Loose Talk: The Editors’ Take
This week wrapped up MLB’s regular season, and with it, the Red Sox’s second straight abysmal showing concluded as well. Boston finished at 78-84, fifteen games behind the division-leading Toronto Blue Jays and confirming something that Red Sox Nation had known well before then: this team sucked. And yet, this team still kept my attention all season. Perhaps it’s just the uber-fan in me, but I found the 2015 Red Sox season to be one of the most fascinating ones I’ve seen. This year was like the most bizarre rollercoaster ride imaginable. It started off high only to plummet before taking you on unexpected drops and peaks followed by even more drops before you’re then sent airborne, thinking, “Holy crap, did the cart go off the track?!” then to have that thought quickly confirmed as the cart crashed into a ball of flames from which phoenixes rose to (hopefully) give way to new life. If that sentence made zero sense to you, don’t worry. The 2015 Boston Red Sox made no sense to me, either. So now let me try to make sense of it.
After a last place finish in 2014, GM Ben Cherington had lots of work to do in the offseason. In November, Boston signed Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval to long-term deal looking to quell their offensive deficiencies. To address the need for more pitching, Cherington went out and traded for Wade Miley and Rick Porcello while also signing bounce back candidate Justin Masterson. The Sox then went out and acquired these pitchers’ a new battery-mate in Ryan Hanigan. The stage was set for an intriguing season.
Boston began the year picked by many as the favorites to win the AL East and Baseball Prospectus had them pegged as 58 percent favorites to make the playoffs. Their odds climbed to 76 percent by late April. The pitching had been rough but the offense, led by Hanley, had more than made up for the starters’ deficiencies and carried them to a 9-5 record. Then the wheels fell off and they lost eleven of their next fifteen games. The mirage of the otherworldly offense was over, and thus started another season of me getting a notification on my phone every night telling me that the Sox lost, to which I promptly said, “They suck.”
The path of disappointment continued while failing to give me a glimmer of hope for the remainder of the season. But the Red Sox kept making noise. Amongst those depressing, never ending notifications, announcements of the front office’s deterioration began to pop up. In August, they came more frequently than a Hanley Ramirez error. The first was the announcement that team president and CEO Larry Lucchino would step down at the end of the season, a welcoming sign to much of the Red Sox faithful who pinned him for some of the disaster free agent signings (Panda, HanRam, Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford) over the past few seasons. A few weeks later, manager John Farrell held a press conference to reveal that he was diagnosed with stage one lymphoma. A few days later came a report that former Detroit Tigers GM Dave Dombrowski had been hired by the Red Sox, although his new position had yet to be determined. After hearing of this news, then-GM Cherington stepped down from his position, presumably not wanting to have work under someone else.
At this time, it looked like Boston’s future on and off the field was in flux. I had the privilege of getting a chance to hear from Cherington and members of the Red Sox’s front office the week after all of this happened at Saber Seminar. The front office personnel who spoke showed signs of uneasiness and uncertainty. A few of them cracked jokes about how they might not be with the Red Sox after this season, eliciting somewhat nervous laughter from those in attendance. Of course, this did little to squash the idea of the Sox having no certain future on the field and certainly in the front offices.
Then came September. Boston went 17-10, including a six game win streak to end the month. The youth finally clicked with each other on the field. Up the middle, Blake Swihart, Xander Bogaerts and Mookie Betts shined and will form a solid foundation for the Sox to add on to. Defensive stalwart but offensively challenged Jackie Bradley Jr. finally broke through at the plate. After an abysmal start to the season, Joe Kelly pitched excellently in the latter half as did rookie Eduardo Rodriguez.
Going forward, the front office still needs to add a frontline starting pitcher (David Price anyone?) to pair with Clay Buchholz and the youth. Dombrowski and newly appointed GM Mike Hazen, an inside hire, still have other work to do, including the potential shedding of Ramirez and Sandoval. But overall prospects are looking high for the Red Sox’s future. And to give Sox fans a sliver of joy, the Yankees were eliminated from the playoffs on Tuesday.