Author: Dan Kennedy

Wait till next year

The shocking truth was that I didn’t see today’s game. Weeks ago, I’d volunteered to lead a church hike through the Lynn Woods. I updated myself on the score several times on my BlackBerry, and made it back to the car just in time to hear the top of the ninth. Ugh.

Tonight, I punched up WEEI just in time to hear some bozo caller ranting that Jonathan Papelbon should be “run out of town.” Can you imagine? Fortunately, the hosts were having none of it. If the Red Sox had been able to hit during those first two games, Papelbon’s rare failure today wouldn’t have mattered so much. Pap’s performance looks a lot worse because others didn’t do their jobs.

Still, despite the holes on this team, if Papelbon had done what he almost always does, and if the Sox had won Game Four, all the pressure would have shifted to the Angels. Who knows what would have happened?

Not that they were going all the way. I agree with something the Boston Globe’s Chad Finn wrote on Twitter: “Bottom line: It’s a crushing way for the season to end, but once Beckett stopped dominating, had to figure a title wasn’t in the cards.”

Maybe the Red Sox need new fans: Just saw this, from Rob Bradford at WEEI.com. I had not realized that some fans were booing Papelbon. What a disgrace. Maybe the Sox need new fans even more than a mobile third baseman and a DH who can hit good pitching.

Through the glass darkly

Boston GlobeFriday was deadline day for bidders seeking to make an offer to buy the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from the New York Times Co. And it appears there’s not much to report.

New York Times media reporter Richard Pérez-Peña writes that it’s not even clear whether the two contenders for the Globe, a group led by former Globe executive Stephen Taylor and California-based Platinum Equity, had submitted bids.

Each had reportedly offered to pay $35 million as well as assume pension liabilities of $59 million. Jessica Heslam had reported in the Boston Herald that the estimate of those liabilities had recently been revised upward to $115 million. Pérez-Peña quotes sources who confirm the upward revision, but suggest the error was not quite as great as that.

It’s hard to know what to believe. I can tell you that I’ve heard the actual pension liabilities may be even higher than what Heslam’s sources told her. The truth may be that such estimates are hard to nail down, and that opinions differ.

Meanwhile, Telegram & Gazette reporter Shaun Sutner breaks the news that former T&G editor Harry Whitin is involved in a group that is seeking to buy the paper separately — the first indication that the Globe and the T&G might be split up. (The Globe runs the story as well.)

The money guy is identified as Ralph Crowley, the president and CEO of Polar Beverages.

The Times Co. bought the Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion and the T&G in 2000 for $296 million.

Several months ago, a T&G source explained to me all the multifarious ways that Globe and T&G operations had been combined over the years. I was left with the distinct impression that it would be an expensive proposition to try to separate the two at this point.

But if the two papers end up with different owners, I suppose it wouldn’t be that difficult for them to reach an agreement to continue joint operations that make sense.

Red Sox by the numbers

The Boston Globe’s Adam Kilgore has the statistic I was looking for. The notion that the Red Sox can’t hit good pitching isn’t just a cliché — it’s actually true. Kilgore writes:

The Sox sputtered all season against frontline pitchers. Against the top 15 American League pitchers in ERA+, a stat that adjusts ERA for ballparks, the Red Sox hit .220 with a .266 on-base percentage and a .327 slugging percentage. The league average against those pitchers was .248, .292, and .387.

Next, one of my own favorite stats. The Sox ended the season 95-67, for a very respectable winning percentage of .586. It’s hard to believe they finished eight games out with a record like that, but that’s what happens when the Yankees sign the three best free agents on the market.

But if you eliminate the woeful Orioles, against whom the Sox were 16-2, then the Red Sox’ record for the year was 79-65, for a mediocre winning percentage of .549. Not that every team doesn’t have a cousin or two, but that’s ridiculous.

Granted, that still would have been good enough to get them into the post-season, and it’s better than Minnesota’s .534. But it is, perhaps, a more accurate measurement of their actual abilities.

The Sox still have a chance to prove us all wrong. But right now things don’t look good.

Did Acorn help Al Franken win? (II)

It’s been more than 24 hours, and Katherine Kersten has not responded to my e-mail asking how voter-registration fraud in Minnesota could have led to election fraud that helped put U.S. Sen. Al Franken over the top in his race with Norm Coleman.

At this point I have to assume she’s firing blanks.

