Boston Globe suspends Nick Cafardo indefinitely for reporting on actual baseball news in St. Louis

Posted on October 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

Fenway Pastoral has learned from unnamed (definitely not made-up or in any way questionable) sources stationed deep in the bowels of Morrissey Boulevard that Boston Globe Red Sox beat reporter Nick Cafardo has been suspended indefinitely for traveling to St. Louis to report on the 2011 World Series.

Courtesy of NESN.com

Cafardo’s bold recap of Game 1, which the Cardinals won 3-2 over the Texas Rangers, was filed late last night by Cafardo and published in error in the sports section of this morning’s Boston Globe.

The paper’s sports page editor, Joe Sullivan, released the following statement this afternoon: “We are aware that many of our treasured readers were rudely treated to a baseball story this morning that neither piled onto the orgy of news surrounding the collapse of the 2011 Boston Red Sox nor aided the ongoing effort to expose members of the aforementioned team as sloppy, poultry-obsessed alcoholics. For that, we are all deeply sorry.”

Sullivan went on to explain in an internal memo to staff members that Cafardo’s presumptuous “inverted pyramid” style of journalism flies in the face of everything the Globe aims to accomplish in its daily quest to churn out sensationalistic drivel cleverly packaged as hard local news.

Subscribers will be given a special pass code that can be redeemed on the paper’s website for access to five free articles (the Globe’s site transitioned to a paid content system earlier this month).

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Posted in Red Sox, The Boston Globe

Boston Globe Smear Job Outtakes: Picked up pieces from Larry Lucchino’s office floor

Posted on October 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

Every master manipulator knows that successful spin control is a matter of quantity over quality. Not surprisingly, quite a few details were left out of the Boston Globe’s “Inside the Collapse” expose on the 2011 season.

They may have captured our hearts for months and won games at a dizzying pace for two-thirds of the season. But, seriously, these guys were absolutely incorrigible…

To wit, many story ideas that were work-shopped in those lush, think tank executive suites on Yawkey Way wound up on the cutting room floor, deemed far too perverse for public consumption—even amidst a full-fledged smear campaign:

After pounding grape soda with Jed Lowrie, D'Angelo Ortiz tries to crack a smile out of clubhouse recluse Jacoby Ellsbury (REUTERS).

Jed Lowrie: “I shared a can of grape soda with Big Papi’s little kid, D’Angelo, back in August…By the time batting practice rolled around, we were both too jittery to take any swings. My god, what a day.”

Jose Iglesias: “I’ve never seen The Cosby Show and, thus, have no direct knowledge of its impact on pop culture or the modern-day sitcom format. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Who’s Tom Werner?”

Scott Atchison: “I’m actually a 55-year-old man…”

Drew Sutton: “I gave Globe beat reporter Peter Abraham a pair of $300 headphones that I found sitting in my locker one day. I assumed they belonged to him because he never shuts up about the songs he listens to on his portable music player device.”

Alfredo Aceves: “I took showers in the clubhouse before and after games. Water conservation is for hippies.”

Jarrod Saltalamacchia: “That’s nothing. I specifically request double plastic bags when I buy stuff at the grocery store.”

Josh Reddick: “I told a couple reporters that I thought J.D. Drew was one of the most caring, hardest working veteran players on the team.”

Darnell McDonald: “I sat through an entire episode of NESN Daily…with the sound ON.”

Daniel Bard: “I got suckered into that Jordan’s Furniture Monster Hit promotion. You try staring at the same sign for four hours every night…”

Matt Albers: “I kept a stack of comic books out in the bullpen for those longer nights when every other reliever had already entered the game. Francona used to always tell me he was ‘saving’ me in case the game went 20-plus innings…None of our games ever went 20-plus innings.”

Lars Anderson: “I could lead you to 10 dead bodies buried in a storage shed near the Mexican border right now if I felt like it. Oh yeah, I also stole some canisters of Double Bubble out of the Fenway clubhouse for my own personal use.”

NOTE: The preceding anecdotes were provided to Fenway Pastoral by a nameless, faceless man who stands to profit monetarily by their legitimacy. Naturally, we scrambled to shed light on these facts as soon as possible. Our work here is clearly done.  

