Chip Benson

THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE GOVERNMENT

The Providence Journal

January 21,2024

Big business is booming in the United States, and rightly so. Almost 50 years of free-market policies have allowed the biggest and best companies in the world to flourish. The American Dream and its way of life are fairy tales come true, courtesy of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Tesla and the S&P 500 companies. American businesses are the embodiment and intent of all that the country has strived for, and, globally, they project American influence and its ideals of independence, hard work, creativity and wealth.

Ironically, the principles in business that the American government and society have fought so ardently for are not the principles for how the government is run. The difference between the quality of the government sector and the quality of the private sector in America is stark. Compare the quality of service between Federal Express and the post office. One is modern. The other is not. Start at the top, where the CEO of FedEx, Raj Subramaniam, makes $13.25 million per year, while the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, makes $480,985.

The same goes for the U.S. military services. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown Jr., makes $266,000, while the CEO of Raytheon, Thomas Kennedy, makes $23 million per year. Finally, look at Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, who makes $99 million per year, while the president of the United States, Joe Biden, is paid $400,000 annually.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren testified in Congress last week, and her comments were echoed by Republican Senators J.D. Vance, of Ohio, and Patrick McHenry of North Carolina: “No one wants to waste taxpayer dollars, but Congress needs to be more realistic about what it takes to attract the top people to public service across the board.”

Numbers and salary reflect a person’s worth and importance in the U.S. system; no surprise then that the best and brightest no longer go into government service, they go into business. There are exceptions, of course. A few good people step up and try to do the right thing, but by and large this hollowing out of the government into a meek enterprise has been a steady and insidious slide mirroring the improvement in the fortunes of private sector America.

Is this dynamic the Achilles heel of the American system? Or is it a natural political evolution away from big government and to a more democratic society by way of a strong and diverse private sector? Certainly, at the moment many things look good for the United States, but change doesn’t begin to explain what the next hundred years will look like. Will it be necessary to have an enormous centralized government as they do in China, so that the big things get done well? Or will the fractured, seemingly unhappy, but nevertheless successful and strong American system prevail?

In the ultimate book of morality, the meek were said to inherit the earth; but thousands of years later, we live in an age determined by science, math and data. Morals are meek, and numbers are biblical.

Chip Benson is an occasional contributor, and lives in South Kingstown.

Fifty States

The Providence Journal, December 21, 2021

We have fifty states, why not use them? If people want to have guns, let them live in a gun state. If people don’t want abortion, let them live in a state where the law prohibits abortion. If people want universal pre-kindergarten, let them pay the tax, and live in a state where that is provided.

This country is at odds over so much, but maybe that’s because too much is decided at the national level. We’re not using our fifty states. We have fifty states, why not use them?

Particularly in the Northeast, with so many smart people, it seems obvious to us what the laws should be! Travel to other parts of the country, though, and it can be shocking how much they do not share our perspective. Instead of doing battle over all this, at the bloated federal level, where there is a thirty trillion-dollar deficit, why not cede some of this responsibility to the states? Again, we have these fifty states. Many of them barely have any people in them. Why not use them?

Liberals may not agree with conservatives on many of these issues. Democrats and Republicans are even worse! So why not agree to not be so disagreeable, and take advantage of the fifty states. Why not let Texas be a state that prohibits abortion to 12 weeks? Let the people who want to live like that move to Texas and live out their pro-life dreams? Let the pro-life movement run its course in Texas. If there are people in Texas right now, who don’t agree, then grandfather them in or offer incentives for them to move to neighboring New Mexico where the law might be different. Let the states run their course. Let the issues run their course.

The fundamentals of governing this country are too complicated. Many are saying that the U.S. is becoming unrecognizable because of its political differences, and that a second civil war is brewing in a few years. Gun sales are up! Trump may have unleased much of this, but the fundamentals of his America First politics are legitimate in the eyes of 74M voting Americans, with much of it focused on making things more governable, on both domestic and international issues.

