No, you idiots, the Boston Red Sox did not demote a major league pitcher because he said “something publicly that goes against what the Leftist elites want you to believe.” This totally manufactured “gotcha!” story, initially pushed by the only intermittently reliable New York Post (meaning it isn’t reliable at all, which made it easy for the pro-Biden censors to hide the Hunter Biden laptop story) was flogged to death by P.J. Media’s Robert Spencer. Its gist: Matt Dermody, who started Boston’s final game last week in a series against the Cleveland Indi–sorry, Guardians, was demoted after the game “because he has dared to depart from our insane society’s wholehearted worship of sexual deviance.”
I venture to conclude that Spencer didn’t watch the game. You see, I did. You had to be watching from the National Anthem, because Dermody was only around for three innings, and even that was touch-and-go. I also was aware of a controversy in “Red Sox Nation” over Dermody being brought up from the minor leagues to start that game, but it had nothing to do with his social media comments in 2021. Oh, the usual suspects like the Boston Globe tried to assail the team for even signing a pitcher who wouldn’t wave a rainbow flag, but the real problem with the move was that it made no sense as a baseball tactic. The Red Sox have been in a protracted slump, they had fallen into last place in the hyper-competitive American League East, and they needed a win to stay above .500 and to win the series, which was tied 1-1. Cleveland is a weaker team than the Sox (though they are in second place in the pathetic AL Central), but the Sox still needed a competent performance from whomever they started.
Dermody, it was obvious from the moment the announcement was made that he was being brought up from Worchester, wasn’t likely to provide it. He is a 31-year-old retread who had been forgettable in four brief stints with the Blue Jays and Cubs and hadn’t even been getting batters out in the minors. Every Red Sox fan, as well as a Red Sox beat writer who has been my friend for 20 years, thought the decision to use him was asinine….and it had nothing, nada, zilch to do with his views regarding gays.
Why did the Sox bring up Dermody? Well, it’s complicated. The team was headed to Yankee stadium to play its first series against the hated Yankees, who had wiped the team out 13-6 in last year’s games. The first game would pit them against Gerrit Cole, the Yankee ace and probably the best pitcher in the league. It was Boston’s Garrett Whitlock’s turn in the starting rotation—he’s a promising young starter— for the Cleveland game, but some genius in the Boston high command thought it made more sense to hold him out for an extra day so he could get beaten by Cole than to pitch him in Cleveland, where he had a better than even chance of winning.
This is going t be a little over some non-baseball heads, but the Sox also had a roster issue. They were going to re-activate slugging centerfielder Adam Duvall for the Yankee series and had already jettisoned an outfielder from the 26-man roster to clear a space. Someone had to fill the slot for one game only to be sent down to the minors again or released after the game. The team decided on Dermody like Apollo Creed settled on Rocky for a title fight. Even if the old hack pitched a no-hitter, he was going to be a one-day wonder.
The news media, left and right, ignored all of this. So after Darmody stunk up the game (though Sox reliever Cory Kluber was worse in the Cleveland wipe-out), the narrative was, in Spencer’s ridiculous analysis, that Dermody “’posted a tweet in June 2021 — when he was a member of the Saitama Seibu Lions in Japan — denouncing homosexuality as a sin in the name of his Christian faith,’ …Apparently, to be an effective pitcher in today’s major leagues, you have to love the entire Pride extravaganza that is forced upon us everywhere during the month of June (and all other months as well).”
Uh, no, you jackass, to be an effective pitcher in today’s major leagues you have to be able to pitch. Obviously–or at least it should be obvious to anyone with two neurons to rub together—if the Red Sox were going to penalize Dermody for his anti-gay tweets, they would never have given him a shot at another major league start. Doing so meant more money for the pitcher, and also was an opportunity that his age and career performance indicated that he never was going to get again. It was stupid for Sox GM Chaim Bloom to bring up Dermody, but he certainly wasn’t yielding to the LGTBQ+ lobby when he DFA’d (“designated for assignment”) the journeyman after the game.