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Posted in Red Sox, Sports

If 2011 Red Sox starting pitchers were alcoholic beverages…

Posted on September 30, 2011 | Leave a comment

John Lackey – Guinness: Heavy, overrated and a seemingly much more viable option in mid-March than on the Fourth of July.

Josh Beckett – Budweiser Select: Your run-of-the-mill Clydesdale-esque, chest-beating America-red-white-and-blue stalwart who has captured the minds of us New Englanders and our undeniable Puritan roots. If Puritans drank, they would have appreciated this as a high-end lager capable of delivering an entire region to the Promised Land (again). Or at least it’s pretty to think so.

Jon Lester – Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA: An aggressive, acquired taste deserving of its accolades that alternates between being either delightfully intense or unwelcome and bitter, depending on the circumstances. Don’t hang with this brew all nine innings unless you want to wake up with a sore upper body and significant memory loss.

Clay Buchholz – Jeremiah Weed: One of those non-beer concoctions aimed at teenagers who want to hang around friends who drink beer without feeling like an outcast. But, yeah, it gets people drunk and any style points are in the eye of the beholder.

Tim Wakefield – Pabst Blue Ribbon: Sometimes the quality of a beer is transcended by a deference to the past that lets the drinker overlook otherwise important attributes like ‘taste.’ A bar commands a certain respect by merely having Pabst on tap and available for purchase during those (hopefully) rare moments when the time is right.

Andrew Miller – Miller Chill: It works in that backwards kind of way. Like when big fat guys are nicknamed ‘Tiny’ or  ‘Slim.’ Plus, Bud Light Lime is probably more up Kyle Weiland’s alley.

Daisuke Matsuzaka – Olde English 800: You bought it in a moment of weakness because you figured you could use the attention. Now, as your buddies stand there snickering, all you can do is look at it and wonder what in the world you were thinking. Yet even after all that apprehension, you might as well drink it down until the bottom fifth gets warm. No one will think less of you if you just pour that last little bit out on the ground. It’s finished. Maybe buy something a little more practical next time?

Erik Bedard – Merlot: Talk about a headache not worth having…

Fenway Pastoral would have done the same exercise for relievers. But frankly, finding any humor in their situation right now would feel like a few shots of Somerville-produced vodka just rolling around in a weakened, compromised stomach that is just waiting for that pivotal, highly-public moment in which to evacuate its contents.

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Posted in Red Sox, Sports

Diehard Red Sox fans forced to pay attention to baseball games before October

Posted on September 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

Local sports fans who assumed they could stop paying attention to baseball for a few weeks were understandably perturbed last weekend after the Devil Rays swept the Red Sox in Tampa, thus drawing hazardously close to Boston in the standings.

“That was an intense series between two of the best teams in baseball,” said Frank from Haverhill. “The games were filled with emotion, drama, the prospect of failure, questionable moves by the managers…I hated it. I can’t believe we have to go through the whole thing again this weekend.”

“I mean, really? When was the last time the Red Sox were playing meaningful games in September? Like, 20 years ago?” asked Tom from Chicopee. “I was hoping for a few weeks off before the start of the postseason.”

“It’s basically like the playoffs came a few weeks early. I was supposed to go to my sister’s wedding this weekend, but now I’m going to have to get stupid drunk with my friends and watch these games against the Devil Rays instead,” said Jon from Weymouth. “This is too important.”

Sally from Shrewsbury: “My coworker was asking me if I’d seen some game against the Blue Jays this week. The Blue Jays?!?! This isn’t how I expected to spend the month of September. I’d rather be following the paths of potential hurricanes and complaining about the fact that summer is over. Eventually, I just told the guy I had a little bit of diarrhea and walked away.”

Spending his last available sick day of the year to watch Wednesday’s matinee against Toronto, Michael from North Quincy employed a little sarcasm to help ease the sting of having to show up at Fenway Park on such a picture-perfect, sun-splashed afternoon. “Oh, yeah, not being able to call in hungover until 2012 was totally worth it to watch John Lackey throw those trademark dogshit sliders to the Blue Jays. I’m not bitter at all.”