Compromise has actually been dead in Washington for decades now. Biden and the Democrats may cite the founding fathers, and the Constitution, just as the Republicans do when they are in power, but this uncompromising dysfunction precedes Trump, and has been going on for the last thirty years and through five presidencies. Government shutdowns, and Capitol showdowns and riots are getting worse. There is too much to disagree on at the federal level.

Why not relieve the pressure that’s clearly brewing in this country, and let the fifty states have more autonomy and responsibility? Otherwise, why do we have these fifty states? The different states were supposed to be laboratories for different ideas, and different laws. Sure, slavery and civil rights were worth fighting over, but that doesn’t mean that absolutely every other issue has to be fought over, and decided in Washington, D.C.

The closest thing to the problem in Washington may be the progressive state of California. Long a beacon of tolerance and big business, with the fifth largest economy in the world, it is now hemorrhaging people and businesses to places like Texas because the politics in the state have gotten so bad.

Rhode Island experimented with religious freedom, and it turned out to be a pretty good use of an eventual state! That should be the principle right now, to defuse the powder keg politics threatening the united part of our States of America.

LOW HANGING SUITS

The Providence Journal, October 25, 2021

CVS Corporation, the seventh-largest company in America and the second-largest pharmacy in the world, is, incredibly, based in Woonsocket. Yet you would almost never know it. Despite being about 20 times the size of the state government of Rhode Island, the powerful and influential company operates in relative obscurity because it receives little scrutiny from the journalists of the Ocean State.

Television, radio, and newspaper reporters still pursue the antiquated idea that the government is what must be held to account — but power is not in Providence, it is in Woonsocket. CVS has a roughly $250-billion annual budget and employs 300,000 people, compared to the governor's $14-billion budget and about 14,000 who work for the state.

The top 50 individuals who work at CVS make millions of dollars every year and live lavishly right here in proudly blue-collar Rhode Island, but most people know more about the low-hanging suits and salaries at the state capital than the truly powerful executives of CVS.

Rhode Island journalists and the companies that employ them, such as The Providence Journal, NBC Channel 10, or even NPR, have faced dwindling audiences for years. Needing to reinvent themselves, they have instead stuck to an old formula of covering politics and all that the government does, resulting in a familiar rut of roasting hapless fire department officials, police officers and politicians.

Much more interesting, and much more powerful, are the executives of CVS and the everyday decisions they make. And the money. Follow the money. Over the last 10 years the top executives at CVS have made an average of $13 million per person, per year, every year. That’s much more consequential than the $145,755 salary of Gov. Dan McKee, or the paltry $16,636 salary of a state senator. Yet the focus of journalists up on Smith Hill remains in a trivial pursuit of government.

Perhaps the truest expression of American democracy today is the 100 or so largest companies in the U.S. These successful billion- and trillion-dollar institutions are in effect decentralized sources of power. Companies like Apple, Google and CVS are global in scale, and on the ground in Rhode Island, dwarf the government meant to regulate it, and the local journalists who should scrutinize it. 

The power, the money, the influence of big business is by and large missed, under-reported, or bought and paid for. Journalism in Rhode Island, like many other places in America, is cowed and lazy. Cowed because business power can intimidate and corrupt, and lazy because the First Amendment makes it easier to report on government than to report on a business. 

Most of the issues and stories that cover the front pages of The Journal, or at the top of the Channel 10 newscast, or on radio, are personified by CVS, and could be made so much more interesting and relevant by connecting these issues to the actual people who work at CVS.

Forbes Magazine recently named the CEO of CVS the most powerful woman in business. Yet most Rhode Islanders don’t even know her name: Karen Lynch. Ms. Lynch is a dynamic person, and CVS is an incredible company meaning to do well, but whether it be opioids, COVID or the economy, CVS and its wealthy executives, with stores in almost every town in Rhode Island, are knee deep in effecting and managing the health of millions of Americans, and should be held to account.

Instead, it’s a former CVS executive, Helena Foulkes, now running for governor, who will receive the familiar but misplaced scrutiny.   

