Elegy for ’18 – Boston Red Sox
(Photo: Keith Allison)
Now with their fourth World Series ring since 2004, we can safely say that any remaining curse on the Boston Red Sox has been exorcised with extreme prejudice. Surprisingly, their 108-win, 2018 season was the first hundred-win season for the franchise since 1946, back when Julio Franco was about 35.
The Setup
This World Series-winning Red Sox team should probably considered part of a new dynasty, rather than as the final installment of the one that won three World Series championships in the 21st century. Obviously, the players are different; 14 years have passed, and even awesome players are subject to the ravages of time. But the front office also has a very different look.
Theo Epstein has now been gone for nearly a decade, but in the years after his departure — and the brief interregnum featuring a dashing escape from Fenway Park dressed in a gorilla suit — the front office had a distinct flavor of the Epsteinian dynasty, with Ben Cherington, Jed Hoyer, and Mike Hazen all having ties to Epstein.
When Dave Dombrowski took over as President of Baseball Operations at the end of 2015, the ultimate responsibility for the day-to-day decision-making shifted for the first time to someone without ties to the 2004 champions. The Epsteinians ended with less bloodshed than a lot of great dynasties; Hazen getting a job in Arizona is hardly comparable to the violent end of Andronikos I Komnenos. (I swear I’ll stop now before the rest of the article is just me comparing Red Sox transactions to Byzantine battles.)
It’s easy to forget in the wake of a trophy in 2013 — flags fly forever, yada yada yada — but that victory was sandwiched between three last-place finishes in the AL East. To find the last time the Red Sox had consecutive losing seasons, you’d have to look back to around the strike.
The 2016 roster looked very different than the 2013 one. Only two starting position players remained from 2013, Dustin Pedroia and David Ortiz, and the latter was in his grand farewell procession. The 2013 rotation was gone, except for Clay Buchholz, and of the main bullpenniérs, only Koji Uehara remained.
After adding David Price and Chris Sale in consecutive offseasons, the 2017-2018 winter had its own big highlight: the team’s re-signing of Mitch Moreland. OK, we all know that’s a lie; Boston successfully waited out a winter during which many of the other big market teams did little with their cash, and brought in J.D. Martinez on a six-year, $110 million contract. It was the rare signing of a star free agent on Martinez’s side of the defensive spectrum that ZiPS didn’t immediately start digitally laughing at.
With a young offensive core — 30-year-old J.D. Martinez was the old man of the valuable parts of the lineup — and a hopeful return to health and form from David Price, Boston rightly felt that they didn’t have to add too much else. Unlike some of those other high-revenue teams, Boston was on no quest to get under the luxury tax threshold for 2018, already having reset its penalties in 2017 (the Red Sox payroll resulted in a nearly $12 million luxury tax payment).
The Projection
ZiPS projected Boston to be in a close battle with the Yankees going into the season, with a two-win deficit that could evaporate by simply making a slightly different set of assumptions. The computer projected Boston to have a 78% chance of making the playoffs, far better than any projected runner-up, with the next-best being the St. Louis Cardinals at 53%.
ZiPS did see some weaknesses in the team, viewing the catching situation as a bit of a mess and believing Mitch Moreland and Hanley Ramirez to be rather unambitious choices at first base. ZiPS wasn’t super-confident about the depth at the back of the rotation, either, and was concerned the No. 4 and 5 starter situation could unravel very quickly with a few Nasty Surprises in the health department.
The Results
Well, they won 108 games and the World Series, so you could say that there was definitely some more-than-passable adequacy going on. The weird thing about the Red Sox season is that as 108-win teams go, it really wasn’t all sunshine, lollipops, and Mike Trout Everything.
Unusually, you could see a lot of what-ifs scenarios, none of which were all that crazy, in which Boston could have easily finished with even more wins. The catching Cerberus hit like a three-headed hot dog, Moreland and the released Ramirez were in fact rather mediocre at first (though Moreland, as usual, wore his surprise breakout costume for a couple of months), and the back of the rotation did in fact have a couple of Nasty Surprises. Rafael Devers growing from his rookie season instead of regressing from it could have added a couple more wins as well.
The contours of the Red Sox season weren’t surprising, but the magnitude of the good things were. The Twitter Baseballosphere all joked about a specific article written before the season, in which a Boston-area writer said Mookie Betts was as good as Mike Trout (I was one of the sarcastic quippers, naturally). But Betts actually was as good as Trout in 2018, as weird as that claim appeared at the time.
