ESPN.com - From a distance, Boston seems half-baked

ESPN.com: ESPN

Tuesday, September 4, 2001
Updated: September 5, 3:34 PM ET
From a distance, Boston seems half-baked

By Ray Ratto
Special to ESPN.com

The NFL season begins Sunday, and the Baltimore Ravens test the vaunted HBO Jinx.

Fresno State is still being slighted by the poll voters for being, well, in Fresno.


	Pedro Martinez says he may want to shut it down for the season.

The U.S. Open continues to bore us into catatonia.

Thus, America's attention is riveted, as ever, on New England's shame, the Boston Red Sox.

They have already been good and properly mocked for firing manager Jimy Williams, guilty of being mocked, ignored and undercut while the team was winning. But hey, it's the Red Sox. Silly things happen.

But the beauty of the Red Sox is that they never leave bad enough alone. Monday, for example, they fired acting pitching coach John Cumberland after 18 days on the job, apparently for not finding a way to make David Cone throw better than a perfect game Sunday night.

Cumberland had taken the job vacated by Joe Kerrigan, who took the job vacated by Williams. Since that time, the Red Sox have lost 11 of 16 games, including eight in a row, the last five of which saw the Red Sox pitchers allow nine entire runs.

Yeah, John Cumberland. What a total bastard.

But this isn't about John Cumberland, or even Joe Kerrigan. It isn't even about Dan Duquette, whose reputation has deteriorated to the point that he makes Kevin Malone seem like Branch Rickey.

But we're getting closer.

True, the prototypical Red Sox fan is for the most part an annoying little screwball, celebrating their team's failures for their failures' sake and then trying to pass off their retelling as literature.

Not all Red Sox fans are like this, mind you. Some of them are normal, devoted folks who just want the damned team to win something before they die, look at the current burst of cheap operatics and wish they could care about the Patriots instead.

But because the Red Sox are for sale, the current management is stuck in a grisly stasis in which no act is too embarrassing, degrading or stupid.

Say, like firing John Cumberland for not further screwing up a pitching staff that was already running on fumes.

The Sox are now nine games behind the Yankees, and deservedly so. They are also eight games behind the A's in the wild-card race, and would also be behind the Angels and Twins if they weren't too busy heading down their own gurglers.

Not only is there no hope of thinking it will get better for them, most of America is hoping it only gets worse. They lost three games over the weekend to the defending champions, 3-1, 2-1 and 1-0, and the pitching coach gets slagged.

And presumably Carl Everett got his contract renegotiated for breaking up Mike Mussina's perfect game.

So we who do not live in New England are trying not to be unkind to the loyal but unpretentious Red Sox fan who deserves infinitely better than he or she are getting, but are aching to wish the team nothing but humiliation and shame until the team is sold and the front office scattered to the nine vectors, doomed to work in the hammer department at Home Depot until the Devil Rays win the World Series.

Based on what the Red Sox have created for us already, shame is pretty hard for them to come by.

It also behooves the rest of us to look at our little teams and remember that, no matter how bad it gets, it can always get worse.

The Devil Rays nearly bankrupted themselves. The Twins are playing .250 baseball since the All-Star break. The Expos are averaging 8,200 fans per game. The Orioles are one Cal Ripken retirement away from being unwatchable. The Royals, Reds, Brewers and Tigers are irrelevant.

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And they're all better off than the Red Sox. They may be losing, but they're losing with more dignity. They're not firing the pitching coach just to see the look on his face, for example. ”

And they're all better off than the Red Sox. They may be losing, but they're losing with more dignity. They're not firing the pitching coach just to see the look on his face, for example.

Will it get any better? For this team, who knows. It is rare these days for men who spend $400 million on a play toy like a baseball team not to want to be stupid in public now and again -- and this may be the time to salute the Mariners' ownership for doing none of those things. Thus, the Red Sox may end up with someone like Jeffrey Loria or Vince Naimoli, Tom Hicks or Peter Angelos, Disney or Fox, who hasn't got this ownership thing quite down yet. They may even end up with someone who thinks that Duquette is doing a hell of a fine job, although that would imply that the new owner is a secret Yankee fan.

In the meantime, the Red Sox have their third pitching coach of the season, and still have plenty of other scapegoats on staff that they can toss in the fireplace between now and the day they are eliminated.

Or passed by Toronto in the AL East, which ever comes first.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.