For one fleeting, iridescent spark of a moment, the Red Sox were back. And then they traded Rafael Devers.
That’s at least how it felt yesterday when, mere hours after sweeping the Yankees out of Fenway Park, Boston dealt its franchise cornerstone to San Francisco in a trade that sent shockwaves through the baseball universe and threatened to ruin Father’s Day for dads across New England.
Xander Bogaerts is a San Diego Padre. What a strange sentence to write. But it’s true, all 11 years and $280 million of it. The Red Sox played a dangerous game of chicken for months, and this is the end result: San Diego swooped in with a buzzer beating blockbuster in the final moments of the Winter Meetings, Bogaerts is heading west for the next decade-plus, a day with two substantial Red Sox moves (signing All-Star closer Kenley Jansen and NPB star outfielder Masataka Yoshida) ended more bitter than sweet, and Red Sox Twitter self-immolated spectacularly in a way that only Sox fans scorned can. The reasonable take? Boston could have nipped this all in the bud last winter with a competitive offer. They didn’t, and opened the door for some team–in this case an all-jacked-up-on-Mountain-Dew AJ Preller and his Padres–to throw all of the money and years at Bogaerts and take things to a point where no sane person would be willing to go. Having said that, every sane person would agree that the Red Sox are a worse team today without Xander Bogaerts, and the Padres are a better team. The Red Sox, a team already in search of an identity, just lost a franchise cornerstone and incredible leadership figure. In many ways, it’s almost impossible to assign value to that.
I have been thinking a lot about the pre-2004 Red Sox this week, as the 2022 MLB regular season (and a particularly frustrating Red Sox campaign) came to a close. I don’t think any fan, especially those older than me with an even stronger relationship to the heartbreak wrought by the Curse of the Bambino, would say that they long for those days. And yet, there was something romantic about how 86 years forged an identity for not only a baseball team, but for a fanbase, city, and region. We knew the Red Sox would probably come up short in the end, but we loved them anyway. “There’s always next year” was equal parts coping mechanism and rallying cry. Sure, things might not have worked out this time, but the Sox would be back next April, and so would we.
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.
Waiting is hard.
You’d think Red Sox fans would be used to waiting, having spent 86 years doing exactly that. Four World Series rings in 17 seasons tends to erase a lot of bad memories though, and winning at that rate can shorten the fuse of even the most patient fanbase. Nobody wants to go back to losing once you get that first real taste of glory, and the Fenway Faithful are no exception.
For The Love 