All September, we watched the Red Sox half-heart their way through the month. Guys got days off, pitchers were pushed back, bullpen arms were saved, and the general intensity of all the games flat out sucked, especially as a late season product where historically there’d be a race to get into or improve playoff positioning.
All of this uninspiring play was only potentially made palatable by one overarching theme: After losing their previous series in New York at the end of August — And with it the tiebreaker over the Yankees — the Red Sox essentially made a deal with the baseball devil in which they (apparently) made their return trip this week their sole priority. In short, they put the results of games in the first four weeks of September on the backburner in favor of getting healthier and being ready to go for September 29th.
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Well, September 29th came, and they were woefully unprepared for the very matchup they were supposedly studying up on for the last month. They looked flat, overwhelmed, and like a team who didn’t belong on the stage.
Just as importantly, they looked like the same team they’ve been all month, where they not only rank dead last in runs scored with just 71, but are 18 runs behind the next closest squad.
They also mimicked multiple September games in which they ran out the white flag bullpen squad after falling behind early. When Payton Tolle walked off the mound in the fifth inning, it was still just a 1-0 game, but the next five pitchers through the bullpen door were Erik Miller, Greg Weissert, Alec Gamboa, Wyatt Olds, and Brayan Bello. Chad Tracy did this in a playoff game, in New York, with winter potentially breathing down their neck in 24 hours. That is some September 15th garbage!
Regardless of whether you felt the July and August Sox were legit or all smoke and mirrors, there’s no denying they had a certain fight to them, and it’s a quality that kept them in every single game.
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And then all at once, after losing that Yankee serious to close August, they intentionally and strategically stopped pushing for wins every day with the same intensity. On one hand, I can’t even entirely blame them for doing that because it’s largely the box this playoff format puts you in … But wow, if you’re going to do that, you absolutely need to have a way to guarantee you can hit the ground running and be ready to go when Game 1 does come around, because tonight, this Red Sox team proved entirely incapable of flipping the summer switch back on.
Apparently, in their final tune up, they spent all weekend practicing against the Trajekt machine on the Schlittler setting, and despite seeing the difference between his velocity and off-speed pitches simulated, it didn’t make a lick of difference and they still got caught with their pants down for the second year in a row.
Unfortunately, there’s no perfect way to enter the playoffs, and this wretched, bloated postseason format only further complicates the conundrum. For this reason, I’m actually partially sympathetic to the idea there’s just a reality here where the line between getting the plane off the ground and never even getting started in October is razor thin and tough to gauge.
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However, at the same time, solving this riddle is exactly what the guys who run this team get paid to figure out. That’s literally the gig. And borrowing a dramatic turnaround, it appears they’ve failed miserably.
Things aren’t quite over yet, but unless Wednesday and Thursday feature a flip of the script that’s as jarring, abrupt and surprising as that performance was hideous on Tuesday, it’s going to be a brutal and bitter winter in Boston. If there’s any bullets left in the gun, they need to find it and start firing now.
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