The Red Sox will likely miss the postseason by about a half-dozen games, which might be a bit of a surprise considering the injuries they dealt with.
COMMENTARY
I watched a good amount of Thursday’s final Athletics game at the Oakland Coliseum, repeatedly struck by the parallels to the Whalers leaving Hartford 27 years ago. (To be fair, those parallels also strike me while grocery shopping, brushing my teeth, and observing it’s a Tuesday. I may have a problem.)
I was also struck by an idea I’ve seen, and made here, in various forms.
“Yo, all of this is so absurd, but also this one thing affected me in this specific way emotionally.”
That’s from Kyle Porter, who “use(s) golf to write about life” in his roles with CBS Sports and his newsletter, Normal Sport. I enjoy the latter for a lot of reasons, but most relevant here is its celebration of fandom with rationality. How we can embrace the inherent ludicrousness of big-time sports while also swooning for it, time and again.
No Red Sox fan needs a reminder this is all so deeply, deeply stupid. We’re a little more than a year removed from Underdog T-shirts being a thing, and a decade removed from beards being a much bigger thing. The Twins and their moldering summer sausage just left town. I can’t see salads on a restaurant menu without Joe Castiglione popping to mind because of an insurance commercial. Worms in the brain, the lot of us.
The 2024 Red Sox used 56 players to navigate 159 games, a final three left against the Rays this weekend. The production out of Curacao (Ceddanne Rafaela, Kenley Jansen) far outstripped what they received from New Englanders, even if we count Jamie Westbrook (left Holyoke, Massachusetts, when he was 10) and Luis Guerrero (moved from the Dominican to Franklin Park as a child).
Essentially, they were a core of guys from the DR, Texas, and California, peppered with others from further reaches and most of whom are here by assignment rather than choice. Logically, their baseball play helped dictate the mood of a bunch of us for six months.
It is, on paper, a therapist’s dream. Yet there are millions of us, in colors similar and different, everywhere. We were here before, we are here now, and we will happily be here again.
I mean, hopefully not specifically here. John Henry was trending on social media again Thursday morning, the universal symbol for “Red Sox fans are angry” these days. As it does, Wednesday night’s mathematical elimination from the playoff race came well after we all sort of knew. Losing 10 of 13 to retouch .500 after the strong series in Houston was probably it, but it doesn’t much matter.
The peak was All-Star week. Just five out in the division, Roman Anthony and Jarren Duran shining bright in Arlington, the hard work felt done. And in truth, it was. Had the Red Sox simply split their 66 games after the break, they’d be an 86-win team. Detroit and Kansas City, all but locked in as AL wild cards behind Baltimore, sit on 85 on Friday morning.
“You look around, you look at the teams that are fighting, we had it right there,” manager Alex Cora told reporters Wednesday night in Toronto, “and we blew it.”
Who blew it is, of course, open to interpretation.
“This is the Boston Red Sox, and to go three consecutive years without a single postseason appearance is not enough,” proclaimed NESN’s Tom Caron on Wednesday, part of a frank discussion of affairs with Jim Rice on the postgame show.
It was well said, and what needed to be said in the moment. Though viewing it through social media, you’d have thought we were seconds from the feed abruptly being cut, then coming back to find a stand-in filling Caron’s chair.
Red Sox CEO Sam Kennedy will say the exact same thing next week at another season breakup press conference. He won’t be nearly as universally praised, even if Kennedy has as much to do with wherever the Sox end up as Caron does.
Ah well. I’m meandering a bit here, but that’s what you do when seasons end safely short. Even if, at the end of a fifth year in six without playoff baseball, the goal of a gold trophy that was so tangible, and so regular, around here was never really in the discussion.
I don’t think this will linger, because mediocre seasons rarely do, but it really is amazing how close these Red Sox came. It really wasn’t ridiculous to be musing about the division title in mid-July. Yeah, the bar in Rob Manfred’s MLB is low, but these Red Sox will only miss October by about a half-dozen games.
They lost 38 times with Dom Smith starting at first base instead of Triston Casas.
They lost 19 started by pitchers not named Kutter Crawford, Tanner Houck, Nick Pivetta, and Brayan Bello. Games that could’ve gone to Lucas Giolito or Garrett Whitlock, had they been healthy. (Of note, they also lost three Whitlock did start, despite him handing his bullpen a lead in two.)
They lost seven, just in one month after the break, in which they led in the seventh inning or later.
They lost six in which their pitchers held the opposition to two runs or fewer. (Four, you’ll be shocked to learn, came between Aug. 29 and Sept. 19, when the team had a collective .616 OPS and was 7-13.)
It was, as our soon-retired Cobb salad enthusiast often said, a squander. But not one without a whole lot of joy infused in it, and one that went well beyond the expected “season for the sickos.” Even if it ended up right where most of us expected.
I keep replaying the same scene when I think about it all. Aug. 12, standing near the back of the bleachers on a warm summer Monday, watching a reasonably swelled Fenway rock to ‘Mr. Brightside’ during a pitching change. I’d moved upstairs when Rob Refsnyder rewarded them with a 10th-inning walkoff.
There’s danger in building your team only to that standard. We’ve lived it. It leads to five playoff absences in six years. It leads to goodwill becoming perpetual doubt about motives. It leads to amazement that the Sox might eke out 10th again in MLB attendance, their 2024 (32,770 per game entering Friday) essentially matching 2023 (32,950) and maintaining the big jump in 2022 (32,409).
There’s also danger to taking those nights for granted, or letting them slip by without you.
The Sox are playing for something this weekend. Would be better if it wasn’t just .500 — one win gets them to 81, a series win gets them over the line — but it’s something.
Somehow, we’ll miss them when they’re gone. Even if we spend every day of the winter angry at them until they come back.