With even just a couple of wins this weekend during their four-game series against Tampa at Fenway, the Red Sox would ease some of the pain of the last couple weeks. However, some fans say the damage is already done.

“The Sox play four more games against that team (the Devil Rays) this weekend?” Eric from Saugus replied. “That’s just ridiculous. I’m sick of how long us diehard fans have to wait for the real season to begin. Jeter sucks A-Rod!! Let’s go!”

“Usually, I have some extra time to do nice things like recycle and volunteer at inner-city youth recreation centers during those few weeks after Labor Day,” said Mary from Wellesley. “But I’m a little bit concerned about Daniel Bard’s arm slot right now, okay? Maybe next year…”

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Posted in Red Sox

Sources: Tim Wakefield no longer plans to thank God when he wins No. 200

Posted on August 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

Is Tim Wakefield the victim of some sort of divine act of statistical balancing?

While largely an arbitrary and meaningless statistic, knuckleballer Tim Wakefield’s career wins total is evidently garnering a fair amount of attention from the heavens.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, Red Sox clubhouse insiders confirmed Monday that Wakefield no longer plans to publicly tip his cap to the heavens upon winning his 200th major league game because the 45-year-old is thoroughly convinced The Man Upstairs clearly has lost interest in further assisting him in his journey to accumulate a gaudy, round number of wins.

After his fifth failed attempt at 200 in Kansas City, Wakefield could be heard in the visiting team’s clubhouse muttering under his breath, “This is bullshit. This is bullshit…” over and over.

“I think this is probably His way of punishing Tim for his past wizardry. Those fluttering pitches can really take some ungodly dips and turns. Wake’s stuff really hasn’t looked any different over the last month, but clearly there is a higher power at work, especially when the bullpen comes in to try and polish off the game,” said one scout.

Wake’s next shot at 200 comes on Friday night at Fenway Park against the Oakland Athletics.

“Clearly, Tim’s on his own on this one,” observed another scout. “Really, though, who can blame Him? The guy’s a freaking sorcerer when that pitch is working.”

Indeed, Wake’s been defying the odds for years, going against what was ostensibly His Plan for Tim’s career to peter out as an outfielder in the Pittsburgh Pirates minor league system in the early 1990s. By developing the pitch, Wakefield followed the path of guys such as The Niekro Brothers and Charlie Hough–perfectly innocent former major leaguers who just so happen to have names that sound like they could have moonlighted as brutal serial killers.

A local historian: “If olde-tymey Puritans still lived in New England, they’d be Yankees fans…No way they’d root for a team with Tim on it. The initial settlers of Massachusetts were firm believers in long work days, fear of a higher power and violent pitching motions that put extreme stress on the shoulder and elbow. To them, the knuckleball would have been akin to sleeping for more than three hours each night. And, of course, the fact that a speedy man of Native American descent in center field tracks down many of the well-struck baseballs thrown by Wakefield would not have aided the pitcher’s cause if our forefathers had any say.”

Indeed, it appears that God has clearly enjoyed toying with Wakefield over his last five starts—even going as far as allowing him to take a no-hitter into the fourth inning in his last start at Fenway Park on August 3 against Cleveland. The first Indians hit was a 400-foot home run that landed in the visitor’s bullpen.

“Wake is just sick of it,” said one observer. “The mental anguish, the constant questions from reporters – he’s tired of it all.”

Still, some theologians believe the saga accentuates some important issues in the ongoing debate between the doctrines associated with intelligent design and Darwinism.

“This certainly gets down to the crux of the matter,” said one professor. “I would point out that Wakefield does have 177 career losses…So perhaps there is an equally strong argument that some mystic entity still has a say in where the knucklers flutter, so to speak. Maybe there is some sort of universal regression to the mean occurring right now. Or, maybe, we just need to come up with a better way to express the value of starting pitchers…”

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Posted in Red Sox, Sports

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Clay Buchholz’s Love Doctor Mailbag: August Stretch Run Edition

Posted on August 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

Frontline Sox starter Clay Buchholz may not pitch again in 2011 after being diagnosed with a stress fracture in his back. His potential loss for the season is a significant blow to the team and could mark the end of yet another solid year on the mound for the young right-hander. Somehow, he managed to answer some pressing questions from readers in between medical appointments and rehab sessions.

