A diatribe about spin... and some baseball stuff

Well 24 hours later... and he is still gone!

Today the players weighed in on the subject - the thoughts of Schilling, Varitek and Ortiz can be found without much effort in various sites on the web. It really does raise an interesting point - why do people when asked a question feel that they absolutely have to have an opinion? Why couldn't the three guys just tell the truth - 'At a personal level, I am sorry that Theo is gone, but I have absolutely no idea what went down, I haven't been in touch with anyone at the club since the Chicago series...' unless they do know something... in which case.... let it all out... name names!

This move is going to provide a lot of talking points over the next few days, weeks and months, and I find myself very frustrated that I can't articulate the mixture of emotions that this move, but more particularly the response from fellow Red Sox fans, draws out - I guess the way for this Sox fan to go is just to pick one small theme each day, and see if I can get my bigger picture over that way...

Today's theme - LL is a lying *, who used the media to further his own goals and stab Theo in the back...

This is a very common theme today, borne out of the belief that Theo had agreed to come back, but that on reading this article, Theo changed his mind. This is part of the wider fan theme that the Sox ownership group is obsessed with spin and managing the PR game - any readers in the UK see a well worn theme here? Perhaps Tony Blair could resign, hand over to Gordon Brown, and come manage the Red Sox in his retirement? Is Blair a sabermetrics or a scouting guy? I need to know!

At some point people will realize that the Red Sox don't operate in a vacuum - if the Sox organization is obsessed by spin, it is simply reflecting the world around it - we are all obsessed by spin whether we want to admit it or not.

We have gotten lazy, we don't want to read complex arguments about complex problems and complex people, we want simple answers, simple solutions, in short, easy to read sentences... We don't want to read that Theo had complex reasons for resigning, we want to read... it was LL's fault... we don't want to read that Theo was just as adroit at using the media to further his cause as Larry (I mean c'mon, we aren't supposed to believe that Theo was leaking the lowball salary details to the media... what Larry was leaking that as well?)... we want to read it was LL's fault... and we want to read that the team would do anything to keep one of 'us' at the helm... we want to read... well we really just want to read that Theo is still GM...

(As an aside, this is the type of thing that the management consultant version of a Moneyball / Sabermetrics GM should be studying - the mass population response to change... bad...)

We have decided as a world that we don't like "bad" news, and that people (other people obviously, not me / you, I / we can handle the truth...) are incapable of dealing with bad news - so we try to manage the news so that nothing is bad news. We do it in our roles as sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, friends, employees, employers, social groups, politicans, etc, etc, etc and yet this behavior is only bad in other people, or if we don't like the message that is being 'spun'.

That poses the question, when is a story spin, not simply someone's genuinely held opinion on how things really are?

Over the next few days we will see more of this spin - LL will undoubtedly use his 'friends' to get his message in play (spin), while Theo will use his 'friends' to get his message in play (not spin) - and the world will keep on spinning.


* enter as many advanced expletives as you wish, I want to give readers choices!