Jerry Remy died over the weekend. Unless you’re a Red Sox fan, you may not have heard of Remy, but he was a Boston icon by the time he died at the age of 68. I was trying to come up with an ethics theme to justify writing a post about him: I can’t, in fairness. He was just a normal guy who got to live his dream, some would say: a Boston kid (Fall River, to be accurate) who grew up, like me, loving the home town team with all of its drama and disappointments, and was talented enough to play for it, after being traded by the Angels to the Sox in 1976. Then Remy became part of Sox lore, the frustrating parts, as his team battled the New York Yankees in their most repulsive incarnation for primacy in the late ’70s, always falling short. In the most famous and tragic of those near misses, Yankee shortstop Bucky Dent’s cheap home run became the decisive blow in a single play-off tie-breaker in 1978, making Dent a a Yankee immortal. Only moral luck prevented the hero of that historic game from being Remy. In the bottom of the 9th with the Red Sox trailing by one run, Remy hit a blast to right field that Yankee outfielder Lou Piniella lost in the sun. It landed in front of him and bounced to his left: Piniella threw his glove up in blind desperation, and the ball, somehow, landed in it. Lou later told Remy that he never saw it until it was in his grip. Had that ball gotten by him, Rick Burleson would have scored the tying run from first, and Remy would have had an easy triple. He might even have had an inside-the-park homer, winning the game, the division championship, and immortality for getting the biggest hit in Red Sox history.
Remy’s knees gave out eventually, like many second basemen before base runners were forbidden from breaking up potential double-plays with hard slides. He eventually became the Sox cable broadcast color man for 34 years, until he left the booth in August to battle lung cancer. Remy was warm, informative, candid, modest and funny, all while describing himself as a mediocre hitter who felt honored to play on a team with stars like Jim Rice and Carl Yastrzemski. He also kept doing his job, despite more than his share of tragedy and pain. His oldest son was a drug addict, and murdered his girlfriend in a steroid rage. He is serving life without parole in prison; Jerry and his wife took on shared custody of their infant granddaughter. Remy’s battle with lung cancer began in 2008; he kept fighting off multiple recurrences with operations, radiation and chemo, and it kept coming back. He battled depression as well, and spoke and wrote about the illness, inspiring and comforting many who shared that often crippling condition.
Jerry’s last appearance on a baseball field was, appropriately, when he threw out the ceremonial first pitch on October 4 for another one game play-off with the Yankees, who had ended the season tied with Boston, just as in 1978. I knew he was through: he looked pale and weak, but Remy beamed at the huge ovation he received from the Fenway Park crowd as he lobbed the ball to his frequent NESN broadcast partner and fellow member of that tragic 1978 team, Dennis Eckersley. This time, the Red Sox beat the Yankees.
Jerry Remy made a lot of people happy during his life, was respected and loved by those who knew him and worked with him, and kept fighting his way through what chaos threw at him, becoming a better, kinder, nicer human being in the process. That’s a pretty good legacy, better than many greater baseball players. I know he made me happy lots of times, and did so while he must have been suffering.
Good for you, Jerry. Good job at life. I’ll miss you, and so will everyone else. The more good, hard working, courageous human beings we have around, the better it is for everyone.
1. Not funny, not acceptable, but not like cheering on ISIS, either. A Southwest Airlines pilot lats week ended an address to passengers with the words “Let’s go, Brandon.” That phrase means “Fuck Joe Biden;’ let’s not be coy. There’s no excuse for saying that to a plane full of people even though, thanks to a near mainstream media black-out, most of his passengers probably had no idea what he meant.
So Southwest Airlines released a statement apologizing for the pilot’s words and promising an investigation. An investigation of what? A pilot behaved unprofessionally and gratuitously insulted the President of the United States with a coded obscenity. Res ipsa loquitur.
Fire him.
But this being the time of the Great Stupid, commentators on both ends of the political spectrum made fools of themselves. CNN analyst Asha Rangappa tweeted, “As an experiment, I’d love for an [sic] @SouthwestAir pilot to say ‘Long live ISIS’ before taking off.My guess is that 1) the plane would be immediately grounded; 2) the pilot fired; and 3) a statement issued by the airline within a matter of hours.”