Back when he was still single, sometimes ladies' man Clay Buchholz had to get a bit creative, as shown above, in remembering if he had been with a woman the night before (AP Photo).

Clay,

What is with all this “moral compass” talk being shoved down our throats by the local media?

-Jeannie from Foxboro

I don’t know, Jeannie. I’ve been to The Moral Compass, if that’s what you mean. It’s a strip club off Route 128 and the ladies who work there are fantastic. I’m always treated like royalty there and the women are super-ethical about giving you what you pay for.

Clay,

Kathryn Tappen is headed to the NHL network. Jade McCarthy finally admitted she’s seven months pregnant and moving out of the state. And rumor has it that Heidi Watney might be leaving after the 2011 season, too. Is it just me or are the NESN studios going to be a real sausagefest next year?

-Bill from N. Attleboro

That sounds terrible, bro. I’m glad I don’t have to watch the games on TV very often. I guess I’ve got another reason to plug away at my rehab so I can get back on the field. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it. John Henry seems like the kind of dude who’s willing to open up his wallet if that’s what it takes to get some good talent on the field and in the booth. Not having a beautiful baby touting NESN Daily or whatever else the channel programs in between Sox games is like going to a strip club that doesn’t have liquor or cigarettes. It’s more than just window dressing. Those dames need to be an integral part of the viewing experience.

Clay,

Have you seen that raunchy video that was shot in 1995 by an ESPN cameraman that’s been making the rounds on the Internets? This dude and another girl are totally groping this chick while they’re standing at the railing of the roof box pretending to pay attention to the ballgame. It’s almost as provocative as anything you see on stage at Centerfolds…

-Mike from Quincy

Yeah, Mike, that was pretty crazy. I’d expect that type of thing to happen all the time in empty outfield bleachers in minor league parks. But that much rubbing and tugging at Fenway Park not involving Julio Lugo is pretty shocking. It’s always funny to look back on how baggy people wore their clothes 15 years ago, but you gotta hand it to that chick: she set herself up for easier access and those two people reaped the benefits of a high-school-style threesome. Really, though, the most troubling part of the video is that neither broad appeared to have any tattoos or interesting piercings. JC Penney denim shorts don’t count as any sexy kind of freaky in my book…

Clay,

I’ve got a problem. I’ve been seeing this girl that I met during study hall last spring and we’ve been going out this whole summer. With school starting up again soon, we’re probably going to be an official couple and all. But lately she’s been pressuring me to do something that I don’t really think I’m into. She really wants watch me eat one of those new tuna salad sandwiches from Dunkin’ Donuts. I just don’t know, though. I mean, have you ever done anything like that? Those things don’t even look appetizing when they’re done up all nice and pretty on TV. I can’t imagine what one actually tastes like…

- Bryce from Salem

That’s easily the most disgusting question I’ve ever received in one of these mailbags, Bryce.

Clay,

The state’s unemployment rate is finally heading in the right direction. Have you noticed any discernible changes in staffing levels at strip clubs?

-Patrick from Winthrop

It’s interesting, Patrick. It actually seems like the pickings are slimmer than usual. I heard a bunch of dames went back to their day jobs working at hedge funds and private equity firms. If it gets much worse, the broad-to-dude ratio is going to reach dire levels, like almost as bad as the NESN studios…

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Ill-conceived pun on Boston.com leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth

Posted on July 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

This is what happens when headline writers cram poorly constructed puns down readers’ throats.

In Kyle Weiland’s major league debut on Sunday, he was tossed from the ballgame in the fourth inning. Other strange things happened as well – a veritable salad of events, including a home run from Marco Scutaro. The whole of the game itself could be considered the lettuce while numerous ejections of players and managers on both sides served as the proverbial tomatoes, onions, cucumbers and sliced carrot.

Thus, the Boston Globe’s online story two days later headlined A Tossed salad for Weiland, was hastily changed to the less suggestive – albeit as perverse on a grammatical level – Lot’s going on in Kyle Weiland’s debut.

There is probably a pretty good joke that could be made here, especially in light of the fact that the gaffe came on the same day the site devoted an entire article to an interview with a Fenway Park hot dog vendor. But unplanting our tongues from our cheeks for a little while suddenly doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.

