Friday Four-Pack 4.18.25

Celtics begin their title defense. Lady Belichick has been busy. Get Roman Anthony to Boston. Portnoy buys a horse. Peeps are awful!

My family—and maybe your family, too—will celebrate Easter this weekend. Traditionally, Easter includes the Easter Bunny delivering baskets full of toys and candy on Sunday morning.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get a few packages of Easter’s top candy, Cadbury Mini Eggs.

Look at those beauties. Tier 1. First Team All-Chocolate. Hall of Fame. Elite, elite candy. The only negative is how addictive they are. If you’re not careful, the whole bag is gone in about 15 minutes. I suspect I’ll mow down a few dozen during Celtics/Magic on Sunday afternoon.

If the Easter Bunny doesn’t like you or maybe if you have a terrible taste in candy, you’ll find some Peeps in your basket this Sunday.

Peeps are disgusting. Expanding Easter Peeps into Halloween Peeps and Christmas Snowman Peeps is a candy abomination.

The only good thing to do with Peeps is to melt them into oblivion in a microwave, like this lunatic did. Just don’t eat them afterwards, again, like this lunatic did. Toss them in the microwave, watch them expand, laugh at them, and throw them in the trash where they belong.

Hopefully, by the time the Easter Bunny makes his delivery to your house, Craig Breslow and the Red Sox will have delivered uber prospect Roman Anthony to Boston’s major league roster.

Baseball America’s Carlos Collazo helped us out here back in March by outlining what makes Anthony such a special prospect. When I mentioned the Diamondbacks’ Corbin Carroll as a potential comp, he didn’t completely dismiss it. Carroll’s 2025 1.6 WAR number is No. 2 in baseball to start the season, just behind Aaron Judge, and well ahead of the much more hyped Juan Soto. I don’t expect Anthony to be Carroll in 2025, but the potential is there.

And so is the talent. Check out this graph on Anthony’s season to-date at AAA Worcester so far - Red Sox Reddit was going crazy for it before Red Sox Superfan and Section 10 Podcast host Jared Carrabis surfaced it this week on 98.5 The Sports Hub’s Baseball Hour.

You don’t have to be a nerd to read it. Just know that allllllllll that red shows the areas of hitting where Anthony has been elite so far this season - like 97th to 100th percentile elite. It’s a freakin’ sea of red in all sorts of advanced offensive metrics.

This chart does not even account for Anthony's pair of home runs on Thursday Night. The kid is ready! And the Sox need help on offense.

They’re 14th in MLB in runs per game. They’ve scored 86 runs on the season, of which 36 (41%!) were scored in just three games against the Cardinals. They've scored two or fewer runs in 8 of their first 20 games (40%!). Adding the 20-year-old Anthony immediately bolsters the Boston Bats.

It’s not even hard to get him in the lineup every day. Ceddanne Rafaela is hitting .211 with no home runs and can play multiple positions. You make him the super utility guy, and Anthony becomes an everyday outfielder. Easy peasy.

The team could use a shot in the arm. At 10-10, it’s been a slow start for a group with some pretty lofty expectations—remember they went off as one of the favorites to win the AL Pennant.

You wonder how much Alex Cora might be pushing for an Anthony call-up, since all of a sudden, he’s come under fire for the team’s sluggish April. If I were the manager, I’d want the best roster possible, and it seems pretty clear that roster would include Anthony.

When Carrabis was pushing for Anthony to potentially get called up sooner rather than later on Wednesday’s Baseball Hour, he said, “I don’t know if it will be as soon as this weekend. But it will be soon.”

FWIW, I reached out to Carrabis late Thursday to see if heard about an impending move that would land Anthony in Boston this weekend.

“I think we’ll probably see him next month…I haven’t heard anything on it (happening soon). They’ve been super buttoned up about it.”

I hope Jared is wrong. He probably won’t be. In fact, he’ll probably be the one to break the news when Anthony gets called up. They’ll be a better team once he arrives.

Unless it turns out he’s a fan of Peeps. If that’s the case, he might be a bust.

Meanwhile, the Celtics start their NBA Title Defense. Lady Belichick is a trademarking machine. Dave Portnoy spent almost $600k on a racehorse. And we have some not-so-early Kentucky Derby thoughts.

