Ted Williams disliked and distrusted the Boston sportswriters. His appellation for them—“The Knights of the Keyboard”—was sarcastic and contemptuous. This doesn’t make the Splendid Splinter an aberration but rather the first in a tradition. In the current era, Carl Everett was sent hence from Boston with his ass on fire and the tag Jurassic Carl hanging from his neck. Manager Butch Hobson (never one of my faves, believe me) became known—sarcastically—as Daddy Butch. Pedro Martinez, a proud and emotional man as well as a wildly talented pitcher, has felt so disrespected by Boston’s Knights of the Keyboard that he has on at least two occasions vowed never to speak to the media again (luckily for fans, his natural gregariousness has overcome these resolutions). Dozens of Red Sox players, past and present, could tell horror stories about how they’ve been treated by Boston’s sportswriters, who now serve just two papers (if you exclude such peripheral rags as the Phoenix and Diehard, that is): the Globe and the Herald. The Globe is the more influential, and by far the more vitriolic. Its most recent acid-bath victim has been Nomar Garciaparra.

The story being disseminated by the writers—Dan Shaughnessy leading the pack—goes something like this: Nomar was never a team player; Nomar was a downer even at the best of times; Nomar had a line in front of his locker to keep the media from getting too close; Nomar told multiple stories about his conversations with Red Sox management before the trade that sent him to the Cubs; Nomar expressed doubts about how much of the regular season he’d be able to play because of the injury to his Achilles tendon. (This last is supposed to help we poor benighted fans understand how Theo Epstein could have traded one of baseball’s five premier infielders for what boils down to a pair of journeymen with good defensive skills.)