The Red Sox' season is over: What can you really say?

Friday 10/3/25

The Red Sox' season came to an end last night at the hands of the Yankees with a 4-0 loss in Game 3 of the Wild Card series. New York scored all of their runs in the fourth inning.

I've spent a lot of time writing about the Red Sox in these pages as I do each season, so I should finish this one off, I figure. I'm sure later I'll discuss the rest of the playoffs and also many matters pertaining to baseball history, as is my regular wont.

But these Sox...what can you say? Most people predicted that they'd be a playoff team. I didn't. They were. Barely. It doesn't take much. So, to me, there's a built-in caveat with being an eighty-something win team and snagging a Wild Card spot.

You want--I want--October baseball--but as an achievement in and of itself, just getting there as an eighty-something win team isn't an indication that you're good, on the rise, had a nice season.

It merely means you were one of the top six--six!--teams record-wise in your league. Not in baseball, which still wouldn't be a big deal, but just in your league. It isn't a hell of a lot different than making the NHL playoffs these days, though I think on the whole, those bottom teams will have a higher winning percentage than an eighty-something wins qualifier for the baseball Wild Card.

So, okay--people were right that the Sox would get in, and I was bemoaning their flaws while getting it wrong about them getting in. But what I said all along--and what I was correct about--is what matters: You can't win playing the way the Red Sox play. With bad defense. Ineptitude when it comes to the fundamentals. And striking out like they do, the biggest issue of which is a failure to put the ball in play when the ball needs to be put in play.

The Red Sox are a team that commits a lot of errors and has a lot of unofficial errors--plays that aren't made that should be made by big leaguers--or college players--that don't get made by the Red Sox, which don't show up in the box score as errors or mistakes (as if there were a mistake stat--maybe there should be), but which kill them.

The Duran play in Game 2 wasn't scored an error. Whatever the hell Abreau and Rafaela were doing last night when they let a routine fly ball drop between them wasn't an error. Don't get me wrong--the Red Sox still made their official two errors. And they struck out thirteen times.

The Yankees got a great start for their guy on the mound. Massachusetts native--and Northeastern alum, actually. But, again: All of the scoring happened in one inning. One half inning was the difference on the scoreboard. That half inning was helped along by Red Sox-based boneheadness. Just like the Yankees won Game 2 because the Red Sox did half a dozen things to lose it, when the non-doing of a single one of those things likely would have netted a Red Sox win.

I don't want to say that the Red Sox gave the series away. That wouldn't be true. But if the Red Sox didn't play like unschooled jackasses, they would have won the series. There wouldn't have been a Game 3.

Red Sox fans--who are becoming like green-glasses wearing Celtics fans--are over the moon with the team, ostensibly perfectly pleased with a three-day playoff run in the "don't be sad it's over, be glad it happened" style of defeatist banality you get from people in a society where having something new to binge on Netflix--never mind that it's mediocre--is enough for them, because they take what they can get--which means, what they're given--rather than having higher standards and the looking around and the critical thinking that not just settling and being passive requires. "We had a great season." You're not on the team, Tonka. You're eating that second Mama Celeste pizza of the middle innings on a couch.

Nearly all that remains--or that there is--of the true, organic Red Sox fan is a miserable seventy-something in the hills of Vermont, who at least knows what is what. I think most professed Red Sox fans are perfomative and are fans because they don't know what to do with themselves and want to have something, so they make Jarren Duran into their personal little cuddle wuddle bug, and say "we" and "us" and all use terms like "Skankees," which is embarrassing for me to even type secondhand. And they don't have a clue about the sport, how the game is played, how it must be played to be played well, how it works, you could say, and the players on the team as players on the field.

It's kind of like people who know nothing and don't have some instigating experience (like having a visceral reaction to hearing a song for the first time and needing to hear more from the people who made it) about the Beatles and who hop on Reddit and announce that they want to be a Beatles fan and where should they start. Because that's how people are now. They are virtually incapable of organically, truly liking anything, and, of course, knowing anything about anything, or seeing anything for what it is.

