I need to purge

(This is long and cranky.  I don’t want to be cranky today so I’m working on another entry as you read this!)

This is the first season where I told myself I would read less and less of the local sports writers and I actually stuck to that promise.  I credit Twitter and Facebook, really.  It gives me easy access to writers I want to read and not kick in the privates while also letting me find out things I don’t know about in the baseball world without having to read them from people I hate.

But this week has been a little different.  I haven’t had much online contact and took the easy way out this morning:  I read a Dan Shaughnessy  piece.  Rather, I began to read a Dan Shaughnessy piece.  I got to the quoted text below and decided I couldn’t make it all the way through.  But I share it with you so you remember, as I do now, why my dislike (hatred?  Hatred is a strong word but I’m compelled to type it) for the CHB is so damn strong.

This year is different. The 2010 Red Sox are on pace to be eliminated in the next couple of days (try not to get carried away by these easy weekend wins in New York), a full week before the conclusion of the regular season. It has been almost a month since the Sox played a game of any consequence, and these late season, back-to-back weekends with the Yankees are barely registering on the local sports radar.

While the Sox prepare to play the Yankees in the Bronx tonight, the Patriots are playing the Buffalo Bills in Foxborough, the region is agog in anticipation of Shaquille O’Neal joining the Celtics, and the Bruins are rejuvenated by the arrival of rookie sensation Tyler Seguin.

The Sox have done a nice job, given their injuries, but watching Josh Reddick, Ryan Kalish, and Lars Anderson is simply not the same as arguing about whether Terry Francona should start Josh Beckett or Jon Lester in Game 1 of the Division Series against the Angels.

There’s so much about just these few paragraphs that makes me want to write CHB and beg him to stop writing about baseball.  It reminds me of Shaughnessy on the, now, historical film during the day of game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, telling Kevin Millar that the team was an “embarrassment”.  (I’ve always wondered, once they won it all, if Millar ever went back to CHB and told him to go screw himself.  I try to be a good person but I would have had a really difficult time letting that one go by.)

But first, confession time.  After initially deciding that I didn’t want to read the rest of this piece, I figured I should read it so I could write about it (this seems to be a foreign concept to the CHB:  researching what you’re writing about).  So if the above three paragraphs didn’t annoy you, how about these tidbits?

*  He wants fans to be “offended” by Ortiz saying he took a pay cut with the extension he signed in 2006.  His argument is that no fan wants to hear over-priced players complain about money and he even calls Ortiz “delusional”.  Here are the facts:  Regardless of the amounts, Ortiz took a lot less than he was worth in the world of baseball.  This isn’t delusional.  And while the figures are enormous and ones that many of us can’t even fathom, that doesn’t take away from the fact that he could have made a lot more money had he not signed that extension.  He mentions Papi’s slow start this year as a reason Papi doesn’t deserve a good contract.  He mentions that Papi “magically turned around his career in 2003 — the same year he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs”.  (I’m still trying to figure out what, seven years later, that has to do with his contract this time around.)  Papi has over 30 home runs this year, he’ll most likely finish the season with over 100 RBI,  his OBP right now is .364, his slugging percentage is .527 and his OPS is .892.  Statistically, except for batting average, he’s kicking Victor Martinez’ butt and he’s keeping pace with Adrian Beltre (two players most are pointing to as guys the Red Sox “must” re-sign in the off season).  CHB invokes Pedro Martinez at the end of his Papi rant which leads me to one conclusion:  CHB has an issue with the Dominican players.  First he had to destroy Pedro, then Manny and now Papi (let’s all remember that CHB is the one, when he was signed, who called Papi a “sack of shit”).

But none of this, NONE OF THIS is as bad as the following about Mike Lowell:

They have been trying to trade him since the start of the 2008 season, and it has been painful watching Lowell play through a serious hip condition. It’s a miracle that the retiring Lowell is still a member of the Sox as we go into the final week of the 2010 season, but next Saturday’s “Thanks, Mike Night’’ represents the height of hypocrisy. Who thinks of this stuff?

Lowell was MVP of the 2007 World Series and has been a stand-up guy in his Boston tenure, but “Thanks, Mike Night’’ is right out of the Nomar Appreciation Playbook.

Well, since you want to compare, most rational thinking people thought the Nomar appreciation stuff was damn classy of the team and well-deserved for Nomar.  So, yes, in that sense it IS right out of the playbook.  The idea that CHB actually wrote this to insult the team shows you how out of touch the man really is.  (To say nothing of the fact that he’s flat out wrong about when the Red Sox started to try and trade Lowell.  His new contract was signed in the off-season leading to the 2008 season.  If you’re going to write inflammatory stuff, CHB, why not use the Google first?)  Okay, that stuff could just be hyperbole written to get the blood of people like me boiling.  But what do you say about this?

Mike Lowell, who has worked overtime to conceal his disgust with the Sox organization the last couple of years.

Is there anyone who pays attention to Red Sox baseball who thinks that CHB is an insider?  I would venture to guess he hasn’t sniffed the inside of the clubhouse in quite a while.  So his writing the above, as if he has a clue to what Lowell thinks or does, makes me want to find him and throw things at him.  There is no doubt that Lowell was frustrated THIS SEASON.  He felt like he could play and wasn’t being used in a way that he wanted.  He said as much on more than one occasion.  “The last couple of years”????  He signed a contract with the organization he’s supposedly disgusted with in the last couple of years.  CHB, finding ways to insult absolutely everyone he writes about for centuries.  (Gee, exaggeration is fun!)

I don’t know why I even bothered writing this.  I think just to get these negative feelings out.  It’s been a great weekend and even an extreme tool like CHB shouldn’t be able to take that away from us.  So I write this to get out the bad and focus on the good.

Which means I need to write another entry to push this one down so we all aren’t cranky this morning.  Coming right up!