Category: Boston Red Sox

 Boston Red Sox

Theo’s Third

With the team sitting a game below .500 in the second half of May (the latest they've been there since the dark September of 2001), it's almost time to admit the obvious: this is likely not a playoff team.

Yes, I know it's still technically early. I know that many teams have executed comebacks far greater than this one would be, and I know that the Sox are not playing at the level of quality they should be, and the one at which they still might down the line. However, they're chasing two frighteningly talented teams, and a nine game swing will be very tough to overcome.

I also know that just two weeks ago, I wrote a long article discussing reasons for optimism. I'm still optimistic - I believe this team is far better than what we've seen so far, and I think it will wind up being the best third place team the league has seen in some time. But they'll still likely be a third place team. The question, then, becomes this: how will we view this season two years from now? Will it be an aberration? A signal of the end of an era? Or will we see it as the halting first steps of a new contending club? To answer that question, it's worth looking back at the most recent disappointing teams of the Theo/Trio era, and what they each signaled.

May 19, 2010 andrew lipsett
Boston Red Sox

Oscar Tejeda: Trying to get ahead of the pack.

First the good news about shortstop Oscar Tejeda: he won’t hit the “ripe” age of 21 until December 26. Now the bad news: Boston has a veritable glut of shortstops in its farm system including, in no particular order, David Renfroe, Derrik Gibson, Jose Iglesias and Yamaico Navarro. And just imagine if Boston decided it would be best served by having Casey Kelly play shortstop instead of pitch. In a sense, Tejeda has been running on a treadmill in that last season was his second at low-A Greenville. But the fact he returned to the Drive might have been expected considering he contracted a staph infection in a forearm which hampered him much of the 2008 season. And that was after he had off-season surgery to repair a tiny hole in his heart.

May 16, 2010 mike scandura
Boston Red Sox

Sox historically a step behind, but only a step

Mired on the Bruins beat as I was for the last half of the season, I could not help but start to think about some correlations between what I saw from the spoked B’s in January through March to what we have seen come out of the Fens in the first month-and-a-half of the Major League Baseball season.Two teams, beloved by the people, incredibly inconsistent and frustrating. Both came into their years with high expectations (run prevention and projection adding “another eight to nine wins” is simply not going to happen), both have trouble scoring at times and are dealing with low return on investment and injury.

The historic collapse of the Bruins notwithstanding, both teams are probably better than they have looked. Yes, the Flyers just ripped the heart out of the Hub, but the Black and Gold did deliver a second consecutive conference semifinals appearance to Causeway Street and that was not entirely a fluke.

So, I got to thinking about recent Sox history. I thought to myself: ‘haven’t we seen some frustrating starts in recent years only to come back and win 95 games?” Then I went to the numbers. Here are the May 15th runs scored, allowed and projected win-loss since 2004.

May 16, 2010 dan rowinski