To be completely Ernest, the whole thing has left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

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Posted in Red Sox, The Boston Globe

John Lackey to ownership: ‘Can’t we get some better-fielding ball girls?’

Posted on July 8, 2011 | Leave a comment

In this Boston Herald file photo, a perturbed, sleep-deprived John Lackey storms off the mound and can be clearly seen verbally berating a ball girl.

The frustration in John Lackey’s beet-red face was all too visible during his first start of the homestand.

In the first inning, a foul ball caromed off the padding on the wall that juts out at the corner of the left-field box seats, landing 30 feet in front of Josh Reddick. Twenty-five seconds later, Reddick had finally retrieved the ball and returned to his position.

In the third, a twisting liner short-hopped the cement bottom of the wall near the camera well on the first-base line, rolling right past a 16-year-old local varsity softball star and settling into no-man’s land in shallow right-center. Forty seconds later, play resumed and Lackey was finally allowed to throw his next pitch.

Certainly, some of the more surehanded, veteran ball boys and girls around the majors may have scooped up the same chances with relative ease, sparing Lackey the disruptions. But these are the hazards of employing high school youths from the Greater Boston area to man the scarce foul territory that horseshoes around the baseball diamond inside Fenway Park.

Normally a pillar of stoicism on the mound, Lackey is finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the deficiencies of the ball girls and boys stationed down the left-field and right-field foul lines at Fenway Park.

Earlier this week, the pitcher finally broke his silence.

“I’m not trying to show anyone up, but I mean, c’mon. These kids are pretty much just waving at these balls as they carom off the padding of the walls into the outfield,” he told reporters during batting practice earlier this week.

“As a pitcher, it can really affect my concentration when I have to hold the ball and wait for Darnell McDonald or J.D. Drew to retrieve some errant foul ball that makes it into the outfield.”

Baseball scouts agree that foul ball caroms in Fenway are a significant problem – particularly when Lackey is on the hill. Opponents have routinely been peppering both fair territory and foul ground with loud, ringing hits off the righthander for the better part of his Red Sox tenure.

“The line drive rate tends to be pretty high when major league hitters are seeing 91-mph fastballs grooved into the upper-middle part of home plate,” said one scout. “If Jose Canseco or Bo Jackson were still in the league, I’m convinced we would be talking about some gruesome fatality in the left field stands during a Lackey start.”

Lackey, however, refuses to let the team-chosen ball girls and boys off the hook.

“They are on a major league field and they’re wearing gloves – they need to catch the baseballs. It’s not complicated. I can tell from where I’m standing on the mound that these plays are routine. The team had some honorary ball boy here last month and I swear his UZR must have been like negative-a-hundred…pathetic.”

The pitcher was understandably not interested in acknowledging the small sample size or doling out any leniency based on gender.

“Look, these kids are afraid to get in front of the baseball. They don’t respect the fundamentals. I’ve never seen one of these kids leave his or her feet to make a play on a ball. They sit in chairs all game, they don’t look grounders into their gloves. They are the most lackadaisical fielders I’ve ever seen.”

Club officials balked at the idea of making a trade before the July 31 deadline to fill the holes Lackey speaks of with such rabid disdain.

“At this point, we think it would be best – given the amount of money we have invested elsewhere – to continue to develop some of the younger ball girls and ball boys within the organizational ranks,” said ever-diplomatic general manager Theo Epstein. “If another club were willing to, say, absorb the remaining three years of John Lackey’s contract, we might have more wiggle room for a deal and our outfielders could probably stop worrying about retrieving errant foul balls in the middle of at bats.”

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Fans in box seats who don’t fist-roll are self-centered jerks

Posted on June 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

Back before the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years, practically no one important wanted anything to do with the team. In fact, as recently the late 1980s, Jerry Remy’s Bar & Grill on Boylston St. looked nothing like it does today as it was nothing but a modest industrial mill employing roughly 50 day laborers.

After work, those same blue-collar millworkers got soused on cheap, locally brewed lager and sat behind home plate for a price equivalent to a few hours’ wages. They yelled and cheered for guys like Ellis Burks, Jody Reed and Mike Greenwell; they stood for two-strike counts; and they fist-rolled.

