We are now a couple of months into the baseball season. As I write this post - first of May - the Red Sox are terrible, beleaguered, in disarray. Mostly, they are no fun to watch. Which is too bad, because I really enjoy baseball. Just not the way the Olde Towne Team has been playing it.
They don't have to win it all every year. I was a Red Sox fan for a good long time before they won their first World Series in 86 years in 2004. During my first decades of fandom, there was a lot more thin than thick, and I'm not going to abandon them now. I'm a better-or-worse kind of gal. I'd just like them to be a bit more competitive than they are now.
Then there are the NY Yankees.
Unlike our boys of summer, they're having a pretty good year. Including coldcocking the Red Sox three times in April. Hiss, boo.
One Yankees player who is a particular nemesis is pitcher Cam Schlittler. In his April win over the Sox, he did his part to secure a series sweep, beating our boys 4-2. And last October, when the Red Sox had narrowly made it in to the post-season, it was Schlittler who put the Sox away in the deciding game of the three-game Wild Card series. He went 8 innings in a 4-0 shoutout. (Fortunately, the Yankees got clobbered by the Blue Jays in their next series.)
Schlittler's just 25, and, unless he turns out to be injury-prone or gets the yips, it looks like he has a pretty good career ahead of him. The rub, of course, is that he's a local. He grew up a Red Sox fan in Walpole, a south-of-Boston suburb that, before Cam Schlittler, was perhaps best known as the home of the ultra-violent, maximum security Walpole State Prison. (In the mid-1980s, the good citizens of Walpole demanded that the state rename the prison, as they didn't want it to keep tarnishing the town's reputation. The state renamed it Cedar Junction, which makes it sound like a leafy, bucolic neighbor of Mayberry. The prison is now closed.)
And another rub: Schlittler didn't flee the harsh New England weather to play college ball in the more baseball-friendly climate of, say, Florida. No, he stayed put and played for Northeastern.
Anyway, Cam Schlittler is a Yankee now, his family converted to Yankees fandom, part of the Evil Empire. And prior to the April series, played at Fenway, he reported that he and his family had received online death threats. The nature of these death threats did not rise to the level of 'call the cops' - which would have been his father, who is the police chief in Needham, another Boston suburb. (Apparently, no one texted a picture of seashells writing out 86 31 - Cam's number - or someone would probably have tried to make a federal case out of it.)
Schlittler shrugged the threats off as meaningless, diehard intensity. And he's been known to engage in online back-and-forth trolling with Red Sox fans. (Among other barbs, after he shut the Red Sox down and out in the Wild Card series last fall, he tweeted “Drinking dat dirty water.” Which is actually pretty funny, given that "Love that Dirty Water" is a Red Sox theme song, played after every winning home game.)
“Most normal fans could care less, right?,” Schlittler told [the New York Post's John] Sherman. “It’s just those diehards that just have nothing else in their lives other than baseball or sports that really care about this and the fact that I play for the Yankees makes it worse for them.” (Source: Boston Globe)
As one of those normal fans, I find it beyond ridiculous that someone would make an online death threat against an athlete, let alone his family.
I'm all in favor of trashtalk, but don't cross the line into death threats. And you'd think that some of the trashtalkers might be silenced by the fact that Schlittler pretty much owns the Sox. (Kind of like the Fenway faithful should probably stop breaking into Yankees Suck chants everytime they get bored. Which is plenty, given how the Sox are performing this season. Admittedly, it is true that the Yankees do suck. Sadly, just not at baseball.)
Anyway, while we're on the subject of Cam Schlittler, I'm pretty sure that if my name were Schlittler, I would have changed it. Kept it Germanic with Schlitz. Pick out the best part and go with Little. But Schlittler is just such an unfortunate combination of the first syllable sounding like shit, and the overall name rhyming with Hitler.
At least his parents didn't name him Adolf.
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Image Source: Topps