Betts and Martinez gave the team two MVP candidates and Chris Sale was, as usual, a legitimate Cy Young candidate. One could argue that the Boston Red Sox were a bit like a very sunny version of the Colorado Rockies, a team that also had two MVP candidates and a legitimate Cy Young candidate, but surrounded their core with an Ian Demond-Gerardo Parra Imagination Christmas.
Unlike Colorado, Boston never stopped trying to find opportunities to deal with their team’s limited weak spots. Steve Pearce gave the team a legitimate right-handed role player who could do at first base what Hanley proved too inept to accomplish. Ian Kinsler was brought in to patch the hole at second, even if the move failed to be all that profitable. And Nathan Eovaldi solidified the back of the rotation and finished the season having completely resurrected his career.
Boston’s regular-season pummeling of the league continued, with the team steamrolling over the Yankees, Astros, and Dodgers — the majority of the teams ZiPS that thought were better going into the season — and only dropping three games over the entire postseason.
And while he didn’t have a Cy Young-type season, it was nice to see Price eviscerate that laziest of baseball storylines, that of the postseason choke-artist. After a lousy start against the Yankees in the ALDS, Price only allowed seven runs over his remaining 24.1 innings. And after having to make an appearance in that crazy 18-inning Game 3, Price allowed just one run in seven innings, on one day’s rest filling in for Chris Sale, who was hospitalized with a stomach ailment.
What Comes Next?
Over the next few years, the Red Sox will likely have harder decisions to make than their eternal rivals, the New York Yankees. Chris Sale, Rick Porcello, and Xander Bogaerts are free agents after the 2019 season, and if he plays just as well as he did last season, Martinez may very well join them by using his 2019 or 2020 opt-outs. Mookie Betts hits free agency after the 2020 season as well.
That’s a lot of talent to see leave, and keeping that group together will be expensive; the team has already hinted that it will pose a great challenge to sign all of them. This team blew through the luxury tax threshold and that’s with Sale, Betts, and Bogaerts making under $30 million combined. If Martinez doesn’t opt-out, the Red Sox already have a hair under $110 million baked in the 2020 cake for just six players. If you bring back Sale for $30 million, and Bogaerts for $20 million, even with letting Porcello walk, that’s $159 million with 17 roster spots left to fill.
And those spots won’t be cheap to fill. Using the framework developed by Craig Edwards, and the pre-2018 prospect ranks of Kiley McDaniel and Eric Longenhagen, Boston had the second-least value in their farm system, ahead of only the Mariners. While the McDongenhagen analysis for this winter isn’t out yet, I daresay that there weren’t enough victories in the minors (Michael Chavis was suspended, Sam Travis was terrible, and Triston Casas can’t single-handedly turn around the farm system) to drastically change this ranking for the better.
As Boston sees its young core become expensive without easy answers from the farm, the team will have to be creative (or get much more comfortable with the luxury tax) in the coming years to not have a significant down turn in the franchise’s fortunes. Transitioning to the team’s next core without spending $300 million a year may be the biggest challenge for the dynasty of the Dombrowskii.
ZiPS Projection – Mookie Betts
Let’s just bask in the Mookie-y goodness and hail to whatever we find in the sunlight that surrounds him.
| Year | BA | OBP | SLG | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | BB | SO | SB | OPS+ | DR | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | .299 | .379 | .528 | 591 | 114 | 177 | 43 | 4 | 28 | 94 | 75 | 91 | 29 | 138 | 18 | 6.7 |
| 2020 | .293 | .375 | .525 | 570 | 110 | 167 | 43 | 4 | 27 | 91 | 74 | 91 | 26 | 136 | 18 | 6.4 |
| 2021 | .291 | .375 | .521 | 557 | 108 | 162 | 42 | 4 | 26 | 88 | 74 | 92 | 24 | 135 | 17 | 6.1 |
| 2022 | .288 | .374 | .516 | 541 | 104 | 156 | 40 | 4 | 25 | 85 | 73 | 88 | 22 | 134 | 17 | 5.9 |
| 2023 | .288 | .372 | .518 | 527 | 99 | 152 | 39 | 5 | 24 | 82 | 69 | 82 | 22 | 133 | 17 | 5.7 |
| 2024 | .285 | .368 | .495 | 505 | 93 | 144 | 35 | 4 | 21 | 75 | 65 | 79 | 20 | 127 | 16 | 5.0 |
| 2025 | .280 | .361 | .482 | 483 | 86 | 135 | 33 | 4 | 19 | 69 | 61 | 73 | 17 | 122 | 16 | 4.4 |
I asked ZiPS to give me all Betts’ remaining four-WAR seasons in the projections, and it returned a nice little collection of superstar seasons. All-told, ZIPS sees 52 WAR remaining for Betts, which puts him above 80 WAR, a definite Hall of Fame trajectory. Even if his defense doesn’t age as well as ZIPS thinks it will, knocking off ten runs a year from his defense starting in 2019 would still leave him at nearly 70 wins, and that’s way too harsh and adjustment.
