I’ll give the Red Sox this: they can successfully sabotage everything else six ways to seven, but Fenway Park is beautiful until the end. Among MLB stadiums, it’s exactly as spiritually lovely as Wrigley Field, and if there’s anything at which these two environs have been the best to ever do it, it’s lulling the hometown team’s ownership into complacency. The Red Sox are back to not giving a shit after a 20-year absence during which they won four World Series titles, had the single most memorable postseason series of all time (in which they were the hero) and finished off with an arguably top-10-all-time-great team taking it home in 2018.
You’d think it would be hard to undo so many good works, but it’s really not, as the receipts show. If you stop trying, you can get bad pretty fast. In the Commonwealth of the Sox, it’s gospel that the ghastly 2020 season should be stricken from the record, with which I agree. I have the same take on the inexplicably great 2021 team, however, which was fun and great and just did the right stuff at the right moments but obviously didn’t have staying power (which I said on this site at time). That said, that season was why baseball is great. But when that season ended I was far happier with the endpoint than the trajectory, which was pointing even further down than I thought, landing them in last place two years in a row.
The most incredible thing about the Red Sox in the early 2000’s is that they were dominant for the exact same period of two centuries, culminating with a historical World Series win followed by a inexplicable decision, baseball-wise, and the immediate cessation of it all. I have read almost all the side literature on L’Affair “No, No Nanette” and while, yeah the details of the Babe Ruth deal are nuanced, it was still dumb as shit! Given what Ruth did both before (set the single-season home run record with 29) and immediately after, like the season afterward (set it again with 54), it’s the clear winner. It’s Babe Ruth! The actual guy. He wins.
And yet, because I am alive now and not them, I remain pretty sad and angry about the Mookie trade. It was the exact moment baseball-qua-baseball stopped mattering to the Sox’s owners after nearly two decades, and baseball-qua-spending returned, monarch-in-exile-style, triumphantly to the throne. They had to do it to us. In the imagined paraphrased words of John Henry, sympathizing with Immortan Joe: Do not, my friends, become addicted to winning. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!
Sorry Joe/John: I do resent the absence of winning. If the first two-plus decades of my life were tolerable, it’s because the Red Sox had woken up after sleepwalking for most of 80 years with admittedly ecstatic highs that scraped the ceiling as hard as possible without breaking thru. That history made it special, because stories do that. It was the result of a slow boil over decades that cooked its way through the details. There was sympathy for the organization even if the people and decisions got us there didn’t deserve them, because time has a way of wearing us down. Except Dan Shaughnessy, who got rich off it. Good for him, I guess.
The problem now is that the Sox are at the start of a new self-induced failure cycle, and instead of long-forgotten miscues and incompetence to blame, it’s the people in charge, right now. It is like this because they wanted it to be, and the Sox are no longer exceptional nor do they have an exceptional or even compelling story. We are back to life on the Fury Road, where the only way is to end and back, however many decades it takes.
