I know what you're doing, Red Sox!: Predicting the club's deadline moves, where Bregman ends up, and what it's really all about for the Old Towne Team

Saturday 7/26/25

The Red Sox lost the first game of their series against the Dodgers at Fenway last night. No surprises there. The Red Sox are not a good team, so they don't beat good teams. It isn't more complicated than that. They're overmatched against strong competition. They can beat bad teams.

I guess you could be the third Wild Card team in this manner. Then what? You're done fast. A person could say that the team's thinking--by which I mean the front office now--is that once you're in, anything can happen, but I don't believe they believe that or care. Rather, the MO is Make the money, do the bare minimum to appease an easily-satisfied, undiscerning fan base.

I thought it was the right move to trade Devers, but I don't think the club did it for the right reasons. For John Henry, it was about money. He didn't extend Devers for the right reasons either. That was about trying to make himself look good, the same reason he also signed Bregman, which was a low risk move because it was most likely for just one year and they wouldn't need to invest heavy cash--by professional sports standards--in the player, but Henry would get credit anyway as if he had.

People are too simple and unthinking to even process that level of nuance. Henry banked on the fan base thinking he'd just invested in the current-day Mike Schmidt of third basemen--when Bregman was never more than a poor man's Ken Boyer--and that's exactly how they thought.

The Red Sox aren't in the championship business. They're in the coast business, which is to say, this is just a business with no other aspirations than bumping along as one of an owner's many businesses that is far back in the portfolio's pecking order. I mean, that's what it clearly is, right?

Thus, I expect them to do little to nothing at the trade deadline. They won't do nothing nothing, but they'll in effect do nothing. What they do will be as a sop to that fan base, as part of a stringing along. So long as fans can go on social media and call their favorite, most cuddly-wuddly players by their first name like they don't live lives of obliterating loneliness and a three game losing streak is followed by beating up on St. Catherine's Sisters of the Poor in a weekend series, those fans will pay what they have to pay to see the games so they can go on Reddit and feel like they have a group they belong to.

It's depressing.

The organization used to be hungry and motivated and they had such exciting players. Big time stars, big time character guys, personalities, color. Look at those 2003-04 teams. How can you have more exciting rosters than those teams had? In any sport?

Imagine that now? Even the non-stars were household names and fixtures in New England. Hell, the baseball world.

By the end of the season, you'll see meager-ish numbers from Bregman. The counting stats will all be low, and the rate stats will be well down from when people were calling him an MVP candidate.

If he opts out and leaves, then no one who looks at his stats with the Sox--which, granted, would take the slightest effort, and people don't do any more than they have to, so this is really a moot point--after the fact will think he made some mark during his time there. They're going to see 63 RBI and a decent but underwhelming OPS.

Bello wasn't awful in his start last night. Wasn't that good either. I guess you could say he pitched well enough to win if the team had a punchy offense, but they don't. Runs come in bursts because of how the Red Sox approach offense, and that's by swinging from the ass. They don't string hits together. Sometimes, two or three guys run into a few pitches. If they do, cool, if not, it's another L.

This is an impractical approach because you're limited and you won't be able to mount consistent production.

People are really into the probabilities provided by sites like baseball-reference. I think they think that they're like magic. Fortune telling, but with hocus-pocus-y clarity. They know more than humans are able to know.

It's such BS. A team wins four games in a row, the probability goes up. Drop five in a row, it goes down. There's nothing more to it than that. Why even include it, then?

Well, again, people are simple, simple, simple. They'll believe almost anything, like these numbers are a form of second sight that combines all of this fancy math and strength of schedule data and recondite formulas along with some newt eyes and lizard tails, blah blah blah.

Also, many people are degenerate gamblers. That all of these sports have married up with the gambling industry is something that stuns me no matter how mainstreamed it is. It's just so...wrong. Backwards. Foolish. A recipe for disaster. Someone will murder a player at some point over the money they lost. And it will be because of some prop bet or because they hit a homer in a meaningless situation that messed up their bet.

You hear talk of the heinous things people say to players and their wives. Kill yourself, etc. Sports betting has produced a lot more of this than there ever was before.

Anyway: I had said you'd know whatever was left to be known about the 2025 Boston Red Sox after these nine games coming out of the All-Star break. With two left, they're 2-5. You think they're going to win the next two against the Dodgers to take the series and thus go 4-5 against these three quality opponents? That'd be borderline respectable, at least. Or do you think they're likelier to go 2-7? That would be ugly. 3-6 is pretty bad as well.

Sure, they have Crochet starting one of these weekend games, but how long can you count on his start being the win that breaks your losing streak? He's likely to have a bad game at some point. Or go out there and give up two runs in seven innings and lose because the swing-from-the-ass approach produced three isolated hits and thirteen strikeouts.