That wraps up the Elegy for ’18 series; next year’s series will commence with the Orioles sometime in late March. Thanks for joining me in my final goodbyes to the 2018 season, even if they went week past when I’d intended!
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
Shots fired @Orioles!
Just like the Siege of Constantinople…
It’s Istanbul, not Constantinople.
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks
I prefer Byzantium.
They might be Posey, Crawford, Belt,…….
Why does nobody remember the HoF-worthy 3rd baseman Adrien O’Ple, one of the finest Hiberno-Latino players of recent years?
Tragically renamed at Ellis Island as “Ed Dirna,” of all things.
That projection only takes us through Betts’ age-33 season, at the end of which he’d have 280 HR, 270 SB, about 1,200 runs scored and more than 1,800 hits. Add another five seasons, and you start to have the makings of a really impressive HOF career in both counting and advanced stats – health and aging curves permitting, of course.
If Betts joins the 300-300 club at age 34, he’d join Bobby Bonds, Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez (and presumably Mike Trout) as the only players to do it so young.
The thing that really blows my mind about Mookie Betts is (a) that he is that good in right field and (b) that he’s turned into a guy who threatens to hit 30-homers in that stadium. As one of the high guys on Betts, I saw him as a prototypical top-of-the-order leadoff hitter with high OBPs and good enough defense and baserunning, maybe good for a 4-win player. And then he proceeded to turn into Roberto Clemente but with elite baserunning and some more power. He’s 26 years old and he has put up 30 wins in his career. Steamer thinks he’s good for 7 wins next year, he’s probably the second best player in baseball right now, and if he ever comes close to that offensive performance over multiple seasons then he’s on possible a Hall of Fame trajectory. I’m pretty sure absolutely no one saw this coming, not even his most ardent proponents.
As I recall the “Bogaerts or Betts” debate, conventional wisdom tended to favor Bogaerts. All due respect to Xander, I think we can put that to bed.
(I just realized my user name may betray some bias on this topic.)
It occurred to me that your user name might reflect being a fan of the 1980s Mets, but emphasizing a particular affection for Mookie Wilson would be a rather cruel thing to post in the comments section to an article about the Red Sox.
I thought his upside was to be Pedroia 2.0, or maybe Roy White after his conversion to the outfield. And even though I bought into his power surge despite his size, I thought of a Jimmy Winn upside at best.
But even as the biggest Mookie fanatic out there, I never thought he’d become a Joe Morgan caliber all-around superstar.
One of the highlights of my retirement has been the opportunity to travel up and down the east coast each summer watching minor league baseball at several different venues each year, always focused on the Red Sox of course. The spring trip bookends my yearly trip to The Masters then a second trip to visit my brother and his family in South Carolina later in the season makes it perfect. 2012 and 2013 were very special. 2012 featured both JBJ and Bogaerts in Salem then in 2013 Betts started the year in Greenville then moved up to Salem while Bogaerts moved up to the Eastern League and JBJ did the Pawtucket shuttle. It was Bradley, who I saw play for just 6 games in the Carolina League in the spring of 2012, that I came away from, not just thinking but, absolutely convinced that I was watching the next Willie. The spring trip in 2013 was my first real look at Mookie and it was another revelation. As a PGA professional for over 50 years I have considerable knowledge and understanding about the mechanics of the swing action and it was obvious from the start that Betts had a very, very efficient lever and could move the bat quickly. It boggles my mind that so few were willing to see his 15 home runs in just 127 games in the Sally League and the Carolina League, both pitchers leagues, in 2013 at the tender age of 20 as a sign that he was going to hit with real power. Then in 2014 he blew up the Eastern League. I recall a series at New Britain in which he went 6 for 13 with a 435 foot bomb tossed in along with a couple of steals. My slash line for Betts in 2016 under a different pseudonym at BP was .310/.375/.500 with 25 HR. I think those numbers indicate that, while he has exceeded my expectations, it has only been by a relatively small amount. Nobody could predict that he would be, at least in 2018, the best player in the game.
