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Never Touch a Hot Stove (League)

I love baseball. The Red Sox could wind up changing my mind.

Not that it's their fault. The Sox are a perfectly acceptable major league team, one that's given me much personal and professional pleasure in the 30-some years I've lived in the Boston area. Most of those happy occasions however, have come in the summertime. You know, when baseball is actually played.

In the winter, the Sox are a nuisance. Or rather, the incessant attempts of the franchise and its media enablers, a group containing every outlet in New England, to make the Sox the biggest sports story of the day every day are a nuisance. What right-thinking citizen wouldn't prefer spending an afternoon looking for a Back Bay parking space at Christmastime rather than listening to good Sox trade talk on WEEI?

The signing of Japanese pitcher Daiseke Matsuzaka was legitimate offseason news. Given the state of local, national, and international affairs, Matsuzaka's arrival for a Boston press conference did NOT warrant a front-page photo in the both the Globe and Herald the next day. That was a bush league manuever suited for a bush league town.

Of course, the signing of Matsuzaka was very suspenseful. Uh-huh. Not even the Devil Rays could lose an auction where they were the only bidder. Not even Scott Boras was going to miss a chance to triple his client's income on a mere principle (especially not Boras, in fact). The baseball business can be a soap opera at times. This wasn't one of 'em.

The story I hate most each December are the folks lined for tickets at Fenway Park. "Law of Supply and Demand Still Works" should not lead the 6 o'clock news, and always does.

Because I listened to the Thursday night NFL game on my car radio, it was still tuned to WEEI Saturday morning. Now let's consider the following non-Red Sox sports news of that particular day.

1. The state university had lost a national championship football game.
2. The only Division 1-A college football school in New England was in an emergency head coaching search.
3. The local NBA franchise was in the midst of a winning streak surpring most everyone, especially me and probably itself.
4. The local NFL team was coming off its worst loss of the season, and its All-Pro quarterback had called out his teammates in public.
5. For the prurient, the same All-Pro QB had just broken up with his longtime movie star girlfriend.

A vertiable banquet of sports news, isn't it? Care to guess what Larry Johnson and Craig Mustard were discussing that fine morning? Should the Sox bring back Mark Loretta to play second base, that's what. On the Globe's front sports page, news the Sox had signed a couple of relievers was above the fold sharing equal billing with UMass' loss to Appalachian State.

Enough! The endless Sox-driven drivel of the offseason has got to be reined in. It's bad enough in spring training, but now's a time for visions of sugarplums, or at least pigskins, to dance in our heads, not visions of journeymen middle infielders.

Each December, Christmas cookies remind us that too much of a good thing palls. Baseball news is no different. The more babble a team generates in the winter, the more violently adverse the reaction if it falls apart in August.

As a former professional journalist, I make the following plea for sanity. Martin Baron, Kevin Convey, I beg of you. When February rolls around, PLEASE don't run photos of the damned equipment truck leaving for Fort Myers.

Not on page one, anyway.

posted by Michael Gee @ 11:04 AM