Picked-up pieces while waiting for the next David Ortiz celebration at Fenway Park . . .

■  I miss Channel 7’s Dan Hausle in Foxborough. There were no Donald Trump questions for Tom Brady on Wednesday. It was all about football. Swell. But Brady did himself no favors last week by walking out of a press conference after he was asked to comment on “locker room talk.’’

Hundreds of athletes have answered the question in the last two weeks. The locker room is a professional athlete’s workplace, and it’s no political statement for an athlete to define his understanding of “locker room talk.’’

It’s OK to say that talking about sexual assault talk is not part of your locker-room culture. LeBron James wasn’t afraid to say it. Even Troy Brown said he’d like to have heard something from Brady on the topic.

■  The Red Sox once had Theo Epstein, Terry Francona, Jon Lester, and Andrew Miller — all stars of the 2016 postseason. In those same positions, the Sox now have Dave Dombrowski, John Farrell, David Price, and Craig Kimbrel.

■  Curt Schilling is becoming Mel Gibson in “Conspiracy Theory.’’ Pass the tinfoil hats. The last three institutions that gave Schilling millions — the Red Sox, Rhode Island’s Ship of Fools, and ESPN — get insulted daily by the big blowhard. Schill is beyond unhinged. Can’t wait for his Senatorial run.

■  Don’t buy the “Red Sox decide to bring back John Farrell’’ narrative. Farrell was going to be paid next year no matter what. He is being allowed to come back, which means that Dombrowski clearly does not have an available candidate in mind.

But Farrell will be a lame duck from Day One of spring training — until/unless the Sox trigger his option for 2018.

Meanwhile, we have club CEO Sam Kennedy going on the radio and saying that Farrell’s 2018 option is “ownership’s call.’’ Kennedy told WEEI, “Dave will make a recommendation to ownership . . . We’ll talk about that in the coming days, to be sure.’’

Wait . . . I thought Dombrowski was in charge of baseball operations. So why is the manager’s future an ownership call?

■  We are at the LCS level now, so I guess champagne/beer celebrations are in order the rest of the way, but baseball would do well to address the nonsense of teams celebrating wild cards and first-round series with the big goggle bash. It’s stupid.

Theoretically, a team could do it five times: clinch wild-card berth; win wild-card game; win Division Series; win LCS; win World Series. Really?

When the history of the 2016 Red Sox is written, the low point of the season will be Sept. 28, when they blew a 3-0 lead in the ninth in Yankee Stadium, lost on a walkoff grand slam, then held a toga party in the clubhouse.

Imagine Bill Belichick allowing that. It set a loser tone that carried straight through their playoff sweep.

■  Can anyone explain why Boston College football coach Steve Addazio is paid more than $2.5 million per year while losing 11 consecutive ACC games? It can’t be the gate receipts. BC’s once-strong season-ticket football base is less than half of what it was and now hovers in the 14,000 range.

Look for athletic director Brad Bates to be gone soon. San Diego State is looking for a good man.

■  The Cleveland Indians indirectly owe their name to Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot Indian from Maine who played two seasons at Holy Cross before he wound up as a star with the Cleveland Spiders of the 19th century National League.

Cleveland was part of the original American League in 1901 and played as the Cleveland Naps until 1915 when “Indians’’ was selected as the new name of the franchise.

Sockalexis played two seasons at Holy Cross, hitting .436, then .444. Sockalexis and Bob Cousy were inaugural members of Holy Cross’s Varsity Club Hall of Fame when it was established in 1956.

■  Last February, John Henry told us that the Sox were “reliant too heavily on analytics’’ and were looking to balance their approach. Now we have the departures of Mike Hazen and Tom Tippett. Few fans knew about Tippett, a Toronto native, but he was the mastermind behind “Diamond Mind,’’ which was Henry’s original favorite computer simulation game.

In 2006, Epstein commissioned Tippett to create the proprietary software program that became known as “Carmine.’’ Here’s Francona on Carmine: “Carmine took on a life of its own with the media. It made it easy for the radio pundits to make smart-aleck remarks, but it was a tool in our system that dumb-asses like me could go to, to get information right now. And it was good.’’

■  More Tito-speak: When Francona was first asked about Trevor Bauer’s sliced pinkie, the manager said, “It’s kind of self-explanatory. I think we’ve all, at some point or another, had a drone-related problem.’’

■  Great story by the Globe’s Ben Volin about former Dartmouth receiver and Patriots tryout candidate Ryan McManus working out four or five times with Brady to help the quarterback get sharp before his return in Cleveland. But can it be true that Brady and Alex Guerrero didn’t offer any payment for the guy’s services? Yeesh. Would a little mileage reimbursement have killed them?

■  The passing of Fred Slaughter got no attention around here, but Slaughter had an impact on our sports scene in the 1980s when he served as agent for both Dennis Johnson and Ray Williams. Slaughter was the starting center on UCLA’s first NCAA basketball champion in 1964 and was one of the NBA’s great characters in the golden days of Larry, Magic, and Michael.

■  Quiz: Name the Angels pitcher who surrendered the next-to-last homer in the career of George Brett in 1993 (answer below).

■  Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred should be worried about the pace of games. It’s going the wrong way and young fans will not stand for it. The epic Dodgers-Nationals nine-inning Game 5 last week took four hours and 32 minutes. The seventh inning alone took one hour and six minutes. In 1919, the Phillies and Giants played a nine-inning game in 51 minutes.

■  When you look at what the Patriots got for noncompliance and “more probable than not’’ in deflating footballs, you wonder what Roger Goodell would have done to A.J. Preller, the San Diego Padres general manager who withheld medical information from the Red Sox at the time of the Drew Pomeranz trade. Preller was suspended for 30 days. A joke of a punishment.

■  Memo to David Price: Roger Clemens won only one of his nine postseason starts for the Red Sox.

■  Eric Mangini confessed regrets about Spygate to the New York Post. “Spygate is a big regret,’’ he said. “It wasn’t supposed to go down the way it went down . . . There was no great value in what they were doing. It wasn’t worth it . . . It wasn’t worth it to the relationship. I cared about him [Belichick]. I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want to hurt the Patriots. They were a huge part of my life, too, and the Kraft family . . . It wasn’t like I was thinking I really want to get these guys. My thought was I don’t want to put my team at a competitive disadvantage, no matter how small.’’

Belichick was a reader at Mangini’s wedding, and Mangini’s son Luke’s middle name is William in honor of Belichick. According to the Post, Mangini and Belichick “have not had a real conversation in 10 years.’’

■  Quiz answer: John Farrell.

■  The second Pete Frates 5K to benefit Pete’s Park will take place Nov. 6 at Lynch Park in Beverly. For details, go to petespark.org or call Kate Murphy at 623-512-2829.

Dan Shaughnessy can be reached at dshaughnessy@globe.com