They just think they should do or like something. And being entirely alone in all of the ways that matter, they think putting stuff like this out there means they're a part of a community and they have people, when the truth is they have no one, including themselves. Such is our world out here in the soulless nightmare terrain of 2025.

This was not a successful season for the Boston Red Sox. It was more successful than the last few seasons, most of which they finished in last place. I mean...hooray? They are not "back" or "on schedule" to win the World Series next year. "Breggy"--as these people call him, as if he's a plush toy they snuggle under their chin as they sleep--should not be re-signed, like they all insist, for six years or whatever, so that he can "teach the kids."

You need to shut the hell up with that stupidity. He's out of his prime (18 homers, 62 RBI, .273 average, 3.5 WAR in 2025...is that Alex Bregman or Alex Pedestrian?), he underachieved in Boston with a lot to play for, he dwelt on money as the games were being played, he wasn't a difference maker, and he's only going to get worse and likely injured more.

Also: There was all of this talk about Bregman's career numbers at Fenway before the season began. Look out on Lansdowne Street! We got the ultimate Fenway hitter here!

Bregman hit 6 of his 18 home runs on the season at Fenway, where he batted .246 and had 84 total bases. So much for that, huh? How do you only get 6 home runs at Fenway from Bregman? That is paltry.

I said at the trade deadline that the Sox should keep Duran for the remainder of the season, but now you need to move him. You've seen the best of him. He dropped off a lot from last year. He still gave you some value--in terms of extra-base hits (doubles and triples; not really home runs) and RBI, but show me a worse defensive outfielder in the American League who is out there regularly. He doesn't have a natural feel for the game. You see it in the outfield, but also on the base paths. Speed is his thing--not understanding, a feel for the game; what people wrongly call "instincts," being that humans don't have instincts, but we'll leave that aside for now. Why does a player with Jarren Duran's speed have relatively few stolen bases? It's because he can't read the pitcher. He doesn't have that understanding of the game. The finer points. And it's those finer points that in large part make the game the game, and that the better players process and incorporate as part of their processes. You could say pair with. They're a part of their own games. They are natural baseball players. Duran isn't.

I think his attitude sucks, I think he's a "me first" kind of guy who tries to cover that up with his "Oh, my mental health, woe is me, my mental health" shtick which people buy into because people are 1. Stupid 2. Desirous of being fooled. Also, many women enjoy masturbating to him and like to imagine that knock on their door being his while nursing a fantasy of pooling issues in some form of joint understanding ("You really get me and I really get you").

Like I said yesterday, if all of this is a huge problem and it's so awful for someone to say, then get into a different line of work--one that doesn't pay you millions and millions of dollars to play a game that ultimately doesn't matter much in the grand schema of humanity and one's fellow humans.

The guy stopped an at-bat to call someone in the stands a "faggot" during the middle of it. And that heckling fan was right--often Jarren Duran would need a tennis racket to hit the ball. He's aging out of his speed years, too. He'd do well in, say, Arizona and maybe make an All-Star team if they didn't have anyone having a particularly good year that year.

Also, there are teams that will still be overvaluing him right now, but perhaps not after another season. Sell fairly-ish high, I say. He took the collar last night, incidentally, with two more strikeouts, as the Sox' lead-off hitter. Set that tone and table, brother man. Maybe if you had a tennis...wait...my bad.

(By the way: I put the TV on yesterday and it was still on ESPN from the night before. I won't watch ESPN unless it's the only place to see a given game. First thing I hear from the "experts"--which is a thing that no longer exists with just about any subject or in any field...says the person who is the expert in many--is one of them saying that Jarren Duran is a "great" defensive outfielder, because he's fast--I mean, how ignorant are you trying to be and did you just carve your eyes out of your skull or is it that you can't be arsed to use them?--and then someone else saying that Jazz Chisholm is "all about vibes," and "there's no other way to describe what he brings to the table." Morons. But sure, baseball experts. What amazing experts. What outstanding insight. You wonder how and why anyone is paid for anything, because it's never for talent and what that person offers with what they do that a stump couldn't do at least as well. Here's a truism: The likelier someone is to say the word "vibes" as an explanation for anything, the stupider--and the lazier--they are, and less capable of being able to think today than they were yesterday, and so on, until they reach the point of never being able to think again, if they even wanted to, which they never think about anyway.)

