DHL Dan CCLXXVI - Forgiven?

In this week's Picked Up Pieces column, Shank wonders if certain (i.e., juiced) baseball players will make it into the Hall of Fame this time around:

Sports seem to be in an all-forgiving mood. Is the Baseball Hall of Fame next? And other thoughts.

Picked-up pieces while wondering if folks at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame will take action if HOFer Chauncey Billups goes to prison for his alleged role in a gambling and money laundering scheme.

Probably not. O.J. Simpson was never kicked out of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. As far as I can tell, Alan Eagleson is the only person expunged from any of our four major sports Halls of Fame. Bobby Orr’s corrupt agent resigned from the Hockey Hall in 1998, shortly before the Hall’s board was set to expel him.

What about baseball, you ask?

At this hour, baseball seems to be all about forgiveness.

Look no further than the Fenway Park dugout. Alex Cora is one of the great managers in Red Sox history and his unfortunate role in the 2017 Astros’ cheating scandal seems to have gone away. MLB suspended Cora (a bench coach then with the Astros) and Houston manager A.J. Hinch for a year, but both are back in the dugout with playoff teams and nobody really brings it up anymore.

Swell.

So, how are we going to feel if next summer in Cooperstown we’ve got Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, and Carlos Beltrán on stage holding Hall of Fame plaques?

I'm not sure myself, but a connection, albeit a strong one, is not a determination by some governing body or a conviction in court. Should it still bar these guys from HOF consideration? It'll come down to the 'ol character clause and how stongly it's employed.

Instant Classic

Shank wraps up last week's World Series matchup between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays; Games 6 and 7 were the best games I can remember in a long time:

Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series Game 7 was one for the ages, as well as one for all ages

It’s been several days and some of us are still talking about the seventh game of the World Series that unfolded late Saturday in Toronto.

In the ninth inning alone we saw Miguel Rojas’s (zero hits in a full month, 57 home runs in 12 seasons) unlikely homer . . . Toronto pinch runner Isiah Kiner-Falefa called out as he slid across home plate when he should have run straight up . . . Andy Pages making a Series-saving catch seconds after being inserted for defense. And there was so much more.

When baseball is played well in high-stakes games, it provides indelible moments frozen in time, easily summoned decades later.

Even though the 1975 Series was a half-century ago, Baby Boom New Englanders still carry on as if the thing ended last weekend. And why not? That epic had Looie’s shutout, Armbrister’s bunt, Fisk’s homer, Dewey’s catch . . . oh, and what do you think would have happened if Darrell Johnson hadn’t pinch hit for Jim Willoughby in the bottom of the eighth of Game 7?

Make the column about Boston - that's our Shank!

DHL Dan CCLXXV - MVP! MVP!

In this week's Picked Up Pieces column, is Shank a week or two away from jumping on the Drake Maye bandwagon?

NFL MVP Drake Maye? Probably not, but his candidacy is no joke, and other thoughts.

Picked-up pieces while remembering days when Notre Dame at Boston College was a big deal around here . . .

⋅ Drake Maye for MVP?

Patriots fans certainly believe. They love the Drake. They were chanting “MVP!” late in the third quarter of last Sunday’s rout of the Browns at Gillette. Days later, oddsmakers listed Maye as the third-leading candidate for MVP, trailing only two-time winner Patrick Mahomes and last year’s winner, Josh Allen.

Count me as one who doesn’t think it’s going to happen. It’s fun, and a far cry from this time last year, when Maye had three starts under his belt for a rudderless, 2-6 team bound for 4-13, and a head coach firing. The Patriots have had only one NFL MVP in their history: Tom Brady, who won the award in 2007, ’10, and ’17. Boston Patriots Gino Cappelletti and Jim Nance were AFL MVPs in 1964 and ’66, respectively.

The NFL MVP tends to be a quarterback. Peyton Manning is the league’s MVP king with five trophies, followed by Aaron Rodgers (four), and Johnny Unitas, Brett Favre, Jim Brown, and Brady, who won three each. Vikings tackle Alan Page (1971) and Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor (1986) are the only defensive players to cop the award since the Associated Press made it a regular thing in 1957.

If the Patriots keep on winning, Shank's singing a different tune in about a month.

DHL Dan CCLXXIV - Driving Ms. Russell

This looks like an interesting column:

Bill Russell’s daughter had never met Bob Cousy. Until now.

WORCESTER — It’s Sunday morning in mid-October and Worcester is looking unusually colorful and picturesque.

