Duh Sawx

Well, to be honest, right now Duh Sawx sux. (BTW it's Duh Sawx and Dah Broonz. Do not question matters that you were not meant to understand.) The owners ordered a salary dump, and they traded away all their best players for pretty much bupkis, marginal prospects. The only exception is pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez who is out for the season with heart damage from Covid-19, and no doubt if he were able to play they would have traded him too. So they're fielding a AAA team with no pitching and they're in last place, by a lot.

Whether this is part of a long-term plan to rebuild on a more cost-effective basis, or just momentary greed, I can't say. The plan was in the works before the pandemic but it sure was well-timed since people aren't paying much attention to baseball anyway and duh Sawx suckiness doesn't really matter. This reveals something basic about baseball as a product: more than any sport, it depends on the collective event of spectatorship. Basketball, football, hockey, soccer -- they're more fun when the arena is roaring with excited fans, but they're watchable without. Baseball really is not. The pace is so languorous, the action so sparse, that you need the electricity of the audience to keep interest alive.

This is probably especially true of the Red Sox because Fenway Park is very unusual in being right in the city, in a real live neighborhood with residences and businesses and a subway stop. Game day is a big event, with people and families of all stripes thronging the streets and pubs of Kenmore Square and the Fenway area and the east edge of Brookline, street vendors, ticket scalpers. Inside, the park is infused with folkways. Its scale is relatively intimate, and the crowd is as much a part of the action as the players. The gameday experience is part of the lifeblood of the city and region, a big part of what knits it together. Sure, dah Broonz and the Celts (who get a properly pronounced article) do that in the area of Boston Garden, but on a much smaller scale. And the Pats play out in the wilderness of Foxboro. 

There are costs of the present catastrophe that cannot be measured.