Opening day panic
Red Sox lose opener - probably won't win World Series!

For the love of God. Perusing the news headlines across the land known as Red Sox Nation, you would imagine the end of the world is just around the corner. In this current, ugly atmosphere of instant-gratification style reporting, scribes across New England and the USA in general are already writing off the Red Sox.

The Simpsons captures this 'unruly mob', panic mentality perfectly at least once an episode. Lenny, Karl, Moe or someone shouts 'Get 'em!' and the mob descends on the unfortunate victim.

'They aint gonna win the freakin World Series! Get 'em!'

Take a deep breath everyone. I know Shaughnessy, ESPN, the Globe to some extent, 90% of the online media you read and that negative, jaundiced clown that runs 'Dirt Dogs' is screaming blue-murder with last nights loss to the Royals, however, believe it or not, 0-1 does not a season make. Have a peek at three very recent and consecutive Red Sox season opening scorelines.

• 04-01-2002 vs Toronto Blue Jays 11-12 L
  
• 04-12-2003 vs Baltimore Orioles 6-13 L
  
• 04-09-2004 vs Toronto Blue Jays 5-10 L

Well now. To review, they lost three in a row from 2002 to 2004. What's that you say, '..but they won the world series in 2004! It can't be that bad?' That's exactly it. 2004 was particularly bad. Pedro got mashed and people were marching single file in orderly fashion to throw themselves into the Charles. Have we learnt anything from that, at all? Anything?

Sadly, apparently not.

I have one more question. Does the negative, aggressive and self important slant of 'Boston Dirt Dogs' (link available on the Globe, I refuse to print it here) remind you of anyone? Shaughnessy anyone? While Shaughnessy does sometimes attempt to simply write ( and write eloquently) about Sports without serving some grudge or another in his articles, he often does slip into a little 'hatred zone' where he comes out with utter rubbish like his recent little tirades against Curt Schilling. The guy on Dirt Dogs absolutely lives in that zone.

A 'headline' of his from a couple of days ago;
Red Sox Internet Ace Will Bring His Long-Winded Analysis to a Japanese Audience

Come on, your telling me Shaughnessy had nothing to do with that headline? I feel another 'separated at birth' blog entry coming.

Here's the thing though. The self-righteous individual that runs Dirt Dogs has zero problem playing the sycophant to Shaughnessy's Calvinist, acerbic style of writing, but at the same time he uses Schilling's blog as a news source that he quotes extensively from (extensively today, for example, again, you won't ever find a link to his rubbish here).

I have to ask, which is it Chief? You going to spend the entire season ripping the guy down, or are you going to be using his blog as an interesting, unique source of information?

Make your mind up, oh and while you are doing that, cheer up buddy, it may never happen.