Wow, what an idiot! (but if you’ve paid any attention to this radical left-wing hysteric, you know that.) Here’s what I’d like to see as an experiment: CNN being responsible and only employing hosts and analysts who demonstrate at least rudimentary analogy skills, and ditching those, like Asha, who prove that they think insulting a Democratic President with the same level of venom as her allies used to denigrate a Republican President is the equivalent of cheering on a terrorist organization.
On the other side, we have conservative pundit Karen Townsend, who spins, “Remember when actor Robert De Niro walked out on the stage of the Tony Awards (it was televised) and began his remarks by screaming “F**k Trump!”?…In this case, Let’s go Brandon is really tame. Biden’s name isn’t even used, it’s just a joke used by his critics.”
No, it means “Fuck Joe Biden,” and she knows it means “Fuck Joe Biden.” That is NOT tame in a professional setting, and it is not acceptable or tolerable. De Niro proved himself to be a vulgar creep, but the Tonys show is not a passenger plane.
2. I love this story! Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi, a pure, obvious and intellectually dishonest race-hustler and anti-white racist, tweeted this:
Boy, whites are really…hey, wait a minute. Kendi’s whole career has been built on his contention that whites have it made in this racist society, and their privilege guarantees success. But if that’s true, then why would any whites pretend to be non-white? And if that tactic succeeds, doesn’t that disprove his thesis?
Now, a genuine, wise, serious scholar would be able to explain this apparent contradiction, assuming that his public statements are backed by integrity, scholarship and serious analysis. But, as some of us knew long ago, they are not. So after critics pointed out that Kendri’s tweet undermined his entire, lucrative, career-advancing, racist position, he deleted the tweet!
‘Contradictory tweet? What contradictory tweet? I don’t see any contradictory tweet!’
Ethics Alarms 
That was a beautiful tribute to Rem-Dawg, Jack. Rest of the post was pretty damned good, too!
Well, I owe it to him.
Yes, I thought of our host when they did the little tribute to Remy last night during the WS broadcast. He was also really, really big on The Jimmy Fund, wasn’t he? Funny, I still think of Remy and Jim Fergosi as the original Los Angeles Angels.
#2 Kendi is a real scumbag. But I have to give it to him, I respect the grift. Making self hating suburban liberal women buy his bunk, so they could learn more about how white people are the worst is genius. This is some “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” material here! And he gets $10 mil from Jack Dorsey, aka Twitter Rasputin. Imbram X Kendi might the 21st century’s greatest con man. If he wanted, he could become president of BU, just by accusing the current one of being an old white guy (who does all the woke motions, as required).
Frankly I don’t blame the pilot for spouting off, after all the crap that air travel personnel are getting, at least in part, due to the vaccine and mask nonsense. That said, they were already on their way there after 2017 and the poor behavior of some of their colleagues toward passengers. One man was lionized for inserting himself into a situation he had nothing to do with and threatening a flight attendant with “I’ll knock you flat.” Then there’s the matter of last year lionizing those who beat those they don’t agree with and breaking their stuff. It should come as no surprise that now some people are in fact knocking air travel personnel flat, and air travel personnel are coming unglued. As for “Let’s Go Brandon,” I just bought a hat with that on it, and I’m not afraid to stand behind it. Fuck Joe Biden, fuck his worthless vice president and cabinet, and fuck the Democratic party for the shitshow they’ve turned this nation into.
Southwest has always encouraged (scripted?) snarky commentary from their cabin crews. This is just a small bird coming home to roost. I doubt the guy will suffer any consequences. His supervisor will probably have some sort of obligatory sit down with him the next time they’re in the same location, they’ll have a chuckle about the whole thing and then compare notes about their newest fishing boats. Additionally, if Southwest were to try to do anything really serious to this guy, I’m sure the union would be all over them. I’d sure represent the guy. Southwest is estopped from saying “No jokes.”
Just throwing this into the mix;
https://www.dailywire.com/news/southwest-airlines-pilot-lets-go-brandon-claim-by-ap-under-question?fbclid=IwAR2dx3nw7kQmvWnpMqlIP1TbqJSEE6aBKOl3eG_DDxbGtQThgSFqibCasxw
Filed under: Media Bias.