Oh, did they ever fist-roll.

That jarring motion of rolling forearms just inside the pitcher’s peripheral vision resulted in uncharacteristic loss of strike-zone command, disorientation and, in many cases, projectile vomiting due to nausea.

Think Alfredo Aceves’ five consecutive walks in Tuesday night’s loss to the Padres was a bizarre display of pitching yips? Well, Fenway fans rolled their fists so furiously during one game in 1990 that a confounded Chuck Finley threw an entire inning with his right arm even though he was predominantly left-handed. The Red Sox scored 11 runs on only two hits.

But that was back when Bostonians used to make things. Back before Everything Went Corporate.

The Red Sox won it all in 2004 and businesses cashed in. Shortly thereafter, perhaps only coincidentally but most likely not at all, fans’ gamesmanship officially died—grown men were suddenly deeply offended by mostly meaningless hand gestures; passive aggressive T-shirts professing various degrees of suckitude replaced half-joking (but mostly good-natured) death threats aimed at rat-bastard Yankees players and coaches; parents stopped buying their kids multiple bags of Cool Ranch Doritos and jars of peanut butter to snack on during doubleheaders.

In a few blinks of the eye, the Red Sox fan base has gone soft. The fire is officially gone. The old-tymey tenacity has been replaced by lukewarm ‘Let’s Go Red Sox’ chants.

It doesn’t have to be like this, of course. In a cruel twist of irony, the last glimmer of hope resides in the people that sit in the box seats behind home plate.

If Fenway’s well-to-do fans can routinely go to the trouble to pull out their cell phones to make sure their best friend from the third grade knows they have seats in the fifth row, there’s no reason why they can’t go the extra mile and churn their fists at a rapid rate of speed while the opposing team’s pitcher is on the mound trying to hone in on home plate.

As denizens of the field box level, these fans enjoy the convenience of never having to leave their seats to purchase beer and concessions. Aramark servers cater to their growingly sophisticated needs throughout the game, affording their full attention to the baseball game and leaving their forearms in perfect position for rolling their fists in an obnoxiously fast circular motion.

Sure, this fist-rolling tactic may sound childish and embarrassingly stupid. But anyone who claims they aren’t interested in the Red Sox winning a ballgame because Justin Verlander got a serious case of vertigo after staring at a bunch of spinning forearms in the box seats isn’t being honest to themselves. As fans of a team that has lost hundreds of at-bats over the last four-plus years from J.D. Drew as a direct result of vertigo, can’t we honestly say we have it coming to us? It’s about time opposing pitchers from around the league start to once again fear pitching in Fenway Park.

There’s no reason why the back of the pitcher’s mound shouldn’t look like some puke-laden L Street sidewalk the day after St. Patrick’s Day.

Of course, results may be mixed. For example, fist-rolling could prove counter-intuitive against pitchers such as Kansas City Royals ace Jeff Francis, who sucks enough in his own right. But generally speaking, it is not unreasonable to expect that nearly every visiting pitcher who takes to the mound will be visibly and hilariously affected.

The time has come to return Fenway Park to its glory days. After some lean, dark days following Boston’s two World Series wins in 2004 and 2007, the fans have finally returned—interested, engaged, “All In!!” at long last. The climb back to .500 after a 2-10 start was long and arduous. Now that the Sox have fulfilled their preseason billing, We Won’t Rest…nay, We Shan’t Rest…until the fist-rolling returns.

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Posted in Red Sox

Our City of Bruins…Jerseys

Posted on June 17, 2011 | Leave a comment

Oh, look: Everyone’s sick of Boston fans, again.

Complaining and debating the worthiness of groups of sports fans comes with the territory any time a city is vying for a title—long before any trophies are handed out or banners are raised. Things only get worse once a championship is in the books.

Frankly, it feels flattering to be scrutinized so closely, to be loathed for being momentarily happy, to be repeatedly recognized as torch-bearers of our forefathers, originators of a new pronunciation for the word ‘fuck.’

But really, all this self-aggrandizing psychoanalysis of Boston sports fans is tiresome.

