Do you think columnists get tired of seeing extreme reaction pieces that the variables of a baseball season render absurd, and within days? Graziano and that guy who declared the division race over should get together and combine on a prescription for mood stabilizers.

There was a small, but I thought noteworthy, incident about this issue here at BTF. That Salfino guy whose column gets linked and who posts here write something about pessimism/fatalism being wired into the Red Sox fan base's "DNA" I think he said, during a Red Sox cold streak when the Yankees were charging--this was their first charge, about 5 or 6 weeks ago.

A few BTF Red Sox fans and others got on and talked about how dumb it was to write that--and Salfino just said he was trying to write a "provocative column." This is sort of intuitively obvious--a lot of these gusy are just trying to generate angry emails and web hits, to be "provocative" and we might try to remember that. But a lot of us--me included--forget.

That is not to say that ALL columns like this are shallow attempts to be "provocative" but I think a lot of them are.