The Red Sox and the nature of baseball

Tuesday 8/11/26

You want to be a good team, not a team that had a mid-season run. The Red Sox have now lost three in a row to weak teams. People talk like the playoffs are a given. I’ve seen posts about what the postseason rotation should be. You can’t assume like that; it’s contrary to the nature of baseball. They need to halt this skid. Be a good team.

Uninspired play from the Red Sox over the weekend, losing both of their games to the Athletics. Can't be dropping a series like that to a team like that.

Red Sox got off to a nice start Saturday and then fizzled out. Little hard contact from the offense as well as loads of strikeouts and Jake Bennett wasn’t sharp. Then on Sunday, we had the so-called bullpen game.

That term “bullpen game” automatically makes me go, “Uh oh.” Your team may win, but chances are they’ll have to stitch it together out of extra bits, deficits will need to be overcome, you may require a three-run homer, and it’ll be back-and-forth before you prevail. It's a bit like a professional Little League game.

Had the Red Sox won on Saturday, that would have been ten in a row. I had posted something about wanting to see this, both because of how rare it is for a team to have two winning streaks of ten or more games in the same season, and because the Sox, of course, are my team.

Someone replied saying that the Sox should sweep the A's, like this was some given.

I don't like that attitude. For one thing, it smacks of someone who doesn't understand baseball, and people who don't understand baseball also don't understand life. There's a dissonance to them, and their words, which is discordant with how I am, so I find it grating.

For me, with how my mind works, in its precision, there are thousands of external behaviors and utterances assailing it each day, which contributes to each day being as hard as it is.

I find that people have no grasp on the rudiments of anything. The most basic aspects of the basics. They're clueless. As if, as the old saying goes, they were born yesterday.

Good teams usually don't sweep bad teams. It isn't the nature of baseball. In baseball, the real game is the series. Baseball isn't like other sports this way. You play a team once in football, hockey, basketball. Maybe in those last two sports, you have a home-and-home, but you understand what I'm saying.

Baseball is about winning series more than games. The series is the game, the way I look at it. That bad team is going to beat that good team once, probably.

Then you have something like a pitcher holding down the opposition's offense. That one guy has all the influence on that day. This happens. It isn't unusual. The very bad team with the pitcher having a great day beats the great team on most days.

Again, this is baseball. Same pitcher who shut the Sox down out in Sacramento shut them down again on Saturday at Fenway. There goes your winning streak. No surprises there to me. But I understand baseball.

It bothered me during this game to hear Willson Contreras get booed by Red Sox fans for not running out a grounder. That’s certainly your right as a ticket buyer. But this guy was drilled in the head recently, then he was sick. Surely these are mitigating circumstances? Or enough to warrant the benefit of the doubt? He’s meant so much to the team, too.

I shared this thought somewhere, and someone commented that the fans had every right to boo and if Contreras was too hurt to give effort he shouldn't be out there.

Isn't it amazing, no matter how many times you see it, how accustomed you are to it, how stupid people are?

Here was someone in the first place saying what I'd just said. You pay your money for your ticket, and you can express yourself how you wish, so long as don't cross a line. Now, you doing that doesn't not make you a jerk or an idiot or both, but that's a somewhat separate matter.

Was this person so bad at reading that they couldn't comprehend what I'd just said? Otherwise, why would you say the same thing? And as for him being too hurt...I mean, really? Can people really not think their way through anything?

You have someone who is a very good hitter. They can stand in the batter's box and more or less do their regular thing, but maybe they have a knee issue when they run.

It's a better idea to have a much lesser hitter in their place? If you can't go full bore from home plate to first on a tapper back to the mound, there's no point whatsoever in you being out there? Automatically? Or because you pick your spots while you're not 100%? How is the picking of the spot not a smarter choice and better for the team?

Because what sense is there in maybe making yourself less well, thus taking away in other areas what your team can't replace, or maybe making it so you can't do anything for the team at all, by pulling a Pete Rose and busting it as hard as you can to first on a routine ground out?

According to this guy--and you can imagine how much I love when dumb people comment in the fullness of their stupidity on the intelligent things I share--then Kirk Gibson should never have come to the plate as a pinch hitter in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.