All ahead in today’s Four-Pack.

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On your Playoffs update on my Celtics Concern Level…

January MutStack CCL (Celtics Concern Level) = 0.0%
February MutStack CCL = 0.0%
March MutStack CCL = 15%
April/Playoffs MutStack CCL = 10%

The HBO docuseries Celtics City has done many things well. At the top of that list is the series' ability to connect the Celtics’ past to their present.

Larry Bird's arrival is the focus of Episode 4, Great Hope, Period. But you also get Jaylen Brown talking about what it means to walk in and see all those banners that Bird and Co. helped raise during their dynastic run of the 1980s. He shows great reverence for the history of the team and what it means to wear the Celtics uniform. Moments like that happen throughout the series, where the current NBA Champs are part of a storyline that captures prior decades of team history.

The timing of the series' release is fitting, seeing as this 2024-25 Celtics team can join the list of all-time Boston teams by winning a second consecutive NBA Title.

They are not the betting favorites to do so. Across multiple books, the Oklahoma City Thunder have the lowest odds to cut down the nets. In some cases, they’re very slight favorites, but favorites nonetheless. Winning this year would make them just the seventh franchise in the last 35 years to win back-to-back titles—rarefied air for sure.

And as they get set to face the Orlando Magic in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Round One series on Easter Sunday, I keep coming back to one player being the storyline for the C’s title defense: Jayson Tatum.

He’s not going to win the MVP this year, but he played like a Most Valuable Player. He’ll finish Top 3 in the voting and be named to his fourth consecutive All-NBA First Team. And somehow he’s still underrated: both in Boston and nationally.

I mean, the storyline since last June has not been about how Tatum helped the Celtics win their first title since 2008 and in the process, led the team in postseason points, rebounds, assists, and free throws made. No, the storylines were about Tatum not winning ECF MVP. And then not winning the NBA Finals MVP. Then, his curious benching at the hands of Steve Kerr was one of the biggest storylines in the Olympics. It all seemed to overshadow the year he had on the court.

Locally, his big game no-shows still seem to haunt him with fans and media, even after winning it all last summer. Some of those bad playoff games came when his wrist/thumb were injured, but that’s ignored by the Tatum Haters, of whom there are still (somehow) many.

Nationally…yeah, I don’t quite get it. Maybe he’s not flashy enough? Does he make things look so easy at times that he gets overlooked? Could be. But he’s an elite scoring machine who also rebounds, defends, and passes at a high level. He did all of those things this season while playing in 72 games - 9 more than Brown and 30 more than Kristaps Porziņģis.

This is all to say that I think he’s criminally under the radar heading into the playoffs. With Brown banged up, this is a chance for Tatum to shine on the biggest stage and maybe, for once, get the credit he deserves for being one of the three or four best players in the NBA.

Of course, the flip side is that Tatum will be the No. 1 target of fans and media if the team fails to at least return to the NBA Finals. And as the team’s best player, that’s fair. But as a Day 1 Tatum Guy, I have faith he’s sitting on a huge post-season run.

If Brown were 100%, I’d have a 0% CCL for this team as they try to defend their title. Tatum is locked in and saying all the right things. The team did what it was supposed to do and smashed their inferior competition, winning 12 of the final 13 that mattered to clinch the No. 2 seed. And they catch an Eastern Conference with one real competitor in the Cleveland Cavaliers.

It’s unlikely they’ll match their gaudy 12-3 playoff record from a season ago, but it would not be a total shock, given Porziņģis seems healthy and the offense will be very tough to defend.

I only see injuries derailing this team. The extra rest of the playoff should help, for sure. If the Celtics do get it done, they’ll have to add an epilogue episode to Celtics City.

And you’ll probably have to start talking about Jayson Tatum as one of the best players ever in franchise history.

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On the latest from Chapel Bill™️ and Lady Belichick…

On Wednesday’s Kirk Minihane Show, the world-famous podcast host accused me of being ‘obsessed’ with this story.

Guilty as charged.

At first, the obsession was over the newly turned 73-year-old Bill Belichick dating the 24-year-old Jordon Hudson. Love is love; I get it, but the almost 50-year age gap is weird. If the relationship were playing out privately, that’d be one thing. But it seems like every week, another social media post of the two goes viral. The latest was a video showing Hudson looking to be an active participant in a UNC practice. For a guy who was OBSESSED with what his players posted on social media and compelled them not to be a distraction, this has been a pretty big 180” for BB.

