Shaughnessy's bitter tone is a sign of the times... he knows the football barbarians are at the gates of his baseball kingdom, and the region will never be the same again. Football is spreading rapidly in the region, even UMass is debating going Division I. If you read Buckley, Massarotti and Shaughnessy's shoddy football efforts this year, the barely-suppressed envy is visceral, irrational....they want nothing more than for the Pats to fail just like the Red Sox last year, to strip the aura from BB so that much-maligned Red Sox management will cease to suffer by comparison. They want things to be as they were, a provincial baseball town ruled by bitter baseball scribes.. but now a whole new crop of young-gun football reporters is on the rise region-wide... Reiss, Tomase, Breer, Felger, commanding the public's attention, setting the sports' agenda, displacing baseball from the airwaves and the headlines, threatening the old baseball guard represented by tenured maven "Curly" Dan.
Once again, in a football column, Curly Dan feels compelled to make a baseball comment in THE VERY FIRST SENTENCE/PARAGRAPH. I wonder what he and Lucchino talk about when they plot media strategy, Lucchino plying him with whiskey and offering pet jobs to Curly Dan's immediate family... that's how Boston works, doesn't it? The Sox knew they had to make a splash this offseason... one more incompetent year like last year and they would have become 2nd class to the Pats despite the oft-repeated axiom that this is a Red Sox region. Not anymore, folks, and they are starting to squirm. We don't need them anymore....
" but you might try inserting one per sentence and rereading.