Just wanted to point out that JBJ was batting under the Mendoza Line as late as June and proceeded to top .800 OPS each of the final three months before mashing all postseason. His defense is otherworldly. He’s the guy everyone wants traded or demoted before June, who then ends up as a good team’s 5th best hitter come October. He’s already got a 5 win season under his belt and a clear baseline of 2-3 WAR. That’s usually not a guy you’re eager to push out the door with a couple age 20something seasons left.
I’d take locking him up with money leftover instead of, e.g., committing, right now, to extending Sale. Not saying it’s going to be easy to figure which core players are extended and which ones walk over the next couple offseasons. But JBJ never gets mentioned in the calculus of core players, and it’s strange. He’s a really, really good player, and a joy to watch in the field.
This is a really good point, and I hate that it’s assumed that one of the X/JBJ/Betts/Sale/JD quintet will have to go in the coming two years. Because my question about that is:
Why?
The Red Sox are rich enough to afford the luxury tax hit. The only reason to make this hard choice (assuming all are playing well and are worth extending, of course) is to maintain the fiction that baseball owners simply cannot afford to spend huge amounts of money on their payroll. Except they can; they’re spending less as a percentage of their revenue than they have in years, if not decades.
So take the hit. Maybe doing so and not only surviving but locking in long-term dominance (to the degree something like that can be assured anyway) would encourage the rest of the league to pay players what they deserve based on the revenue they generate, instead of based on the arbitrary levels of what is now functioning as a de facto salary cap.
(This is a little weird for me to argue because 15 years ago, I hated the Yankees for doing this very thing, and I’m not going to engage in the gymnastics required to make myself sound consistent. The fact is I’ve changed my mind. Some of that is no doubt that it’s my favorite team in the position to “over”spend and not make the hard choices budgetary restraints might impose, and some of it is that the game has changed, where payrolls have shrunk relative to revenues across the board, making even overspending in today’s context less profligate than it was in the early 2000s. But most of it is that I have changed, and I no longer see much value as a fan in rooting for billionaire owners to maximize their profits at the expense of their labor, no matter how much that labor is getting paid.)
Given how great Mookie looks to be in the future, how excellent JBJ is in the outfield, and how promising X seems to be, is the person to go JD (age) and/or Sale (arm concerns) once their contracts run out? Just a hard decision all around.
I don’t envy the decision makers, especially in a pressure cooker environment where every choice is going to get picked apart to death.
Sale has had yellow flags with his shoulder for two consecutive years. He was also flagged as a prospect IIRC for mechanics, and you wonder how long this pitcher can be durable for. The production is incredible and I think you strongly consider holding your nose and living with injury risk, but I don’t think keeping him is a slam dunk at all. Betts has to be priority #1 and go from there.
Bogaerts is a Boras client. The Sox have also been getting relatively modest power (aging Hanley, Moreland) from 1B for years now. Given the 1B/DH market the past couple offseasons, there’s a very viable alternative in starting a glove-first regular at SS and replacing Bogaerts’ power production with a 1B. And I think Xander is a hell of a player. The team would be worse, but it might end up only costing them a win or two, while banking 15-20+ AAV. Compare to replacing Betts with a generic regular, which would cost the team several wins and perhaps not save them very much money.
Or, these guys could go all 2000s Yankees on the league, if they really want to.
Payrolls have not shrunk relative to revenues. The Players have achieved their highest share at near 50% in the last CBA. I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea.
The players not being paid “what they deserve” primarily are young stars on the fixed first 3-4 years of near-minimum pay and then their 3 arbitration years after that. The Red Sox offering new FA-type max contracts to every one of their stars and to slightly above-average JBJ after the first 7 years of their careers has no impact on those young stars around the league. And Betts, Sale, and X will achieve “what they deserve” in FA whether the Red Sox bid on them or not.
Jeff Sullivan has proposed raising the ML-minimum, which is a good idea, but there can’t quite be a solution for these young stars. In all the major sports, rookies go on a rookie scale that governs their pay for their first n years before they are FA-eligible. The good ones become disadvantaged in this situation. Though barring injury, they tend to do quite well when they hit FA.