I am driving Karen Kenyatta Russell to Bob Cousy’s home because we’re new social media friends, and she texted that she was going to be in town for the Celtics’ season opener, mentioning, “I am going to try to see Mr. Cousy.”

So, I am driving Ms. Russell to meet Mr. Cousy.

Russell and Cousy are New England sports royalty. Bill Russell and Bob Cousy were pillars of the greatest dynasty in American professional sports, built by Red Auerbach.

Karen Russell is the 63-year-old daughter of Bill Russell, who died three years ago at the age of 88, 53 years after winning his 11th championship in his 13th and final season with the Boston Celtics.

Bob Cousy is the 97-year-old last survivor of the first Celtics championship, won in 1956-57, which happens to be the year Russell brought his talents to Boston.

Cousy and Russell are NBA Hall of Famers, NBA MVPs (Russell five times!), Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients, have their own statues, and won six championships together before Cousy retired in 1963, one year after Karen Russell was born.

DHL Dan CCLXXIII - Looking Back

With the Boston Red Sox no longer in the playoffs, Shank looks back a half century:

Why are we still looking back at the 1975 World Series 50 years later? Because it’s who we are, and other thoughts.

Picked-up pieces while blissfully remembering what life was like when the World Series was here 50 years ago this weekend . . .

⋅ A half-century later, the October 1975 and 2025 calendars align perfectly.

Game 4 in Cincinnati was Wednesday, Oct. 15. That’s when Luis Tiant whirled and twirled for 163 pitches and went the distance in a 5-4 series-squaring victory. The Reds’ Game 5 win was Thursday, Oct. 16. Then everybody flew back to Boston for Game 6 on Saturday.

In October 1975, Kevin Paul Dupont and I were 22 years old, covering high school football for the Globe for the princely sum of $35 per game. Through the kindness of veteran Associated Press sports editor Dave O’Hara, we also were quote-runners at Red Sox games at Fenway Park ($7 per game), which is how we happened to be at the Park Plaza for the food-and-booze World Series hospitality feast on Friday, Oct. 17, the eve of Game 6 — originally scheduled as Bill Lee vs. Jack Billingham. There was a threat of rain all weekend.

While inhaling our free Lobster Newburg, we learned that the Globe was looking for Peter Gammons’s World Series notebook. Nobody on Morrissey Boulevard could find Gammons and we were tasked with cobbling together some notes for the next morning’s paper.

DHL Dan CCLXXII - The Mike Vrabel Column

This week's Picked Up Pieces column focuses on first-year head coach of the Patriots Mike Vrabel:

The Patriots aren’t there quite yet, but they sure have the coaching part figured out with Mike Vrabel, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while wondering when Bill Belichick can put UMass on the Tar Heels’ schedule to pick up a much-needed win . . .

⋅ We’re not going to get all Super Bowl silly on you. The Patriots have a lot of work to do and, realistically, are in no position to think any upcoming opponent is an easy win. New England is still a very young and flawed football team.

But the Patriots have the coach part figured out. They have Mike Vrabel.

Five games into this new regime, it’s pretty clear that Bob Kraft made a great move when he admitted Jerod Mayo was a mistake and switched to Vrabel at the end of Mayo’s single season as head coach in Foxborough.

It couldn’t have been easy. Kraft’s ego is bigger than Gillette’s new lighthouse, and he probably wanted to honor the commitment he made to Mayo and give the neophyte coach a second chance.

Taking shots at ownership - check!

The Other Type Of Shank Column

By now we're all familiar with one type of Dan Shaugnessy column - the ones where he's second guessing a team / coach / player and / or crapping on the team's ownership. Today we get the opposite type of column, the heads version of the coin. When a team's on a winning streak, their opponents all of a sudden turn into small aluminum things!

Maybe we shouldn’t be thinking playoffs for the Patriots just yet, but their softer-than-soft schedule says otherwise

The Patriots just enjoyed their best win in five years, are over .500 after five games for the first time since the Brady era, and we are seriously talking playoffs again.

Not a moment too soon. The Red Sox thrill ride has been over for a week, and with the Bruins/Celtics launching seasons of low expectations, the Patriots have come to our emotional rescue.

Sunday’s wildly entertaining 23-20 victory over the unbeaten, Super Bowl-favorite Bills at Highmark Stadium put Gillette back on the NFL map. After two straight 4-13 campaigns and five years of front office frostiness, draft day boobery, personal vendettas, and abject incompetence — patterns and pettiness that put the franchise on the road to irrelevance — the Patriots are a team on the rise.

