Welcome to another edition of “Friday 4”, where I talk about the four things I’ve been thinking about the last week and the upcoming weekend in sports and the world.
ONE
It’s great to see someone you’ve talked with before making the top level of the sport they play. It happened many times in the Worcester IceCats and WorSharks as both were AHL teams, the level just under the NHL. It hasn’t happened yet for the Railers, an ECHL team down two levels from the NHL, but it will someday. Oh, and yes, Arnaud Durandeau did play for the Railers and make it to the NHL, but he was never really one of our guys and I never spoke to him. The same is true of the WooSox, I don’t talk to those players.
While not so much anymore I used to talk to Worcester Bravehearts players all the time. Before COVID I’d be at the ballpark two or three times a week, and many times the players walking around signing autographs would stop by for a chat as I stood at my usual Fitton Field perch. One of those guys was catcher Ben Rice. Rice became the third former Bravehearts player to play in MLB when he debuted on June 18th.
Rice was unlike the two other former WooBall players to make “The Show”, Aaron Civale and Josh Walker. Civale played about a quarter of the Futures Colegate baseball League season while Walker pitched in just a single game. Rice, on the other hand, spent two full summers on Worcester’s roster and won the FCBL MVP award along with several 210Sports awards. Seeing Rice make it to the Major Leagues is a lot different than those other two guys.
It’s also different because Rice’s debut was with the New York Yankees. In an area full of lifelong Red Sox fans, it’s a little disheartening to see someone you’ve been rooting for to make the Major Leagues actually make it, only to have it be with our team’s major rival. And then it was another kick in the pants to have him have three home runs in one game against the Red Sox a week ago. His 3-3 night with seven RBI and 12 total bases is one of the best from anyone in MLB this season.
As with hockey players heading to teams we don’t like, we’ll still root for Rice and watch all the highlights posted and hope that while he does well the Yankees will find ways to lose.
It’s the right thing to do.
TWO
It’s summer, and that usually means vacation season. In fact, as I type this out my wife and I are on our usual July “staycation”, taking a break today from day trips in the hot and humid weather. We’ve had a wonderful time checking out places like the Mass State Police Museum & Learning Center in Whitinsville and the Patriots Hall of Fame in Foxborough, along with many independent bookstores along the way.
I think everyone should be supporting small, local businesses whenever they can, and this time of year it’s doubly important to do so as traffic into these businesses gets a lot lower during vacation season when people tend to travel away. On top of that, when these folks go on vacation, they’re usually making nothing with their shops being closed.
Just remember that $5 coffee you buy at Starbucks and Dunkin’ quickly ends up in the pocket of some corporation while that same money spent in a local coffee shop or diner stays in the community a lot longer. And that paperback book you bought from Barnes & Noble would have cost the same at a local shop, where again, that money stays in the local community.
Sure, I understand sometimes we don’t have that little extra that shopping at a local, independent store can occasionally cost. But if you do, the fifty cents you save from shopping at the national chains does a lot better in the pockets of a small business owner.
THREE
For the second week in a row, I’m bumping the MLS section for something that just happened. As I noted above, my wife and I are on our usual July “staycation”, and despite having no plans on Thursday we decided to head out to the Solomon Pond Mall, mostly to use their air conditioning as opposed to ours. Well, that plan was kind of a failure because in about half the mall the air conditioning wasn’t working. It was OK on the first floor, but on the second floor many of the stores were very warm.
Although it’s not like it mattered to the visitors to the mall, because there were hardly any.
I couldn’t believe how empty the mall was, both of customers and stores. Now I hadn’t been to the Solomon Pond Mall in years, and I knew that malls everywhere were having issues, but you could have played stickball in the parking lots with little fear of hitting a car. You could have also played floor hockey in the mall with virtually no obstacles. We were trying to figure out the last time I was at the Solomon Pond Mall, and it must have been in March or April of 2014, right after the Disney Store there closed. So more than ten years.
I remember there being a Waldenbooks in that mall, but that chain closed in 2011 or so. Once the Disney Store closed, the only other store in the mall we shopped at with any regularity, there was no reason to go there. And had it not been the lure of someone else paying for air conditioning we wouldn’t have gone there this week.
There was a shoe store there whose name escapes me at the moment that we bought some socks from, and we stopped at The Toy Vault where Trish was in her glory with all the Funko Pops. The guys working there really enjoyed our conversation, and I got the vibe not a lot of people stop in there during the week.
If anyone reading this knows any executives from FYE, the company Strawberries, Record Town, and a whole lot of other entertainment chains were rebranded to, tell them that the reason why their company is failing is because they’re breaking just about every single marketing rule you could possibly break. Well, maybe more correctly, their Solomon Pond Mall location is doing that.
I guess the good news there is hardly anyone will notice.
FOUR
People often ask me what I do during the summer months when there’s no hockey, and most times they regret asking me when I start talking about all the books I’ve read since the season has ended. I’m a voracious reader, and the extra time I gain in the summer from not going to hockey games is filled mostly with reading. This summer is no exception. One of my plans every summer is to pick an author I haven’t read before and read all their books, usually in release order. Sometimes that doesn’t work out because of other projects, but I manage to get one author done at least once a year.
This summer the author was Mark Greaney. I was already familiar with him as he “co-authored” the final three Ryanverse books that Tom Clancy was alive for and Greaney continued writing books in that series until 2017. I use quotation marks because it’s obvious that most of the story and writing in those first three books was from Greaney, and if there was any doubt the subsequent novels prove it.
Greaney’s primary character is “The Gray Man”, a former CIA operative named Courtland Gentry, and to give you more information on Gentry could be considered a spoiler, so that’s all I’m going to say for now. Gentry appears in 13 books, so you’ll have lots of time to get his backstory. The first 12 of those books are currently in paperback, and those are the ones I read.
And they were all amazing.
I gave each of them 4 stars on Goodreads, and had it been an “out of 10” scale most would have been 9/10. They’re well written, well-paced, and the plots make sense. There are a ton of authors in the thriller genre, or as my buddy Mark calls it, “hero porn”, and Greaney isn’t reinventing the wheel with his books. He’s just writing solid book after solid book, and that’s not an easy thing to do.
As I noted, I usually read an author’s books in release order, but The Gray Man series was so good I skipped over the two other books Greaney wrote to finish the Gentry books. In terms of continuity, it didn’t matter. Neither of those two books has anything to do with that series.
Once I finished the Gentry books the next was Red Metal. Greaney co-authored that book with H. Ripley Rawlings IV, and it was the best novel I’ve read in a long while. I used to give out too many 5-star reviews on Goodreads, but Red Metal absolutely earned one. Easily a 10/10. If you’ve read the early Clancy books, Red Metal will remind you of those.
It was 900-ish pages of amazing.
Armored was the final book of Greaney’s I read over the summer, and I really loved the lead character Josh Duffy. Again, I won’t give you any backstory about him, but he’s a refreshing change from most lead characters in thrillers. I also gave Armored 4 stars on Goodreads and it would have been 8/10 on that scale for one reason: having read so many books in this and the mystery/suspense genres I figured out what the hidden backstory of one of the main characters was about halfway through the book.
But when you figure that’s the 21st book of Greaney’s I’ve read over the years, figuring out the mystery of one character, and that mystery really doesn’t play a role until the very end of the novel, it’s still pretty good writing.
Well, no, it’s not “pretty good”. It’s all great.
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