Wednesday 7/10/24
Red Sox won a slugfest 12-9 over the A's last night at Fenway, thanks to an eleven-run outburst in the first two innings. Brayan Bello was bad again (5.40 ERA on the season now), though, giving up 5 runs in five innings, despite 11 strikeouts, which nonetheless got him the win. Sox are a season-high ten games over .500. Yankees lost, too. That puts the Sox two back in the loss column for the first Wild Card spot. The Yankees will get going in the other direction again. The All-Star break will likely help them reset. Devers keeps hitting.
On the subject of Devers: He has a huge wad of tobacco in his mouth, all game, every game. That's just so bad for you and dangerous. How has MLB not outlawed tobacco usage during games yet? There are all of these changes in sports--replay, for instance--that usually make things worse. But here's a change you could do to make things better and it's not done.
The trade deadline is coming up, and if I had to guess, I'd say that the Sox brass will do nothing and that the front office and ownership actually wants the team to lose right now. That way there will be less criticism if and when no moves that could help the club are made, and they won't have to spend, which I don't believe they want to do and could very well not be willing to do.
A lot of what happens in sports now is predicated on what the machines say about things that haven't happened yet, based on how likely the machines determine certain outcomes are. We see projections like win probability percentage, odds of making the postseason, etc. This is among the worst things ever to happen to sports. Decisions are made based on what a computer determines is likely to occur. The human element is ruled out. The best part of sports, in other words. Think of all of the teams and great accomplishments in sports history that wouldn't have happened if a team shut it down based on projections. Thousands of great events and victories, right? The 2001 Patriots don't happen, the 2013 Red Sox don't happen, because they wouldn't have been given a chance to happen. Those with say-so would not have allowed those teams to try as hard as they could to go as far as they were able to go.
You never know with sports. You just don't. Everyone on a team can start going in the right direction together. They can get buy-in. Buy-in becomes belief. Confidence empowers performance. Momentum is built. A form of on-field magic can start to happen. You can win a championship that way in all sports. Especially in baseball, though, and hockey. Take that away--the possibility of that away--and you wreck sports. Then it's just athletic displays by a set, preordained group of people, and not something about the the manifold possibilities of what humans can do.
I'm going to tell you what people like most whether it's in baseball, in writing, in movies, in music, in life: That which is most human. The more human something is--no matter what it is--the more people will like it. In this world, there are fewer and fewer and fewer people who can give other people what we all want and need the most. There are fewer and fewer and fewer people who even try, or think to try, or would have it occur to them to try. In publishing, for instance, there isn't a single other person. And in sports, we have daily evidence of a pushing away from human possibility, which would have once seemed impossible itself.
A final Sox thought for now: Paradoxically, Alex Cora's lame duck status as manager is helping the Sox. He's trying harder than he has in recent years because he wants a good job somewhere else next year and he's basically auditioning for that right now. And he's less beholden to what the front office wants him to do and can encourage the team to play the style of ball that they're employing. The small ball, speed-based stuff. This is shaping up to be a pretty compelling Red Sox season, which I was not expecting at all.
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