Over the last few years, Shaugnessy's national profile has risen, with some column's appearing on Sports Illustrated's website. Even after the wins, he remained very negative and critical, penning his infamous article about Theo's bridge year comment as giving up, when in reality it was that Shaughnessy just didn't understand that the roster was in transition and there would be a lot of change until 2011, when the roster would stabilize. And look! That's exactly what happened. The Red Sox in 2010 weren't undone by giving up, they were undone by injuries. And 2009 and 2010 were bridge years - we had brief tenures by players like Alex Gonzalez, Victor Martinez and Adrian Beltre, and departures by former key contributors like Mike Lowell and Manny Ramirez.
Already reviled in the Boston area, he's doing his best to go national with that as well, by writing articles like this. After peddling doom and gloom in the Boston area, Shaughnessy is doing his best to epitomize the obnoxious Boston sports fan, essentially rubbing Boston's recent success in the face of every sports fan who doesn't root for a Boston team. When the Red Sox were downtrodden, he was a faithless nay sayer, and now that Boston is on top, he's crowing from the rooftops about the dominance of Boston teams.
Lovely.
Ah, but are we just feeding into Shaugnessy's ego by talking about him? Perhaps we should take the approach one would take with a dog that is jumping for attention- just ignore him until he starts to write stuff that isn't drivel.
ReplyDeleteAmazing. At this point I've stopped reading everything he writes for the Globe, it just makes me angry, but since he's one of the most prominent Boston sports writers nationally, I like to try and read his nationally distributed columns. It's sad to think that twit is the face of Boston for SI readers now.
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