Larry the K's Lineup

  The Attleboro Arts Museum, in March of 2020, was among the first Attleboro area events to become a casualty of the-then newly-declared coronavirus pandemic, as officials there were forced to cancel their highly popular 24 th annual show just days before it was set to open on March 18. That necessitated taking down the exhibits that were already in place. The cancellation was a big deal as the museum typically raises $30,000 from the four-day and one-night show. With the state’s lockdown-related restrictions in place for the rest of the spring last year, the non-profit museum located in downtown Attleboro, MA, eventually had to stay closed for more than three months. For the rest of the year, the museum’s exhibits were available both online and in person, with restrictions, and after a successful online auction, there was hope for 2021. Fast forward to mid-January of 2021, when the optimism of a new year was crushed by the reality of the pandemic. With cases still surging in th...

The death of baseball’s home-run king for decades, Hank Aaron, last week at the age of 86 was the latest in a stunning series of 10 deaths of Hall of Famers to have died since last April --- the other Hall of Famers who we’ve lost in that time span were Al Kaline (Tigers), Bob Gibson, Lou Brock (Cardinals), Tom Seaver (Mets, White Sox and Red Sox), Whitey Ford (Yankees), Joe Morgan (Reds, Astros), Phil Niekro (Atlanta Braves and other teams), Tommy Lasorda (Dodgers) and Don Sutton (mostly Dodgers). Aaron’s passing, however, was arguably the most significant one in terms of baseball history, given who Hank Aaron was: a landmark player who had to contend with bigotry and death threats during his career ---- especially before he broke Babe Ruth’s career home run record of 714 with his 715 th homer off Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Al Downing on April 8, 1974. Aaron, who would wind up with 755 homers after retiring from the Milwaukee Brewers in 1976, was later edged out by Barry Bonds, w...

The Red Sox – after a winter of being fairly quiet --- finally made a decent move this week, acquiring relief pitcher Adam Ottavino and prospect Frank German from the Yankees. The trade is a big deal as before the trade, the Sox’ major moves had been: * Signing righthander Garrett Richards for a one-year $10 million deal (he had a so-so year with the San Diego Padres in 2020 after having Tommy John surgery in mid-2018). * Signing infielder Kiké Hernández for a two-year $14 million deal; the versatile player, who spent the last few years with the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers, is a solid candidate to play second base, which was a wasteland last year for the Sox. * Earlier signing outfielder Hunter Renfroe, re-signing starting pitcher Martín Pérez, who was in their rotation last year, but someone whom they had released after the season; and signing reliever-starter Matt Andriese. That was a mediocre effort at best to bolster the lineup and roster. But now, in Ottavino, they...

I get that a lot of New England Patriot fans remain bitter about the Patriots-Brady divorce, which landed the GOAT in Tampa Bay. But count me as among those fans who were rooting for the Bucs and Tom Brady in Sunday’s National Football Conference Championship game against the Green Bay Packers. All season long, I wished Brady the best, knowing that back in March of last year, there wasn’t a realistic route to Brady staying with the Patriots, given how inferior the Patriots' offensive weapons had been in 2019 and how there was little chance for improvement in 2020. Plus -- and Pats' fans just have to admit it -- there was a lot of bad blood between head coach Bill Belichick and Brady, and the GOAT wanted out. The Pats at least had a fairly productive Julian Edelman to catch Brady’s passes in 2019, but with Patriots head coach Bill Belichick being unwilling to surround Brady with better receivers and a bona fide tight end, Brady felt he had no choice but to move on. And if Bra...

  When I wrote this article in early December, COVID-19 deaths in the United States had exceeded 300,000 and had risen to more than 350,000 by the time it was published on Jan. 8. Coronavirus deaths in less than two weeks since then have grown to more than 404,000 as the virus continues to surge and the new strain of the virus is making more inroads in the United States. As the vaccine rollout stalls, pending action by the Biden administration, it’s legitimate to ask where we are with the virus and our seemingly impossible quest for a touch of “normalcy.” A friend suggested that we’re in the ninth inning of the crisis, while others have suggested that we’re nearing the closing stages of a marathon, but I submit that we’re a lot farther away from getting this pandemic under control than those sports analogies suggest. Given the fact that we’re still, as a nation, attacking this virus from 50 different ways with each state on its own --- and with the vaccine distribution plan hav...

Anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head again with the rise in white supremacist groups in society and on social media and the Internet. This column, which I wrote for Jewish Rhode Island of Providence in November 2018 (known then as the Jewish Voice) in the immediate aftermath of the deadly mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, is more relevant than ever in the wake of the Jan. 6 siege at the Capitol, in which white supremacists were seen wearing T-shirts such as “Camp Auschwitz” and other vulgarities, such as one that had a reference to the “6 million” not being enough” (a reference to the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust). This column, and a related story on Jonathan Weisman, the-then deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, who at the time was getting ready to speak to the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island about the rise in anti-Semitism on social media, are worth reading now. (My story on Weisman is featured in the post immediately precedin...