The Red Sox have hardly been immune to the corporate insanity infecting almost all sports franchises to toe the progressive fealty line; even as a lifetime fan, I have criticized the team’s many grovels to the city’s social justice mob, notably by plastering “Black Lives Matter” propaganda all over Fenway Park, inside and out, in 2020. This supposed example of the team’s politically motivated “treatment of a pitcher who dared to utter unapproved ideas,” however, was complete fantasy—fake news.
The examples of real censorship and individuals being punished in the workplace for non-conforming statements and opinions are so numerous that there is no excuse for making them up. But that’s today’s journalism, folks! If a fake story will help move the public opinion needle just s bit toward a reporter or pundit’s favored position, it’s considered justification to lie.
Ethics Alarms 
Good post. The more conservative side of the political spectrum (where I live) has plenty of truly outrageous things to deal with from the liberal side. There is no need to manufacture outrage where none exists.
We help ourselves not a bit when we do this.
By the way, kudos to Garrett Whitlock, who ended up matching Cole pitch-for-pitch Friday night…and beating him to boot.
Indeed…but it’s still moral luck. The odds were better for the Sox if Whitlock had pitched against Cleveland. And Tanner Houck, who would have faced Cole, might well have beaten him too, based on his start in Game 2 of the NY series.
Good post on the ethical topic. Now for some thread drift… there’s been much discussion in various NHL fan forums regarding who would take over as General Manager of the Pittsburgh Penguins – which, as Jack may know, is owned by Fenway Sports Group (FSG).
I had to point out several times that Penguins fans shouldn’t get too excited about the direction the team would take, noting that FSG had no experience with hockey and decades of experience running an MLB team, and that the latter sucks, and regularly sucks, except maybe once a decade.
Now now…be fair. Boston leads all MLB teams in World Series victories this century, with wins in 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2018, and was two games away from another WS visit in 2021. But you have every reason to be bitter after what happened to the Bruins….
Not bitter. Merely disappointed. Bruins management, which hasn’t proven any more skillful than Red Sox management, gave the players every possible asset it could to make a run for the cup – at the expense of a bunch of future good draft picks and a pitiful salary cap situation going into next year (the NHL, unlike MLB and the NBA, has a hard cap.
Yes, perhaps I should have said “every five years.” But why do the Sox regularly deliver four years of suckfulness for every year of glory?
Oh, I can answer that!!!! Long before the Sox broke “The Curse” in 2004, my long association with the team (including watching or listening to all but a handful of games since I was 12 caused me to formulate The Red Sox Principle, which was that whenever it was most certain that the team would succeed, it would fail, and vice-versa. The RSP applies from season to season, game to game and sometimes even play to play. Every time the Sox won a pennat prior to 2004, they were regarded as non-contenders. Every season after they went to the World Series (in 1946, ’67, ’75, and ’86) the next year, when the team was among the favorites to prevail. again, they crashed and burned. Meanwhile, they managed to just miss winning those Series, and always in strange or controversial ways.My familiarity with this weird proclivity allowed me to tell all of my fellow fans and baseball fanatics, when teh team was down 0-3 in the ALCS against the Yankees in 2004, that I was certain that the team would not only come back to become the only baseball team to overcome such a deficit in the post-season, but that it would also go on to break “The Curse.” I explained that the RSP demanded that the Sox could only succeed when it appeared impossible—Yankees, 0-3. I was serious. I put my analysis in writing. And I was right.
Once the team started winning pennants and WS routinely, the RSP asserted itself, as it had to, by decreeing that the team really crash and burn between triumphs. (From 1967 to 1983, Boston never had a losing season–a record)
And so it has. (The RSP dictates that the team will make the play-offs this year, because literally no one thought they would. Except me.)
Prior to 2004, I opined that if the Sox ever won the World Series, the magnetic poles would shift to the equator and each successive year would bring further chaos to the world order.
It appears I was largely correct, except for the magnetic poles thing.