It was Boston.com’s Eric Wilbur’s turn with the ol’ Red Sox Chicken torch today.
In “Red Sox sweeping regret under the rug” an edgy, primed-up Eric Wilbur takes his best shot:
No more jokes about chicken and beer. We’re talking about the health and nutrition of players here, people. Don’t you feel badly now that you laughed all winter about the human players’ right to eat? Why do you feel the need to pile on a laughingstock? Let’s see you go three hours without greasing up your hands and pounding some swill.
Some have opined that the “chicken and beer” story line was simply symbolic of how this team tanked down the stretch. That’s unfair. Have you ever had Popeye’s and Bud Light together? That’s a heart-stopping recipe not to be denied to anybody.
Reaction: Get some, Wilbur! Get some!
Literary devices employed: Thick sarcasm, audience-engaging rhetorical questioning, the daring use of subject/verb agreement.
Takeaway: Wilbur appears to be initiating an attempt to lead Adrian Gonzalez (the team’s best player) toward the woodshed for actually giving a reporter the time of day by issuing a benign answer to a question about something that happened five months ago. Boston.com is essentially the graveyard in which insightful baseball analysis goes to die … before being memorialized in 50-page gallery format. Wilbur is no stranger in a strange land. Here, he proves himself something of an apprentice Masserotti, getting paid by the pound to shovel low-grade fertilizer onto the site’s Red Sox content farm.
Final Grade: D-minus.
Second in a series celebrating the Boston sports media’s refusal to abandon a dead storyline. Please send submissions to fenwaypastoral@gmail.com.
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