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Premature Requiem for a Welterweight

 Way back in the 1980s, the Celtics were the hot team in Boston and had what is now called the Pink Hat crowd. Still, deep in the public consciousness, the Red Sox came first in most sporting hearts. 

This led me to formulate a semi-facetious theory. The Sox tended to have excellent starts only to falter in midsummer, right about when the NBA Finals concluded. So I opined that Boston's baseball team tended to do its best when the fewest people were paying attention to it.

This theory was rousingly validated last weekend when the Sox swept Washington to make the playoffs when there was no sports topic in town except Tom Brady's return to Gillette Stadium. I mean, local TV news had live shots outside the Patriots' home hours and hours before game time in their broadcasts last Sunday well before they ran the highlights of the Red Sox' comeback win. "Oh, yeah, Sox make playoffs" was an afterthought.

Boston hosts the Yankees tonight in the winner-take-all (if getting to face the Rays is one's idea of "all") wild card game. The Red Sox have the sports stage all to themselves not only here, but across the entire country. Does the Gee Theory mean they're doomed to take that stage and stumble into the orchestra pit?

Not at all. There's no theory extant that can predict the outcome of one baseball game with more than 50 percent accuracy. Greyhound racing handicapping would be easier. I will say it's unlikely the Red Sox will go on to win the World Series. Like all wild card teams except the '21 Dodgers, they have been too inconsistent to predict that.

But the point of this post is not the future, it's to examine what the Red Sox have already done. Specifically, it's to examine how they performed relative to the expectations of late March.

Those expectations were not high among either fans or the baseball community itself. How could they be after Boston's horrid 2020 semi-season?  The consensus was for an upgrade to mediocrity. The most optimistic scenario presented by said consensus was that the Sox did possess a strong enough lineup core that with improved pitching they could contend for a wild card playoff sport.

Lo and behold, that's exactly what happened. Boston's all-conquering first half the season was a mirage, its dreadful August simply reversion to the mean. If the team won a wild card by the skin of its teeth, well, that's how most wild card teams get in each season. If they were better, they'd win their divisions.

When the most optimistic preseason predictions come true, how can that not be a good year? So the '21 Sox didn't go worst-to-first. They weren't the Miracle Mets, or even the '13 Red Sox. If one's happiness, as a fan or as anything else, needs miracles for realization, life's gonna be grim.

My regular golf partners are devout Sox fans (hey, we're all old). They are grumblers, as are most devout fans of all sports teams. During the July-August slide, their grumbling reached cicada noise levels and I felt the need to stage a brief intervention as we waited for the green to clear on a par-three.

"This Red Sox team," I said, "has given you far more than you expected and that's true no matter how the season ends."

To my surprise, they immediately agreed with me. Didn't end the grumbling of course (should've heard it after the last Yankee series), but on average the noise level declined to a buzz from 777 on the runway.

My August statement is my final word on the 2021 Red Sox, whether their postseason ends with a champagne shower or ends tonight. 

posted by Michael Gee @ 8:29 AM