Yes, but. It is also possible (or likely) to have the 300 million dollar team that suffers from missed projections and bad luck. The Yankees finally decided to not swim in that end of the pool anymore and they were right. The Sox should go all in for ’19 and then all out for a couple years. The game has changed tremendously at the most important level, the front office. Dombrowski, all credit due him, is not the answer going forward. There is nothing that smacks of dynasty in their model.
Overall he adds up to an above-average (if streaky) player, but he’s under contract for two more years, in his age 29 and 30 season, and that seems like the ideal time to hang onto him and then cut bait before the athleticism goes. I think he’s a decent bet to be an above average player in the near-term, but after that? Not really.
That said, if anyone suggests they should trade him for Jose Abreu again, I’m gonna lol.
I’d love to see JBJ get an Arrieta-style contract to stay in Boston…a club option to extend, and a player opt-out if they don’t extend.
So, I really hate to rehash the kinda racist prognosticating habit, where e.g. ANY great defensive/high K/20-25 HR center fielder automatically compares to Mike Cameron if he happens to be a black man. But here it is anyway, because the player profile is very similar. JBJ’s clearly a notch or two below peak Cameron, but he has several prime years left to catch up.
Cameron aged very gracefully. He actually accumulated 14 WAR age 33-36, eclipsing 4 WAR in three of those four seasons. He was done as a regular after 36, but never truly awful.
He walked more than Bradley does and had quite a bit more SB speed; JBJ is in his ballpark on defense, although to this point, he’s short of the couple of peak 20+ def seasons Cameron had in his prime.
Bradley might have changed as a hitter midseason, however. Cora talked effusively about his approach and work even before the results started breaking his way. Quality of AB was referenced heavily in June pregames, even before the hits were falling in. Then, there was a Rob Bradford article this winter which discussed JBJ’s first conversations with JD’s hitting guru, Craig Wallenbrock, where JBJ says “this is the first time I’ve heard any of this stuff.”
Personally, I’m glad they have him under contract for two more years, but I would try to extend him through age 32 or 33 right now (instead of 30). If JBJ can consolidate some of his second half gains, he’s a 4+ WAR regular going forward. The Sox aren’t getting a discount on any of their other pending decisions. Do you see any of Betts, Sale, Bogaerts, JD and Porcello receiving less than 20m AAV? I think the floor on Porcello’s next contract is Eovaldi’s 4@17 (he’s making 20 right now), and I think all of the others easily match or exceed 20. Bradley’s a glue guy and actually provides an opportunity to find surplus value, if his refined approach is at least somewhat sticky.
All of which is amazing – even if you’re less bullish, this is a guy who more Sox fans than not wanted off the roster two months in.
This has been bugging me a bit today. At best, the way I introduced this comment was clumsy. My first exposure to minor league baseball was by lurking on John Sickles’ old SBNation blog. There were probably better examples of what I was getting at in random comment threads, but here’s a perfectly fine prospect retrospective on Cameron written by Mr. Sickles: https://www.minorleagueball.com/2012/2/19/2810320/prospect-retrospective-mike-cameron-retires
The only players mentioned in the comments are: Jared Mitchell, Jiwan James, BJ Upton, Donovan Tate and Trayvon Robinson. All of these players were African-American outfielders who struck out a lot. I also remember Chris Young and Curtis Granderson getting a lazy Cameron comp. Note that most of these players didn’t stick in CF, and none of them were close to Cameron’s class of defense. There are not a *whole lot* of African-American players in MiLB or MLB and although comps are kind of stupid in general – well, that’s quite a number of comped players who share one thing in common besides strikeouts.
To be clear, all I’ve ever heard from the professionals is, at best, comps can be less helpful than not. I was referring to the Peanuts’ gallery that is under the articles.
Could’ve just left the comment out though. JBJ is a hell of a player. On July 29th, JBJ made this ridiculous diving catch on the warning track in LCF during one of Eovaldi’s first starts with the Red Sox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlUOX1g2b5Q
I listened on the radio. Tim mentioned that Statcast gave JBJ only a 42% catch probability on the play. Joe was incredulous. He said it was one of the best catches he’s ever seen. Eyeball test isn’t everything, but, the man has been calling games for 35 years. THIS catch gets made almost half of the time?!
Extend the damn man, and downvote me all you want for advocating it 🙂
Now that I watch this clip, Remy says the same thing: one of the best catches he’s ever seen. There’s another 30 years of eyeballs following another 10 years playing in MLB. It’s very hard for me to trust Statcast’s readout on that particular play.