The heart of her argument, published in the Star Tribune, is that Acorn registered 43,000 new voters in Minnesota last year; that, given Acorn’s track record, some of them must have been fraudulent; and that since Franken won by just 312 votes, only a tiny fraction of those registrations needed to be transformed into votes in order to explain Franken’s victory.

Of course, the alchemists believed that if they could transform just a tiny fraction of the lead they had in their possession into gold, they’d all be rich.

Let’s try to keep in mind what this is about. Acorn hired temporary field workers who, in many cases, were paid by the signature to sign up new voters. That created an obvious incentive for the workers to fill in as many names as possible and thus make more money.

I’m not aware of an allegation being lodged anywhere in the country that an ineligible voter showed up on election day, identified himself by one of those phony names and then cast a ballot. The right has spent months — years — looking for such evidence only to come up with nothing.

And when you understand the nature of the very real fraud that was committed, it’s impossible to see any connection. It’s like tying the health-care debate to the color of Queen Elizabeth’s hair.

Obama’s Nobel Prize (II)

Just want to make it clear that I’m not siding with those who say President Obama should refuse the Nobel Peace Prize.

He should accept it with great humility, and make it clear that he understands it’s a goad for what he might accomplish — not a lifetime achievement award for a president who’s only been in office for nine months.

Refusing the award would merely compound the Nobel committee’s mistake with an even greater one. (Via Hub Blog, which notes that Jon Keller and David Kravitz want Obama to reject the Nobel.)

Obama’s Nobel Prize

obama_20091009I should be reading the papers and getting ready for class, but I just want to get this out there first. No doubt the topic will inspire a long string of comments, and probably a few of you will have more coherent thoughts than I do.

President Obama is a leader of extraordinary promise. I think he’s already accomplished a lot. His policies helped steer the worst economic crisis since the 1930s into something like a normal recession. He’s come closer to enacting comprehensive health-care reform than any previous president.

And, yes, his approach to foreign policy has combined pragmatism, cooperation and an orientation toward negotiation and peace that stands in stark contrast with the belligerent Bush-Cheney team. I’m also glad he’s rethinking his original desire to escalate in Afghanistan.

That said, I’m puzzled, to say the least, by his winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I think Obama might well have been Nobel-worthy in a couple of years, depending on what he’s able to accomplish with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Iran and its nuclear aspirations, with the Afghanistan-Pakistan mess and with North Korea. And that’s assuming he can find willing negotiating partners.

For the Nobel committee to award its most prestigious honor to Obama at this early stage of his presidency, the members must have been thinking one of two things:

  • He deserves it for all sorts of symbolic reasons: he’s the first African-American president, he represents a clean break with George W. Bush and he’s reached out to the international community in a variety of ways.
  • He doesn’t really deserve it, but he should get it in order to give him ammunition (oops; bad word) against his critics and to provide some momentum to his peace-making efforts.

I don’t think either of those reasons are good enough.

Conservatives, needless to say, are going to have a field day with this, comparing it to previous Nobels they think were undeserving, such as those given to Jimmy Carter and Al Gore. By contrast, I think Gore and especially Carter were very deserving recipients who received the honor on the basis of many years of hard work.

Many liberals are going to be thrilled that Obama won, although the early buzz on the left, based solely on my monitoring of Twitter, is that at least some liberals are as perplexed as I am.

Not that Obama is the worst selection ever. Certainly there have been much more undeserving recipients, such as Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger. (Despite what some conservatives are claiming on Twitter, Adolf Hitler did not win the Nobel. Try looking it up, folks.)

Anyway — there you have it. Discuss among yourselves.

Deadline day for the Boston Globe sale

Tomorrow is the day that the New York Times Co. has set to accept final offers to sell the Boston Globe. And Media Nation is picking up some well-informed buzz that things are not going well with either of the two prospective buyers — a group led by former Globe executive Stephen Taylor or Platinum Equity, owner of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Like any reader of the Globe, I have a rooting interest in this. I’d like to see the Taylors make a comeback. But even if they can pull this off, you have to wonder if they’ll be so under-capitalized that the cutting will resume almost immediately.

Dear Next Owner of the Boston Globe …

On the eve of what may be an announcement that the New York Times Co. is selling the Boston Globe, Boston.com editor David Beard weighs in with a smart piece for Poynter Online on “10 hopeful points about the future of journalism.”

Although perhaps Dave missed Dan Gillmor’s 11th rule.