For some time now I have been annoyed by various (Boston) sports’ writers who seem to me delighted to create controversy, stoke ‘controversy,’ and generally confuse good sport’s reporting with manufactured controversies.
I know Boston writers have a history of being tough on the Sox (Teddy made it easy for them), but I’m not talking about that so much as the ‘manufactured’ controversies, the over interpreting, the seeming delight in augmenting even the smallest issue into a major bruhaha (sp?).
The latest along this line is the Bobby V comment on Youk and the fallout resulting. We all know that Bobby talks too much. But so do the (Boston) sports’ writers who need controversy to fill their columns.
I don’t plan to comment on each and every so called controversy this season, but I just read on a friend’s blog what I think is all that needs to be said about Bobby & Youk and whatever else will come along along these lines this season.
Check out what Jere Smith wrote last night in his A Red Sox Fan From Pinstripe Territory blog: An Elvis Man Should Love It.
He nails it.
Matt said:
The problem with Bobby Valentine is that he doesn’t know when to shut up. He talks and talks and inevitabily will say things that create controversy. When the Sox hired him, they had to know that this was part of the package. No one should be surprised.
The media loves it. He makes their job very easy. If anything, the press has been bending over backwards to support Valentine (see Cafardo and Shaughnessy), because they know that he will constantly create controversy and that makes for easy writing.
And I don’t agree that this was a media driven controversy. When the team has a 3 game winning streak and Youkilis, after slumping in the first 5 games, has started to get hot, why would a manager ever say: “I don’t think he’s as physically or emotionally into the game as he has been in the past for some reason”? And he said it about a player known for being too intense and one of the harder workers on the team.
This won’t be the last player-manager controversy. It’s who Bobby V is, it’s what he’s done everywhere that he has ever managed. He brings it on himself.
Richard said:
We agree, until you get to your point that it wasn’t a media driven controversy. Read, listen to the entire quote. Once again, the media has picked out one sentence, not including the context in which that one sentence was spoken, and jumped on it. You’re right that they love it. And they stoke it.