There’s a long history of people being associated with things they never *exactly* said. On July 15, 1979, exactly 18 months after I was born, Jimmy Carter gave a speech about a “crisis of confidence” in America that’s commonly referred to as the “malaise” speech, despite Carter never having used the word. But the brain has a way of filling in these gaps. It’s more or less the Mandela Effect as it applies strictly to quotes, and a recent example of it has been bonking around my head for weeks.
On November 30, the Pittsburgh Steelers lost to the Buffalo Bills, at home, 27-6. They let up the most rushing yards in Heinz Field/Acrisure Stadium history (aka since 2007) and the most at home in 50 years. After the game, Steelers writer Seth Rorabaugh, anticipating the words and deeds of Mike Tomlin, the league’s longest-tenured coach and one predictable and colorful to the point of hilarity-or-agony-depending-on-where-you-sit, wrote a banger tweet that turned out quite prescient:
A day later, the team signed Adam Theilen, a 2018 Pro Bowler, to the practice squad, and Rorabaugh’s tweet made the expected rounds in football media circles. It was a great call, yes, but that’s not the part that stuck with me. I will never be able unhear Tomlin saying “We can’t eat soup with forks. We need spoons,” despite the fact he never said it, and I think about it whenever Tomlin comes up these days. He’ll probably say something similar once the team is dismantled in the first round of the playoffs tomorrow night by the Houston Texans, but it won’t, to me, top the turn of the phrase he never uttered. That’s just not how our brains operate.
Over the last couple days, however, it finally hit me that the Red Sox, despite their upward trajectory, are still trying to eat soup with forks. With the notable exception of Alex Bregman, who Scott Boras is trying to extort the team into re-signing, the team doesn’t seem to be in on any big free agents. Specifically, they’re sitting out the Kyle Tucker sweepstakes, all but ceding a generationally talented hitter to their division rival and near-World Series champion Toronto Blue Jays (or whoever else signs up, but Toronto’s allegedly in the lead). I don’t care about an outfield glut. Nor do I actually care if Bregman or Bo Bichette commands an astronomical salary. It’s not my money. We’ve seen what it takes to compete. We need spoons.
The integration of analytics into baseball front offices is near-totally complete at this point, with the novelty long having worn off. This doesn’t mean analytics aren’t useful; of course they are. But the evolution of baseball thinking through the Moneyball era basically resembles the Bell Curve Meme, insofar as that, having armed ourselves with previously unimaginable amounts of information over the last 30 years, we’ve more or less ended up where we started:
This is why I liked the Willson Contreras trade. He’s a good player and that’s really all there is to it at this point. It’s why I loved the Garrett Crochet trade too: He’s a great player and that’s all there really is to it. There is evidence that the Red Sox know now, in a way they didn’t in the Chaim Bloom era, that having and keeping good players is important (see Schwarber, Kyle and Eovaldi, Nate). But I still fear that the team’s instinct is to grab for forks when the bisque is ready.
In fairness, it’s an approach the Yankees are using, too, in a dynamic that resembles nothing more than nuclear deterrence among self-important historical rivals. You don’t blow up, we don’t blow up, we both make money, the world continues to spin apace. Never mind that the Dodgers and Blue Jays are fully, unreservedly at war with one another, with the Mets, Phillies and others eager to get on the battlefield. They’re actively fighting over the biggest and best spoons. Yes, we have a few of them. But as of right now, we’re the only team in the majors not to have signed a free agent this offseason.
As of now, our only team-building activities are growing through the draft and trading for players from teams more desperate than we are. It’s a volume business, but it’s a dependent one. The draft is a crapshoot, and if no teams are eager to unload decent players at decent prices, there’s nothing we can do. We’ve taken our agency out of free agency, when it’s the single most effective way to add talented players to a team: You pay, you receive the player, and your team is then better. Yes, the team has steadily improved over the past few years using this approach, but that’s exactly why it’s time to expand our horizons. We’re ready to compete. Now is the time that each incremental player matters far more than they did a few years ago. If not now, when? Let’s put a fork in the old ways, and get us some dang spoons! Sign free agents and get better, you fools!
