Good God, even Bill Simmons has an opinion on the Red Sox’ handling of Roman Anthony

In merely mentioning Bill Simmons, I am inviting the internet to start yelling underneath my browser window. He has become a vector for whatever you want to say about the sports media, the regular media, podcasting, nepotism, labor relations, contemporary liberalism, navel-gazing, blogging, or Gen X white maleness. There have been thousands of words written about him on all of those topics. The last thing the world needs is another opinion about Bill Simmons; it’s all been said and it’s all painfully boring.

And yet here I am, throwing another blog on the fire, because something surprising — nay, shocking! — has happened recently: Bill Simmons has started tweeting about the Red Sox again.

Simmons, a man who launched his career by camping out at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Charlestown and writing about the Red Sox (and, in so doing, subsequently changed American sportswriting forever) stopped caring about baseball a long, long time ago. In fact, he not only stopped watching and thinking about baseball, he became actively hostile to the sport, viewing it as an interloper that unjustly sucks attention away from the things he believes are more worthy of our collective discourse, namely: the NBA, LA real estate, and the relative hotness of actresses in 80s action-adventure movies.

If you’ve consumed anything he has written or recorded over the last 10-15 years, his baseball disinterest should be abundantly clear to you. I’m confident that Simmons thinks that David Hamilton is a cornerback, Liam Hendriks is the lead singer in a Britpop band, and Fenway is the name of the third Fanning sister who was just cast in the next season of White Lotus. I bet when he goes to Dodgers games he’s surprised to see a DH in the lineup — that is, if he even takes a break from gossiping about c-suite turmoil at Castle Rock Entertainment to watch the game.

And that’s fine! People change. The intensity of our passions ebbs and flows. It’s healthier to recognize that and change our behavior accordingly than to cling to outdated identities. But given his lost passion for baseball, it says something about the Red Sox’ handling of Roman Anthony that even Simmons has developed an opinion on the matter:

Yup, that definitely counts as an opinion. And here’s another:

He even had two thoughts about Anthony in one day!

And he was still at it last night, after Anthony hit yet another bomb.

I don’t bring this up to argue with Simmons (I agree with him!). I don’t bring it up to act as a gate-keeper to Red Sox fandom, either. Hell, I don’t even want to hash out — yet again — the particulars of the Roman Anthony promotion saga. I bring it up, believe it or not, to celebrate.

Both Red Sox baseball and Red Sox fandom have been stuck in a malaise for the better part of a decade now. On the field, this remains the case, with the team seemingly unable to pull themselves out of a morass of mediocrity. But off the field, things might be changing. The Sox once again have a badass ace who inspires casual fans to check out the pitching probables. They’ve got a disgruntled star performing at the peak of his powers while acting as a content-generator for the Twitter take machine. And they’ve got Anthony, who is becoming the central figure of the 2025 season despite not playing a single game — I’ve personally been asked about him three times in the last week alone, all by people who would normally be far more interested in NFL OTA workouts at this point in the calendar.

And now Bill Simmons, the personification of the modern casual Sox fan, is angry at the Sox front office. This is a good thing. Embrace it. Maybe even join him in firing off a few rage-tweets.

The Red Sox are, yet again, a middling team. That sucks. But the fanbase is now really, really angry about that. That’s a good thing.

Now let’s hope the front office responds and shows some urgency. Because at this point, keeping Anthony in AAA is a bigger mistake than taking Karen Allen out of the Indiana Jones franchise, or asking Brad Pitt to wait tables after Thelma and Louise, or something something Robert De Niro in Heat. It’s dumb, as the world’s most prominent Red Sox fan would say. Stop being dumb dicks.