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I'm not sure whether this news will delight or infuriate Pierzynski.
Bah! They can't even limp right. Losers!
The Angels actually won 11 of their next 13 after Morales went down. I'd say the limping started about two weeks later.
Don't fight it. Boston went on a hot streak and won the World Series after Varitek slapped A Rod. Don't confuse the issue by saying the Sox were mediocre for 2-3 weeks after and then went on a streak.
That's the thing. You're kind of tempting A.J. to go out and do something just to rekindle that fresh hate you guys once had for him.
And after listening to him on the radio the past two years, I've got to confess that I've come to really like A.J. Which is odd for me, because unlike Srul, I'm not the anti-hero type.
Beckett
Youkilis
Papelbon
I'm hearing Lester, as well.
Apparently Epstein seeks this psychological profile. Any way to search BRef for the historical performances of ornery bastards?
You forgot Pedroia....and Lackey is just an A#$.
Years ago a friend of mine and I went through and ranked out our top 50 players of all time. One of the things that was interesting was when you looked at that list it seemed to be heavily populated by people who were viewed as less than pleasant. Obviously that is hardly a scientific test but it was interesting.
On the one hand, he should have known the fans in Anaheim weren't going to view him too fondly after leaving for a team they've faced in 4 postseasons out of the last 6. On the other, it's pretty impossible to say no to $82 million. Lackey's wife is from Maine, no idea if that was a factor either.
I think it's a little easier for the driven, self-obsessed type of person to reach those heights. Stan the Man types are more rare.
To make it clear that he was referring to "a jersey that read Satan across the chest" rather than the great deceiver himself, the agent of Bryce Harper.
Pretty much. It's possible the Angels fans hatred will wane a little after finally getting past them in the 2009 postseason.
What's up with the Angels' recent clownshoes defense, though? Has that been an issue with them all year? For a team that has always prided itself on attention to detail it was pretty startling to see Kendrick and Fuentes butchering a routine grounder, and Rivera absolutely murdering Lowrie's routine fly ball through bad positioning and a worse route to it.
Beckett
Youkilis
Papelbon
I'm hearing Lester, as well.
I'm not really sure that Lackey belongs in that list. He strikes me as very milquetoast compared to Youk, Beckett or Papelbon (although I think Papelbon is a bit of an unfair standard on this scale, not sure anybody in the league can really measure up to him when it comes to sheer mindless craziness. Or super-intense lip-pursing.). If Lester turns out to be an emerging douche-in-the-grass, I think I like him even more.
We've covered this, but the next time 15,000 Angels fans, half wearing Weaver jerseys, Tim Salmon jerseys, and/or Angels hats, show up at Fenway, let me know.
Aging OFs is one problem. Rivera was never good. Hunter is still good but getting older, and Abreu was never good and is 35 or 36. This was particularly glaring during the Angels' recent visit to Texas.
I picked the Angels to win the west in pre-season, but I was wrong. Texas is better.
Torii Hunter brings enough ####### for two or three teams. And K-Rod was quite annoying with the Angels.
But yeah, most Angel players are pretty anonymous, if overrated due to "grittiness" or whatever.
I know that's part of the issue, but the Angels hatred for the Sox goes beyond the typical fans' level of disdain for the club (AFAICT), and surely the playoff ass kickings played a part. Now that they've gotten off the postseason schneid against the Sox, it's possible they'll ratchet down the hate a little.
A thousand times yes.
Absolutely. Angels fans hate the Sox on a more rage-filled level than even Yankees fans. With the Yankees/Sox there is this mutual respect and deep loathing, like two brothers that haven't talked for years sitting at the same Thanksgiving dinner table.
With Angels fans, it's more like a junkie in a holding cell who just MIGHT stab you through the bars when you come to bail out your drunk uncle.
I have found this to be the case with most visiting team's fans regardless of who they root for. I don't know why it's the case but visiting fans generally tend to be jerks.
Just the ones you notice. I'd say it's an observational bias kind of thing.
Road Cub fans can be annoying. Same case almost.
That's not quite right. The Red Sox fan is not "you," but "your drunk uncle."
And speaking as a displaced Sox fan who regularly goes to Sox/Athletics games, I've on more than one occasion been totally mystified by some A's fans idea that there's some kind of rivalry between the two teams. I mean I guess they take the '03 ALDS turnaround personally, but they sometimes seem to harbor a weirdly intense grudge against the Sox. I always want to be like, find a real enemy. I've got bigger fish to fry.
Kills bobcats with bows...does the same "I'm old-school b%$#h!!" thing Beckett does..except he backs it up.
It's no worse than the Twins fans who hate the Yankees.
Upon moving to DC a few years ago, I was informed that apparently fans of the Baltimore Orioles think they have an intense rivalry with the Yankees. The Baltimore who? I get that Sox fans don't hate the Angels, but at least they know the Angels exist.
They're living on the fumes of Dave Stewart owning the Sox.
Eek, a hunter. Oh, the humanity.
