Saturday stuff
*Snow in Braintree on Oct. 29. And people ask how I can put up with the clouds in Seattle.
*OK, someone is going to have to explain to me why, exactly, Theo Epstein has earned anything less than Brian Cashman money. Last I checked, he was the first general manager in the century-plus history of the Boston Red Sox to take the team to the playoffs three years in a row, and, well, there's the little manner of WINNING THE WORLD SERIES on his resume. He hasn't been perfect, of course -- I still want to bang my head off the wall when I think about the Sox letting Orlando Cabrera go and replacing him with Edgar Renteria -- but for each move like that there's been about a half-dozen masterstrokes like plucking David Ortiz off the scrap heap. The Red Sox are obsessed with competing with the Yankees in everything from on-the-field competition to television revenue. The Yanks, for the most part, treat their employees right monetarily. They certainly don't start off by leaking insulting opening offers into the press. If the Sox are serious about being the second superpower over the long haul in the game, they should stop acting like the Kansas City Royals when it comes to taking care of their own.
*Sat up in section 328 for the Bruins-Toronto game on Thursday. Good times. It was nice to see, about a dozen games into the season, that the Bruins finally got the memo that the rules have changed and they no longer need to play dump-and-chase on offense.
I don't know about the rest of you, but attending Bruins game for the past decade or so has been a perversely entertaining pastime, an experience unlike following any other team in the area, where I'll attend with friends, sit in the upper deck, and we'll basically act like those two old guys in the Muppets who sit up in the balcony mock the show and just make fun of the Bruins and their cheapness, then act presently surprised if they win. Typical line came from my friend Greg after Bill Guerin left town. That was the year they added the message board that runs the perimeter of the base of the balcony: "I bet the Bruins decided, 'we can sign Guerin, or we can get one of those color scoreboards that go all the way around the building!'" That sort of thing.
Anyway, the Bruins didn't give us much of a chance for such snark Thursday, and goalie Hannu Toivonen was a pleasant surprise, but I still don't see anything in this team that would indicate they're going to be anything better than the first-round stinkers that have marked the Joe Thornton captaincy.
*Not much to say about the World Series other than, obviously, the best team in baseball from wire-to-wire won. I'd hate to be in Cubs management this winter. Incidentally, that game in which Josh Beckett beat the Yankees in New York remains the last time a National League team won a World Series game. For some reason, that seems a whole lot longer than two years ago.
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