Unless there’s some astounding turnaround, this season could finally be the one in which the bottom falls out for the Red Sox.
Since the Red Sox choose to go the route of combing the discount rack for players, they have generally hovered at or near the .500 mark. They may not be relevant compared to some of those great teams from the beginning of the century, but they weren’t as dismal as they were in, say, 1965, when they lost 100 games (the last time they hit the century mark for futility).
In some ways, .500 is the worst of all worlds. It is the universal benchmark of mediocrity. Teams with .500 records are almost always boring — which is a fatal flaw to have if you depend on attendance and TV views for revenue.
If you’re a .500 team, you fall just short of the mark in the most important attributes. You’re not terrible, but you’re really not all that good either.
You have pitching — just not enough of it. You can catch the ball . . . on good days. You can hit, but never at times when you really need one. You figure that with some nips and tucks here and there, you’ll be right back in the thick of it next year. In other words, you can delude yourself into thinking your future is better than it really is.
But unless things change radically, these guys won’t be finishing close enough to .500 to convince them of anything — except that they’re bad.
Sure, Ivy League genius Craig Breslow did all he could to build a pitching staff. And if it had worked out like he’d hoped, there would be no questions about it.
But it somehow never works out. Ace lefty Garrett Crochet has a sore shoulder that doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to heal, and, already, we’ve seen Sonny Gray and Ranger Suárez miss significant time. And Brayan Bello has been awful.
Two of their best pitchers have been rookies: Payton Tolle and Connelly Early. Both show promise, but will the rest of the league catch up with them, which is what usually happens to rookies?
They’re better defensively now that Trevor Story will be on the shelf for most of the summer. And speaking of which: Is this just a Red Sox thing (having players report to spring training with untreated significant injuries) or is it league-wide? How does Story report with a sports hernia and have it untreated until mid-May? This just leaves me wondering who was asleep at the switch for this? Anyway, this will be Story’s fourth year here, and he’s only been a factor for one of them.
Prof. Breslow did get himself a real third baseman (Caleb Durbin), but he can’t hit for beans.
But if the Rhodes Scholar has found a couple things out this year, it’s that offense takes precedence over run prevention (as opposed to the other way around) and offense costs money. And this is where the Red Sox fall short. If you even doubted the value of a well-timed, three-run homer over a player’s ability to run down a fly ball, you should have your answer. Great manager Earl Weaver had the winning formula: pitching and three-run homers.
The Red Sox won’t spend for three-run homers, and until they do, they’ll never contend. They only have a handful (if that) who can even put the ball in play during clutch situations.
Owner John Henry seems to have been spooked by paying out all that money for an injured Chris Sale and decided he’d had enough of that!
Don’t blame interim manager Chad Tracy. The Red Sox have provided him with muskets in an age of semi-automatics. What’s he supposed to do with them?
Until Henry decides to get back in the game in a meaningful way, nothing is going to change. All we can do is hope the Red Sox lose 100 games and that it embarrasses them enough to take the current market more seriously.