Bello...I guess you have to keep him, given what starting pitching is. He might have one year where you think he's better than he is--Eduardo Rodriguez fooled a bunch of people for a season...people who don't understand what ERA is, but whatever--and he wins 18 games and finishes sixth in Cy Young voting, but I'd say that what he was this year is the best he'll ever be, because he has rocks for brains and the temperament of any angry (juvenile) starling hopped up on an energy drink.

Crochet will be a foundational piece for the Red Sox moving forward, until and if he blows out his arm, which is always a possibility with how pitchers have been brought along now. Bet the over.

I question whether Roman Anthony has the power to be more than Andrew Benintendi. I know--bad Fleming. Sorry. But I don't see pop yet, and I'm not automatically going to take it on faith that anyone has pop before I see it.

I'd move on from Cora. I know they won't. It's played. He's overrated. He is always building what I'll call before-the-fact excuses, so that his ass is covered if things don't work out. Plus, he's a cheater and a part of me thinks he needs to cheat to provide his real value, which is like saying his value is very limited if he has to play fair.

As I wrote in these pages as well, Alex Cora is the ideal manager for a team that can win 100 games without him. That's his perfect tombstone epitaph, baseball-wise. From these pages to the ears of some person off in the future with chisel and stone.

Aroldis Chapman: Don't expect this again. He was thirty-seven. You may not get half of what he was in 2025 in 2026. I'm not being hyperbolic--double his 2025 ERA and he's still in the twos in 2026. But are you counting on dominance? A thirty-eight-year-old closer being lights out? It's not impossible. This pitcher has a closer's version of a bionic arm, it appears. But he will be worse next year, and it could be considerably worse.

Rafaela isn't ever going to be the player that Red Sox fans like the type I mentioned above already believe he is. They talk about him like he's Willie Mays-lite, whereas he may be Eduardo Nunez-heavy, if you follow me.

I strongly suspect that was the last good season you'll see from Trevor Story. It was very surprising that it happened. A last redemptive kick of the can. Does he ever get to 60 RBI again? Would you take that bet that he does?

I think the Kristian Campbell long-term deal will be great for him and bad for the team, because I'm not expecting him to amount to much.

Giolito is apt to be gone, and he's also likely not to ever be as good as he was this year. How good was he? He's someone who peaks at solid. Then again, Nick Pivetta had a nice year, and I guess Giolito could do what Pivetta did in 2025, but I don't see that happening in Boston.

Starting pitching is weak, you don't have a second baseman, a first baseman (unless you're counting on Casas, and why would you?), we talked about Story, you may not have a third baseman, the catching situation isn't great. You look like you have a right fielder. What else? Where is all of this talent that people who call themselves Red Sox fans keep telling me about?

I don't know...and I don't. I'm not just saying that. That's how it goes with sports. You try and have the best reasons possible, the soundest thinking, for saying what you do say. Or you should. But you can't predict how hardly any of it will play out.

To me, this team isn't poised to make their run, win it all, however you wish to put it. They're a team that can get in because it's not hard to get in, and a team that can win against most other teams that also get in, because no one is very good. Starting pitching isn't a thing anymore. For the most part. And great teams have tended to have great starting pitching. Not always--the 1975-76 Reds didn't. But usually.

Now you just have starters who aren't that much different than relievers. They throw as hard as possible, batters swing as hard as possible. The game of baseball isn't much played anymore. The game is really a game of throwing hard, swinging hard.

It's a highly inefficient way to play what is still, underneath it all, baseball. That means you needn't play baseball very well to, say, win a pennant. Which the Red Sox could have done this year. I mean that--they really could have. But they weren't a good team. As for the cusp they're supposedly on...no one knows that. Would it really be that surprising if they're back in last place in 2026 or out of the playoffs with 85 wins? Totally not, right?

Anyway, that's that. We will see the Red Sox next in February.