  I wrote this story in November 2018 --- almost two years into the presidency of Donald Trump. Anti-Semitism was on the rise, and the warnings by Jonathan Weisman --- the then-deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, who at the time was getting ready to speak to the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island about the rise in anti-Semitism on social media, and threats that he received online during an uptick of threats against Jewish journalists --- were chilling. His experiences are worth sharing more than two years later --- especially in the wake of the siege on the Capitol, where at least one white supremacist was seen carrying a huge Confederate flag through the halls of the Capitol, and others were seen wearing T-shirts with chilling anti-Semitic messages: This story was published in November 2018 in Jewish Rhode Island of Providence, which was then known as the Jewish Voice: The author of a new book on the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the United States says it wi...

While spending my junior year at the University of Massachusetts at Boston in Paris (1972-73), I joined two friends on spring break driving from Paris to Southern France and spent a brief time in Spain. With Franco still in power, there were armed troops everywhere in Spain, including at the border, a sight that was stunning and that stuck with me over the years. That stark image came back to me on Wednesday, when the images of the House debating the second impeachment of President Trump were interspersed with the scenes outside of the Capitol of thousands of National Guard troops patrolling in front of the building. If there was ever an image that supported the impeachment of this president --- who knowingly and willfully promoted an insurrection and whose dangerous rhetoric threatened the lives of the vice president and the congressmen who were inside the Capitol on Jan. 6 while they were trying to do their job and certify the 2020 presidential election --- that was it. Thanks to ...

  This column about the Holocaust Stamps Project undertaken by teachers, staff and students at the Foxboro Regional School in Foxboro, MA, originally was published on Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015 in The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA. The column is more relevant than ever, given the tragic and inexcusable events of Jan. 6, 2021, when the United States experienced its own Kristallnacht – “The Night of Broken Glass” – which occurred in broad daylight as thousands of white supremacists and extremists supporting President Trump stormed the Capitol building in an attempted insurrection or coup d’état, if you will, of the United States government. Their goal was to prevent the formal counting and certification of each state’s voting in the Electoral College, which had just started when the mobs broke through barriers and took over the Capitol for several hours, shouting “Hang Mike Pence” and also shouting vulgarities at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as they roamed the Capitol looking to do the...

In a post earlier this week --- Monday, Jan. 4 seems like a lifetime ago --- I warned that if Trump and his allies didn’t stop spreading their lies about the 2020 presidential election, there would be bloodshed. It didn’t seem to matter that the arguments put forth by the president and his enablers --- that votes cast for him on the same ballots in the same swing states were legitimate because they were for him, while like all dictators, votes cast against him by voters in the same state were somehow illegal --- never made any sense and defied logic. (Republicans down the ticket also won numerous seats in Congress in the same states that voted for Biden, but that never seemed to matter to Trump and his enabler-apologists). So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the lies would further poison our democratic system, and lead to what amounted to a bloody, violent attempted coup d’état, despite these facts: * About 60 lawsuits were thrown out by a host of courts for lack of evi...

For a couple of stories that put the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol siege into perspective, see two excellent articles in the Jan. 9-10 Weekend edition of The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA: * A story by Staff Writer George Rhodes, whose front-page story puts the storming of the Capitol --- just as both Houses of Congress and the vice president were meeting in joint session to count and certify the 2020 presidential election Electoral College tallies --- in historical context. Find Rhodes’ story at: https://www.thesunchronicle.com/news/local_news/while-violence-has-been-interwoven-in-the-capitol-s-history-a-local-historian-says-this/article_61d2c70b-ad26-52db-a6b8-064de0a74d08.html * A column by former longtime Sun Chronicle Editor and columnist Mike Kirby about the 1954 shooting in Congress by Puerto Rican extremists, based on the recollections of that incident by the man who was Speaker of the House of Representatives at that time – Joe Martin of North Attleboro. (Kirby has written extensi...

Our country hasn’t been normal for nearly a year now, so it might not sound right to start this post by writing “in normal times,” but so be it. In normal times, Congress and the president would be working on how to plan a cohesive transition in the midst of a devastating pandemic that’s already killed more than 350,000 Americans, and one that’s increasingly getting out of control despite the approval of two vaccines. In normal times, the president and Congress would be working together in concert with the states to work the kinks out of the vaccine distribution system so that the country could get that much closer to getting back to normal for real; there must be a federal distribution plan for the vaccine; it can’t simply be left up to the states to get the massive job done. But the times aren’t normal, because what our political system has been dealing with since the Nov. 3 election, thanks to the president’s spreading of false allegations of widespread fraud in the election --...