IBC

...shut the f up.

First of all, Mariano Rivera, bar none, has been the best closer in the AL this year. He's putting up video game numbers this year.

Second of all, he's Mariano Rivera and it's the All-Star game at Yankee Stadium.

Papelbon is one of the few players on the Red Sox that I actually, usually, really like. Unfortunately he, apparently, really needs to learn his place in the game - and a new PR person.

The correct answer is: "It's an honor to be an All-Star, especially with the opportunity to pitch with an all-time great like Mariano. Any other year I think I close with the best of them in the majors, but this is clearly Mariano's year and, in this situation, with this game at Yankee Stadium, he should be the closer."

Yes, Papelbon would speak in a run-on sentence.

Why not fuel the rivalry even more, and further position Boston's ignorance?

Isn't that good for baseball?

I've always hated Papelbon. You can just tell he's an arrogant prick by looking at him. He oozes douchebag

Any other time is fine - but to say that for this game is just complete ignorance. Give the guy the respect he deserves - he's the greatest closer of all-time, and he's having an unbelievable year, and the game's at Yankee Stadium.

It's not good for baseball - Josh Hamilton mashing 28 homers in one HR derby round is good for baseball. The Rays and Marlins are good for baseball. The last thing baseball needs right now is more stupidity surrounding the Yanks/Red Sox rivalry.

Let me rephrase my comment...

"Isn't it good for MLB $$?"
What sells more papers, gets more blog subscriptions & produces higher ratings?
It's not the Rays, Marlins, or HR derby.

Guess I was looking at it from a business standpoint, and not a baseball purest point of view.

That being said, I wish MLB could be about the feel-good stories more, and put the Red Sox/Yanks rivalry to rest. It was so much more fun when the Red Sox were a bunch of losers, and had no credibility to back up their ignorant comments.

The only people that aren't tired of hearing about the Red Sox are Red Sox fans. All the good will they had after 04 they flushed down the commode by being a bunch of arrongant, full of shit assholes. I argue this with JP all the time and he says its just my bias against Boston but he's so deep in the Boston forest that he can't see the trees. Ask fans from other franchises located outside of the NY/Boston area what they think about "Red Sox Nation", I put that in quotation marks because they blatently stole that from the Cardinals, and 90% of the people will have nothing good to say

I have to agree with Aaron on this one.

First and foremost I'm a White Sox fan but I live about 30 minutes outside of Boston and generally hit a Red Sox game or two a year. I also watch a good deal of the Sox games on NESN and root for them whenever they're not playing my South Siders and an overwhelming majority of my friends are die-hard Red Sox fans. Living in the "belly of the beast" so to speak I have to say there aren't a more arrogant, whiney, and loyal-to-the point-of-stupid group of fans out there than Red Sox fans (and Boston fans in general).

Obviously there are exceptions to the rule - I'd say about 35% of Boston fans - but the other 65% are so retardedly annoying that you can't help but lump them all into the same category because you never hear from the good fans.

Aaron, if "Red Sox Nation" was bitten off from anywhere (and it certainly was) then it was bit off from the Raider Nation, which is actually a meaningful phrase to the average fan on the national level in the last decade as opposed to "Cardinal Nation" which is not. Second of all, bitch all you want about Red Sox fans, we don't care. We aren't trying to please you, or anyone else. We didn't need that so-called goodwill in 2004, there's no motivation to keep it. Hardcore Boston fans were this way before 2004 and will be after, and complaining to Boston fans about being arrogant, obnoxious, and over-impressed with our own teams is like complaining to an anti-war protester about being a whiny ass communist pussy, your wasting your breath (or internet bandwidth as the case may be), by and large we really don't care and even if we do we aren't going to change. Papelbon knows his fanbase, and that's who he was speaking to. That being said, Aaron you do have an absolutely ridiculous anti-Boston bias.

Raider Nation was taken from Redskins Nation, just like Red Sox Nation was taken from Cardinal Nation. The reason they were called nations back in the day was the Skins were the southernmost franchise until the Falcons came along, just as the Cards were the southernmost and westernmost franchise in MLB. So their fanbases were called nations because geographically, the boundries of the reach of their fans was greater in size than some countries. Look at the Cardinals due to KMOX, they could be heard anywhere from the Rocky Mountains to the Carolinas where there wasn't a team and could be heard as far away as Maine on clear nights. All I'm saying is if you take something, whatever, but just say hey, we took it from them

1. Papelbon is a Texan, of course he's mentally retarded.

2. Whether he's right or not, I wouldn't ever want a closer who didn't believe he was the best and doesn't believe he should be the guy taking the ball at the end of the game. Any game.

I wonder how his family in Louisiana is going to react when they hear he's a Texan.

Rays wrote:I wonder how his family in Louisiana is going to react when they hear he's a Texan.

That he's moving up in the world.