The prudent thing, of course, is to pump the brakes and remind everybody that the 2025 Patriots couldn’t beat the awful Raiders, losing 20-13 in Foxborough Sept. 7. Two weeks later, they committed five turnovers in a ridiculous 21-14 home loss to the Steelers.

The lords of television buried the Patriots in the anonymous 1 p.m. Sunday slot for at least 13 weekends. And they did it for a reason; the Patriots were not expected to be interesting.

But thanks to Mike Vrabel and Drake Maye, they’re suddenly a must-watch. And thanks to the easiest schedule these eyes have ever seen, the Patriots are a threat to return to the postseason and possibly even contend for first place in the AFC East.

It’s all about the schedule, people.

Seriously. Not enough has been made of the clear path the Patriots have been handed.

Welcome to the March of the Tomato Cans, 2025.

THat's right - it's not because our team's good; it's because everyone else sucks!

DHL Dan CCLXXI - Second Guessing, Shank's Favorite Pastime

In this weeks Picked Up Pieces column, Shank plays the what if? card with the Red Sox:

Rafael Devers might have been the piece the Red Sox were lacking in the playoffs, and other thoughts

Picked up pieces while predicting a big Patriot win Sunday night in Buffalo …

A fun Red Sox season is over. The locals made it to the postseason for the first time since 2021, then flamed out in a best-of-three Wild Card Series vs. the hated Yankees. The Sox were staggering at the finish, with only one-and-a-half starting pitchers, the worst defense in baseball, a lot of injured players, and a Charmin-soft lineup peppered with guys who’ve been cut loose by other teams and picked up from the recycling bin.

Seriously. How far were you going to go with Rob Refsnyder batting leadoff and Romy Gonzalez hitting cleanup against a Yankees team that featured four former MVPs in the first four spots in the lineup?

I will leave it to the Globe’s super-smart baseball scribes to speculate on what should be a busy winter for Boston baseball boss Craig Breslow and the Sox owners.

But for one final time, please let me address the myth of the Rafael Devers trade/salary dump that has been credited with turning around the Boston season, but, in fact, ultimately sunk the team in its final days.

The Red Sox batted .198 with one homer in the playoffs. Gonzalez, Refsnyder, Jarren Duran, Ceddanne Rafaela, Wilyer Abreu, Nathaniel Lowe, and Carlos Narváez combined to hit .054 (3 for 55).

Predicting a big Patriot win tomorrow night, is he? Here's another prediction - if the Patriots lose to Buffalo, Shank will be all over their case on Monday and he'll somehow blame Robert Kraft for it.

Belated Red Sox Playoff Wrap-Up

I didn't spot these columns 'til late in the week, so I'll mention them briefly.

Shank's first column celebrates the grand tradition of the Red Sox / Yankees playoff baseball. He loved Garrett Crochet's pitching in Game 1 of the series, and then things came crashing down in Game 2 when the Yankees tied the series up. In the end, the Yankees were the better team, who now go on to play the Toronto Blue Jays in the next round.

I'm left wondering one thing - would the series have turned out better for the Red Sox if we could've played just one freaking game at Fenway Park?

Back On The Bandwagon?

With the Boston Red Sox now in the playoffs, their opponet is their traditional rival, the New York Yankees. After shitting on the Red Sox and their ownership team for a majority of the past four years this season, Shank's now back at the front of the bandwagon:

Red Sox-Yankees in the playoffs. Does it get any better than this?

It’s just too good.

The Red Sox are in the playoffs Tuesday for the first time in four years, only the second time since they won the World Series in 2018 . . . and they are playing a best-of-three against the New York Yankees.

Red Sox-Yankees. Again.

Do we need to educate the young’uns and remind everyone what this means?

Red Sox-Yankees is an all-timer. It’s Harvard vs. Yale, Kennedy vs. Nixon, Athens vs. Sparta.

It’s Ohio State-Michigan, Army-Navy, Trump-Comey.

It is the ultimate American sports rivalry and we are getting it in the first round of baseball’s ever-expanding playoffs.

Strap yourselves in for two (possibly three) nights of hard-ball history and histrionics. This could be great. Enjoy the ride.

It's a good column by Shank, but I wonder - if Aaron Judge finally snaps out of his postseason slumps (and it's not pretty), do they win this series?