Red Sox News: Like Conan O’Brien, Triston Casas Can’t Stop

Jimmy Fallon is a terrible late night host, but he does his job well. The problem for us, and the boon for him, is that the leader of Tonight’s show doesn’t need to be funny per se, and it’s far better to avoid the accusation altogether. This is a show that actively avoided hiring David Letterman, thus setting this whole analogy in motion. It’s not for the bold. It’s for the meek. This is for those of us who are at the end of the day, or our ropes. There’s money behind it and a rotating cast of pretty people. It is difficult to do well, and easy to do well.

Rather than go into detail, let’s just note that Conan O’Brien was briefly the host of Tonight’s show, largely because NBC executives were understandably afraid of losing Letterman a second time. It was his dream job, and it lasted six months before NBC put Leno — the living definition of “good enough” — back in charge. It was cruel, public and upsetting, but it didn’t make him any less Conan O’Brien – talented, manic and absolutely dying for attention. It simply took away his outlet, and it wasn’t until he dreamed up a cross-country tour of in-person appearances, away from the television cameras due to the legal ins and outs of his departure from NBC, that he started to feel a little, maybe a little, like himself again.

The subsequent documentary on the tour, Conan O’Brien can’t stop, showed a beloved but frantic and bitter man adjusting to a reality that had given him precisely what he wanted in life, only to take it away. In organizing the tour and embarking on it, O’Brien, contrary to his nice-guy image, is something of an asshole to his employees, constantly drowning them in insults in the ostensible vein of comedy, and even though this bothers them sometimes, you can tell they know it’s just a function of his recovery: that’s who he always was, but in his lowest moments he was like that, much more.

I thought about all of this while I was watching the Red Sox/Yankees on ESPN Sunday night and the good folks at Worldwide Leader turned their show over to Triston Casas. Sidelined due to injury, he was finally back in the saddle, much like Conan on tour, and damn. perform like a guy whose teammates once rebelled against his pregame tanning routine and who inspired MassLive’s headline “Red Sox’s Triston Casas Explains His Tweets: ‘I Feel Like (Lizards) became more athletic.'”

The first thing to note is that it was Father’s Day and ESPN had interviewed Casas on Mother’s Day, with Ravech asking him about his mother, who died when Casas was 9 years old. It was embarrassing. This time, as soon as Casas was introduced, he started talking and didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. And so, on Father’s Day, Casas told a twisty story on national television that ultimately concerned his father’s arrest at a Little League game for literally kicking to young Casas on the field. I can’t properly describe how weird it was, so here’s the video:

This could be a Saturday Night Live sketch in itself, but that was just its opening material. He was just warming up. It meandered for so long that Kenley Jansen asked Brayan Bello, who was wearing his jersey backwards, to tell Casas, live on air, to take it off.

If only it were that simple. Like Conan, Triston can’t stop, and when separated from his main stage, the pack, will only get crazier. The energy is always going to go somewhere, and the further they move away from the public eye, the more craziness it takes to refocus the attention on themselves. To their everlasting credit, when the spotlight is on them, they have no problem clearing the bar. For example, when the premise of a wildly successful and highly entertaining talk show is “A small amount of these hot sauces will make people sob,” what do you do when the guest drinks the hottest bottle? What’s left?

Like Conan, Casas must dominate a room. Like Conan, he is charming and talented enough to succeed and make the people around him like him. It’s no secret, it’s just incredibly difficult to achieve. He may not drink a bottle of radioactive hot sauce, but I wouldn’t forget him. Everything is on the table, because it always has been. I’m just happy to be sitting here…even if I can’t say a word. The floor is his. The ceiling is for all of us.