Every so often, Buster Olney – who is otherwise one of my favorite non-statistically focused baseball writers – careens off the rails into the type of mawkish story typical of the more traditional beat writers. So it was Thursday, I’d argue, when the headline to Olney’s blog read “Red Sox protest hurtful to fans.”

Huh.

At this point, you might expect I’m going to furiously defend the players in their recent dispute over the stipends for the coaching and training staff. Which I’m not. At least not furiously. Like many, including – presumably – those who will be receiving said stipends, I appreciate the sentiment. But I agree with the many observers who felt that the situation was clumsily handled at best.

But “hurtful to fans?” Please.

Was it inconvenient? Probably. Was it ideal that fans weren’t kept up-to-date on the situation? Nope. But ultimately, this was the effective equivalent of a rain delay. No more, no less.

Olney, apparently, saw things differently, saying “Instead, the Red Sox walked out on a crowd that had paid in good faith to see a baseball game.” Which would be true, if they had actually “walked out.” But of course they did not. He went on to quote “a major league executive with another team” as saying, “At the end of the day, it is the fans that took the hit.”

What hit? An hour and six minute delay of the game?

Maybe I’ve been hitting the Kool-Aid jug too early and often of late, but I can’t get in a twist about a dispute that lasted less than two hours.

The really offensive bit, as far as I’m concerned, was this:

Given that it was the responsibility of the Red Sox players to understand the situation before it became a crisis, a more magnanimous gesture would have been for some of the Boston players to offer up their stipends to the coaches, given that some of them are paid somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000 a day, rather than victimizing the fans.

Would that have been magnanimous? Absolutely. But given that MLB – a six billion industry – is disgracefully trying to extort the tiny Cape League, you’ll forgive me if I’m not inclined to take the league’s side here. Why, precisely, should the players foot the bill for a trip that benefits the league rather than themselves?

The suggestion, frankly, was ludicrous, and I expected better from Olney.