Could it be that the fans who stayed in their seats—or stood in front of them, loudly cheering—last week, in the bottom of the ninth, when the Boston Red Sox were down 7–2 to the Athletics of West Sacramento, were the same fans who, only a few months ago, booed the Red Sox at Fenway Park? They sounded so hopeful that it hardly seemed possible—and yet something about the angle of their rally caps, hats flipped inside out, reminded me of the tilt of the sad paper bags some Sox fans wore over their heads back in May. The Red Sox were putrid then. Everything about them seemed to stink. Their ace, Garrett Crochet, was sidelined with a bad shoulder. Their best young hitter, Roman Anthony, was heading to the injured list with a torn finger ligament.
The team’s good will had been squandered over the years by parting with a few of their best players. In April, while on a road trip, the manager, Alex Cora, was fired, along with a fair chunk of his staff; at four in the morning, he tweeted the word “Happy!” along with a smiling emoji. The owner, John Henry, was dogged by chants of “Sell the team.” The Red Sox, who’d won a wild card in an up-and-down season last year, had come out of spring training expected to contend for a playoff spot, but by the time Cora was fired the team had dropped seven games below five hundred. Under the interim manager, Chad Tracy, the team sank another seven below that, and was fifteen and a half games behind the Yankees at the top of the division by late June. They were still eleven games under five hundred in July. The rest of baseball, along with all logic, still reels from what happened next: a winning streak of fifteen games, followed by a nine-game streak, which they were trying to keep alive that day against the A’s.
During those stretches, they swept the first-place New York Yankees, the first-place Chicago White Sox (twice), the first-place Tampa Bay Rays, and the first-place Los Angeles Dodgers. They went 21–4 last month. The wins came every which way—extra-inning dingers, pitching gems, the slow build of sacrifice bunts. Their eighth straight win, over the White Sox, had been a thirteen-inning game that stretched on for more than four hours, in which the Red Sox hadn’t held a lead until the four-hundred-and-forty-third pitch—which turned out to be the game’s last. For their ninth consecutive win, they hammered the A’s by a score of 13–1. So when they fell behind the A’s by five, the fans at Fenway—turned faithful again—expected the unexpected. And sure as fate, three successive hits brought one run in, a walk loaded the bases, and the tying run came to the plate in the figure of Eli White.
Afterward, the players said that they could sense it happening. White blasted the ball, and Tracy said after that he felt a little thrill of belief when the ball met the bat’s barrel. But the drive went right into the center fielder’s glove: game, and streak, over. By then, the Red Sox were being called the best team in baseball, or close to it.
Except the A’s—who, for their part, had finished the month of July with a lowly record of 5–19—won the next game, too. And then the Toronto Blue Jays took the next three, handing the Red Sox their second five-game losing streak of the season. The bleeding wasn’t done: although the Red Sox beat the Blue Jays on Thursday to avoid a sweep, they got pummelled the next day by the Pittsburgh Pirates, who sat last in the National League Central.
Teams get hot, then cold; they get lucky, then unlucky; injuries always play a part. Records rarely paint a full picture of a season. But normally the thermodynamics of a baseball season find some sort of homeostatic balance.
If a team is really good, it is not also really bad, unless there is some big event or clear explanation. Surely, the postmortems of the team this fall will tell a story, with compelling causal details. Caleb Durbin started working with a private hitting coach. The video coördinators made a hype video of the fans at Fenway Park, to remind the players of what the stadium sounded like when the team was winning. Jarren Duran shouted at Willson Contreras at the end of an inning for no good reason.
Credit might be given to Ceddanne Rafaela’s cleats and arm sleeves, as bright as a French’s yellow mustard bottle. Maybe it will all add up to something that sounds plausible. And yet it seems to me that the 2src26 Red Sox cannot be made to make any sense at all.
True, for most of the first three months of the season, the Red Sox were probably better than their record. Before their turnaround, they were on pace to win only around a third of their games, but their expected wins—calculated using a formula that relates the number of runs they scored to the runs they gave up—would suggest a five-hundred team, a reflection of some bad luck. Play enough games, and the luck swings; balls that were caught in April started falling. You could justify, too, some of the team’s more recent cooling.
Durbin played through the hot streak with a dislocated left pinkie; when he came to bat on Thursday, the finger poked through his torn left batting glove—a sign that the swelling was becoming harder to tolerate. The bullpen, which had been baseball’s best for a long stretch, was wearing down; eventually, the cost of so many innings comes due. And so on. The Red Sox were never as bad as they looked, and never as good. Their over-all record right now—the good and the bad jammed together—may tell us who they really are and who they’ve actually been all along. (They’re currently projected to win around eighty-seven or eighty-eight games—right around where many analysts’ models had them during spring training.)
So what meaning is there to extract from any given game, or even a streak?
Baseball “is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out,” John Updike once wrote, in a piece set at Fenway Park. Viewed a certain way, no particular instant much matters. “Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest,” as Updike put it.
From that perspective, perhaps it was unwise for the Red Sox’s front office to trade away a handful of the team’s best prospects for the Orioles’ Adley Rutschman, an injury-prone All-Star catcher, just before the trade deadline. The Sox might not be quite the juggernaut they briefly seemed. And yet, there the fans were, rally caps on, ready to believe in another mighty comeback—to read heroism into a story that could also be told, perhaps more accurately, in terms of swing decisions and contact points. Good for them. We live in the present moment, not in abstractions.
One way or another, the Red Sox are making those moments count. ♦
