection of never-weres and has-beens). And that the Orioles just might be winning these games on their own merit? The Orioles are 9-6 against the Red Sox this season--the only AL East team with a winning record against them.

Alphonso's irrational conspiracy-mongering is the sad byproduct of a mind corroded by too long an attachment to a toxic, corrupt franchise.

Mark Charles Teixeira 1B said...

Well, as a Maryland native and as a guy who watched a lot of Oriole games in person, I gotta agree with Alphonso. Yankee Stadium is the place to be. Let's see, how many World Championships for the birdbrains? What would you rather do, ride the pine with Alex Rodriguez while smoking a little reefer, or be in Buck's platoon, doing calisthenics?

Anonymous said...

Yankee Stadium is the place to be? Agreed. But Yankee stadium doesn't exist anymore--it was demolished by the Steinbrenners. What you now have is a tacky restaurant/shopping mall erected for the pleasure of hedge-fund execs, a baseball dead zone from which real fans have been priced out. It is NOT the hallowed ground on which Lou Gehrig delivered baseball's Gettysburg Address, nor the expanse roamed by DiMaggio grace or tamed by Mantle's might. It is an empty shell of hustling and gimmickry, like the current Yankees.

Showalter platoons very few positions-only where necessary and beneficial, just like . . . Casey Stengel, who managed the real Yankees, not these inept impostors.

Look at the two rosters--the O's are bursting with young talent, a franchise with a future. The Yankees are headed into baseball senescence, a prolonged dark night.

At some point, you have to examine which assemblage of human beings--on and off the field--you find repugnant, and which appealing, and adjust your loyalties accordingly. Laundry fetishes ill-become a rational adult.

Jimmy Durante said...

Yezzzuh, and ya gotttttttaaa like the nose on Chris Davis!

Squid Lips said...

Thanks for defining "senescence" for me. I have indeed noticed a thesaurus in Buck's hip pocket. Are all Orioles fans this proficient at language? Can Adam Jones spell "banana"? So fans should seek out virtuous individuals and root for the team that is richest in moral fiber (like shredded wheat)? Rooting for a team over a period of decades is now obsolescent? I have to change my wardrobe because A-Rod took steroids? Just trying to understand what exactly you are saying in your magnificent prose.

Anonymous said...

Let me put this in Dick and Jane prose in the hope that you can understand: you grow up with certain emotional attachments--to your family, your team, your religion. Then you grow up--you find out, maybe, that your father has been cheating on your mother, so you don't feel the same way about him; or you're a Catholic and find out that the Church is a protection racket for pedophiles; or you're a Yankee fan and realize that your team has been reduced to rubble and trashed by a crew of clueless mercenary morons. In any of the foregoing cases, a rational human being might reconsider the blindly, irrationally formed attachment through the use of reason.

You want (a)to bury your head in the sand and shout "huzzah" for whatever creepiness and slime you were born into; or (b) do you want to exercise your mind and free will to arrive at reasoned judgments about who and what merits your affection and support in the world?

You obviously choose (a). And you actually seem proud of that--very strange indeed.

Mike said...

Anonymous, you rock more than even you can possibly think you do. You make some great points...and I give you credit for co-opting (small hyphenated phrase but that's little not-so-old me for ya) the old Seinfeld bit equating following a team with a laundry...fetish? I don't recall Ol' Jer calling it a fetish, though. The assumption of Dad cheating on Mom and the (again, assumed) chicanery of the Catholic church is an interesting route to take, insofar as it says a lot more about you than it does about anyone who maybe just picks a side in an admittedly unimportant (cosmic-wise) "fight" and sticks with it.

You seem well-educated and plenty confident in your certainties; I'd ask that you consider giving up education and pursue knowledge, for while your arguments (again I admit it) hold some sense in them, a whole heaping bunch of your better-than-thou rhetoric reeks of a relative of mine who was Ivy League educated and yet somehow knows damn near nothing.

Anonymous said...

Mike--I appreciate your taking the time to respond to my comment, but I'm not sure what your purpose was, since you address none of my substantive points but rather attack me personally. Sorry if this sounds over-educated to you, but that is a classical ad hominem tack--you attack the person rather than address the argument.

My examples were purely abstract. I was not born a Catholic and as far as I know my father was a faithful husband. I'm just giving examples of how someone might grow up--the very essence of growing up is lost illusions, to quote the title of the Balzac novel on that subject.

So . . . if you prefer to denigrate a person rather than deal with points of substance, you yourself are contributing to my lost illusions about the human race--although you'd have a hard time competing with the Steinbrenners on that score.

The Steinbrenners have gradually, in stages, over decades, wrecked the greatest franchise in American sports history--stripped it of its magic, its nobility, its greatness, notwithstanding the periods of success that were achived in spite of--not because of--the Steinbrenners (Gabe Paul in the late seventies and Stick/Buck in the early nineties).

George grew up an Indians fan who hated the Yankees. As owner, he (and now his sons) have finally slain the dragon of George's childhood. If you want to embrace that carcass as your own, that's fine. Just don't confuse it with the organization of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, etc. The last frail threads of attachment to those Yankees were blasted away the night the real Yankee Stadium was imploded under cover of darkness.

Mike said...

Anony M.- If you think my words gathered themselves into anything resembling an "attack", then you might do yourself some favors and study the etymology of that word. Disagreement on a few things regarding a baseball team and the stating of them in a forum such as this is not what anyone who's ever been truly attacked would call an attack.

That said, I agree with most of what you say. I don't know the name of the building that used to be in the right-field camera shots but I don't believe in any Yankee Stadium which doesn't have that vista. As for the Steinbrenners, I have never been a fan of the offspring and have often thought of Howard Spira when considering their actions regarding everything. I think Bob Watson is at least slightly underrated as a GM.

I could type all night but what more could I say?

None of this makes me care any more than I did, but I thank you for making me think about it. Please don't take that as an attack of any kind.

Parson Tom said...

What the heck? You pick your team when you're a kid, and that's it for most of us who maintain an active interest in the sport. It's ingrained, sometimes deeper than religion and nearly as strong as family.

Rooting for the Red Socks would be like cheering for the Russians, and the Orioles, especially for Yankee fans like me who were young when Frank Robbie and crew were crushing them, would be China or Korea. I'm not going to ever root for either one of them just because they have the upper hand now -- even if the Yankees now deserve the lower hand.

Most Catholics are aware of the scandals and yet they still identify as Catholics and recognize that there is a higher definition of being Catholic -- Pope Francis, thank you for proving my point -- even if many of the church's leaders have failed at it. Dad may have cheated on Mom, and that hurts and he sucks for it. But he's still Dad to most people. You only get one Dad.

For most of us, you only get one favorite team. This year, I will be interested in seeing if the Braves or the Pirates can make some noise and have some fun, but I'll always come back to the Yankees. It's no longer a personal choice for me and, I'll bet, for everybody who reads and writes on this blog. You raise some mildly interesting questions, Mr. Anon, but they don't really have application here.

Bob Sheppard said...

Animus, Why do I get the feeling that you are a Mets/Jets/Nets/Islanders/ and on occasion a Devil's fan.

SanJoseKid said...

Owners come and go. Their attachment to a team is fundamentally fiscal. Fandom lasts forever. Your teams are a component of your individuality. Even if your team changes cities, you likely will continue to support it. Anonymous, Alphonso will pour you a stout shot of Crown Royal Black and bring you to your senses . . . . Either that or take some LSD.