By David Scott
Boston Sports Media Watch

Just when you think this region’s infatuation with all things Red Sox cannot possibly be ratcheted up anymore, Mr. Michelle Damon bolts town.

And the folks grinning from ear to ear were the button pushers (literal and figurative varieties) over at the New Balance Building headquarters of WEEI 850 AM. Add in a little mid-winter bump for the NESN folks (who carried the no-info, “Lucky Speaks” presser, live on Wednesday afternoon) and the content/programming this offers to news outlets (especially at this usually slow time of year) is a huge boon for business.

Scott’s Shots offers some highlights, lowlights and blinding lights from Damon Departs Day, 2005:

• CBS4’s Dan Roche deserves credit for working his source, in this case, Damon, to the best of his ability. A fixture around the Sox because of his “Red Sox This Week” and “Friday Night Baseball” duties, Roche was able to get to the first local interview with Damon on Tuesday night. He has since done the rounds, but Blogger Man Roche and the revamped CBS4 website hopped on the story hard.

•The Christmas Eve Deadline. The Halloween Secret Departure. Are these Sopranos episode titles at On-Demand or pieces of Red Sox lore? Or a combination thereof?

• Where Was Curt? Anyone hear form Curt on the car phone? Anyone? ( Check here for some Schilling horse-racing news.)

• What will the marketing opportunities be for Shaving and Cutting of the JD Beard be? Gillette, we’re guessing, the old standby. Old Spice, perhaps. Super Cuts? Maybe some charities. . .Oh, and we’ll also get an ad in the local papers – maybe even on NESN and ‘EEI, if he were smart enough – whereby Johnny and Michelle thank all the great fans for their undying support. And rub salt into the wounds of the Three Wise Men (Larry and B&J). . . You know, New York is a strong Dunkin’ Donuts market too, so Damon’s affiliation with them needed be discontinued. He’ll find some other opportunities as well – the Big Apple has lots of people who need to sell something through the Yankees’ centerfielder. Especially with the initials JD.

• Our guy, Dave Doyle, formerly of the so-named World, has settled in nicely at FoxSports.com as an editor extraordinaire and was called from the writers’ bullpen for a little Sox analysis. Nice take from LA Doyle and a good juxtaposition against Kevin Hench’s “good riddance” missive (a view certainly shared in this corner, Hench Man!).

• Fair Warning to The New York Media, especially Shots compadres-in-spirit, Michael Morrissey and Mike Vaccaro of the New York Post – Damon’s a livewire and has now proven to be a bit of a snake in the grass. He went out taking some subtle swipes and insinuated that the Sox didn’t do right by him. He was always the go-to guy for a quote here and he will likely emerge as the same thing in the Yanks’ clubhouse. But professionals like Jeter and ARod aren’t going to stand for the Idiot crap. Be sure to take note of just how free Damon’s spirit is in a Joe Torre clubhouse as opposed to a Tito Francona playground.

• The computer-manipulated image of the clean shaven, short-haired Damon in a Yankees hat and pinstriped shirt, is in the strictest sense, a blatant violation of any ethical premise you would have learned in JOURN 101. It’s harmless, yes. Even remarkable for the creativity and cleanness. But it’s also lying to your audience and assuming they’re smart enough to understand that.

That’s a big leap when the viewing public includes the string of callers who went venting on ‘EEI on Wednesday. They were all out in full force: Dakota, JenniferLovesBillMeuller and a Chris from Quincy. The board was lit all day long and to their credit, all hosts we heard gave the people some airtime. The calls weren’t always listenable, but they were representative of the Nation’s feelings.

Listen folks – he’s gone. The Grateful Dead sang it best: Now he’s gone, now he’s gone, Lord he’s gone, he’s gone/Like a steam locomotive, rollin’ down the track/He’s gone, gone, nothin’s gonna bring him back/He’s gone.

He served our purpose well, gave some great memories and will eternally be a part of the Nation’s soul. You can ignore that if you want or rant about it, but that’s the facts, Jack. And to be brutally honest, he’s going to be in our face for 19 contests (or more) each year. But the simple fact is, if the no-move move had been done by Theo, we’d all be claiming it was brilliant and shrewd. But with the instability of a three-headed leadership and the recent management maneuverings, it is being painted as chaos.

The line between those two interpretations is thinner than any of us may be willing to admit.

• For some reason, this reminds me of something that has been evident ALL month long: Boston Sports Guy has been negligent in his duties as they pertain to his readers. The guy updates less than the Herald Baseball Blog for cryin’ out loud. Book tour or no, this is exactly the ammunition all the Simmons bashers have been accumulating for months.

• That won’t go over well at Sports Guy’s Lair behind the Sports Guy’s Home in Sports Guyville. But it has been a very slow time on the dotcom for the Author.

• Shots interrupts IdiotGate to give props to the Globe’s Hiawatha Bray for his introduction to Shots’ personal fitness machine of preference, the Koko Smartrainer, or as we like to call it, Koko B. Ware.

With any luck, your favorite hotel chain will buy into the Koko and you can travel from city to city ensuring your workout will be consistent. Something Shots finds reassuring, even if he doesn’t use the equipment. Our guy Magical Mike Lannon may very well be onto something with this entrepreneurial adventure. (Yes, a Shots relative is employed by the company – but it’d be a good idea anyway – and who knows about the fitness biz better than us?)

