Will Flemming sat in the WEEI booth on Sunday and asked a Red Sox pitcher to put a baseball into a Yankees catcher. Not metaphorically. Not as dark humor after a bad inning. He said it out loud, on the air, while the New York Yankees were turning a rivalry series finale into a 16-1 demolition.
I have covered this league long enough to know the difference between heat-of-the-moment venting and a grown man in a professional broadcast seat rooting for intentional violence. Flemming crossed it. Twice.
With the Yankees already up six in the eighth and Jazz Chisholm Jr. standing on third after two stolen bases, Flemming floated the idea that reliever Jovani Morán should drill Austin Wells. “Wouldn’t you sort of like to see Morán drill Wells right here?” he said. Moments later, after Wells went deep and Chisholm jogged home, Flemming escalated. “And Morán should fight Chisholm.” He labeled Chisholm a bush league player who “plays the game the wrong way.”
That is the record. Those are the words. And I am telling you they say more about the people saying them than about Jazz Chisholm Jr.
The White Flag Was Already Waving From the Mound
Will Middlebrooks, to his credit, stayed closer to the old code without calling for blood. The former Red Sox third baseman noted the situation cleanly: up six in the eighth, the defense electing not to hold the runner. “That’s the white flag, right?” Middlebrooks said. “Normally in that situation, you don’t run.” He called the steals selfish. Fair enough. That is a legitimate baseball argument, and men who actually played the game get to make it.
Flemming did not stop at the argument. He wanted retaliation against a different player and then a fistfight. He wanted Morán to manufacture a brawl because the Red Sox were getting crushed and Chisholm had the audacity to keep running.
I watched this series. I watched the fifth-inning play that lit the fuse: Chisholm’s sinking liner to center, Ceddanne Rafaela’s dive, the umpires ruling a trap, the challenge denied, and five Yankees runs pouring across. Flemming called that replay “ridiculous” and questioned whether the MLB Replay Command Center “had its head on straight.” He kept circling back to it. By the eighth, the booth had turned a lost afternoon into a morality play about how Jazz Chisholm “plays the game.”
Chisholm did what elite players do when the other team has already waved the white flag. He took the bases they left open. The Yankees were still fighting for second place in the American League East. After the win they sat 78-59, four games ahead of Boston at 74-63, and they finished the season series 7-6. This was not a spring training laugher in March. This was August baseball with playoff positioning on the line. Acting like Chisholm owed the Red Sox a polite slowdown in that environment is nostalgia cosplay.
Bush League Lives in the Booth, Not on Third Base
Let me tell you something about the unwritten rules. They have always been enforced by the people losing, never by the people winning. When your pitcher walks the leadoff man and then fails to hold him, the runner is not the villain. When your bullpen is getting torched for nine runs in an inning and Austin Wells is going deep twice, the problem is not Jazz Chisholm’s home-to-first trot. The problem is that Boston got outplayed in every phase and someone in the radio booth decided the cure was a beanball and a brawl.
I have sat through enough of these sermons to recognize the pattern. A team gets embarrassed. The broadcaster reaches for the nearest convenient villain in pinstripes. Suddenly the conversation is about “the right way” instead of command, defense, and the five-run inning that opened the floodgates. Flemming did not just criticize a steal. He invited a pitcher to risk a suspension, a potential injury to Wells, and a benches-clearing mess because his team was down by a touchdown in the eighth.
That is an abdication of the job. Play-by-play men are paid to describe the game and give the audience the temperature. They are not paid to script the next fight or lobby for a hit-by-pitch as emotional compensation. Middlebrooks drew a line at selfish baseball. Flemming drew a target on Austin Wells and then told Morán to throw hands with Chisholm. One of those is analysis. The other is negligence dressed up as old-school toughness.
The Red Sox and Audacy have not answered for it yet. Silence after a broadcaster publicly roots for drilling a catcher and fighting a second baseman is its own statement. Jazz Chisholm did not invent the scoreboard. He did not invent the stolen base. He took what the defense gave him in a game that still mattered in the standings. If that makes him bush league in someone’s radio booth, the definition has rotted past recognition.
Boston lost 16-1. The Yankees scored five in the fifth after the disputed catch and nine more in the eighth. Wells did historic damage. Will Warren carved through the order. The Red Sox walked into Yankee Stadium needing a statement and left with a mess. None of that is Jazz Chisholm’s fault for running. And none of it is fixed by a microphone telling a pitcher to start a fight.
The next time someone in that booth wants to talk about playing the game the right way, they can start with the man calling for the drill and the scrap. That is the actual standard. Everything else is noise from a lost weekend.
