Don’t mess with Mister In-Between

So tonight is the night Boston sports writers have been foaming at the mouth in anticipation of what they’ll write tomorrow.  Daisuke Matsuzaka is back on the mound.  If he’s successful, there will be many pleased Red Sox fans but many disappointed sports writers.  You know most of them already have their stories written about how signing him was such a failure and that he’s not a team player and he only cares about playing for Japan and he turns small children into furniture.

I say he goes 7 innings and only gives up one run.  Let’s be positive, right?  The Sox have been playing well so I see no reason to start peeing on the fire now.

Speaking of which, I usually don’t pay that much attention to Boston.com any more.  It’s part of my new practice of avoiding places online that make me want to punch someone.  But I do follow two or three of their writers on Twitter – one being Eric Wilbur.  Today he tweeted what I thought was a terribly clever title for a blog entry:  “Dissing Suzy Kolber”.   I was excited to think that someone else picked up on Tom Brady’s interaction with Suzy Kolber after the game last night and was eager to read his take on it.

Here’s where I warn folks that I’m going to briefly mention football.

I watched the last five minutes of last night’s Pat’s game.  I saw the touchdown that put the Pats ahead for good and watched as Tom Brady triumphantly walked off the field.  Actually, that’s not entirely accurate.  Brady was jogging off the field, stopping to congratulate his teammates and trying to make his way across the field to shake the hands of his opponents.  I’m not a big Tom Brady fan.  I find him a bit arrogant and he seems to have totally welcomed being someone TMZ deems worthy of following around.  But last night the guy was congratulating people, shaking hands and just working his way back to the locker room while Suzy Kolber ran alongside him like a puppy.   So Brady tried to blow her off (first he told her he was on his way in and then he told her he couldn’t hear her – actually, I thought he was much less harsh than, say, a Mr. Beckett sometimes is).  I’m all for calling out an athlete when they’re acting jerky but this didn’t feel jerky to me.   Hell, Kolber practically stood in front of a football player while he was running just to get a sound bite no one could hear anyway.   They have post-game pressers for that, Suzy.   They also have an entire team out there.  Why not talk to Ben Watson?    He had a bit to do with the win last night, yes?  Why pick the guy everyone wants a piece of who was, before she even approached him, obviously in a hurry to get where he was going?

The reason I even bring it up is because Wilbur turned what could have been a humorous entry into a piece of whine that reeked of him just looking for something to use to rip on an athlete.  Wilbur’s conclusion:

That being said, it was pretty lame. Granted, post-game interviews like that are more worthless than 99 percent of the pre-game predictions that had the Pats blowing out the Bills by 50, but is 30 seconds of class too much to ask? Brady didn’t look good for most of the first half, and he certainly didn’t look good in the seconds after the game was over.

Again, I actually watched this and in the seconds after the game was over, he was congratulating his teammates and making sure he got over to the other side to shake the hands of his opponents. That looked pretty good to me. Yet another example of members of the Boston sports media beating up on a local athlete. It’s getting so very old.

But back to baseball and something positive and just good.  Ian Browne wrote a wonderful piece on Tim Wakefield that shows you his teammates and even the owners of the team love and respect him as much as Red Sox fans do.

“He sets the standard for our players, and for all of us, as people,” Red Sox president/CEO Larry Lucchino once said. “He uses his popularity and prominence the best possible way: to make his community and our world a better, kinder, more humane place. I wish we had 25 players with his perspective and maturity. We are really proud to have him wear ‘Boston’ on his uniform.”

It’s nice to read a positive piece about one of the hometown team players. It seems to easy to keep focusing on the negative but I’d be if they looked around the local writers could find a lot of positive to cover as well.

7:10pm at Fenway.  Daisuke v John Lackey.  I’ll be watching from home with my fingers crossed!