A TEE TIME FOR ALL

The Providence Journal, April 7, 2021

There is no televised sporting event that better captures white privilege in America than the Masters golf tournament this week. The shrouded, museum-like TV coverage is a tell for many of the conspicuous display through sport of racism, income inequality and the inequities of U.S. economic and cultural life.

It is a twisted tale. So much good intention, great legacy golf and a terrific sport, alongside insurmountable American barriers, both spoken and unspoken.  Viewers watch what is out of reach, while the PGA and its advertisers tell you about their efforts to grow the game in diverse populations. It is the American experience. Full of contradiction, and continuing a rising tide of envy that is at the choke point of so much anguish.

Private golf clubs such as the Masters in Augusta, Georgia, are shrines of the one percent. They are the best that America can be, and yet also the worst. They know it. The public knows it. And the PGA should try to do something about it. Why not take the full weight of the Masters week, and call for all private golf clubs across America to open their doors to the public once a day, every day, for at least one payable tee time of four golfers? Open up access to private clubs like Augusta in Tiger’s name, and in honor of him and of a more equitable America.

The campaign could be titled A Tee Time for All, with Tiger Woods as its symbol and sponsor. A tee, an access, to the best of what America has to offer, so that everybody has access to the best.

At the sacred Home of Golf in St Andrews, Scotland, people come throughout the year from all around the world just to walk and play the historic 600-year-old golf links. Men, women and children, old and young, are free to walk the course at all hours as golfers play. Tee times are open to the public every day. Most Scottish golf links are centered in the town, and very much connected to the town, as it is in St Andrews.

High on a hill in Newport, Rhode Island, is the austere Newport Country Club golf course — the site of the first U.S. Open, in 1895. It could be a mecca for golf in America, and also a tremendous resource and source of pride and fun for all New Englanders, but most people will never set foot on the course, or even see it. Like the Masters, it’s sequestered away by its wealthy members, a lonely gem. A links course in name only.

Near Boston, there are private courses such as The Country Club in Brookline and the Charles River Country Club in Newton. These golf clubs are private enclaves that have also lost their link to the public, as wealthy people continue to put up walls of one kind or another around their favorite things. Golfers should know better. It’s bad for the game not to have everybody included, and it’s unAmerican not to have everyone participating. 

In the greatest democracy in the world, golf is losing its link to the people. Private golf clubs should look to Scotland not just to mimic links course design, but also for the right way to operate a club. Golf should be by and for the people, and to be linked by more than just land, and with a Tee Time for All.

FARM TO TABLE BASEBALL TEAM

The Providence Journal, March 6, 2021

The Red Sox are building the first farm-to-table baseball team!

Owner John Henry, always the pro’s progressive, has committed to sourcing players locally from the team's farm systems in Portland, Salem and Worcester, and to using organic methods to build out the 2021 roster of homegrown players. The wonky owner likes to win championships but hates the idea that they were bought and paid for through unfair capitalist business practices like free agency. In 2018, the sheepish CEO, with the biggest payroll in baseball, practically apologized for winning the World Series against the Dodgers, citing the “unity and diversity” of the team instead of free agents J.D. Martinez and David Price and their $223-million payroll.

Building a farm-to-table baseball team is a first-world baseball team problem. Mr. Henry’s $7-billion Fenway Sports Group is the most successful organization of its kind in the world, winning many championships not only in baseball, but also for Liverpool soccer and Roush NASCAR, which are part of his company. It’s clear the man is looking to go beyond just winning.

We are in a necessary new age of political correctness, but John Henry has been out in front of this for years. In 2015, the Red Sox put a 7,000-square-foot organic garden on the roof of Fenway Park, and in 2018 revised the name of their street address — from Yawkey Way to Jersey Street — the way progressive Democrats want to rename Southern military installations.

Mr. Henry has come a long way from changing, and possibly ruining, baseball through analytics and big money. Now, he wants to remake the Red Sox into a politically correct sports team, and more. To do so, pre-pandemic, he hired Chaim Bloom, the vice president of baseball operations for the Tampa Bay Rays, who for years could only afford farm-to-table players and built organic teams that were good but not great. Then, the Sox traded their best player, Mookie Betts, to the Los Angeles Dodgers, whom the Red Sox chairman, Tom Werner, then criticized for giving Mookie a $365-million contract extension. 