I'm not saying Contreras was as hurt as Gibson was then. But he definitely had just gone through some head stuff and some stomach stuff, and the dew point, as I've noted, was like 75 degrees. The guy took a fastball in the head. Then he was hugging a toilet bowl.

But if it's unwise for him to sprint to first when it doesn't matter then staple his ass to the bench and get someone out there who will sprint to first no matter if that guy is basically a Triple A player!

Honestly, how can people be this dense? Is it deliberate density? Like, "Behold how stupid I am"?

As I said to someone else who was bothered by the fans booing, it speaks to how ignorant people are now, with no area of society unaffected by this, or, really, not taken over by that ignorance, including at the old ballpark. Most of the so-called Fenway Faithful, the 2026 iteration, don't know what they're watching. They don't understand the game.

In the 1970s and 1980s, you had these verbal assassins at Fenway. The stuff people would say...it wasn't great stuff. Going to Fenway for the uninitiated in these matters made for quite the eye-opening--and ear-opening--experience.

But those fans who'd say some of the most horrible things, understood the game better than the fan of today. They wouldn't have booed Contreras on Saturday.

I've been tired of Dave O'Brien's act for a while with the Sox winning, and the rest of the NESN crew, too, save Jim Rice and Jonathan Papelbon, which feels like an odd thing to say, because it's not like they aren't bad at this.

Rice is kind of bitter and Papelbon is mostly a tool, even if he does understand what goes into winning better than most, including other baseball players--which was reflected in how he pitched, tool/fool though he largely is.

The others, though, with the ceaseless hymns of praise. The casual hubris and bad sarcastic kinds of jokes like it's impossible that the Sox could lose while constantly talking about the past. I don't care if it's the recent past.

The past gets awfully old awfully fast, do you follow me? This is baseball, where you can lose seven games in a week. The Sox are playing sixteen games in sixteen days. Knock it off. Grow up. This team hasn't won anything yet. They might not make the postseason as a Wild Card team. Would that be shocking? It'd be a hell of a lot less shocking than their six-week run.

It's has to play out, and as I said above, you want to be a good team, not a team that had a fantastic stretch and nothing more.

Dave O'Brien too often sounds like that kid in high school who wasn't good enough to make the hockey team, so he becomes the equipment manager and is all proud that he "earned" a varsity letter that way. This weird parasocial thing that exists even at the high school level between the wannabe and the person the wannabe wants to be.

Dale Arnold was like this and it was sickening. He'd be like, "Aw, shucks, gosh golly, don't get Chara mad because he's so strong he'll stick you in a locker!" So embarrassing to listen to.

I also don't like Chad Tracy telling me how close the Red Sox were after these losses, doing a game of "if only, if only, if only." On Saturday, the game took the form of "if only" a game-tying grand slam was hit. "Brought the tying run to the plate."

Stop that. Loser's mentality. You were down, what, five coming into the bottom of the ninth? You kept fighting, sure, but don't do this. It's how a team falls into bad mental habits.

Then the Sox turned around and slept through Sunday's performance, with the series on the line. Soporific Sox. Next it was off to Toronto, and more of the same, except this time you had your ace in Sonny Gray on the mound and it didn't matter, you still lost.

Hello three-game losing streak, which was the most amount of games that the 2013 Red Sox lost in a row all year.

See how that was? See how fast that was? From the verge of a ten-game winning streak on Saturday to a three game losing streak--the longest that other Red Sox teams have had all year--by Monday night.

That's baseball. This is how it works. This is why, among other reasons, it's so hard, and your head has to be screwed on right. Everybody's head on a really good team.

Good teams don't need streaks. They win series. It isn't flashy. They take two of three, they split the four-gamer, they take another two out of three.

Almost everyone you play--and probably everyone in your league--is going to beat you at some point.

But the real game is the series. And a significant portion of being successful in the the game is playing the game the right way, having your head on straight, fundamentals, focus, mindset. No big highs, no deep lows.

Baseball rewards being workmanlike. More than any other sport. Again, it's the sport's nature.