Disappointed But Not Surprised

Baseball, more than any other sport, is truly Shakespearean. Everything happens so gradually, so deliberately, it’s almost impossible to actually be surprised. Even the best plot twists have been foreshadowed ad nauseam, and are less twists than the culmination of an entire play’s worth of intentional choices and actions. We’re not supposed to be shocked by Hamlet’s death, nor Romeo and Juliet’s death, or the end of Richard III’s reign. We’re supposed to reflect on all of the little moments that led to that grand, tragic finale. Baseball is no different. A 162 game season, containing three-and-half-hour marathons with hundreds of pitches and no game clock, leads to end results that may not have been expected in April, but by the time October rolls around are logical conclusions deduced from dozens of key moments over the course of a long campaign.

The Red Sox were just swept in a mid-week August series at Yankee Stadium that, in classic Shakespeare tradition, was equal parts comedy and tragedy. Scoring one run in seven innings off of notoriously run-friendly Andrew Heaney on Wednesday night? Tragedy. Garrett Whitlock and Josh Taylor combining for a line of 0.1 IP, 3 BB, 2 H, and 3 runs to blow a tenuous 3-2 lead in Game 1 of Tuesday’s doubleheader? Comedy (I suppose). Boston started the series in 2nd place, struggling through its worst stretch of the season but still clinging to a postseason spot. By Wednesday night at 11 p.m., it was in 3rd place and out of the playoffs entirely. It’s not the worst Red Sox/Yankees regular season series of my lifetime. 2006’s Boston Massacre redux is still the leader in the clubhouse there, with 2019’s London Series (the Red Sox scored 21 runs in two games, but allowed 29 in back to back losses that effectively crushed their 2018 title defense) a worthy honorable mention. But, it’s absolutely going to be one that sticks with me, as the moment the 2021 Red Sox were officially pronounced dead by any impartial observers with two eyes and a functioning brain.

Like Billy Shakes’ best work, this Red Sox free fall may be unexpected based on how their season began, but it’s far from surprising. The clues have been there all along. Early on, the Sox were relentless, a tough out that led the majors in come from behind victories for months. Even without Chris Sale, the starting rotation held their own, keeping one of the best offenses in the league in the game early, before giving way to a relatively unheralded but effective bullpen. The lineup clearly had holes, but the core four of Alex Verdugo, Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, and JD Martinez formed heart of one of the best run-scoring groups in the league, with pleasantly surprising support from Hunter Renfroe and Kikè Hernandez buoying the stars in slumpier moments. It was imperfect, but not ineffective. At minimum, it was enough to field a first place team for 85 days.

Unfortunately, a MLB season is much longer than three months. Somehow, this Red Sox team has managed to combine the gritty, upstart, “vets-who-know-how-to-play the game” lovable traits of the overachieving/best case scenario 2013 Sox with their regression to the mean sequel from 2014 in the same season. The result? An incredible run or poor play (Boston has lost 14 of its last 20 games) that has dropped the Red Sox from first place to all the way behind a resurgent Yankees team, a team they had a 10.5 game lead on as recently as July 5th. It’s been a summer reminiscent of the Sox’s 20th century, and not their title winning, curse-rebuffing 21st.

Most frustrating is that we probably should have seen this coming. Were we really all expecting a rotation of Nathan Eovaldi, Eduardo Rodriguez, Garrett Richards, Nick Pivetta, and Martín Pérez to last for a full season? That seems like it should have raised some red flags! Would it have made sense that eventually the stars in the lineup would go cold, and that the likes of Bobby Dalbec and Christian Vazquez might not be enough to carry the team in that scenario? That checks out too! When your bullpen consists of vets having career years and a rookie who is destined to hit a wall, can you really be that upset when those vets start playing more like their career norms, or when that rookie (regardless of how lights out he’s been to that point) hits a rough patch and looks like he might be running out of gas? Maybe, but you can’t act like it wasn’t a possibility.

Even so, it’s hard to say that a slide of this magnitude was something we were all prepared for. On July 30th, the day of the trade deadline, the Red Sox were 63-41 and possessed a 1.5 game lead over the Rays for first place in the AL East. They lost that night, and 12 of the following 18 games after that (including last night’s listless 5-2 loss in the Bronx to Hea-Hea-Hea-Heaney). The Globe’s Peter Abraham was harsh in his analysis on Tuesday…but he wasn’t wrong. The Red Sox haven’t been a good team for almost a month, and in hindsight maybe the fact that they had to come back so regularly throughout the first half of the season should have been a warning that the team was closer to a collapse than we realized. All of those come from behind victories now seem more like a team stealing wins and punching above their weight than a true World Series contender dominating their competition.

So many of the things that made the team great this spring have dissipated into thin air during the dog days of summer. A formerly top 10 bullpen has posted a 6.02 ERA since July 30th. The starting pitching hasn’t been much better, with a 4.87 ERA over that same span. The offense has a 113 wRC+ since the trade deadline passed, good for 8th in baseball, but also a league worst Clutch rating. The lack of timely hitting was on display yet again over the last couple of days, when the Sox loaded the bases with no outs in the 7th of the first game of the double header on Tuesday only to score zero runs, and again on Wednesday when they stranded runners on first and third and the tying run at the plate in the 9th. Moments where a big hit was once inevitable now feel impossible.

A lot of the blame is falling at the feet of Chaim Bloom for his Bartleby, the Scrivener routine at the trade deadline. I’m not sure those critiques have a ton merit, though (or at least not to the extent they’re being bandied about). For one, Bloom did acquire an All-Star in Kyle Schwarber to help lengthen the lineup. Granted, that was a cost friendly move and not a push-all-chips-into-the center gambit, but to label that trade as insignificant is disingenuous. Bloom, with the state of the farm system at the deadline, was never going to swoop in and swing multiple rental blockbusters for the likes of Scherzer, Kimbrel, and Rizzo. In all honesty, how many trades would it have taken to genuinely fix the rotation, add another major arm or two to the bullpen, and address the holes in the lineup and on the bench? 4? 5? The Sox straight up do not have an asset base to win a bidding war for that many acquisitions mid-season, and to gut an organizational rebuild so soon in the process for a heap of rentals isn’t good baseball business anyway.

Of course, none of those rationales feel any better when, during the turning point of last night’s game, newly acquired Yankee first baseman Anthony Rizzo pulled a bouncing grounder down the line that glanced off of Dalbec’s glove, scoring two runs and stretching New York’s lead to 4-1. That’s the same Anthony Rizzo who came up in the Red Sox farm system, was traded to the Padres for Adrian Gonzalez, won a World Series for Theo Epstein’s Cubs, and was heavily linked to the Red Sox all last month as an almost perfect trade target, given Dalbec’s struggles this season. I’d call it Shakespearean, but that might be too melodramatic. It’s just baseball, and the Red Sox might merely be who we thought they were before the season started.