What's good with the hate for Boston?

[imperialh8]

Sure New Kids is from Boston but so are these guys...



I visited about 3 years ago on vacation. Very nice place to see..the food is really good.

If you preconceptions of this place are bad then you're closed minded. Don't knock the place if you haven't been there. Enjoy traveling.

btw I'm from L.A and that should really matter.

 

[GTA 809]

Originally Posted by NooEra

Great schools, great hospitals, great sports, and just an overall nice place. People talk about Boston like it's some small city in New Hampshire

why do people on here think there are no black people in Boston? Also, why does everyone assume its soft? Go to Mattapan, Roxbury, hell even Hyde Park, and talk down on Boston like everyone here does, and you will get snuffed, just like in any other major city. Boston is no New York, but it's a nice city and a nice place to raise kids. Discuss.

The only thing in your entire post I agree with.

 

[westcoastsfinest]

ive never been to boston and i wish to visit there sometime...so i cant judge the city or the state of massachusetts...but ive always hated all their teams

 

[yuras718]

I can't stand the red sox's and their fans, and im sure they have the same love for me

Although it is a beautiful city and i would def like to go back there sometime.

 

[chicityk7]

I HATE BOSTON
I HATE THE PATRIOTS
I HATE THE CELTICS
I HATE THE BRUINS
I HATE THE RED SOX
I HATE BOSTON
IM FROM THE CHI f&^% BOSTON

 

[bostonmarc]

Originally Posted by I DONT PASS

Boston sucks..and their sports teams were one of the last to intergate with blacks..did you know the Boston Bruins had a black player before the Red Sox?

Did you know the first black player drafted by an NBA team was Chuck Cooper, picked in the second round of the 1950 draft by the Boston Celtics. So it lookslike a Boston team started it all considering the NBA is mostly African American players, and probably has the highest percentage of African American playersin any of the major sports.

 

[23mcpizzle23]

because CALI > ______

 

[bostonmarc]

Originally Posted by bostonmarc

Originally Posted by I DONT PASS

Boston sucks..and their sports teams were one of the last to intergate with blacks..did you know the Boston Bruins had a black player before the Red Sox?

Did you know the first black player drafted by an NBA team was Chuck Cooper, picked in the second round of the 1950 draft by the Boston Celtics. So it looks like a Boston team started it all considering the NBA is mostly African American players, and probably has the highest percentage of African American players in any of the major sports.

And the other thing that people need to realize is Boston is a small "major city". You can fit almost all of Boston inside Central Park New York. So as far as comparing things other then sports teams you have to keep that in mind. But to defend the original post I would put our schools and hospitals and our sports teams head to head with ANY city in the country

 

[panaricanretro]

but it's a nice city and a nice place to raise kids. Discuss
It's the people here. There's a reason they're called Massholes. They're either stuck up pretentious Harvard types, orthey're like trailer-trash loud obnoxious people. The people who are neither make this place bearable and liveable, but you just always have to deal withsomebody's attitude or sense of entitlement. It's also the worst place in America to drive, cause the roads just don't make any sense. I wouldnever want to raise kids here.

 

[shaq diesel 34]

Boston is a dope city. It's a big city, has a DOPE undergound hip hop scene, got some exclusive stores (Concepts, Bodega, Johnny Cupcakes, KarmaloopBoston), Concerts, SPORTS teams, beaches, etc..

I see people talking about racism in sports, remember the Celts were the first team to start 5 black players

 

[nationaltruckerdave]

Originally Posted by daproblem53

NY>

 

[i dont pass]

[h2]No honor in Red Sox anniversary[/h2] [h3]Way too late, Boston made 'Pumpsie' Green the team's first African-American player[/h3]

Comment Email Print >http://a.espncdn.com/icons/share-i...y: continuous;">Share </div><cite class= By Howard Bryant
ESPN.com
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On July 21, 1959, at Comiskey Park, Vic Wertz of the Boston Red Sox singled to center off *$*@ Donovan in the eighth inning of a 2-1 loss to the Chicago White Sox. Boston manager Billy Jurges then sent Elijah "Pumpsie" Green in to run for Wertz.

The White Sox would go on to win the pennant that year; the Red Sox finished with a mediocre 75-79 record. But in that game 50 years ago Tuesday, just before the dawn of 1960, Green became the first African-American to play for the Red Sox. Boston was the last of the 16 teams in the major leagues to field a black player, 12 years after Jackie Robinson.

In today's world of political correctness, marketing polish and media savvy, baseball has become expert at selling memories, and the game often seems untroubled if those memories don't exactly align with history. During past anniversaries -- the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's debut in 1947, for example -- the Red Sox have flown Green and his wife to Boston (first-class, of course), chartered them a limousine and feted them as important elements of the team's and city's history.

