Someone please kill Twitter. Kill it with fire:
Following the Red Sox’ 4-3 win over the Yankees, Thursday night at Fenway Park -- their eighth victory in as many meetings with New York this season -- Sox majority owner John Henry posted on his Twitter account: “the MT Curse?” The ‘MT’ was assumed to be in reference to Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira, who signed with the Yankees instead of the Red Sox. But a few hours later, in an email to WEEI.com, Henry wrote: “Purely Entertainment. Nothing more. I don’t believe in curses.”
OK, that’s not fair. Twitter isn’t the problem here. It’s just the medium. This is really two problems, a minor one and a major one. The minor one is that John Henry doesn’t know how curses are supposed to work. The Red Sox allegedly failed to win the World Series for over eight decades because they gave up the guy they should have kept, not because they got him. For there to be some curse analogous to that of the Bambino here, it would have to be the curse of, hell, I dunno, John Smoltz or Brad Penny or something. Wait, the Yankees didn’t want those guys. Look, just make up your own curse, I don’t have time to think that through.
The major problem here is the pathological overreaction to this kind of stuff by the East Coast media. So John Henry said something somewhat off-the-wall late in the evening. Henry is my mom’s age. She’s so batty we can’t take her in public, so this isn’t exactly news. Nevertheless, we can be assured that Henry’s tweets will be all over the Boston and New York media today. If that seagull thing had happened in the Sox-Yankees game the bird’s family would be on all of the talk shows today.