The remaking, unwinding and scolding process is not an unfamiliar road for Red Sox Nation during the prosperous reign of John Henry and his partners. There have been several boom-and-bust cycles featuring the likes of Wily Mo Peña, Bobby Valentine and Carl Crawford, and the Red Sox are yet again jettisoning talent like Andrew Benintendi for future bust Franchy Cordero. 

The smartest people in the room are gathered yet again at Fenway to see if they can, ironically, do it the old-fashioned way, as many organic methods always are. This time it’s going to be different!

Getting the horse back in the barn for the sake of farm-to-table principle has proven to be an oft-impossible free market challenge. Can we develop our own pitchers and relievers? Or do we need the conspicuous free agent signings of Chris Sale and Craig Kimbrel to beat the Yankees? 

Mr. Henry is a leader, and he once again will try to do the right thing for the right reason. Then there are the fans, who will have a say in how long a righteous effort can continue. Can Red Sox Nation tolerate losing in the short term, and perhaps the midterm, for a chance at higher ground, and maybe an organic World Series championship?

On the Thursday following the Daytona 500, Roush Fenway had the pluck to announce that they will be the first carbon-neutral NASCAR team. Leading the way for Southerners, sports fans and citizens everywhere, in the twilight of a great career, will be John Henry.

SHUTDOWN IS FAR WORSE THAN VIRUS

The Providence Journal, April 10, 2020

Two years ago, 45 million Americans were infected with the seasonal flu. Some 900,000 of them needed to be hospitalized, and 80,000 of them died. As of Wednesday, the coronavirus had infected 400,000 Americans, and about 12,000 people had died. Just a little perspective.

You probably didn’t know this about the flu of 2017-2018, because the public health officials and political leaders didn’t label it a pandemic, and the news media didn’t turn it into a 24/7 Death Toll watch.

Worst of all, the resulting COVID-19 hysteria has produced the terrible shutdown and quarantine policies that will probably send our country’s economy, and the world’s, into a depression. The loss of jobs, incomes, homes and food will wreak far more havoc than the coronavirus ever could.

It didn’t have to be this way. Instead of targeting 100% of the U.S. population with the shutdown policies recommended by Doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, they could have just targeted 20% of the U.S. population who are the most vulnerable to the novel virus.

Sensible social-distancing policies and shelter-in-place orders for older people and people with underlying medical conditions would have avoided the unprecedented, unproved and probably catastrophic economic outcome to come as a result of the shutdown policies.

The theory being used by public health officials and politicians to manage this outbreak is called The Hammer and the Dance. The hammer represents the strict and forceful shutdown policies, to be followed by the dance of an economic rebound. It is an ivory tower solution, and incredibly has been adopted by almost every single country in the world.

The Hammer is a good metaphor for the overkill this public health theory will cause. We don’t need a hammer, and in doing so we are going to shatter our economy and our whole way of life for years to come. The dance, if it comes at all, will likely be 10 years from now, as was the length of the last worldwide depression, nearly 90 years ago.

The coronavirus outbreak has been compared to 9/11, and certainly the resulting fear, hysteria and pandemonium that have followed both, are similar. The United States, and the world, are headed down a familiar path in lockstep and overkill.

They say that bad crimes lead to bad laws, and the same can be said for bad public tragedies leading to bad public policy.

In the years that followed 9/11 only a few individuals and countries dared to speak out against the War on Terrorism, and the cascade of bureaucracy and public policies, and endless wars, that followed in its wake and continue to this day.

The same is happening now, led by the pandemic lobby of expert scientists and like-minded politicians, and fueled by the news media.

Only two countries similar to the United States are taking a more sensible approach, and in effect, targeting 20% of the population instead of hammering the entire 100% of the country.

