As we all know, it’s time (past time, really) for the season-ending, soul-searching, celebrating-the-Yankees-elimination post that ends every annual volume of Keep Your Sox On (2005, 2004). Robin has a rant planed on the end of the Pink Hat Faction that should scorch the paint and offend a few readers in the process, but he’s a slacker who can’t cut his post down to less than 4 pages. Or he’s crazy passionate about the topic and can’t cut his post down to less than 4 pages. In any case, he’s promised to have his season-ender up by Friday or I get to hit him with something heavy.In the meantime, you have me. I spent this past weekend up in Salem, Massachusetts with my in-laws, who, besides being Yankees fans are also big Halloween fans. Needless to say, my wife, father- and brothers-in-law were less than pleased about how the ALDS turned out for their team, but couldn’t understand why I insisted on gloating about their misfortune. After all, they pointed out, my team wasn’t even in the playoffs. One brother-in-law, who was in a bar in Boston for Game 4, said that he asked the bartender the same thing and heard that Red Sox fans would rather see the Yankees lose in the playoffs than the Red Sox win. I’m going to assume this bartender was either plastered out of his mind or on crack, but it got me thinking (some more) about how this year turned out.
At the midway point of the season, we were all riding pretty high on how things were throwing down in Beantown. Sure, the 13 game sweep of the NL was over and we’d had some struggles (ending the mid-year with that tough game against Chicago wasn’t that fun), but as Robin wrote in his All-Star Break wrap up, “Can they get 100 wins and will that get them into the playoffs? Yeah, I think so.” Hell, we were 53 and 33 with three games up on the AL East and things were looking pretty bright. And then the second half happened. A tough string of games on the West Coast at the end of July, Varitek’s departure for the DL on August 1 (otherwise known as the Raven Game) then the full-on collapse against Tampa Bay and the Royals had Robin posting about injury woes. And then that stupid five game set against the Yankees, followed by the final nails in coffin pounded in by Seattle, Oakland and Anaheim basically pushed the playoffs out of reach, even though I wasn’t prepared to admit it at the time. All of the sudden, it’s the end of the year, Jon Lester has cancer, the starting rotation has become Schilling, Beckett, Tim Wakefield and whatever warm body can throw a ball, the Sox don’t come anywhere close to winning 100 games and have their worse standings finish in about a decade. What the hell happened?
Obviously, a complete collapse happened, but how? Was it really the injuries that sent the Sox from the top of the world to the bottom of the heap in the matter of a month and a half? The Yankees had injuries too, but they had the depth to make up for the problems – or were their injuries much more superficial because they involved their 35 outfielders, while Boston lost half of the starting rotation? My feeling is that injuries were the prime suspect because they were to so many key players. Much has been made of Theo’s decision not to go for a big trade at the trading deadline that would have kept Boston in the running with another starter or some bullpen help, but I think in retrospect the move played out well in the long run – who would we have given up and who, truth be told, would we have acquired in exchange? The Javy Lopez acquisition looks pretty crappy looking back and Boston only gave up Adam Stern and his base stealing potential. Imagine if we had traded away one of the young guns instead? We could have another Cla Meredith situation staring us in the face.
2006 exposed the soft underbelly of the Red Sox, pure and simple. Injuries ripped the team apart, made it vulnerable to easy exploitation by any team across the AL (no matter how terrible a record) and spoiled any chance for a playoff berth. All we had to make up for the loss of the veteran core was a legion of promising but untried youngsters who could not hold up the burden on their own and Julian Tavarez, who is certainly the biggest enigma of the year and possibly of the whole decade. Now we move forward, we look forward to the off-season acquisitions that will fill a number of big holes and we await 2007. GO SOX!!!
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