Visiting Yankees fans are condescending but only moderately grating a-holes who drew strength from their sense of easy superiority. Boston and Philly fans are animals.
I thought fans of every American League team hate the Yankees.
I think it is more likely that they would like to see your ass go back to Boston or Providence or wherever if you are going to be a Red Sox fan and show up for Red Sox-A's games and also say stuff like, "I've got bigger fish to fry." That is what I have told transplants, mostly in jest, who move to CA and talk about how cool the sports scene back home is, mock the home teams in their new towns, and show up at games in full visiting team gear.
We have covered this many times, and like I have said, when people hate your team and call your fanbase names, it means two things: your team has done well over an extended period and gets a lot of media hype. Having been a Lakers fan since I was a kid, I am quite familiar with this territory. True and loyal Red Sox fans are not, I am sure, collectively, bigger aholes than any other fanbase. Most of the Red Sox fans here at BTF are teh awesome. But between bandwagoners and people showing up and being loud at visiting arenas/ballparks, that is going to generate some ill will, and I think the "rivalry" aspect comes in part from the fact that beating the Red Sox (or the Yankees, or the Lakers, or whoever) is the only way to get those people at the park/arena to STFU.
I don't read those comments as having anything to due with where he came from, only that he's happy that his new team will be a perennial contender (ie he didn't leave one perennial contender to go to the Pirates or Royals).
I don't remember the Angels making any effort at all to re-sign Lackey.
That's redundant. Everyone should hate the Yankees.
You love bunny rabbits?
How do you explain the Raiders?
Right, but I meant in the context of always being knocked out of the postseason in the last decade.
I know you are partly kidding around, but...
When the Raiders were good and the Chargers sucked, there would be maybe 25,000 Raiders fans at Charger games in SD. Now, there are a lot fewer. The "Black Hole" Raiders fans are that relatively small number that dress up and get a lot of hype.
There's also a one-sided rivalry between the Red Sox and Mets. I'm a Mets fan who visits family in New England regularly. They hate everything New York, lumping the Mets right in with the Yankees and football Giants (18-1), plus the 1986 Mets were never revenged upon, and maybe for stealing Pedro. But most Mets fans are happy to root for the Red Sox at least as a Yankees foil, and often in their own right. More so before 2004/07 and the emergence of the Rays as another foil, but still some.
Lester: "Nothing like a brush with death to make one appreciate the grace and grandeur of God, nature and one's place in the grand scheme...IT'S COMING RIGHT AT ME!!"
I'd say the percentage of Red Sox fans at road games who are dicks is much greater than pretty much every other team I've witnessed. And because so many of them go to games, a home town fan is much more likely to be annoyed by them.
Is the tendency to deliberately get shitfaced to the point of incoherence and puking a northeastern USA phenomenon?
Wherever there are four Irish, there's always a fifth.
Sox fans hated the Mets pretty intensely from '86 to '04 for obvious reasons. Based on my friends I would say that has dramatically declined.
As a non-Patriot fan I rather enjoy watching Pats fans getting worked up over the Giants. The buildup to that game was ridiculous, anyone who even dared suggest the Patriots would lose was biased and didn't like the Pats, the only possible outcome was a Patriot victory.
Pretty funny to see a Sox fan play this card given that Sox fans tried to pretend that they had a "rivalry" with the Yankees for 80 years. A rivalry that was roughly as competitive as lion versus antelope.
Which is odd, because lots of Pats fans are Giants fans, too. I mean, they're on TV just about every week, and used to be Boston's team.
You misunderstood me. I wasn't talking competitively one-sided, which the Sox/Angels has not been. I meant emotionally one-sided. There's not a single Sox fan who would list the Angels in the Red Sox top 3 rivals. I probably wouldn't even go as high as #4, really.
Sox fans only did this pretty much starting in the late 70's though, right? I can't imagine New Englanders in the 40's considering the Yankees as hated rivals.
...but I could be wrong.
I'd go further than that. I'd say most of us kind of like the Angels, what with them beating the crap out of the Yankees in the playoffs so frequently. Last year really screwed things up all the way around. Thanks a lot Halos.
The Yankees were every American League team's hated rivals, and none more than the Sox. I think the Yankees' hated rivals tended to be dictated by whatever team was the biggest minor nuisance for any stretch of time, but was probably just the Dodgers or Giants.
At Miller Park it's Cubs fans who had not the means, connections, ambition to acquire the tough ticket at their beloved home park. Bottom feeders, in other words.
More appropriate an analogy for closely situated rivals (BOS and NYY fans at Camden Yards, say).
Well, at least they can hate the condescension.
But that was the only possible outcome. The game and its plays which ensued were impossible, damn it!
The NY Giants are still my favorite NFC team.
2. I do not hate John Lackey.
3. I think booing John Lackey was silliness.
4. However, Lackey has subtly and not-so-subtly thrown some digs at Angel fans since he left, so at least it's silliness with some basis.
5. The reason so many Angel fans dislike the Red Sox is, in my view, because of the perceived obnoxious behavior of Red Sox fans in Angel Stadium, with the postseason match-ups a complementary but not decisive factor.
