In Jerry Green’s day, they knew how to lose quietly. Over and over again. From Saturday’s Detroit News.
Ted Williams wore his uniforms with dignity and honor. He would never shame them, the creamy Red Sox regalia he wore as baseball’s most proficient hitter of the last 75 years or the olive Marine officer’s uniform he wore in two American wars.
He did not preen nor prance nor rag on opposing players. He was the perfect professional. He was more than a blip on major-league baseball’s 128-year history.
Sad is what the current reigning world-champion Red Sox have become. A blip on history. A team lacking dignity and honor, a team of overflowing egos, a team of classless athletes who have shamed their classy Boston baseball uniforms with their behavior.
Through the winter, these unlikely champions soured their special October. They turned one of the most magnificent pieces of sports theater ever — their comeuppance of the Yankees, their sweep of the Cardinals in the World Series, their redemption – into a charade of bragging and ridiculing their victims.
After 86 years of frustration and futility, the Red Sox themselves and so much of the New England populace, dissed the imperial Yankees. They had won a World Series, yet they preened and boasted as though they had won the World Series 26 times since 1918.