For one fleeting, iridescent spark of a moment, the Red Sox were back. And then they traded Rafael Devers.
That’s at least how it felt yesterday when, mere hours after sweeping the Yankees out of Fenway Park, Boston dealt its franchise cornerstone to San Francisco in a trade that sent shockwaves through the baseball universe and threatened to ruin Father’s Day for dads across New England.
Time flies, man. It’s hard to believe another year has come and gone. But it has, which means only one thing…another edition of America’s Favorite Year-End Music List! That’s right, we’re back for Year 4 of FTL’s Annual Playlist. This year, thanks to the sheer amount of blue-chip music releases (seriously, it felt like everyone put something out in 2024), The List™ is bigger and better than ever. Hold on to your butts and grab a nice pair of headphones. Time to dig into my favorite year of music since starting this list.
Two summers ago, after the Boston Celtics lost the 2022 NBA Finals to the Golden State Warriors, I wrote about the Championship Crucible, and the often fleeting nature of title contention windows. The core question at the heart of that post was simple: Had the C’s (or at least, this iteration of them) squandered their only shot at a championship? Would they get a second chance after wilting on NBA’s biggest stage?
As it turns out, the Celtics are getting another shot at a ring after all. And make no mistake, the team is treating it that way. Jayson Tatum said as much earlier this week:
Welcome back for another edition of (surely) everyone’s favorite end-of-year music list! We’re officially on Year 3 of this exercise, in which I do my best to keep up with as much new music as humanly possible without feeling like Steve Buscemi wandering the halls of a high school.
Again, this list is a mostly subjective, mostly comprehendible selection of the music that made my year. Hopefully I included your favorite 2023 album, or mention your favorite song. If not…well there was a lot of great music this year, and there’s always room to listen to more! For what it’s worth, I have 2023 as not quite as good as last year, but better than 2021 (although I am open to hearing arguments to the contrary). Regardless, I loved everything mentioned here, and a few things that didn’t make the cut.
Without further ado, let’s kick this thing off with a brand new bonus category!
I regret to inform you, dear reader, that I have lied to you. Okay, maybe not a full-on fib, perhaps exaggeration is a better description? Granted this space has been prone to the occasional melodramatic post so that shouldn’t be too surprising, but I still feel like I should come clean: Last year, despite my insistences to the contrary, was not necessarily a great year for music. While there were certainly a bunch of excellent releases, in hindsight it wasn’t as good on the whole as I thought it was when I put 2021’s version of this list together.
The good news? 2022 was mostly killer, very little filler. At minimum, it certainly felt like there were more big time albums released by big time artists all year long. And, for whatever it’s worth, I had a much tougher time whittling down the 150+ albums I listened to this year into the tidy top 10(ish) list you have before you.
Xander Bogaerts is a San Diego Padre. What a strange sentence to write. But it’s true, all 11 years and $280 million of it. The Red Sox played a dangerous game of chicken for months, and this is the end result: San Diego swooped in with a buzzer beating blockbuster in the final moments of the Winter Meetings, Bogaerts is heading west for the next decade-plus, a day with two substantial Red Sox moves (signing All-Star closer Kenley Jansen and NPB star outfielder Masataka Yoshida) ended more bitter than sweet, and Red Sox Twitter self-immolated spectacularly in a way that only Sox fans scorned can. The reasonable take? Boston could have nipped this all in the bud last winter with a competitive offer. They didn’t, and opened the door for some team–in this case an all-jacked-up-on-Mountain-Dew AJ Preller and his Padres–to throw all of the money and years at Bogaerts and take things to a point where no sane person would be willing to go. Having said that, every sane person would agree that the Red Sox are a worse team today without Xander Bogaerts, and the Padres are a better team. The Red Sox, a team already in search of an identity, just lost a franchise cornerstone and incredible leadership figure. In many ways, it’s almost impossible to assign value to that.
I have been thinking a lot about the pre-2004 Red Sox this week, as the 2022 MLB regular season (and a particularly frustrating Red Sox campaign) came to a close. I don’t think any fan, especially those older than me with an even stronger relationship to the heartbreak wrought by the Curse of the Bambino, would say that they long for those days. And yet, there was something romantic about how 86 years forged an identity for not only a baseball team, but for a fanbase, city, and region. We knew the Red Sox would probably come up short in the end, but we loved them anyway. “There’s always next year” was equal parts coping mechanism and rallying cry. Sure, things might not have worked out this time, but the Sox would be back next April, and so would we.
It’s one of the most indelible images in NBA history: Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden standing courtside, with Sixth Man of the Year Harden’s arms draped over his two All-NBA teammates, looking on from the bench as the Heat wrapped up their gentlemen’s sweep of the Thunder in the 2012 NBA Finals. It was simultaneously a moment of acceptance and defiance—the Thunder were beaten, but seemed galvanized. After all, those three dudes would be unquestionably be back, and this was just part of the learning curve for the NBA’s next great team.
There’s a scene in The Departed where Billy Costigan (Leo DiCaprio’s character) is asked by his probation-mandated psychiatrist to describe how it feels to do what he does as an undercover cop working the Boston mob scene.
Costigan replies: “You sit there with a mass murderer. Your heart rate is jacked. And your hand? Steady. That’s one thing I figured out about myself in prison. My hand does not shake. Ever.“
There might be no better way to describe the 2021-22 Villanova Wildcats than that clip: Clear eyes, jacked hearts, steady hands. No matter how choppy the waters seem to get, these ‘Cats never get lost at sea.
Last year around this time, I wrote about Tom Brady and the internal conflict of rooting for someone who meant so much to me for two decades, even though that person no longer played for the team I care about. It was the first post in this blog’s history (a history that also includes a breakdown of Harry Potter’s Quidditch career and a dissertation of how Real Housewives of New York reflects the decline of American society for those interested), and a lot of words to basically say “I wish Tom Brady was still on the Patriots, and I wish him the best in Tampa, but I’m still like 30% salty about this whole thing”. I probably could have saved a lot of time and energy by just posting Doug and Jem’s fight from The Town and calling it a day:
For The Love 