Sports

Little Christopher, who lives somewhere in the Philadelphia area, really, really, really hates Tom Brady. If you were his father, would you put this online?

Via Boston Daily.

White smoke wafts over Fenway tonight.

Leslie Jones took this photo of the Braves' Casey Stengel (on the left) and the Red Sox's Joe Cronin in the dugout at Braves Field before an exhibition game on April 15, 1939.

From the Boston Public Library's Massachusetts baseball collection. Posted under this Creative Commons license.

Boston.com - Which Patriots quarterback is your favorite?

Something must have gone wrong. There's no place to write-in Joe Kapp or Michael Bishop.

A report out of Philadelphia says everybody's favorite beer-box wearer is heading for the City of Brotherly Love.

Joe Paterno just lost his job as an alleged enabler of a child rapist. Seems Tom Yawkey engaged in the same thing back in the early 1970s with the clubhouse manager at the Sox spring-training camp in Florida.

Via Soxaholix.

Oh, those wacky, fun-loving Henrys, whose joie de vivre is just so darn infectious, City Hall can't help but give them great deals on city property! Wouldn't you?

Or, as dvdoff, who spotted this example of All Henry, All The Time puts it:

If anyone else needed proof that Boston.com is turning into the Onion ...

A Sox fan sent in this photo of Fenway Park on Friday to the Globe. Hanging among the other retired numbers on the outside of the ballpark was good ol' #7.

Of course, Carlton "Pudge" Fisk (#27) might have something to say about all of this.

The Globe reports on the great deal the Sox got from Boston for using city streets

Mats Tolander writes the Edelman incident is just the frosting on the cake of mediocrity Belichick has built in Foxboro:

There is only so much that genius head coach Bill Belichick can do to make up for the mediocre general manager Bill Belichick. He’s coming up short. He no longer has control of his team. The players pay lip service to his greatness but their weak efforts and lack of discipline betray them. Maybe they feel betrayed, too. If the Patriots are so great, and their coach is so great, why are they so bad?

A glassy-eyed, alcohol-infused Sox fan who had to be wrestled to the ground at a game in July after knocking a woman down raised the hackles of Boston Licensing Board Chairwoman Nicole Murati Ferrer today.

"What concerns me right now is the level of intoxication of this patron," she told Fenway officials at a hearing on a police citation for having a "disorderly, intoxicated patron arrested on the premises" at a July 27 game.

Sox officials said the issue was more one of general belligerence than drunkenness - the guy just seemed to have a lot of pent up anger and had been yelling for several innings.

From a Sports Illustrated writer.

The Taiwanese have made a cartoon about it:

Thanks, Kaz!

The Sox starter talked to the Globe.

Cambridge, Mass. — Tickets are on sale now for George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Stickball Productions’ world premiere stage adaptation of the quintessential Boston crime novel. The production runs Dec. 8–Jan. 15 at Oberon in Harvard Square, for tickets, visit www.thefriendsofeddiecoyle.com

It is the winter of ‘69 in Boston and Eddie Coyle is a bottom of the barrel hood attempting to stay alive and out of jail among his “friends” – cops, bartenders, radical hippies, bank robbers, hit men and informants. Weeks away from a prison sentence for trucking stolen booze, Eddie’s making a few bucks supplying the guns for a rash of brazen bank heists, while looking to tip someone in for a kind word to the judge.

George V. Higgins’ classic novel has been called the “best crime novel ever written” by Elmore Leonard, and literary scholars have compared his unforgiving and realistic depiction of Boston’s underworld with the works of Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Balzac. Through dialogue quintessentially Bostonian, and the most poignant homage to Bobby Orr and the ’69-’70 Boston Bruins in literature, The Friends of Eddie Coyle has set the bar for Boston crime stories for nearly 40 years.

When you own the Red Sox and you hear a couple of guys on 98.5 badmouthing you while you're driving around, you detour to the station and unload (good thing he wasn't on the yacht).

Listen for yourself.

You know it's bad when even Heidi Watney gets dragged into the mud (and comes up slugging; denies that rumored fling with Varitek).

Chicago columnist welcomes Theo Epstein:

Epstein, see, has yet to win a Series without a juiced-up middle of the order. ...

I want Epstein to succeed. I'd love for the Cubs to win a World Series just to see whether that indeed marks the apocalypse.

But it's hard to get past the idea of the most embarrassing franchise in sports empowering the man in charge of the most embarrassing death spiral in baseball history without concluding that, yep, the Cubs are getting exactly what you'd expect.

Meanwhile, back here in Boston, Paul Flannery asks:

So, anyone want to buy a Fenway brick?

The Globe details some of what was going on in the clubhouse as the Sox collapsed last month. Not pretty; give Francona props for talking, at least.

Or how about a commemorative beer cozy?

Bruce Allen examines the delight the Globe - not just Shank - took in the collapse of the Red Sox.

Allen Rines reports Robin Young's segue from a Sox report on her "Here and Now" show this morning:

Well that's over, let's talk about sperm banks.

Meanwhile, what are the odds these bus ads will stay up as long as that Coraline thing on the Red Line?

Because it was spread out over an entire month. Good God.

The bullpen held it together long enough for Ellsbury to hit another home run and keep the Sox a game in front for the wild card. Sign of things to come, or dead-cat bounce?