Perhaps the most amusing of all the recent anti-Boston viewpoints came last week in Jonah Keri’s article for GQ in which he informed Bruins fans that the majority of North America was rooting for the Canucks. Setting aside what “majority” means in this case (more than 2 percent, hopefully?), the rant itself was a complete waste of a talented writer’s time as it took generalization (a largely inaccurate one at that) to an embarrassing extreme just to arrive at a painfully obvious point:

No one in Canada wants you to win, of course. Not when a Canadian team might bring the Cup back home for the first time in 18 years.

But U.S. hockey fans aren’t behind you either. There’s none of that (slightly weird) national pride here. Flyers fans hate Boston. Rangers fans hate Boston. Casual hockey fans in Boise or Mobile are, at best, indifferent about Boston.

Ultimately, Keri should have known that absolutely zero Bruins fans read GQ. They’re too busy picking fistfights with the guy who just cut them in line at Dunkin’ Donuts and settling old grudges from their days in Kindahgahten.

Speaking of which, Mr. Destructo laid out a well-written, deeply analytical piece about Boston’s “Dynastic Sports Paupers”:

What has made the Boston sports fan so exceptional and objectionable is the willingness to cloak bullying in the mantle of suffering — as if the kid who pinned you to the floor in gym class and whaled on your face kept sputtering out words between tears and rained-down blows, saying, “I hit you… because I resent… your wholeness… Violence is something… I learned… from my dad.”

Grantland’s Chris Jones went the other way with the hatred by essentially condemning Bruins fans as incapable of enjoying a Stanley Cup as much as any fan base in the entire country of championship-starved Canada:

Winning might not feel possible this broken-glass morning; it might feel as though Tim Thomas will be smiling at us through our television screens forever. But it must happen, even if it’s not for another 86 years. Some year, however distant from now, the Cup will be ours again. And however happy Boston felt last night, however happy that city feels this morning, we’ll feel that a thousand times more, and we’ll feel it together.

Let’s go Toronto. Let’s go Montreal. Let’s go Ottawa, Edmonton, and Calgary.

Let’s go Vancouver.

Let’s go Winnipeg.

Now, that is a prototype display of unjustified superiority that has repeatedly been projected onto the Boston fan base over the last decade-plus. (The odd paradox of the article’s primary sentiment somehow being both provincial and anti-provincial at the same time is another matter.)

The problem with all these discourses is that their authors clearly either, a) associate on a friendly, informal basis with people who root for these teams, or, b) willfully consume media expressing all those feelings they seem to so rabidly resent (in other words, they read Bill Simmons columns). Otherwise, how in the world do they have such in-depth knowledge of Bostonians’ inner feelings?

For example, Kissing Suzy Kolber took the easiest of routes in mocking the lowest common denominator by quoting Dan Shaughnessy’s front page story in the Boston Globe as definitive evidence that Boston fans are douches. The problem is that even some of the most despicable locals got tired of Shaughnessy’s act years ago. In fact, these days the sole utility of Curly-Haired Boyfriend’s columns is the unfailing ability to raise the cackles of people looking for reasons to dislike fans of Boston’s professional sports teams.

This isn’t to imply that Simmons is even approaching Shaughnessy levels. But is it even necessary to point out that a 40-year-old man who still watches MTV reality television doesn’t exactly speak for any sort of status quo?

The beauty of the modern media age is choice. Nobody is obligated to subscribe to the @SullysFackinBeantownBeatdown Twitter feed if they don’t feel like it. Nobody is obligated to tune into the local news to watch a bunch of yahoos pontificating on which of the recent titles feels most significant to them, personally. That is a painfully stupid debate to digest even when one resides in the same city and cheers for the same teams.

So, really, by all means, change the channel. Avert your eyes. Navigate away from any and all gushing columns about what a great ride it was for some fan base other than your own. Stop watching obnoxiously low-quality YouTube videos made by fans who don’t cheer for the same teams you do.

The Bruins parade is on Saturday and things could get pretty ugly. Some of the fans in this town are so jaded and spoiled that they didn’t even bother destroying any property on Wednesday night. In fact, some of the same people will probably wind up sitting in Fenway Park tomorrow night still wearing their brand new Tim Thomas jerseys.

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