A Red Sox broadcaster spent part of Sunday's game against the Yankees calling Jazz Chisholm Jr. a "bush league player," and then went a step further and suggested Boston should "drill" one of his teammates. The first half of that is talk radio. The second half is a grown man with a microphone floating the idea of a 95 mph fastball into somebody's ribs, and that is where I get off the bus.
Let me be careful about what I actually know here. I have the broadcast and the words. I do not have the frame by frame of whatever Chisholm did to set him off, and I am not going to invent one to make the story tidier. What I have is the take itself, and the take is the story.
What the Red Sox broadcaster said about Jazz Chisholm
Stripped down: the radio voice of the Red Sox, live, mid-game, in a Yankees series, labeled New York's second baseman bush league and then wondered aloud whether Boston ought to put one in a teammate over it. Not a player barking from the top step. Not a manager protecting his guy. The broadcaster. The person whose job is to tell you where the ball went.
Home radio has never been neutral and it was never supposed to be. Hawk Harrelson yelled "He gone!" at White Sox strikeouts for a quarter century and nobody filed a grievance. Bob Uecker made Milwaukee feel like a front porch. Partisanship in a booth is a feature. It is the reason your grandfather's kitchen radio sounded like family.
There is a line inside that tradition, though, and it is not a subtle one. You can call a guy a showboat. You can say you cannot stand his act. You can say he cost your team the inning. Advocating that a pitcher throw at somebody, and at somebody other than the player you are actually annoyed with, is not homerism. It is asking a third party to take a fastball for a style disagreement.
Why Yankees vs Red Sox makes this louder
Because it is these two, everything gets amplified. This is the rivalry that gave us Pedro and Zimmer in the 2003 ALCS and Varitek shoving his mitt into Alex Rodriguez's face at Fenway in July 2004, a game Boston won on Bill Mueller's walk-off off Mariano Rivera. The history is real and it is genuinely part of why people love this thing. But that history was made by players, in the moment, wearing the uniform and accepting the consequences. Nobody in that pile had a headset on.
Chisholm, for his part, has been the same player since Miami: loud bat, loud clothes, loud joy. He has been a face-of-the-sport marketing pick and a lightning rod in the same breath. Some people watch him and see the game getting fun again. Some people watch him and see disrespect. That argument is older than any of us and I find it mostly boring. What I do not find boring is the idea that the answer to a bat flip is a rib cage.
What comes next for Chisholm and the Red Sox
Probably not much, and that is its own small comment on the state of things. Broadcast discipline is a club and network matter, quiet by nature, and there is no public word yet on how anybody handled it internally.
The schedule also cools it off. Boston hosts Seattle to open the week and the Yankees are out in Anaheim for a set with the Angels, so these two are not staring at each other across a foul line any time soon. By the time they are, the news cycle will have moved eight times.
What I am watching is whether the club says anything at all, and whether Chisholm bothers to respond. My guess on the second one: he flips a bat somewhere this week and lets that be the answer. That is the correct reply. Always was.