Larry the K's Lineup

The good thing about making predictions for this year's Red Sox season, which will start tomorrow (Thursday, March 30) with the home opener against the Baltimore Orioles, is that the Sox's expectations are so low that if they're a .500 or better team, they will have improved over their 78-84 last-place finish in the American League East in 2022. Or, to put it in a way that fans of the iconic 1967 "Impossible Dream" team would understand, if they simply meet the spring-training prediction by that team's manager, Dick Williams, that "we'll win more than we'll lose," the season will be a success. That's because realistically, with all of the question marks surrounding both the lineup and pitching, especially among the starters, there's no way you can pick them to finish any higher in the AL East than fourth, behind the Yankees, Blue Jays and Rays --- and even that assumes that this year's Sox will be better than the once-lowly Oriole...

  CUTLINES: Left:   Sylvia and Ike Kessler, 1945 while Ike was in the Navy during World War II. Below: Sylvia and Ike Kessler in the 1990s. Today (March 13, 2023) is the 20 th anniversary of the death of my father, Isaac “Ike” Kessler at the age of 84. His yahrzeit or remembrance in Hebrew, was marked on the ninth of Adar, the day on the Hebrew calendar that corresponded to March 13, 2003. Officially, he died on the ninth day of Adar II --- the leap month that is added periodically to the Hebrew calendar to compensate for it being a lunar-based calendar. But on non-leap years, his passing is remembered on the ninth of Adar. (It’s kind of like being born or dying on Feb. 29.) At any rate, in honor of the milestone of losing my Dad, I wrote this column, which appears in the March 2023 edition of Jewish Rhode Island of Providence, R.I. The link to the article, on that paper’s website is: https://www.jewishrhody.com/stories/my-dad-long-gone-but-never-forgotten,29722 ? ******...

Photo by Mark Stockwell / The Sun Chronicle Rick Thurmond, center, is flanked by then-Sun Chronicle Editor Mike Kirby, left, and Larry Kessler on March 17, 2017, when all three retired from the newspaper. Growing up, and later as an adult, I was always told by my parents and older friends that one of the toughest things about growing old is seeing friends and relatives predecease you. I always knew that to be true, as I saw my Dad Ike lose a lot of friends and relatives before he died 20 years ago this month. But I recently received yet another sad reminder about that truism when a longtime colleague and friend died way too soon. Yes, it’s true that my good friend had been battling COPD for several years, but even though his condition had worsened, I still had hoped that he’d be around for years to come. Sadly, that was not to be. Rick’s passing at the age of 68 was made worse because nearly a year ago, he had moved out of the Attleboro area to another Massachusetts city that was ...

It may just be an unfortunate byproduct of the nasty and hateful cesspool that social media has all too often become these days, but a report that Boston Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom has been subjected to antisemitism and death threats has to be addressed. In an informative, and entertaining, feature on Bloom in The Boston Globe recently, photo journalist and reporter Stan Grossfeld of the Globe included this alarming paragraph in the story: "Bloom is reluctant to comment on the rare death threats and an antisemitic slur he has received. He doesn’t want to talk about having trouble sleeping when the team plays poorly or about the migraine headaches he occasionally gets. “I’ve had them my whole life,” he says. I've been critical of Bloom's roster construction and his botching of the Xander Bogaerts negotiations. I've also suggested that Bloom and principal owner John Henry were never serious about giving Bogey a long-term contract or else the ex-Sox shorts...