The Red Sox may have snuck into the the playoffs in the worst American League of our lifetime, but they never made it to October. As the calendar flips to baseball’s most prestigious month, we now know Fenway Park will once again sit silent for the fifth consecutive postseason. It’s the longest drought we’ve ever seen in the Wild Card era, and the real measuring stick that separates the contenders from the pretenders in the expanded playoff format.
Failing to reach the bar that should be considered the bare minimum for this franchise has sadly become the new norm, but there’s something especially repugnant and appalling about this particular conclusion to the season I’m still trying to wrap my brain around. Everything sucks right now! — Both in the immediate, and on the horizon.
As we pick up the pieces, sadness and anger are sharp and palpable this morning, but the uneasiness and confusion that make up those components are still hard to process. So instead, disgust and uncertainty rule the day; and even before the fog of last night’s disaster has fully lifted, it’s clear these emotions are not going to be temporary. The darkness is rising like menacing mountain in front of us, promising to deliver a period of awful that will define the coming weeks, months, and maybe years.
Normally, when a season ends, it comes with the typical melancholy of needing to wait until spring. But this year, with a lockout looming, we don’t even know when regular season baseball will be played at Fenway Park again. (Let alone postseason baseball, which is the thing we’re truly starving to see and just had ripped away from us again.)
But even if we somehow get good news on the lockout front of this layered cake of crap, are we even sure the Red Sox are going to move heaven and Earth in response to this week’s embarrassment in New York? Historically, this wouldn’t be a question, but last year, the season ended in the Bronx because the Sox didn’t have enough firepower in the lineup, and they somehow ended up right back in the same spot 12 months later with Nate Eaton and his career .601 OPS once again in the starting lineup for Game 2 of the Wild Card series.
It’s not just that this series sucked, it’s the discomfort of knowing the response to it is probably also going to suck. We are living in an entirely different Red Sox universe than we were 20 years ago, and it’s categorically worse in almost every way.
Speaking of which, Willson Contreras had some interesting comments after the game last night:
So, we’ve got a star player criticizing (and correctly I might add) the team’s overreliance on data when it comes to decision making in a do-or-die playoff games, and we’ve got Sonny Gray, who was right in the middle of last night’s questionable decision to remove him after just 4.2 innings saying this:
What an absolute waste of Sonny Gray’s ability to pitch deep into games! Not only did the Sox waste it last night in a game they had to win, but they also kind of screwed up any inside track they might have had to land him with a mutual option before we plunge into the depths of the offseason.
Pretty much the only thing the Red Sox made certain going into the winter is that they extended Craig Breslow and Chad Tracy, which while designed to cerate some stability, also has the potential to backfire in spectacular fashion, particularly after what we saw the last two nights in their first playoff games working together.
And amid all this fog, something else happened this week that might be even worse. Roman Anthony is once again injured.
In many ways, this piece of uncertainty hits the hardest. Something is clearly wrong when a 22-year-old hitting phenom keeps getting hurt swinging a bat. It feels increasingly likely that his elite swing speed is the very thing that breaks him, and I’m not sure how you fix that.
But to cut to the chase, this news on Anthony sours even the most obvious beacon of hope Sox fans can cling to for whenever baseball returns. Roman Anthony is supposed to be the future, the thing we can dream about in future summers, the guy in the middle of the next great run of Red Sox teams, and now, there’s a real chance the injury bug is just going to drag him into its lair and ruin something spectacular. It just sucks for both him and us!
Last night, he was one of the last guys to leave the dugout, just staring into the abyss of the repulsive present and uncertain future confronting both him and the team.
Oh, and to make matters worse, it’s going to be a long, long time before we get an answer on what Anthony’s future health might hold, because not only does he need to play for an extended period of time to prove he can kick this thing, but we don’t know when the next time he’s even going to get a chance to do that.
This series in New York ruined the 2026 season, the looming lockout threatens to ruin the 2027 season, and the Anthony news threatens to already blow an early hole in the 2028 season and beyond.
We are staring at a wall of shit, and I just wish I knew when it was going to get better. It’s October 1st, and I already wish we were on the exact opposite end of the calendar on April 1st, only this time, there’s no guarantee baseball will even begin again when we get back to that date. And from there, the future of the young core looks less certain than ever.
Man, it’s bleak out there!
