Is Dan Shaughnessy The Most Hated Man in the City of Boston?

For as long as I can remember, Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy has been persona non grata throughout the city, viewed with the sort of contempt usually reserved for pederasts, drug smugglers and members of the band "Foreigner."

Not that the guy hasn't given us plenty of reasons to hate him. He's long embodied the "sports journalist as scorned nerd" stereotype, taking venomous swipes at the likes of Roger Clemens, Jose Offerman (whom Shaughnessy once referred to as "a piece of garbage") and Manny Ramirez. He also seems to represent everything that's bad about old school media, most famously illustrated in a column last March in which The Shaughn offered up a fictional correspondance between Curt Schilling and a pack of sycophantic, "basement dwelling" bloggers.

An excellent article in this week's Boston Phoenix examines the phenomenon that is Shaughnessy-hating, interviewing local bloggers, media types and sports fans to identify what it is, exactly, about Shaughnessy that makes otherwise law-abiding citizens want to throttle him with their bare hands. Needless to day, his detractors have no shortage of reasons, stooping even to that time-honored classic, "he's funny looking."

Consider this tale from "Cheryl" - a Rhode Island woman who regularly stays in a hotel near Shaughnessy's during spring training, and asked that her last name not be used. "Every year, I see CHB jogging," Cheryl wrote in an e-mail. "In 2006, I'm coming off a 6- or 7-mile fitness walk, and here comes CHB jogging toward me. He had just come out of his hotel and he was so bright red and sweating so profusely that I thought, 'Oh, God, if he needs CPR I'm not sure I'd offer. . . . . He's got that red curly hair and that white splotchy skin and he's all gangly.' "

Ponder this for a moment: a trained CPR practitioner thinks she might actually let Shaughnessy die if he dropped to the pavement in front of her. That's as bad as it gets.

Hey, say what you will about Shaughnessy; not unlike The Iron Sheik handing out copies of The Communist Manifesto, the guy has always known how to push our buttons. And sell newspapers.