• And yes, the Globe’s baseball/Red Sox blog is far superior to the Herald’s – but understand this: The Globe has a staff working exclusively on web content. The Herald has a gerbil spinning on a treadmill to generate the bandwith and electricity necessary to provide the barebones they manage currently.

• NESN’s Johnny Damon Top 10 was well-executed and included the Idiot book tour stop at newfound jock-sniffer Regis’s show.

• Tom Caron may have delivered the best interview with Damon on “Red Sox Now” over at NESN. Not necessarily for what Damon gave him, but more so for the well-conducted one-on-one that included the questions of what Damon would tell the fans and if he ever thought this day would come.

• ‘EEI snagged Damon for a phoner just before 5 p.m. on Wednesday and Glenn Ordway and Tony Mazz handled the questioning while Pete Meat Sheppard was – can you believe it? – silent throughout. Damon used his familiar soft, measured tones, to quietly kill the Red Sox management group and question their sincerity in pursuing his royal highness, King Johnny. . .Sheppard’s best contribution from what we heard went like this: “The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” It did, in fact, appear that way when Ben and Jeddy were fighting for scraps from Lucky’s answers.

• Ordway, during the crossover with 2 Live Mikes (Holley and Smith, the latter of whom was filling in for Dale Arnold) attempted to give his boy, Steve DeAwful DeOssie, credit for “breaking” the Damon story during a Sunday night TV appearance.

Ordway claimed DeOssie was “reporting” on a five year, $53 million deal and hinted that DeOssie was acting on information from a fellow Harley guy and/or an athlete. All that is well and good, but there’s no way DeAwful is going to be given credit for “breaking news.” He’s a character on a sports talk radio show, not a journalist. If he was so sure about the deal, he should have given the info to his employer, WEEI, and let one of their “news” people try and confirm the story. Of course that would indicate that there are journalists working at ‘EEI and that’s a tougher sell than ice to Eskimos.

Ordway’s good enough to try and get his boy some love, but he’s wasting time with that campaign. A DeOssie or a Smerlas will NEVER break news because they don’t understand what the term consists of.

• If the Sox got worse on Wednesday than NESN got markedly better: They won’t be hamstrung by spotlight seeker, cleavage barer and below-average TV talent, Michelle Damon. Mrs. Idiot will give naughty Anna Benson a run for her NYC money if given the opportunity. Scary thing is, sleazy Benson is in the Julia Roberts’ class category compared to Mrs. Idiot’s Tonya Harding act. Her NESN stuff was unwatchable and if she expects that to fly at George’s YES, she will be in for a rude awakening once Bob Raissman or Andrew Marchand gets a load of her. She’ll be wise to smile pretty for the still photographers and hope no one asks her to speak in public. . . If the Track Gals are weeping today as the Page Sixers celebrate, it’s okay: New York has eaten up a lot bigger stars than the Idiot Benedict Arnolds. And the Gals still have the Cutie QB, Curt, Bennifer and Shonda.

• Remember when we used to have pro hockey in this town? Who’s the last guy other than Dale you remember even talking about the Bruins? Cheevers maybe?

• The 2 Live Mikes, by the way, were not exactly stellar during the latter part of the shift that Shots caught. Smith sounded mostly disinterested and it’s awkward to hear Holley doing the compulsory instructions to callers usually given by Arnold. There was a bit of discussion about how enamored this region is with the Sox and how much drama they create which started to get good, but 2 Live’s time was up by the time Smith decided to try and make riveting radio.

• No better sign of how much disarray the Red Sox are in than the dog and pony show that trotted out to react to the news they hadn’t received yet? Huh? As Ordway said on ‘EEI, a one paragraph release would have done the trick.

Instead, we saw how in control Lucky really is and how puppet-like Ben and Jeddy are. One of the first rules of PR is to not make a story bigger than it already is and that was broken just after 2 p.m. yesterday by the crack staff at Yawkey Way. If this is all Lucky’s doings with strings pulled by Dr. Chuck from behind the Crown Royal Room curtain, than John Henry and Tom Werner need to have a serious sit-down with L-squared. The perception (and quickly becoming the reality) is that the Sox are a rudderless ship. That may be extreme, but the former Masters of PR are now acting like the Midgets of Spin Control.

•“We created the best sports radio station ever,” goes one of the EEI streaming audio ad spots. Of course, the best sports radio station ever still can’t figure out how to remove Ted Nation from its “Now Playing” box which controls the streaming. Planet Mikey (Adams) has a tag on the front page, but Ted Nation still lives deeper into the site. Jason Wolfe must be so busy, he can’t see to the little things.

• Damon’s line of the day on ‘EEI, “Does anyone want to buy a house?”

• “Damon to Demon” by ABC5 won the title tag battle. “Here’s Johnny” and variations thereof lost. Big time.

• Happy Holidays (politically correct) to every person (gender-equity approved) and check back over the next couple of weeks where we’ll be sporadic at best (shameless plug and excuse for having too many other things on my plate).

Shots thanks you for being part of this community and for keeping dialogue flowing. We might not matter much, but maybe we make a difference every now and then.

Mushy, gooey, kids stuff, now finished.

Bah Hum Bug.

David Scott writes from a seaside shanty on the shores of Hull, Mass. and can be reached at shots@bostonsportsmediadotcom