In marked difference to their neighboring European countries, Sweden and Holland have both kept their cities, towns and economies largely open, with sensible distancing policies. Both countries will serve as test cases for what should have been done, although at the moment, predictably, they are being criticized by the status quo pandemonium.

When your beaches are shut down, and people are arrested for playing golf, you can’t see your loved ones die, and your livelihood is taken away from you, perhaps it is time for a different kind of revolution. Perhaps, in the words written by Paddy Chayefsky and spoken by the character Howard Beale for the book and movie “Network,” “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

Chip Benson, an occasional contributor, has a house in East Matunuck.

Red Sox battle Amazon and Netflix

The Providence Journal, April 4, 2018

The 2018 Red Sox are an embarrassment of riches. They have the highest payroll in all of baseball, $232 million, they generate almost $500 million in annual revenue, and they are worth about $3 billion. No surprise then, that on the field the team is an embarrassment of redundancies, nowhere more glaring than the pitching staff, which once again features four left-handed starting pitchers.

General Manager Dave Dombrowski spent another offseason spending like a sailor, and unfortunately thinking like one too. He signed yet another redundant star player, right fielder J.D. Martinez, to an enormous contract, $25 million per year, but there’s not even an everyday position for Martinez in the lineup! Mookie Betts plays in right field, and Hanley Ramirez, at $20 million per year is the designated hitter.

This follows last year’s star acquisition, Chris Sale, a left-handed power pitcher redundant to the previous year’s $217 million signing of a left-handed power pitcher, David Price.

They are built for regular season ratings, not the October playoffs, where they will surely get plastered by the right-handed power hitting lineups of the Houston Astros and New York Yankees.

The Red Sox are desperate for attention, and unfairly so. Despite two recent first place finishes and three World Series titles, which broke an 86-year curse, the Sox are struggling for relevance among spoiled Boston sports fans who seem more interested in the winning ways and drama of the Patriots, Celtics and Bruins.

As they say, these are first-world problems. Nonetheless, the Red Sox fired their manager last year, John Farrell, and hired Alex Cora to make their 2018 brand of baseball more fun! They have also embarked on a public relations campaign that hints at a new and more serious threat that may also be coming to Boston soon. Amazon Prime TV, and it’s HQ #2.

The 2018 Red Sox marketing campaign is out and features their new players, but the advertising is trying to convince viewers that the Red Sox can compete with Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu TV shows, not the New York Yankees!

The promotional spots seen frequently on NESN sell viewers on the attributes of the Red Sox as a television series. On every night. Filled with drama. Filled with laughter. Good guys. Bad guys. Characters. One hundred sixty-two episodes. There’s something for everyone. “Feed Your Need” is the promo line used to ward off the daunting competition the Red Sox face from too many other TV shows.

Baseball is a big commitment, with games that last three hours almost every night, for seven months, including the playoffs. It requires attention and devotion that people don’t have in the Age of Smartphones. Every year it gets tougher to draw an audience from a general population afflicted with so much ADHD.

 

But what more can the Red Sox do? They had the best record in the Grapefruit League, they spend like sailors, and they are even willing to change the street name of their home address, from Yawkey Way to Jersey Street, to allay the concerns of just a few of their fans.

If Amazon chooses Boston for its second headquarters, the city will be flooded with 50,000 of its redundancy-seeking engineers. Would they one day have Dave Dombrowski and Fenway Park in their sights?

The Red Sox improbably gather almost 35,000 people per game, for 81 home games, despite being the most expensive ballpark in baseball. It costs a family of four on average almost $400 for one night of the baseball experience. Yet a family of four can subscribe to Netflix for $13.99 a month, and Amazon TV is free with Prime. That’s tough to compete with.

Fans of Red Sox TV programming, though — unlike those of shows on Amazon and Netflix — can come to Fenway Park, where the series is shot and produced, and see Boston’s star players in person, possibly getting their autograph. You can’t say that about “The Crown.”

Chip Benson, an occasional contributor, has a home in East Matunuck.

The Belichick Way

The Providence Journal, February 14, 2018

Bill Belichick was right to bench Malcolm Butler in the Super Bowl.

