The Red Sox will make the cover of Sports Illustrated in September.
If a day before the season started you had told me that, I would have asked who wrote the cover story on Adrian Gonzalez and his MVP campaign.
There will be a period of time in September when you don’t watch a Red Sox game for over a week.
If on that same day you had told me that, I would have inquired about the nature of the life threatening injury that had occurred to me.
These two facts don’t add up. Because if a baseball team makes the cover of Sports Illustrated in September they are good. And if the Red Sox are good then I would never miss a week’s worth of games in a row.
But the Red Sox are not good. I have not watched a game in over a week. And they are on the cover of Sports Illustrated this week.
Funny how these things work out.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the valiant effort Dustin Pedroia is putting in down the stretch, it’s not that I’m not happy that the front office finally showed some backbone and dismantled a team that wasn’t working and probably never would, it’s not that I’m boycotting the team until they finally pull the inevitable trigger and give Bobby Valentine the bad news.
In all honestly, I’m not quite sure exactly what it is. It started after hearing the now infamous interview with Bobby Valentine last Wednesday. I’ve never heard a manager so fed up with the atmosphere surrounding a team and a city.
You can’t help but have some respect for Valentine standing up for what he believed was an unjustified response to a harmless mistake. It’s hard to blame a man for being late to the ballpark because he had to pick up his son. At this point, the media is looking for reasons to crucify the man.
But at the same point, he has to know what city he is. There’s no logical explanation for the way he reacted besides from saying that he’s just had enough. The season has gotten to him, his demeanor in postgame press conferences would lead to no other conclusion.
And you know what? I’m right there with him.
The last teams to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated not for their victories, but for their defeats?
The Lions. Penn State. And the Red Sox.
One went an entire season without winning a game. One received a near death penalty for allegations of child molestation. The other? Well, they finished under .500.
The Red Sox open up a series against the Yankees tonight at Fenway Park. It may not mean anything, but I’ll be watching. Because at the end of the day, it’s still a Red Sox/Yankees game. In a few short weeks, there’s going to be a hole the size of the baseball season in all of our lives.
In the midst of what are undoubtedly two of the worst seasons in Red Sox history, it’s easy to forget what we have.
That’s one of the most storied franchises in baseball history, one that has been consistently competitive over the last decade. Sometimes baseball teams are bad. It happens. The last two years more than most, but it could always be worse.
The offseason will come, and one can only hope it will be a productive one. The Sox are already on their way to rebuilding, and really, it can only go up from here… right?
There’s a reason that the saying “this too shall pass” is such a popular and cliché phrase.
Because it’s true.