-Jut
The Southwest pilot may have actually said “Let’s go Braves”, not “Let’s go Brandon”. That AP reporter who claims it happened has released a “clip” that cuts off at “Let’s go bra-“ very suspiciously, and there is online speculation that she may have made the whole thing up. She also apparently tried to break into the cockpit. The flight was out of Houston and he might have just been tweaking Astros fans, not insulting the president.
“Braves” and “Brandon” don’t sound alike at all. This would seem to be awfully easy to settle.
The audio is available here. It sounds like let’s go braves to me, but it’s hard to tell.
https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2021/11/01/it-was-all-because-one-ap-journalist-went-crazy-sounds-like-media-may-have-jumped-the-gun-on-southwest-pilots-lets-go-brandon-signoff-audio/
Sounds as if he’s about to say let’s go Braves. And it’s so normal and low key, it just sounds as if he’s going to toss in a cheer for his favorite team, not slime a sitting president. It’s all just pilot speak until it gets mysteriously cut off. I’d say false flag/lefty outrage shit storm. I bet it’s on the cockpit voice recorder so it should be easy to determine what he really said.
Sounded like “Brandon” to me.
Sounds like “Bray” rather than “Bran” to me. But it will be on the recorder. Should be interesting.
If it turns out to be “Let’s Go Braves!”, then that will be one more abstracted meme added to the pile of ways to trash talk the President without “trash talking” the President.
But at this point, aren’t we just the Blues and the Greens screaming at each other in the hippodrome?
I think Red Sox fans sliming Bucky Fucking Dent is disingenuous to the point of verging into res ipsa loquitor territory. Cheap home run? Do features such as the Pesky pole or Williamsburg ring a bell? Dent had a heck of a career. The Red Sox collapsed that year. They should never have been in that one game playoff.
1. Still a cheap home run: a pop-up that wouldn’t have gone out of any other park. The definition of cheap. And the pesky Pole homers are acknowledged as cheap flukes…again, the easiest homer in the game.
2. “Williamsburg” was straightaway right, and still one of the toughest homers in teh game. The team built the bullpen to make it easier for Ted to homer, but they weren’t cheap, even by 1940s standards.
3. The razzing of Dent isn’t personal. He was the most likable player on that team—the “Fucking” refers to what he did, not to him. Trust me on this. Nobody was angry at Bucky.
4. The Sox collapsed indeed, but they were wiped out by injuries. They still came back by winning their last 8 games in a row to make up a 3.5 game deficit and catch the Yanks on the final day. I don’t see how you can say they didn’t earn the play-off.
I’d say any homer to left at Fenway is cheap by definition. It’s their park! They built it on a piece of land that was clearly unsuitable for a major league ball park. They should have condemned Lansdowne street decades ago. MLB should have demanded it. Carlton Fisk’s homer was legitimate but Bucky’s wasn’t? Live by the sword, die by the same sword.
“Nothing personal, Bucky. It’s just business.” Red Sox fans never take anything personally or take it out on players. Just ask Billy Buck.
Injuries are part of the game. The proper response is called “depth.”
On the last point: that indeed was the problem, but it was exacerbated by a terrible manager. The Red Sox had depth, but it was wasted and allowed to rot: Zimmer kept playing the stars until they wore out, even when the team was way, way ahead. Butch Hobson literally could not throw at third because of bone chips, yet Jack Brohamer never made it into the line-up. Frank Duffy, who had been a regular ss in Cleveland, rusted on the bench until when he was needed for a protracted period, he was terrible. The worst was Bernie Carbo, who was slugging 4th outfielder, but Zimmer had him traded mid-season because he was a wild and crazy guy (Bernie was also gay.)
But home runs over the Monster are only cheap when they are the Dent variety. The Wall takes away more home runs than it manufactures.
A couple weeks ago, during the ALCS, I was chatting with a fellow at the dog park while watching our dogs play. He asked me who I was rooting for in the game that night. I come from a St. Louis Cardinals family, so even though I live in Texas now, I didn’t much care about the ALCS series. I offered (only half-joking) that I would probably root for the Astros, “because Red Sox fans can be so obnoxious.” He laughed and said, “I understand, I’m a Red Sox fan.”