It may have cost the Patriots a sixth ring, and broken the hearts of their fans, but it was a necessary gamble made to keep in-check the future salary demands of the rest of the team, and was consistent with Belichick’s brutal, clear-eyed fiscal management of his players over the years.

Belichick tried to make an example of Butler. That they could win the Super Bowl without him.

The Patriot Way is not so much the X’s and O’s of their playbook anymore, but rather debits and credits on an incredibly complex financial ledger sheet, a payroll book, which Bill Belichick alone manages.

Malcolm Butler wanted to get paid, and was not shy about it. Like many of his teammates, this was his third Super Bowl in four years. He was an unheralded, undrafted player that Belichick coached into the penultimate play of Super Bowl 49, and both the fans and Patriots owner Robert Kraft loved him. Butler’s interception at the goal line was the best thing to ever happen in his Patriots career. But from that moment on, in Belichick’s eyes, Butler and his agent overvalued his worth to the team, and would not play for a salary commensurate to The Belichick Way.

Established, talented, popular football players are hard to move on from, but Belichick has been famously doing so for almost two decades. The one constant has been a willingness to move on from star players for the greater financial good of the team.

The Patriots spend about the same amount of money on salaries as the Red Sox do — $170 million — and both leagues operate under a salary cap, but Belichick has to spread that money around to about 120 players over the course of the season, compared with around 40 players over at Fenway Park. Even Tom Brady, supposedly the greatest quarterback ever, only made 8 percent of the total 2017 budget for Patriots salaries.

Belichick is tight-lipped at a press conference, excruciatingly so. Praise from Belichick equals money in a player’s contract, so he is careful with what he says.

Yet now he going to “open his world” to the heir apparent coach, Josh McDaniels, and school him on salary cap management.

Belichick is being forced to share his salary cap secrets with McDaniels, because of a breakdown in The Belichick Way that was outlined in an explosive ESPN article last month about tensions with Brady, Belichick and Kraft. It all came to a painful halt for Belichick this year, when he wanted to move on from the greatest player the Patriots have ever known. Tom Brady. When applied to their star quarterback, The Belichick Way was evidently too much for the Krafts, and they blocked Belichick’s plans to move on from Brady and play Jimmy Garoppolo.

Did having his methods questioned get to Belichick?

In the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, the Patriots were leading the Eagles 33-32. The Patriots needed Butler on the field in Minneapolis. At $3.9 million per year, Butler was the 11th highest paid player on Belichick’s active roster of 52 Patriots. Put another way, he was the 11th most important player on a team of 52.

Malcolm Butler didn’t play one snap on defense. He sat on the bench humiliated, an example to all of the other Patriots looking to cash in after the Super Bowl.

All they needed was one stop on defense. One more tackle.

Belichick almost pulled it off.

Chip Benson, an occasional contributor, has a house in East Matunuck.

AT ANY PRICE

The Providence Journal, April 3, 2016

The Red Sox, who open their regular season tomorrow, are desperate, in a Make America Great Again kind of way. Their political hats should read At Any Price, following the absurd off-season signing of a 30-year-old pitcher to a contract that pays $31 million per year, for seven years. Meet the new $217 million albatross, David Price, same as the old albatross: Pablo Sandoval, Hanley Ramirez, Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez…

Red Sox ownership, apparently unwise in old age, mirrors the impatient and now toxic Republican Party. Make the Red Sox great again! So last August, they fired their excellent, analytical general manager, Ben Cherington — the last real link to former General Manager Theo Epstein — and tore up the team’s best practices guidelines, with quaint concerns for organizational process and ideals. The playoffs will justify the means.

What a shame. Boston had the top-rated farm system in all of baseball, but like the Republicans under Obama, the Red Sox are poor losers, and couldn’t wait it out like Epstein (who, as president of the increasingly successful Chicago Cubs, is gaining on them) to develop their younger players. Instead, they brought in a finger-pointing dealmaker, David Dombrowski, to be the new president and general manager, and accelerate the Frankenstein team-building worst practices. Free-agent spackled rosters are nothing new, but of the 30 players now on the Red Sox roster, David Price makes more than two-thirds of them combined. Talk about income inequality!