On Tuesday, The Athletic published a story in which they tried to find out just how involved Hudson was with Belichick’s football program at Chapel Hill. There are instances where she makes suggestions to the team’s media and social media teams about how to position stories, including how to spin the hiring of Bill’s son, Steve Belichick. It’s worth the click and the read.

This part here at the end annoyed me.

Hudson does appear to have a professional involvement with Belichick. An email signature identifies her as the chief operating officer of Belichick Productions. The Athletic could not find a registered business record of Belichick Productions.

On April 3, Belichick signed a document with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office consenting to an application for 14 phrases, including Chapel Bill, Chapel Bill (Bill’s Version), The Belestrator and The Belichick Way.

The company seeking the trademarks was TCE Rights Management, a recently formed Massachusetts company that lists Hudson as its manager. Massachusetts business records also show Hudson as the manager of Trouble Cub Enterprises LLC and other entities, including: a company involved with a “multi-platform media project” (Chapel Bill LLC); a production/merchandising group for “The All-Belichick Team” (All BB Team LLC); and a video podcast production firm (Coach Show LLC).

That’s a lot of trademarks. Bad job by me, being late to snag Chapel Bill (Bill’s Version). 🙄

I get Belichick having a business manager to do things like this, but should the person handling all of this also be the coach’s 24-year-old girlfriend? What happens if/when the two lovebirds break up? She’s being CC’d on UNC emails. She’s at practice. She’s scooping up Belichick trademarks for things like that All-Belichick Team…she’s involved in everything.

Would this all be happening if Bill landed back with an NFL team? From a February Four-Pack:

It remains somewhat of a mystery how Belichick ended up at North Carolina and not back on an NFL sideline. And I wonder if a small percentage of the reason -maybe just 5% - is because the awkward age gap between him and his girlfriend will be less of a distraction at Chapel Hill than it would have been in the NFL spotlight.

I nailed this. Imagine all this stuff happening with Bill as the Falcons' coach or in NY with the Giants. No. Chance. 0.0%. Because UNC is a state school, all of these emails are public records, so I’d bet the Tar Heels media will lead the ACC in public records requests this season.

A major college football personality is already questioning Bill’s hire, in part, because of this story. If UNC struggles on the field, more columns just like this one will be easy to write.

It started out as a curiosity. Then it was weird. Now it’s even more bizarre, with the intertwining of Bill’s love life and his expertise in football. And I’m interested in all of it and in seeing how it plays out, for better or for worse.

If that makes me obsessed, so be it.

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On some non-so-early Kentucky Derby thoughts…🏇🏻🏇🏻

Two weeks out!

Sure, there’ll be last-minute defections that could alter the field. And workouts to analyze and probably overanalyze. But after a prep season that seemed to fly by, all of a sudden, the Kentucky Derby is here.

From where I sit, it’s a wildly interesting 2025 Derby.

🏇🏻 The current favorite, Journalism, appears to be the best of this group. He’s run fast and has beaten real competition this spring. But his trainer is not a household name, and California dirt racing has been relegated to second-tier status. Will he be bet like a true favorite in two weeks, or might his backers get some value?

🏇🏻 Japan is once again sending a strong contender, based on reports with Luxor Cafe. He’s currently the 10-1 third choice in British markets and will have plenty of backers. It’s not a matter of if, but when, Japan gets a Derby win. Is this the year?

🏇🏻 There were multiple Derby Prep races that were run with a crazy early pace or track bias that strongly favored the eventual winners. Those horses could be strong play-against types in the Derby.

It sets up as a fantastic betting race. Two weeks out, Journalism looks like the most likely winner on paper. But at his listed 12-1 in current markets, Tappan Street for SuperTrainer™️Brad Cox would be a strong bet for me. He only has three races, so he’s short on experience but long on natural talent. Getting better every race and with one more forward move, he’s right there at the finish line at a fair price.

But that’s just one man’s opinion with plenty of time to fine-tune before May 3. I asked some other sharp handicappers to give me an early idea of what horse might catch their eye - and take their money - on Derby Day.

