The semantics of losing a late season lead, why the spoiler role means more in baseball, and what everyone gets wrong about strikeouts

Friday 9/18/25

I fear we're watching the end of the Red Sox season, one which will not include any October baseball. With their loss to the Athletics at Fenway yesterday--dropping the three-game series--the Red Sox are now just a single game up on the surging Guardians (always measure by the loss column, and if your team has played more games, assume the other team will win those "missing" games they have yet to play). The Athletics aren't as bad as many fans--who apparently never look at the standings or any stat lines--think they are, but that's neither here nor there.

You could claim the Red Sox aren't outrightly collapsing; I believe they're 7-8 in September. But six of one, half dozen of another, as they say. Same thing either way. They haven't been good enough. The Red Sox do hold the tiebreaker over Cleveland on account of having won the season series against them. So there's that. If they get in, it could well be the tiebreaker that saves them.

The Sox start a three-game series with the Rays today and unless I miss my guess, I believe the Rays will play them tough indeed, looking to be spoilers. The Athletics definitely did--credit to them; you could tell they were taking these games seriously--and given that the Sox are their division rivals and that the Rays are always kind of scrappy, I expect the Rays to at least match that compete level.

Playing spoiler is a neat thing and it means more in baseball than other sports. Why? Well, I think it's the nature of having that many games in a season. The grind of all of those games. The mundanity of having that many. Games come along with different meaning and that perks you up, because you do have to keep going until the end.

Also: Making the playoffs in baseball is just a bigger deal than in the other sports. There's more of this aspect of achievement to it. It can be an accomplishment in and of itself. That's left over from before all of the current nonsense of three Wild Card teams; you could say it's left over from back when only two teams made the postseason in the whole sport. Which was pretty cool. That's why pennant races were such a huge deal.

Maybe you've had a boring, disappointing season, and have been out of it for a while, and now you get to play games that matter more--at least to somebody--and you can rain on their parade. You get up for games like that.

I'm trying to look at it as though it's the playoffs now, which is close to the reality for the Red Sox. Perhaps this will be the only manner in which to get that playoff feel--which has been absent since 2021--with this team. So I'm making do.

Alex Bregman has been a big disappointment for me. Borderline bust of a signing. Recently I saw someone say he was having a career year. Because, again, people just say things. They don't process information, look for information, peruse any form of information. When presented with information they can't understand it.

To them, it's all "vibes." Pay attention to how that word is used now. It's a scourge in our daily devolving age. Like "literally." People use "vibes" as this blanket reason to say whatever they wish to say without the need for, you know, facts, truth, reality. It's a one-word form of linguistic insurance against any of that. And another reason and technique to avoid thinking at all. Or knowing anything.

The Red Sox can't score. This should be when Bregman is producing, leading the offense, but he's among their worst hitters now. His final season numbers will be paltry. His rate stats middling. Let him move on. Don't resign him for big money. Sign someone better.

Giolito and Bello have turned back into pumpkins. Cora lost his patience with Bello in the latest loss, and I don't blame him. Bello isn't a mentally resilient pitcher. You can see it in The Clubhouse but it's always been apparent from watching him on the field--his body language, how he loses focus when things aren't going well, how he doesn't pick his teammates up after miscues behind him. So much of baseball is mental, which is another reason why it's the truest to life sport. Bello took himself out of that game before Cora formally lifted him. By then, though, the damage was done.

Crochett goes today, so that means the Red Sox have a better chance at a much-needed victory, but he hasn't been the same pitcher he was earlier in the year.

He was just okay last time out, but he struck out a bunch of people, and everyone is just so stupid now that because of that strikeout total there were these proclamations of how great and dominant he was.

Last time I checked, all outs count the same. An out is an out. Strikeouts aren't better outs. You can have twenty-seven strikeouts and give up 300 runs. You can have zero strikeouts and give up none. What does it matter?

But now, almost everyone sees a strikeout total and decides the pitcher was outstanding if it's double digits. I encounter this all the time, and it'll be a game in which the guy gave up four runs in six innings. But he struck out ten.

He wasn't dominant then, jackasses. He was not that good. He was worse than average. Just that some of the outs he recorded came in this particular flavor. And the reason a pitcher only lasted five innings can be because he struck out those ten guys. Let's say the pitcher comes out for the second inning. You know what the best outcome is with that first batter? It's a one-pitch tapper to second. Not a seven-pitch at-bat before you fan him looking. And especially not with how the game is played these days, with the babying of pitchers, the enslavement to pitch counts, and the rising amount of arm injuries. One pitch--tapper to second. Second batter: One pitch, pop to short. Third batter, two-hopper back to you on the mound. That's the real immaculate inning.

It's depressing how dense and simple we now are. And how we're almost always wrong about everything. No matter how simple it is itself.