Red Sox Backlash

It's just a sock, really, a sock.

In a journalistic sense it is never a good idea to take both sides of an argument, but on the same token it isn't really a good idea to display a total lack of objectivity which I do every day, so why not?

In the days since the ring and banner ceremony at Fenway I've heard a lot of Sox bashing, telling the nation of fans to move on and that the baseball watching world has had enough of the '04 Sox. I completely understand.

If you live in Milwaukee and cheer loyally for the Brewers, first of all God help you, and second you shouldn't be subjected to 24 hours of Red Sox celebration on ESPN. That makes great sense, the coverage should b oeverwhelming and suffocating in Massachusetts, but certainly it could be toned down a bit in other parts of the country.

However, to say that Red Sox nation is rubbing this championship in the collective faces of MLB fans is ridiculous. If anyone is rubbing it in anyone's face it's ESPN and the other national news networks who are choosing to cover these stories with such great vigor.

The ultimate irony in this story is that the inspiration for this post came from today's "Daily Quickie" on ESPN. com. Listen Dan Shanoff, your employer is the one who runs pieces on life long Red Sox fans who happened to be in vegetative states during the playoff run. It is this same employer who covered the entirety of the celebration nationwide when all they were required to air was the game. And finally, it is your employer who insists on re-running the ring ceremony over and over again on ESPN Classic and ESPN News. What do you think happened NESN hacked the ESPN broadcast and forced viewers all over the country to watch the proceedings in HD? No, so turn your backlash inward and probably upward towards the ESPN executive offices and stop bitching about something that comes from your media outlet.

I feel your pain baseball land, if I weren't a Red Sox fan I would not care in the least about Johnny Pesky and Yaz running the flag up the center field pole, and to be honest seeing it once was enough even for me. However, the people at ESPN know what they're doing, and if they thought it was a good idea to saturate the market with Red Sox ring ceremony coverage they must have had a pretty good idea that someone out there was going to watch, even if it wasn't you. If you no longer find this team endearing and inspiring and now find them annoyingly over exposed that's alright, just change the channel.

Now will come the inevitable Yankee comparisons. "When the Yankees win the whole country doesn't stop and watch them get their rings." "When the Yankees win they give their rings to homeless guys on the street because they know it's all about winning again." "When the Yankees win George makes them use their rings for batting practice to show them how much he cares about last season." So what? The Yankees conduct themselves like a mechanical heartless Nazi regime and the Red Sox have conducted themselves like a slightly over sentimental ending to a movie. No two organizations are the same and they ways in which they celebrate success will obviously be different. Not to mention we beat them, after so many years of Babe Ruth, Bucky Fucking Dent, Aaron Fucking Boone, and all the others, we beat them and we earned it.

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Enough of all that, now onto another overblown and unnecessary national debate caused by the Sox ceremony, the scandal of Derek Lowe and Dave Roberts wearing Red Sox jerseys to receive their rings.

This is not a big deal. Derek Lowe was here for the better part of a decade in various capacities. He started, he relieved, he closed, he beat the Yankees in game 7 in the Bronx to vanquish 86 years of demons, he won all three series clinching games. He was a part of the greatest baseball story of our lifetime and he deserved to wear his former team's colors one last time. Lowe was accepting the ring as a member of the 2004 Red Sox, not as a visitor from the 2005 Dodgers. Monday was about last season, not about loyalties forged or broken in the offseason. Ditto for Dave Roberts.

I know that this is just more Red Sox backlash and that people are looking for reasons to hate them now, 86 of them if you read Dan Schoenfield's column, but let this one go, it's not news.

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I'm sure many of you saw the picture I have above on the front page of ESPN.com today, with the caption, "Schilling may auction the sock." Are they joking?

No, Darren Rovell and Page 2 actually published an article about bizarre collectors and what they seek.

Now if you want to talk about over saturation I'll jump freely onto this bandwagon. There are playoff races in the NBA, steroid suspensions in baseball, the NFL draft in less than 2 weeks, and a whole host of legitimate sports stories that could be the lead on the homepage of the largest sports media outlet in the world. But what do they decide to go with? Bloody sock collectors.

And ironically, the sock is not even mentioned in the article, not once. So, they use a Red Sox star, suggest that he may sell a bloodied sock in an online auction, which is false, all to get people to read an article about Luis Gonzalez's old chewed gum being sold for $10,000 (yes that is the real price). Now that's a gross misuse of the current fervor going around about the Red Sox, and who the hell wants to read about this anyway?

People think Red Sox fans are crazy? This is beyond....