Paul Waldman is upset by the idea that Elizabeth Warren might get in trouble for misstating one of the years that the Boston Red Sox won the World Series:

Reporters, I beg you: If you’re going to discuss this “gaffe” and others like it, do your audience a service and explain why this is supposed to matter. And I don’t mean just by saying, “This reminds people of when Martha Coakley called Curt Schilling a Yankee fan, damaging her candidacy.” I mean explain specifically what exactly misremembering the Sox series victories as 2004 and 2008 instead of 2004 and 2007 tells us about the kind of senator Elizabeth Warren would be. Does it mean that despite all the other evidence to the contrary, she really doesn’t care about ordinary people and will upon taking office immediately introduce legislation to make the purchase of brandy snifters and riding crops tax-deductible? Then what?

First, I think as long as Warren handles this with good humor and with a characteristic display of smarts on the issue, it will be fine. Martha Coakley seemed out of touch even before she botched the basics on one of the most popular athletes in the state, and had the same kind of work ethic problem that got Ned Lamont in trouble back in the day in Connecticut. Elizabeth Warren has neither of those problems. Second, I don’t actually think it’s irrational to expect that politicians have some knowledge of the big, defining cultural interests of their constituencies. We may want to believe that voters make decisions for entirely noble, upstanding, and substantive decisions. But I’d much rather have smart politicians who recognize the gap between the ideal and reality, and respond to it not by being condescending, but by pairing trivia with intelligent and well-thought-out policy positions. That’s a vastly superior recipe for long-term organizing that just asserting that high culture’s better than low culture, or that people should make decisions in a different way than they currently do. And at the end of the day, sports aren’t removed from the realm of public policy. The Red Sox are looking for $40 million in historic preservation tax credits right now.

I’m still quietly recovering from the Red Sox collapse (by which I mean anesthetizing myself with Patriots football), but this devastating analysis of the team’s disintegration reveals some astonishing class politics, and some ridiculous team management policies. And this bit comes after the players throw a temper tantrum about rescheduling a game, to which management responds by buying all the players $300 headphones and giving them a trip on a yacht:

Drinking beer in the Sox clubhouse is permissible. So is ordering take-out chicken and biscuits. Playing video games on one of the clubhouse’s flat-screen televisions is OK, too. But for the Sox pitching trio to do all three during games, rather than show solidarity with their teammates in the dugout, violated an unwritten rule that players support each other, especially in times of crisis.

Sources said Beckett, Lester, and Lackey, who were joined at times by Buchholz, began the practice late in 2010. The pitchers not only continued the routine this year, sources said, but they joined a number of teammates in cutting back on their exercise regimens despite appeals from the team’s strength and conditioning coach Dave Page.

“It’s hard for a guy making $80,000 to tell a $15 million pitcher he needs to get off his butt and do some work,’’ one source said.

For Beckett, Lester, and Lackey, the consequences were apparent as their body fat appeared to increase and pitching skills eroded. When the team needed them in September, they posted a combined 2-7 record with a 6.45 earned run average, the Sox losing 11 of their 15 starts.

First, I’m all for the idea that athletes need some special treatment to do their jobs correctly. Their bodies go through a lot. Massage tubs and sideline oxygen and fancy doctors may seem like luxuries to a lot of folks, but they’re a business investment for teams and they make sense for those of us who want to see these guys on their respective fields of play day after day and week after week.

But you know what? It is not such a terrible hardship to wait until you get home from your amazingly well-compensated job to have a beer, or to treat yourself to some Popeye’s. I’m more ambivalent about the video games — there are such things as rain delays, and I understand that at some point, there just might not be more video you can review, and video games are a decent way to kill time. But letting your stars do things that are actively harmful to their performance while they’re being paid to perform their duties seems pretty epically indulgent. We do, after all, live in a world where teams sometimes run through their entire roster of pitchers and end up with Jose Canseco on the mound. Drinking beer and eating chicken during games is in total violation of the Girl Scout rules about being prepared.