[+] Enlarge
AP Photo/Charles KrupaThe Red Sox have honored Green in the past, including with this ceremonial first pitch at Fenway Park on April 17.

Green has been honored as a pioneer, as a critical first, and he has thrown out the ceremonial first pitch at Fenway Park to the cheers of a newer, younger Red Sox Nation. As the decades pile up and institutional memory fades due to death and time, the story of the integration of the Red Sox could very well be transformed into a moment of triumph, worthy of commemoration.

The truth is that the Red Sox own the milestone nobody should ever want. What is to be celebrated? That the Red Sox put off integrating for as long as possible?

To celebrate that occasion is to do something corporations -- and do not forget that baseball is a corporation -- do very well: They are experts at scrubbing history, at massaging a negative into a positive.

What happened on July 21, 1959, was not a positive, and it never will be.

Through no fault of his own, Pumpsie Green represents a moment in Red Sox and Boston history that should be acknowledged soberly and apologetically out of respect for him, but not as a celebration. Unlike Robinson, neither Green nor the Red Sox exhibited any special courage that July day in 1959. In fact, the sequence of events that led to the eighth inning that day was decidedly antiheroic.

A year earlier, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination sent a letter to club executives asking them to explain how the Red Sox did not employ a single African-American in any capacity -- centerfielder or secretary, groundskeeper or accountant, usher or janitor. It was the second time MCAD had chastised the Red Sox for their hiring policies, and the commission would soon hold public hearings regarding the team's hiring practices.

During the same year, 1958, the Detroit Tigers called up Ozzie Virgil, leaving the Red Sox as the only American League team without a black player. In 1957, the Phillies, the last National League team to integrate, called up John Kennedy.

[+] Enlarge
AP Photo/Ed MaloneyTwelve years after Jackie Robinson's debut in the majors, Red Sox manager Billy Jurges, right, put Green into a game.

Even Boston's hockey team, the Bruins, integrated before the Red Sox.

In the mid-1950s, before Cubs scout Ivy Griffin signed him, Hall of Fame outfielder Billy Williams thought he was headed for Boston. As Williams recalls it, the Red Sox were interested … until they weren't.

"Yaz and I were the two best left-handed hitters going," Williams told me this past spring. "We used to joke about it. Imagine what that Wall would've looked like with the two of us hitting one after the other."

Throughout the 1950s as the integration movement gained national momentum, organizations as disparate as the Boston Ministerial Alliance, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Veterans Committee of Massachusetts, as well as MCAD, all pressured the Red Sox to integrate.

Within this framework was the sad case of Lorenzo "Piper" Davis, who in 1950 became the first black player in the history of the Boston organization. Davis was 26, played for the team's Scranton affiliate, led the team in average, home runs, RBIs and stolen bases, and then was unceremoniously cut from the team and sent home to Birmingham, Ala., without train fare.

In 1949, the Red Sox scouted Willie Mays. Mays recalled hearing that after a few days of inclement weather in Birmingham, the scout, Larry Woodall, told fellow scouts, "I'm not going to waste my time waiting on a bunch of n-----s."

"There's no telling what I would have been able to do in Boston," Willie Mays once told me. "To be honest, I really thought I was going to Boston. They had a guy come down to look at me. They had a good team with [Mel] Parnell and [Vern] Stephens, and of course, Ted. But for that [Tom] Yawkey. Everyone knew he was a racist. He didn't want me."

[+] Enlarge
AP Photo/Peter J. CarrollThe Red Sox history with African-American players wasn't a happy one under the late Tom Yawkey.

And of course, there was the original sin: Jackie Robinson's humiliating 1945 tryout with Boston that ended with Robinson and the Red Sox -- manager Joe Cronin, in particular -- as lifelong enemies. The Red Sox were not serious about signing Robinson; by the time he retired following the 1956 season, the Sox still hadn't integrated.

In response to MCAD's inquiries, Red Sox GM Bucky Harris testified under oath at the public hearings that "the primary goal of the Red Sox is to give the fans of New England a winning ballclub. When capable players are available, they will be used regardless of race, color or creed."

This is the real truth about July 21, 1959. It cannot be changed.

When your organization is less interested in Willie Mays than a spell of bad weather, you get Pumpsie Green.

When you have the jump on Billy Williams and he gets away, you get Pumpsie Green.

When your top baseball man patronizes Jackie Robinson, you get Pumpsie Green.

When you're one of the richest teams in the game and fail to capitalize for more than a decade on a pool of the most talented, available and economically desirable ballplayers in the history of the game, you get Pumpsie Green.