“Transitioning to the team’s next core without spending $300 million a year may be the biggest challenge for the dynasty of the Dombrowskii.”
It shouldn’t be that hard since no one will spend on free agents anymore. Who’s going to sign any of these guys? Cleveland? Manny Machado can’t get a contract what in the world is Xander supposed to expect?
I really enjoyed this series Dan. Hope to see it again next year!
My handle says enough about my attachment to the Red Sox to look at the season from a dyed-in-the-wool fan’s perspective. i don’t miss many pitches during the season using Genie to record every game. One of the more interesting things is reading and hearing the comments from the knowledgeable people on the various media platforms, most notably Fangraphs. The impression I kept getting all season long from these inputs was that very few experts, Fangraphs bloggers are definitely included, actually thought the Red Sox were even close to being a 108 win team. Even when they waltzed through the playoffs against the three toughest opponents in the game, the reaction was surprise. The reason is not difficult to discern. How did they actually do it is a very reasonable question. The offense was really limited to four players, but what a four players they were. Betts, Martinez, Bogaerts and Benintendi consistently produced runs, even against the best pitchers. All the rest of the lineup had to do was throw in a hit here or there and runs came flowing in. Someone who didn’t watch the Sox play and only used the metrics would laugh at the infield defense. Devers did not play major league defense, Nunez was not Pedroia and Bogaerts fails to impress the number crunchers but maybe infield defense isn’t as important as some think it is. Shifts and many more K’s certainly point that way. The starting pitching seemed to always be just good enough. Sale was done by August 1st. Price was okay, Porcello was okay, Rodriguez was okay but they were seldom bad. That has value. During the post-season much was said about the Red Sox bullpen being a weak link. Isn’t it ironic that the only weak link was Kimbrel, supposedly the best of the bunch. That is because Barnes was unhittable all year, Brasier was unknown to many and the others were better than advertised. That old cliche that “Little things mean a lot” also comes into play. The bench was great, Pearce and Holt consistently delivered and the roster construction of carrying 3 catchers enabled Cora to use a pinch hitter for the catcher in important situations negating, to some degree, the lack of offense at that position. One mighty figure, however, towers over this season in the form of a 5’9″ right fielder. It is impossible to exaggerate the impact that Mookie Betts had on every game he played. This season was comparable to Willie’s 1954 and Yaz’s 1967. Forget the batting line, forget the unsurpassed defense and fantastic base running, there was something more, that unmeasurable intangible that you could feel. I know what the numbers say, 10.9 bWAR, but somehow that just doesn’t seem to do justice to the season he just had. perhaps another 5 WAR for leadership should be added . I was thrilled when Alex Cora was named manager and he created the atmosphere for the players to succeed. That is the most important thing a manager has to do. In game decisions are guesses, ask Dave Roberts, a fine manager, about that, but Cora exceeded all the high expectations, after Game1 of the season of course. In summing up this wonderful year it is easy to see lots of reasons for the best season in franchise history, not the greatest, that was retired in 2004, but a great year spent watching a fun team. Dave Dombrowski had the magic touch, selecting Alex Cora, signing J.D. Martinez then making key mid-season acquisitions in Steve Pearce, Nathan Eovaldi, Ryan Brasier and Ian Kinsler. Betts had one of the best seasons of all-time, J.D. Martinez did a superb Big Papi imitation and the entire cast performed. All Red Sox fans understand, especially old ones like me, the feeling that the next shoe was always about drop, the next pop fly was going to drop into the screen or the next easy grounder was going to roll through the first baseman’s legs but this year was different. there was a serenity all year long. This was going to be our year. This is the year Sanchez’s drive is going to be caught on the warning track, Benintendi is going to make The Catch of his life and Steve Pearce is going to put on his cape.
THIS!
Awesome post man. Thoroughly enjoyed reading this.
Thanks. It has been a labor of love for 70 years, though sometimes a burden filled with heartbreak and tears, but never wavering and finally rewarded with 4, count’em, 4 WS championships. Go Sawx!!!!!
Love this post, but the leadership award for me might go to Martinez. His quiet leadership through example was unbelievable and made new hitting coach Tim Hyers’ job much easier. Just being around this guy makes players’ bat more effective (except catchers – they must be immune to the JD effect).
Dan, you wrote an article that talks about the 21st century Red Sox and the Byzantine empire, but you never mentioned the reign of Emperor Dustinian “The Pedroian”???
Down with Big Calendar! (You beat the Chinese New Year by almost a full month!)