This past summer, No. 1 Cubs fan and actor Bill Murray, on Martha’s Vineyard, lamented that Red Sox Nation used to be “gracious as losers, but are now unbearable as winners." Comedians tell the truth. The same could be said for the Republicans and their presumptive nominee, Donald Trump.

Politicians, and good leaders of all types, build consensus and have success by patiently doing the right thing. We don’t need to win the World Series every year to enjoy life as Red Sox fans, and we don’t need to win every economic trade deal to enjoy life as Americans. Some things take time to develop. Ask any gardener. Ask any parent. Some years you do things that won’t bear fruit for a while. It’s okay.

For the good of the team and the game it’s understandable to have a few down years, while the young players develop. Same thing goes for the U.S. of A. The economy is pretty good. Complicated, but good.

Yet here we are seemingly ready to go over the falls with Trump as Republican candidate for president, and then what would be the unthinkable for many, President Trump. As strong as the country is from the bottom up, a rotten top may make a world champion fragile beyond belief. 

The Red Sox ownership are all in, at any Price, but it's a narrow unsustainable path. The obscene salary for David Price will corrupt the team on the field, and be a burden for the organization off the field in the years to come. The mentality for winning at David's price is bad for Red Sox Nation, and not just the sad sight of ordinary fans paying millions of their hard-earned dollars to bring young families to Fenway Park. Too much money and greed changes the equation, and expectations. We're at a tipping point between being curious and unbearable.

A game at Fenway Park last year was still a beautiful experience, despite the outcome on the field. The sky was blue, the stadium green and snug for all the incredible sights and sounds of baseball. Don't take that away from us. Winning wasn't the only thing.

Remember that on Election Day.

 

Chip Benson, an occasional contributor, has a home in East Matunuck.

 

BIG PAPI IS MORE THAN THE FACE OF THE RED SOX

The Providence Journal, April 13, 2015

The most important player of the Boston Red Sox Epoch that has produced three World Series Championships is David Ortiz, a man from the Dominican Republic who speaks English as a second language, and grew up surrounded by Third World Caribbean poverty, eating mofungo (a fried plantain-based dish).

Now in the twilight of his playing career, Ortiz is the one still standing. Long gone and burned out by money and ego are Johnny Damon, Curt Schilling, Terry Francona, Manny Ramirez, Jonathan Papelbon, Theo Epstein, Jon Lester and many others.

"Big Papi" is more than the face of the franchise. In the land of Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Updike, he became the voice and conscience of the Red Sox. The de facto spokesman. With broken English, he has bested the most literate, articulate and insufferable sports journalists in the country. He survived the Boston press corps, and his own all-too-human missteps, to become the embodiment of what the team wants to be going forward in the future.

Big Papi is the blueprint for success of the Red Sox.

Ortiz has paved the way for Spanish first Rusney Castillo, Yoan Mocada, Hanley Ramirez, Pablo Sandoval, Xander Bogaerts, Christian Vasquez, Edward Mujiica, Alexi Ogando, Sandy Leon and others. The new hometown pipelines for Los Red Sox are Santo Domingo, Caracas, Havana and San Juan.

The Big Papi blueprint is a secret-sauce combination of Latin talent, humility and blissful ignorance of a very particular New England English language scrutiny. What’s that you say, bro? Yes, they make millions of dollars, but from Ted Williams to Carl Yastrzemski to Nomar Garciaparra they have all wilted in the unbearable fishbowl of Fenway Park.

Even still, Ortiz has had to fight off — or is it ignore? -- the derision of many this spring who say that he will never get into the Hall of Fame despite all the home runs, clutch hits, championships and kind words. But he will. The rules are different for Big Papi, and for good reason. He’s come farther. He speaks from the heart. We know what he means. Perhaps most importantly, he lets it all roll off his back so he’s loose at the plate and on the field when it counts.

