Red Sox Nation was positively giddy Monday morning. Happier than a seagull with a beak full of stolen lobster roll.
A 6-1 win over the Tampa Bay Ray on Sunday was the Red Sox’ 13th win in a row. That’s a baker’s dozen, and what just a few weeks ago looked like a lost summer now is full of promise.
The least you can ask of a Major League Baseball team is to spend the summer in the mix. The last thing you want is to be out of the playoff running by Memorial Day. A slog to the bitter end is just a countdown to winter, and that’s not fun. Take away hope, and all you have is communal misery barking on sports talk radio. Take away hope, and the second half of the baseball season is sentient heartburn.
In mid-June, questions about the Sox revolved around what they could get for pitchers Aroldis Chapman and Sonny Gray on the trade market. Surely some contender would overpay for either of those guys.
Now the Sox entered their game Monday against the Orioles with a 50-48 record, in possession of the third and final wild-card spot in an American League that feels weaker than instant coffee. It’s now apparent that the Sox don’t have to dominate down the stretch. They just need to be slightly less mediocre than the Orioles, Blue Jays, Twins, Mariners and Astros.
There is no need to set the bar unreachably high. The American League isn’t some Mount Everest this season. It’s more of a Katahdin. Challenging, but with the right determination and effort, doable.
And that’s the question now. For the Red Sox, is slightly better than mediocre doable?
A hot streak of 13-straight wins (that could either be 14 or reset to zero depending on what happens against Baltimore on Monday) is fantastic. Over the last month, the Sox are 21-5. That’s a brilliant turnaround.
At the same time, there’s those first 2 1/2 months of the season, a much larger sample size than the current run the team is on. It’s a telling stat that even playing inspired baseball over this stretch, the Red Sox are only 50-48 after their win Sunday.
So which is the aberration?
Did this team just get hot, or did it really turn a corner? Did interim manager Chad Tracy solve the puzzle and now knows when to push every button? The team isn’t as bad as it played early in the season, and it’s not as good as it’s playing now. Over the next 2 1/2 months, we’ll find out which of those extremes is closer to the truth.
We do know a few things. The Sox can pitch. They boast a team earned run average of 3.53, fourth-best in the majors. We know the hitting isn’t as bad as it was. We know Willson Contreras is the leader this team needed, and Wilyer Abreu inherited the clutch gene passed down from players like David Ortiz and Carl Yastrzemski.
We know the Sox path in a ho hum American League is not so perilous.
There are currently six teams in the American League over .500, with the Mariners sitting right at .500 (50-50) entering a game Monday night against the Cincinnati Reds. All six AL teams over .500 occupy a playoff spot now. For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s going to take 85 wins to hold on to one of those spots.
The Sox have 64 games remaining. Going 35-29 gets them to 85 wins. That’s playing good baseball, but not out of your mind good like the team has played over the last few weeks. Six games over .500 down the stretch feels sustainable, doesn’t it? It forces Minnesota, Seattle, and Baltimore to keep pace, and it forces Detroit, Toronto and Houston to go on run similar to the Red Sox.
What does this team add at the trading deadline? Does it package prospects for a top of the line everyday catcher? A right-handed power bat? Bullpen depth? How close are Garrett Crochet and Roman Anthony to returning?
Those questions are a lot more fun to debate than what do you think they can get for Chapman and Gray?
The playoffs are on the table again. In a long season, that relevance means summer doesn’t fade so quickly.