When the state's corporate watchdog sues your organization not once but twice for discriminatory hiring practices, you get Pumpsie Green.

In short, you get trivia over what could have been triumph.

None of this, it should be stressed, has much to do with Green. He did not ask for his place in time. Over the years as he played along with the role that history had in store for him -- indeed, it is a point of personal pride for him -- Green has often said he shouldn't have been the first. He just wanted to make the big leagues.

Instead, he was placed in the context of being an accidental pioneer -- not for his abilities but for all that the Red Sox did not do before him. Not long after he arrived in Boston, none other than Jackie Robinson told Green as much. In a phone conversation days after Green joined the team, Robinson told him that Green's road would be equally -- if not more -- difficult than Robinson's, for the simple reason that the Dodgers had wanted Robinson to succeed while the Red Sox desperately avoided integration until completely surrounded by the forces of change.

[+] Enlarge
Rogers Photo Archive/Getty ImagesGreen's major league career lasted five seasons and ended with the Mets in 1963. His career batting average was .246.

The beauty of today is that it is does not have to be yesterday, and history provides a watchful eye. Race in Boston remains a powerful subject because it holds a mirror up to the city's collective view of itself. In the mid-20th century, when the remnants of the city's historical progressiveness remained strong, the failures of the 1950s and 1960s -- all the way up to the school integration disasters of the 1970s -- said both to blacks and whites that Boston was not living up to its famous, abolitionist pedigree.

By the time John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino bought the Red Sox in 2002, the dynamic had dramatically changed. Boston -- whether in sports or in everyday life -- could not overcome the images of its intolerance, and the result was a new frustration: Even the best-meaning people could not live down the past.

Today, the cycle moves forward once more. The black and white in Boston, whether they're at the ballpark or reading the real estate section, are now vexed by the unifying troubles of affording the city and paying the big dollars it costs to watch the home team. Race has become a much less acrimonious subject. In terms of black players, the Red Sox are far less diverse than even 10 years ago. The hostilities have calmed, but the patterns have not. Former centerfielder Coco Crisp is the only full-time, everyday African American player they have employed since 2002, but the team is more universally regarded, by all races in all the city's neighborhoods, than ever.

And it is in the cycle of history that the events of July 21, 1959, must always be regarded. Old news, all of it is, but it's no less important to the people whose lives were affected during Pumpsie Green's moment a half-century ago, its context no less important to maintain. Nor is the date something that 50 years later can or should be retrofitted for a different time -- a better time, certainly -- to satisfy a newer, softer narrative.
Howard Bryant is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He is the author of "Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston" and "Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball." He can be reached at [email protected].

 

[ill since 92]

Houston > Boston.

 

[nooera]

^ Like I said earlier, the C's were the first to draft a black player, hire a black coach, and start 5 black players. Someone has to be first and last ineverything.

 

[green rhino123]

I am from Boston. Recently I worked with a girl that was from Ohio. She was blonde with an accent I would more
associate with the South. She said she lived in Ohio her whole life.

She also remarked how people in Boston (Massachusetts) aren't as "nice" as back home. Less talkative, ruder, quicker
to judge, etc...But she was hot and overall - I found her very niave. I'll leave it at that.

Maybe she was right, or maybe she is just that nice...

I don't know, but I a Russian/Polish, not Irish like 75% of everybody I grew up with in Boston - and the Irish-centirc
thing annoyed me from time to time. No - Irish music is not the best in the world. No - Irish food is not the best in the
world. Guiness is not the only beer that is good, and you don't have to say so just because your Irish...And yes - Kennedy
did sound a little stupid with the accent (though I would argue the Cajun accent or Long Island accent sounds even worse).
Though when I shout or yell, I can't even shake it.

Fenway is the oldest right, with Wrigley being a couple years younger...They are the only cool ballparks left.

 

[flasheightzero]

boston sports fans are full of $@%#, boston is full of boston sports fans

 

[mac a roni]

Originally Posted by SirDilbert2k10

Originally Posted by Mac A Roni

Originally Posted by Biggie62

[color= rgb(102, 0, 153)]I'm from RI, and you never really heard *$*@ bout either New England team...esp since i was a kid....now all of a sudden people going ape *$*@ for the hometown favs.....sickens me[/color]

what? I'm from RI myself and growing up I remember there being plenty of Red Sox and Celtics fans, the Patriots on the other hand...

either way, Boston is alright... I rather live there than Providence to be honest.

[color= rgb(102, 0, 153)]I beg to differ....there was always the hometown team love...but nowadays since theyplayoff contenders/championship game winners the NE team insignias been everywhere....it's sickening

[/color]