6. The final score last night was Juan Rivera 3, Angels 2, Brian Fuentes 1, Red Sox 0. Unfortunately, Rivera and Fuentes did all that scoring with their gloves.
7. In my own experience, Yankee fans at Angel Stadium are worse than Red Sox fans. I'd say the Yankee fans at Angel Stadium are the fourth-worst I've encountered in life. The third-worst are Chavez Ravine fans. The second-worst are Cal State Fullerton baseball fans. The first-worst are USC fans, of course.
Is this really true? The Sox were competitive with the Yankees in the late 1940s, the late 1970s, faced each other in the postseason in 1999 and have been neck and neck basically 2003 to the present. I don't think anyone thought of it as a rivalry until the big Williams-DiMaggio comps in the early 1940s. Or maybe that's what you meant by 80 years, since 1940 is actually 70 years ago now (shakes head sadly).
The Yankees won every single one of those matchups until 2004, of course, but the final results belie how competitive those fights tended to be. They finished ahead of the Yanks in 1946 and 1948 and 1 game behind them in 1949. They were just five games back in 1950, but then went into a long funk until the 1970s, and again the Sox topped the Yanks in 1972, '73 and '75 (the Yankees weren't competitive those seasons). In 1977, the Sox finished 2.5 games back, in 1978 they finished the regular schedule tied (including going 12-2 in their final 14 to make up a 3.5-game deficit to force the 163d game), in 1979 the Sox finished two games ahead of the Yanks, though both were well out of it. The 1999 series really marked a revival of the rivalry, as both teams had alternated periods of mediocrity and being in contention, and the Yanks won it in five, but all the games were closely fought.
In fact, the 1999 series really seems to serve as a microcosm for the pre-2004 rivalry. A very close series, but with a lopsided final result. If the Sox had simply been trounced every season by the Yankees, there would be no rivalry. The fact that it had been so close, so often (1949, 1977, 1978, 1999, 2003), really fueled a lot of the rage on the part of Red Sox fans. Yankee fans may have been lulled by the final results into thinking defeating the Red Sox was fated, that this was akin to the age-old rivalry between the hammer and the nail, but that was by no means the case, as 2004 showed.
The teams finished 1-2, in the proper order, in the 1986 season.
Especially considering the Sox were only a very good team for about 10 of those years (the 1940s) until the early 1970s, when they finally managed to stay competitive on a somewhat consistent basis.
I'm not old enough to know first-hand, but I would find it very hard to believe there was any kind of rivalry with the Yankees before 1941, given the disparity between the teams, and all reports indicate there weren't even enough Red Sox fans left to sustain a rivalry with anyone by the 1960s. I date the birth of the rivalry as we know it from the bloody battles of the 1970s. Those teams really hated each other, and it spread to the fanbases and seeped down through the subsequent decades.
I was quite young at the time, so I don't know this for sure, but I've heard references to the Red Sox only really starting to matter locally with the 1967 season. In which case, ever since the team starting trying :), they are bout dead even with the NYY: 328-329
A hunter? I assumed he was a really aggressive cellist.
1. The Red Sox fans buy up the single-game sales for their games.
2. Local fans of the local team don't want to deal with the hassle of having to put up with a bunch of drunken ########## when they go to the ballpark. This is especially true of fans who want to go as a family.
#1 sounds like something that could be prevented to a great degree, if the home fans mobilized.
I've lived in SD or LA for about 30 years, but I am sure everyone else appreciated the Info.
We have covered this maybe 20 times. Demographics, transplant population dynamics, people planning vacations to come out to CA, and many other factors.
Attendance at Ted Williams' last game: 10.454
Check Red Sox 1965 and 1966 attendance at Baseball Reference some time.
As Jay Jaffe and others have written, the Red Sox that we know began in '67.
Why are there so many more Bostonians in southern California than the reverse? Given the absence of thundersticks in the Commonwealth, you'd think they'd never leave.
Don't get me wrong, I don't dismiss the Athletics as competitors by any means. Just as rivals. Believe me, my baseball fandom came of age in the mid 80's, growing up in the Bay Area and going to tons of games, so I well know the feeling of watching my team get their ass kicked by the home team time after time, series after series. I was AT the Clemens blowup game in the 1990 ALCS. I was 10 years old; I'm pretty sure I cried. I got about as good an education in the futility of loving the Red Sox as it's possible to get outside of New England going to Sox games in Oakland with my LL team, which was obviously packed full of A's fans who missed no opportunity to lord over me their team's superiority on a given day.
And I don't dislike the A's at all either. I go to a couple dozen games at the Coliseum a year, and when the Sox aren't in town, I root for the home team louder than many of the A's fans in the ballpark. Which is basically my point - I harbor no ill will towards A's fans or the team itself in the way that many A's fans seem to do for mine. And I always wear my pink A's cap.
They are purely insane. It's kill or be killed when facing one. Why would you show them the mercy they'd never show another animal?
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