Picking Over The Boston Red Sox Corpse And Other MLBullets

If I can just win one Tour de France, I can finally pass Lance Armstrong.

• How would we, baseball fans, survive with the Boston media machine ripping into the Red Sox? According to the Boston Herald, the Red Sox's front office is not happy that just four players (David Ortiz, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Clay Buchholz, and Vicente Padilla) showed up for Boston great Johnny Pesky's funeral, despite the fact that the front office had provided buses for the players to attend. That same day, apparently "nearly the entire team" showed up for Josh Beckett's Beckett Bowl (a bowling and country music charity event). Red Sox President Larry Lucchino said that he thought the attendance at the funeral was just fine, and explained that the players had gotten in very late the night before. In other words, this could be a total non-story. So why does it occupy this space? Because the real story is how the Boston media continues to shred the Red Sox organization from top to bottom. They've been doing it for about a year now, with no end in sight. The Chicago media is, at times, hard on the Cubs, but, let's be honest, the Cubs are frequently terrible. And the stuff for which the Cubs typically get shredded are their on-field blunders. We rarely see this kind of muckraking. Is that a good thing? Bad? Indifferent? I'm not sure.

• Mike Trout has set so many rookie records that it's hard to keep up with them, but it's still worth mentioning the ones we notice. Last night, upon swiping his 40th base of the season, Trout became the youngest player in baseball history to reach 20 homers and 40 steals. He's just so very good at baseball.
• Rob Neyer looks at Bryce Harper's terrible two month stretch, and asks the obvious question that no one seems to be asking: should Harper still be playing every day? Of the Nats' five regular-ish outfielders, Harper's current 98 OPS+ ranks last.
• The infirmary filled up quickly this week. Albert Pujols went down with a leg injury, but fortunately an MRI confirmed that there was no structural damage in his knee or calf. And then you've got ... Miguel Cabrera with a sore ankle, Yu Darvish with a sore quad, Dexter Fowler with a sprained ankle, Jerry Hairston with a hip problem, Buster Posey with a hamstring injury, and Ivan Nova with a sore shoulder.
• If you like links within your links, Beyond the Boxscore rounded up some of the more interesting saber-related links this week.
• Because the Seattle Mariners are so far out of playoff contention as we enter the home stretch in the season, the major newspapers in Seattle have decided not to send their beat writers on the road to cover the Mariners anymore this year. Tough times in the journalism field, but this seems a bit extreme. Bad news for baseball, I suppose.
• Obviously there were a couple big stories that broke a couple days ago - the Bartolo Colon PED suspension, and the Roger Clemens return at age 50 to pro ball (albeit in an independent league), which is coming tomorrow.

Brett Taylor is the Lead Writer at Bleacher Nation, and a Contributor here at Bleed Cubbie Blue.