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YES, I SAID IT FIRST.
Saturday, October 1, 2011 FRANCONA RIGHT
By Patrick Morand, Senior Editor, “YES, I SAID IT FIRST”
By now you have heard that the Bo-Sox and Braves both missed the playoffs in almost identical fashion by slumping through the month of September as they squandered significant leads in their wild card playoff races. No offense to Tampa Bay and St. Louis which won when they had to, but all anyone will remember about 2011 will be the losing the Red Sox and Braves did in the end. It was not meant to be when Atlanta’s future Hall of Famer Chipper Jones couldn’t deliver the winning hit with the Phillies on the ropes late in that game. Their inability to score there cost them the season. Boston also had no outs and an insurance run waiting at third base but could not deliver. And as it went bad for the Red Sox it went oh so well for Tampa as they stormed back from a seven run deficit to win their game in extra innings. At least for the Atlanta players and organization the choke will probably be written off as a team not ready to take that next step. The Braves were at best a wild card contender all season from the time predictions were made and they lost to a team we all precisely predicted would be the death of them – division champions Philadelphia. Philadelphia is the type of team Atlanta would wish to emulate one day. The Phillies are a dream team by baseball standards and they would have stood in the Braves way of going any further regardless. St. Louis was expected to contend down to the wire and had a great final quarter of the baseball season to salvage something. You would not have made a double take if someone had suggested that the Cardinals would beat out the Braves for the last spot at the National League dance unless you said it when they were ten games back. You may though have questioned if we said Tampa Bay would beat out Boston in the American League. In the preseason I had Tampa Bay beating out New York for the wild card spot figuring the Yankees might struggle with their pitching in 2011 and the Rays could surprise. Boston? - Boston should have won the division - forget the wild card. All Boston did was lose twenty of their final twenty-seven games which is the record for worst month by a first place team ever (or something to that effect not to mention in the stretch drive). You have to go back to a New York Giants team of the 1940s that lost twenty games to find a first place team with as many losses in a month, but they also won twenty-one (a month filled with doubleheaders). The Boston drop was the worst free fall a team could have, and that is hard to even imagine still and we just watched it. Tampa Bay kept the pressure on. The Rays actually won eighteen games in August and only gained a game on the Sox in that month. That alone should have been discouraging but as Red Sox pitching ERAs climbed the Rays began to make up three games a week in September. Boston started April with a week of losing, finished with a full month of losing, and the in between must have been remarkable. For the middle of it they really did pose as the best built team ever as projected to be in spring training. And they should have been – with the league highest $160 million payroll, all the MVP candidates and stacked five man starting rotation. They probably were the best team since the 1927 Yankees on paper, as the Boston Herald opined back on April 2. Only here is the problem. We are fascinated that the Red Sox lost their lead for the wild card and fell out of the postseason completely, but as September started they were still favourites to win the division, and so even holding a wild card should have been little consolation with that team. It makes me wonder what was really going through the head of the Sox skipper at the final meltdown. Terry Francona admits his team lost focus and the camaraderie that had to be there wasn’t with that team. Francona always stood up for his players, his beloved organization, and his general manager Theo Epstein. It reminds me of the article back in the spring when I alluded Francona’s response to Baltimore manager Buck Showalter’s comments about the Red Sox, their ghastly payroll, and the perception that Epstein would struggle trying to manage any club with smaller let’s say Tampa Bay money. I'd like to see how smart Theo Epstein is with the Tampa Bay (Rays) payroll. You got Carl Crawford 'cause you paid more than anyone else, and that's what makes you smarter? That's why I like whipping their butt. It's great, knowing those guys with the $205 million payroll are saying, 'How the hell are they beating us?' (Buck Showalter comments in Men’s Journal, April 2011) I think we can appreciate what Showalter said more now, especially if we look at it through the eyes of Francona who has seen everything. Perhaps the target on the Red Sox grew a little bigger since the Showalter comments. There were quite a few journalists and fans interested in the finish of the baseball season - a season just long enough to make the Red Sox look silly. We hear that the love affair of America with the anti-Yankee Red Sox has sort of died off as the Sox have replaced the Yankees at buying players. If baseball had ended after 154 games instead of 162 the Red Sox would be preparing for playoff games as we write this and all that bad play would be water under the bridge. The 1927 Yankees did not have to endure a season as long as today’s Red Sox teams. They did have to win the pennant to get to the World Series, and only one team in each league could, so the focus had to be there. There was never any faint hope of catching a wild card. For most of the 2011 season the Red Sox were placed among the best teams, only they couldn’t hold it. Their suffering dragged on because of the wild card. It could have been muted two weeks earlier if they only had to chase the division crown, and it would have meant a more interesting Yankees versus Red Sox showdown than the one we got between two acclaimed playoff teams sorting out who gets first and who gets the wild card. It might be that lack of desperation of finality for not winning today ruined that team. Baseball with its really long season is so boring for the most part we actually needed the Red Sox to stumble to make it exciting again. As long as the wild card is there teams that don’t have a chance at the division have consolation to play for. It’s easier to motivate the third place team to strive to reach second than to motivate the “silver team” to fight to hang on to second when they missed gold. Normally those division races are sewn up a long time in advance by teams with great pitching, like Boston had. A whole bunch of teams and their fans know that winning the division is next to impossible because richer teams usually have a leg up on those spots. I have been a proponent of a shorter season that is more sprint than marathon because look at what might happen in a sprint. We just saw some of it this September when two teams came from way back, but I doubt fans in Boston and Atlanta enjoyed it. It was only exciting because their teams completely lost bearings. If we could have a two part season then this year Boston having washed out April and September still would have lost both halves. If this were a split season with champions from both halves of the year meeting in a playoff maybe the Sox would not have let up and worked better on the fundamentals that killed their season. Francona’s job would have been easier if the team had heard footsteps behind them all the way along. Epstein may have had to make trades to get better. The 1981 strike shortened season was great. The season had two half season division winners that met in a playoff and those teams went on to the league championships and so on. There was no need for a wild card, but if we would have had that type of system in play this year just maybe that excitement of the last week of September would have meant last week of June excitement too. On July fourth the list of division leading teams still included San Francisco, Cleveland, and the LA Angels. Pittsburgh and Cincinnati were 1.5 and 3 games out respectively. Seattle was only back by 2.5 games. Boston was 1.5 games behind the Yankees at the start of July. If they would have lost the first half of the season, as they did, they may have been more focussed on winning in the second half. So maybe the current marathon season that did in Seattle, Pittsburgh and Toronto this time hurt the Red Sox as well. | |
Baseball finished its regular season in September this year, but that final night might as well have been Halloween for the Boston Red Sox and the Atlanta Braves (once known as Boston Braves) on a bad week for sports in the New England states.