The late Johnny Pesky gave his life to his beloved Boston Red Sox [team stats], but, sadly, it appears only four current players made time to attend the Fenway icon’s funeral.
Word from Yawkey Way is that the Sox front office hired buses to bring players, office and staff to the funeral from the ballpark to the church. The suits, we hear, were surprised and disappointed when the vast majority of the 40 players on the roster didn’t bother to show up for the services.
“We ordered the buses for the front office to go, knowing that any players could join us or drive separately from their homes,” Sox spokesman Charles Steinberg told the Track. “Between the ownership, front office, current players and staff, and former players, we were well represented by the people who knew Johnny best.”
The only players the Herald observed at the funeral at St. John The Evangelist Church in Swampscott were designated hitter David Ortiz, pitchers Clay Buchholz and Vincente Padilla and catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia.
By contrast, that same night, nearly the entire team turned out for pitcher Josh Beckett [stats]’s annual Beckett Bowl and country music show at Lucky Strike Lanes and the House of Blues.
“The front office was not happy,” said Someone Who Knows.
Repoz
Posted: August 23, 2012 at 12:15 AM |
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Citation needed.
This was ages ago in the thread, but I just wanted to point out that Sheff was of course Dwight Gooden's nephew and lived with him for some time, so he probably knew Carter from back then.
Well, maybe in Boston. In my area and my culture, no. We are so medieval that we still "give the road" to oncoming funeral processions in the sense that we pull over off the highway when we see the hearse coming. To not do so is to be an #######. And to not go to a funeral of a co-worker or even an acquaintance (because in a small town an acquaintance is going to be a friend of a friend) is to be an #######; one's personal feelings on death, funeral homes, religion, whatever, are irrelevant. I'm sure Boston is different (though I'm also sure normal people there aren't as callous there as RDP, who strikes me as David Nieporent with an even stronger dose of Aspberger's), but I bet this wouldn't have happened in Atlanta or maybe even St. Louis or Milwaukee.
Heh.
The job of sportswriters is to make it clear to everyone that they themselves are stupid.
Maybe they believed Ray when he told them the funeral was never going to happen.
If memory serves, Staubach was a (much more than, actually) competent passer.
Well, maybe in Boston. In my area and my culture, no. We are so medieval that we still "give the road" to oncoming funeral processions in the sense that we pull over off the highway when we see the hearse coming. To not do so is to be an #######. And to not go to a funeral of a co-worker or even an acquaintance (because in a small town an acquaintance is going to be a friend of a friend) is to be an #######; one's personal feelings on death, funeral homes, religion, whatever, are irrelevant. I'm sure Boston is different (though I'm also sure normal people there aren't as callous there as RDP, who strikes me as David Nieporent with an even stronger dose of Aspberger's), but I bet this wouldn't have happened in Atlanta or maybe even St. Louis or Milwaukee.
I'm from New York and I still pull over for a funeral procession (or at least, I would if I still drove a car). I think you get at one of the key differences when you talk about small town versus city, though. I don't even know everyone who works on my floor let alone every co-worker at my company. Likewise I only know about 3/4 of the people on my apartment building's floor, and that is a pretty high ratio relative to the other buildings I've lived in. Whereas in the town where I grew up, we knew just about everyone on the block. Part of it is small town vs. big city, part of that is people having kids vs. not having kids, and part of it is staying in one place for a long period of time vs. being relatively transient.
So yeah, perhaps you wouldn't have seen this in Atlanta or St. Louis or Milwaukee, but it's not like most of the players on the Red Sox are from Boston. Likewise for those other teams. Beckett's from Texas, where I would think manners are similar to wherever you live.
With so many paranoid clowns nowadays driving around in midday with their headlights on**, it's not always that easy to tell a funeral procession from a routine lane of slow moving traffic.
**as if someone is going to see a pair of headlights on a sunny afternoon if they never noticed the car that the headlights are attached to
The overwhelming majority of them didn't turn their headlights on. The car did that for them.
[Stares at ground, moves sand around with tip of shoe]
Now let's examine the posters here at BTF. Most of us do not work in the Boston area; most of us do not live in the Boston area. Most of us live at least a few hours away from the Boston area, if not longer. No one from the Red Sox arranged transportation for us to go to the funeral. Finally, most of the posters here at BTF did not know Mr. Pesky (though some of us might have met him once or twice).
So let's stop comparing the failure of most of the Red Sox to go to the funeral to the failure of the baseball fans here to go to the funeral. Clearly, logically, and rationally, one situation is not like the other.
We were all there. Where the hell were you?
The highlight was when that one guy stood up and said that Pesky's WAR wasn't high enough to get him into the Hall of Fame, even if you gave him war credit. AWK-WARD!
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