Jessica Paquette, Voice of Parx Racing: Sovereignty…take my money! Also Tiztastic, Sandman and Luxor Cafe.

Dick Jerardi, Veteran Handicapper: Journalism. Only in the Derby and its 20-horse field can you get 3-1 or 4-1 on a horse that is clearly better by the eye and faster by the data.

Anthony Stabile, “The Big A”: If Coal Battle is anywhere close to 30-1, he’s as live a longshot as you will find. Big efforts on the Arkansas Trail to the Derby. The Arkansas Derby was oddly run, and he may have sneakily run the best race, while a workout short, according to his trainer.

Brad ‘Bomba’ Bryant, Mohegan Sun: Honestly, not a lot of value at this point in the game. But Publisher at 40-1 is worth a play. On the improve and American Pharoah offspring.

Five opinions and five different horses are a sign of a good betting race.

Our Derby coverage here over the next two weeks:

Saturday, April 26 - Early MutStack Podcast Derby Edition
Thursday, May 1 - MutStack Podcast Derby Handicapping / Handicapping seminar at Mohegan Sun
Friday, May 2 - Four-Pack Derby Preview / Oaks Day from Mohegan Sun
Saturday, May 3 - MutStack Derby Picks / Derby Day from Mohegan Sun

Pumped to be back at Mohegan Sun for Derby 151. It’s the best Derby Party on the East Coast, and it’s not even close.

It will all start with Mohegan Sun’s Kentucky Derby Handicapping Seminar from the FanDuel Sportsbook on Thursday night, May 1st. It’s free and open to the public, with a chance to hang out with the show's real stars, The Big A and jockey Chantal Sutherland. And you’ll get some cool Derby gifts with advance wagering on The Derby that night. It should be a lot of fun. And again, free.

Hopefully, all the work we put in during the prep season will put us in a position to score out on one of the best betting races of the year. 🏇🏻💰

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On your sports media and sports betting notes…

➡️ Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy likes the ponies. His Go Go Grey Racing Stable is growing this week, with the addition of Hip 96 in the OBS April sale, a gray or roan filly by Tapit out of the stakes-winning No Nay Never mare Mae Never No (IRE). In an X.com video, Portnoy pushed his bidding to $575k to secure the purchase of the quick grey filly.

On Thursday’s Unnamed Show, when he was finished calling me poor and mocking me for my career decisions, Portnoy talked about being a horse owner.

“I’m fortunate where I’m in a spot where I can afford a bigger stake. But when I started doing this (ownership), I was buying far less and I’d feel attached to it (the horse)…and you do get the access (as an owner) that you wouldn’t get (as a non-owner) so I sort of see what he’s saying about that…but it’s a very rich person’s game…”

Bingo! Dave was responding to my suggestion that he sell micro shares of a horse from Go Go Grey Stables so that Stoolies could buy in. Doing so would give new fans an affordable chance to experience the game and, for sure, help bring a new crowd to the racetrack. Just like Dave said, most fans will never have the money necessary to compete at the highest level, but this would give them the thrill of horse ownership with Portnoy and Barstool.

He didn’t say yes or no to this idea on Unnamed. And full disclosure, I have no idea how hard it is to sell shares of a horse. But if he can pull it off, Portnoy could help inject some life into a sport that needs it.

➡️ No problem at all with the Braves TV reporter having some fun with a few female fans in the stands.

➡️ Having gotten eyes on a few weekly reports, I’m curious how the release of next week’s winter 2025 Boston radio ratings will play out for 98.5 The Sports Hub and Sports Radio WEEI. Those are out next Wednesday, and we’ll have a complete breakdown in Friday’s newsletter.

➡️ Circling back to Tatum and the Celtics…he’s +130 to be ECF MVP. And +290 to be NBA Finals MVP. Both at DraftKings. Seems VERY fair if you like the Celtics to win again.

➡️ Solid ‘A’ for Jim Nantz, Trevor Immelman, and CBS for the late Masters coverage. Great…but still way too late to show other players shots and scores. We’re betting Top 5, Top 10, and E/W, Jim…help us out!

And with that, we have for sure said it all.

A happy and healthy Easter Weekend to those who celebrate. Go Celtics. Say no to Peeps.

And thanks for reading.