And it’s pretty embarrassing to see these players blow off their strength and conditioning coach. I respect the right of players to seek alternate opinions, especially on medical concerns. As much as I may have been annoyed by Jacoby Ellsbury’s behavior last year, if the guy really thought the alternate medical opinions he was getting gave him a better chance of succeeding in the future, I have to respect that, especially given the season he had this year. But to just straight blow off your strength and conditioning coach, who is, after all, hired to help you do your job better, especially if, as that quote implies, you’re pulling salary rank on him, is pretty disgraceful. I don’t really expect athletes to be classy people, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth pointing it out when they behave badly. I love Fenway, but after this, I’m tempted to shift my ticket money to the team’s affiliates in Pawtucket and Lowell, where the players appear to have some actual investment in succeeding, and there are sumo suit fights in between innings.

I’m a longtime Red Sox fan, but this statement by David Oritz and calls for players to boycott the All-Star Game over Arizona’s immigration policies absolutely demands to be singled out. It’s a glorious illustration of the fretful wishes of millionaires who, because they’re unaffected by laws, can fall back to hoping that things that make them feel uncomfortable will vanish without them being required to exert any effort or go to any inconvenience about it. He told the Boston Herald:

Baseball is not related at all to politics…I ain’t Jackie Robinson. Sometimes, but remember that was something massive — not only one guy can go out there and act like he knows everything. That’s something where you work as a group. MLB always comes out with the right idea and I’m pretty sure that if there’s something MLB can help out with, they will…There’s nothing baseball can do about it right now, you know what I’m saying? Everyone’s focused on going to Arizona. It’s not baseball’s fault, or MLB’s fault, that that thing is going on in Arizona. I personally think it’s not fair. You can’t really be that hard on [immigrants], so hopefully that thing goes away and everything goes back to normal.

Charming. And makes me glad I don’t have any Ortiz gear in my (rather considerable) collection.

I’m generally supportive of efforts to get more women working in and around professional sports, whether I’m re-reading Nora Ephron’s classic “Bernice Gera, First Lady Umpire,” a must-read if you care about women and baseball, or cheering Kim Ng’s ascent in the front-office ranks. And I’m also not a big fan of policing anyone else’s sex life or personal conduct. But as a long-time lady Red Sox fan, I’ll admit that I cracked up when the Boston Globe’s Pete Abraham tweeted “If anybody at Fenway sees @HeidiWatney in the beer line, tell her the game starts at 10:05.” Whether Abraham intended it as a dig at the buxom blonde NESN sideline reporter or not, it was funny, and a sad commentary on the roles women can end up with in sports journalism.

Because as much as I want more women writing about sports and doing good sports journalism, Watney’s awful. She does the world’s fluffiest sideline interviews — during one recent game, she took a ride on the train that shoots oranges when someone hits a home at Minute Maid park, the player she was interviewing staring at her chest all the while. Watney’s also been rumored to have affairs with both Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek towards the end of his marriage and short-lived Sox infielder Nick Green. Even if she never slept with either man, socializing with them outside of a professional context and in a way that invites comment about the nature of that socializing seems like a substantial violation of journalistic ethics that would get an actual reporter like Amalie Benjamin (or for that matter, Mr. Abraham) promptly cashiered, but I guess it doesn’t particularly conflict with her role as a sideline cupcake.

Sideline reporter is not necessarily the most glamorous job in the business, either, but Suzy Kolber and Michele Tafoya have proven that women can do the job with dignity and use it in pursuit of actual information (even if drunken athletes hit on them), and while Craig Sager may have the world’s worst collection of suits, at least he’s got a sense of humor about his place in the game. In a world where women have a hard time being taken seriously as commentators, Watney plays to the worst stereotypes of women in the game, a baseball Annie who doesn’t even have the cardinal virtue of the original, that she’s a genius at the sport. The standards for women in and around sports are, I’m sorry to say, higher. And having Heidi Watney’s worse than having a man in that spot. Boston’s a city with a lot of female sports fans. Surely, we can find one who gives good camera and good interview, and can do it without playing into the idea that women are either airheads or groupies when it comes to athletes.