Red Sox Nation will soon have more Spanish-speaking fans then they do English-speaking fans. On Opening Day 2015, half of the Medias Rojas roster was born outside the Continental United States, and speak English as a second language.

Red Sox beisbol is still America’s game in the sense that it reflects the engagement of the United States in all economic hemispheres of the globe. For the Red Sox, success breeds Spanish-speaking fans and Japanese-speaking fans, in addition to obnoxious English-yelling fans!

Red Sox ownership of a once provincial and proud Boston baseball team has grown with Ortiz to become one of the premier international sports businesses in the world, the multi-billion dollar Fenway Sports Group, with interests in European soccer, a professional NASCAR racing team and connected media properties.

At the nadir of the murderous Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, it was Big Papi who spoke for the city, in broken English. The profanity was perfect. We knew what he meant. His confidence and success, along with that of the Patriots, Celtics, Bruins and many significant businesses in New England, have culminated in a renaissance of Boston, and a step further onto the world’s stage to try to host the Summer Olympics in 2024.

So far, in the 21st century, Boston is the American City of Champions, with nine titles including the most recent Super Bowl, radiating out to all corners of the world. There are many heroes, both on the field and off.

If the Olympic torch ever makes it down Widett Circle to a Boston Olympic Stadium, David, middle name Americo, Ortiz can surely carry it.

 Chip Benson, of Wellesley, Mass., is an occasional contributor.

EVERY REM DOG HAS ITS DAY

The Providence Journal, March 31, 2014

 

WELLESLEY, Mass.

The city of Boston and New England sports fandom stand at the top of the mountain. After years of heartbreaking futility, and a reputation as the smartest losers in the room, fans of the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics and Bruins can now see their teams and city on the Mount Rushmore of American Sports.

Beantown is Title town. There have been eight championships in the last 13 years. New York has had just three, and they have twice as many teams! No other city is close.

But New Englanders are not dancing down the aisles, or acting any wiser, or kinder. Unfortunately, success has gone to the head of Boston sports fans, and the sports journalists who wag the tail of Red Sox Nation. Emboldened, they continue on in their never-ending quest to wring withering critical analysis out of every minute of every sports day. Decades of New England sports journalism — the best in the country — somehow blossomed into a big bad miserable media business of provoking point/counterpoint arguments over every excruciating detail in and around Fenway Park, Gillette Stadium and the Boston Garden.

Red Sox Nation will eat its young, but next up they are going to take down the most well-known and beloved elder of the team, Jerry Remy. Mobs behave like this. Egyptian mobs!

Jerry Remy, president of Red Sox Nation, former Sox second baseman, restaurateur, 26-year color announcer for NESN and fellow cranky New Englander, is not safe. Nothing and no one is off-limits. The media and sports fans have begun the process. The stories are out on the front page of The Boston Globe and on the radio. Remy enabled his allegedly murderous son Jared. Like the financial markets, natural selection or talk radio, the onslaught is not personal, it’s just business.

The business of sports journalism in Greater Boston and the resulting fan mob behavior does not have a heart.

The Red Sox had a season last year that few in the local media saw coming, but up until Game 6 of the World Series, radio yakkers like Michael Felger and Tony Massarotti were plying their business of “solid negativity,” criticizing Sox management and players at every juncture. This kind of insufferable oversight by the sports press and fan addicts perpetuates itself. They are in the business of being unhappy. I know the winters are long, but is unhappiness what it means to be a true New Englander?

So here come the April fools, and on Opening Day, they will be ready to tear it all down again. Not older and wiser. Not the long view. Not like they’ve been there before.

No. Instead, WEEI and the Kirk Minihanes of the sports world will make plausible arguments against Remy. Once the fire starts the flames take on a life of their own to burn down yet another honorable part of Boston’s sports scene.

In this town, winning breeds winning at any cost, and this city wants more. Soon, the Rem Dog will be saying “Buenas noches,” Boston, for good.

Play Ball! And watch out for who steps on you.



Chip Benson, of Wellesley, Mass., is an occasional contributor.