Summer is just dawning, but America’s pastime is already in full swing — not baseball itself, but the long-standing tradition of lamenting its death at the hands of ruthless corporate modernity.
This week’s inciting incident was the Boston Red Sox trading homegrown slugger and World Series champion Rafael Devers to the San Francisco Giants, something team president Sam Kennedy defended in awkwardly bloodless terms as “in the absolute best interest of the ballclub.” The fans disagreed: Dean of Boston sports fandom and Ringer founder Bill Simmons lamented a “special team that’s NOT special” to its ownership anymore, while one fan raged to ESPN senior writer Buster Olney that the Sox are “not even a real organization” after jettisoning not just Devers but megastars Mookie Betts (now
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