No one does the absurd quite like the Red Sox

The challenge of baseball, and the beauty of it, is the length and density of it. It’s pretty much every day for six months, and every team and every player has to do whatever is necessary to even remember what day it is at this time of year and beyond. Over 162 games in 180 days or so, anybody can be forgiven for forgetting the basics or losing track of how their limbs work for just a moment. Hard to stay locked in that long, and now they don’t even get amphetamines.

But the Boston Red Sox, when their focus has dropped and the mountain of not just a baseball season, but one in the fishbowl of Fenway Park, have taken losing that sharpness to a celestial level. When the Red Sox let go of the rope, not only does it snap back and hit them in the face and nuts simultaneously, it somehow gives them a wedgie too.

Here was the latest example last night:

The runners were going, and hey, sometimes a runner can lose track of the ball while on the move, which clearly Adam Duvall did. It happens. But our 2023 Red Sox aren’t here for run-of-the-mill cock-ups, no siree bob. No one remembers a simple double play. Masataka Yoshida knows that this year, the Red Sox dive completely into the mire, and came to the conclusion if he stopped moving he’d die.

You may be thinking that almost every team knees themselves in the chin like this a couple times a year, but then you probably haven’t been paying attention to how the Carmines do this year. This was only this past weekend:

And then last month:

Maybe there is some cloud over the Fens this year, though you wouldn’t be able to distinguish it from the way the city usually smells in the summer. Whatever is going on, it seems to draw the Sox collective brain out of their ear every so often in the most hilarious way possible. Teams every year go to the playoffs or win the division or the pennant. Only one team will be remembered for surrendering two little league homers and a triple play on their home field in the span of a few weeks. The Sox have definitely Tin Cup’d this season.

Rocky Wirtz passes

Chicago Blackhawks owner Rocky Wirtz passed last night, and he will leave certainly a layered legacy. Yes, under his watch, the Hawks went from the most irrelevant team in North American sports to the most popular and most successful in the NHL. At the same time, he will be remembered for being the owner of a team that prioritized a Stanley Cup and a video coach instead of a sexual assault survivor, Kyle Beach, who was allegedly assaulted by said video coach. Rocky Wirtz was the owner of the team that didn’t say anything to anyone about Brad Aldrich, allowing him to get another job in Michigan where he assaulted a minor.

All of this is attached to Wirtz, and all of it just kind of happened to him. It’s not as if Wirtz saved the Hawks from bankruptcy or something. The team fell to him when his father, Bill, died in 2007. And it’s not as if the Hawks’ “revitalization” involved anything truly visionary. He hired John McDonough as president and together they had the genius ideas of putting the home games on TV (they weren’t before), acting like an actual major league organization, catering to fans instead of doing everything possible to alienate them, and attempting to win. All of it was Sports Management 101, it only seemed revolutionary because of how backward Bill’s ownership had been. Rocky Wirtz certainly didn’t construct the roster that would eventually collect three Stanley Cups. That came with the team that landed on him through inheritance.

As far as the investigation into the 2010 playoff said, Wirtz wasn’t in the room when McDonough and Joel Quenneville decided their own personal glory was the most important thing. There are many who are sure that Wirtz knew all about it, and that could very well be the case. At the same time, people like Wirtz hire people like McDonough so they don’t have to do anything. Wirtz had other businesses to run, and didn’t seem motivated to do much else other than sit in his seats at the top of the 100 Level and soak in the adulation from fans who were delighted that their team mattered again.

Wirtz was the owner as the Hawks refused to change their logo, and perhaps he was more involved with that than was let on, as it was the Wirtz’s tradition to carry on their father’s legacy no matter how asinine. The home games weren’t on TV before Rocky because Bill thought that was what his dad, Arthur, would have wanted. Every time those who speak for the team are asked about it the answers are always wishy-washy, only heightening the suspicion that the orders came from on high without being able to be labeled so.

Wirtz sullied his own legacy, whatever it might have been, with that disaster of a press conference in February of 2022 when at best he seemed not only uncaring about Kyle Beach, but angry that anyone would ask him about it. That a sexual assault and coverup that took place in his organization was beneath his time and attention. It gave off an air that Wirtz was still unsure that the Hawks, and him, either through action or ignorance, had done anything wrong.

In the end, Wirtz’s story isn’t really that much different than a lot of rich kids. His dad was very wealthy, so he was very wealthy, and he was given this team and the other businesses that he was only sort of capable of running. He hired people he thought were, and he was at least smart enough to stand aside and let the team be what it was, both good and bad without really pulling any of the levers. Wirtz will be a historic figure in Chicago, and mostly it just happened to him because of his last name.

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