The storm has been weathered. The awkward White House trip has come and gone. Chris Sale doesn’t stink anymore. Boy wonder Michael Chavis saved the season when all seemed lost. April showers have given way to May sunshine. The Red Sox are a wagon again. They beat the Mariners, 9-5, on Saturday and even got a two-run single from the offensively catatonic Jackie Bradley Jr.
After everything that happened in the Sox’ hideously bad first month of a title defense, they will wake up Sunday four games out of first place. After playing as bad as they could possibly play, the Sox are right where they need to be to get where they want to go. They still have not even played a quarter of the season and everything is ahead of them. It turns out that the hole they dug was not too deep.
If you’ve been consumed by the disgrace of the Celtics or the very real Stanley Cup hopes of the Bruins, know that when the ice finally melts on Causeway Street and the duck boats perhaps have rolled once again, there will still be a Boston baseball season worth watching.
There you have it. The Full Rochie from me once again. And not just because John Henry is a swell owner of both the Boston Globe and the Boston Red Sox.
No. This is the reality. The Sox still have plenty of holes. JBJ (.149) still can’t hit and the closer situation is far from perfect. But just as we suspected, the Red Sox have too much payroll, too much star power, and there are simply too many horrible teams in the American League for them to become irrelevant in the summer of 2019.
Did you get a good look at the White Sox last weekend? The Orioles? The Mariners?
The March of the Tomato Cans has come to the American League. Plan on watching a conga line of bums parading through Fenway in June, July, and August. The AL West has only one team over .500. The Central has the moribund Royals, White Sox, and Tigers. Here in the AL East the Sox get the friendly Orioles and Blue Jays 38 times. Sweet. It’s like the hardball version of the Bills, Jets, and Dolphins.
After falling eight games out of first place and dropping seven games under .500, the Sox are finally over .500 and should stay that way for the rest of the season. The Sox are 7-1 in their last eight games, 10-2 in their last 12. They had the worst run differential in baseball when they staggered out of Yankee Stadium last month, but have since outscored the opposition by a whopping 132-72.
It is to the Sox’ credit that they ignored the noise of their sloppy start. And now they are in a perfect spot to launch their season.
“We still have to get better,’’ Cora said before Saturday’s game. “I think situational hitting can be better. Hitting with two outs. We’re trending in the right direction, but we’re not there yet. We were able to get to this point, although it’s not the point where we want to be, but it’s not like we’re playing our best baseball.’’
Remember the noise of April? Mathematical elimination before Easter? Cora does.
“Seattle dominated us,” he said. “Then we played the A’s and there was the game Eduardo [Rodriguez] pitched [a 7-3 loss when Mookie Betts and Bradley allowed a fly ball to drop between them] and there was a play in right-center that changed the game. And there was a walkoff against the D-Backs so we lost two out of three. We didn’t play well the first homestand and then in New York with a few changes we would have split. I knew we were going to get better. It was just a matter of staying patient and keep preaching the same principles as last year. We believe in it and we’re going to stick to it. I always believed we were going to start playing better.’’
He understands our twitch instinct to catastrophize.
“I used to react the same way when I was working at ESPN,’’ remembered Cora. “I’d say, ‘This team isn’t going to make it,’ and I was wrong.’’
Cora’s stable hand and clubhouse karma helped the Sox endure their spring slump. I believe it also helped them navigate stormy Trump World.
The black and white split that dramatized the Sox’ trip to Washington would torpedo a lot of teams, but these Sox sound believable when they say that can keep the issue separate. In many workplaces having a racial division of this nature would impact the work. People who elect to go to Washington might be upset with the people who decided to protest. Folks who did not go might feel unsupported by those who chose to attend.
If I was Cora or Betts for instance, I might wonder why J.D. Martinez, Sale, and Henry made no mention of my contributions when they had a chance to speak at the podium. We all know the president is only going to talk about those who are in attendance, but would it have killed Martinez, Sale or Henry to have gone off script and cited the contributions of key personnel (Bob Kraft and Bill Belichick similarly turtled when they pretended Tom Brady did not exist during the Patriots’ visit in 2017)? What’s so hard about citing your star teammates and manager?
If you are David Price, how do you get enraged about Dennis Eckersley but not about this?
But that’s just me. Color me petty. These guys are different. They are not giving voice to the obvious clubhouse split over politics. When it comes to baseball, they have only one message. They told us that the White House visit didn’t split them, then came back from Washington and beat the low-energy Mariners by an aggregate 23-6 over the next two days.
“We’re a better team today than March 28, 29,” Cora said after Saturday’s win.
So. Much. Winning.