It’s been a special journey for the Red Sox, but their reality is still close

COMMENT

The Red Sox’s 2024 home opener will be Major League Baseball’s last this season, with every other team unfurling the banner and grandiloquence before Boston does so on Tuesday.

The team certainly made the most of the preparation, with the loss to the Angels on Sunday capping a 7-3 West Coast trip. This doesn’t happen often – in the wild-card era, the only best three-city races in the Pacific have come in 2022 (8-2) and 1995 (8-3). To start a season there? Nothing close. (Hard to forget 2019’s 3-8 title defense start, considering the franchise is still in a hole.)

Hope is eternal? Alas, the reality remains apparent. Trevor Story is sidelined indefinitely after mutilating his shoulder Friday night. And rows of tickets remain available for Tuesday afternoon at Fenway Park, not to mention the rest of the home game.

Charging $81.50 (including fees) for a 36th row bleacher seat and even more for the wood of the grandstand facing the outfield will do it. Even in years when the recurring theme of winter was not the apparent madness of spending money.

It’s hard not to be critical, but also not feel weird about it. The story was hurt on Friday. The Red Sox lost on Saturday on an error by Rafael Devers. David Hamilton’s first chance at shortstop Sunday was a mishandled ground ball. The defensive renaissance doesn’t even seem to have returned to Eastern Time.

It doesn’t matter, for now. Hamilton homered a few minutes later, the first of four in the aforementioned at-bats. Tanner Houck pitched six more shutout innings, handling another bad fielding with sliders and bringing the team’s ERA to an out-of-this-world 1.49. Bring on Baltimore.

The Orioles come in after back-to-back losses at Pittsburgh, who are 8-2 after starting last year 20-8. That those Buccos finished 76-86. . . a fitting reminder of how little the beginning can mean, but here we go again. It’s raining on the parade. (On eclipse day, no less.)

It is first of all a practical question. ESPN’s David Schoenfield released watchability rankings last week, evaluating teams in categories that “fit the general idea of ​​’What makes baseball exciting?’ » “- star power, youth, baserunning, as well as the possibility of highlight catches, monster circuits and a few others.

The pilloried Red Sox placed eighth. Eighth!

“Faster, better defense and much more entertaining,” he wrote in part. “Red Sox fans are naturally grumpy… but I think they’ll grow to love this team – it has a chance to surprise.”

The loss of Story doesn’t cover all of that, but it certainly hits many industries. At the very least he had to be a steady hand amid any surprises, sparing Alex Cora from at least a shuffle on his daily lineup card.

Cora has used nine starting lineups through the first 10 of 2024. The only players who have yet to miss a start are Triston Casas, who led the middle game in Oakland, and Jarren Duran, who moved to twice to center and gave up left field to Tyler. O’Neill.

Now the depth is already tested. It was early on, with Enmanuel Valdez playing solid second base while Vaughn Grissom steps up in Florida. He didn’t hit a single hit, however, coming home 4-for-32 with 11 strikeouts against one walk.

Again, it doesn’t matter yet. Tyler O’Neill’s five homers, Reese McGuire’s 8-for-24 trip, Duran’s 15 hits and six steals and outstanding pitching carried the importance. O’Neill, in particular, was as advertised, tying with the former Boston right fielder for the MLB home run lead and ably managing the outfield alongside Ceddanne Rafaela.

Cardinals fans know the feeling. Perhaps this will be the 400 plate follow-up to his 2021 breakout that they spent two seasons chasing.

The Orioles will be a sterner test than the walk-on Athletics and no-plan Angels, striking immediately with Corbin Burnes to oppose Brayan Bello on Tuesday. Burnes’ uneven departure last week may be excused by the five-hour delay which preceded it, and by the thought of him with the benefit of the noonday shadows. . . Yeah.

Again with the weight on the balloon. For me, this is an inevitable function of the current operation. This is, at least relatively, the least talked about part of the Red Sox’ construction flaw.

Optimism should be everywhere in this sport, especially when the playoff conversation has been lowered well below the 95 wins that Terry Francona and Theo Epstein aimed for each year. The Red Sox could split their last 152 games and be an 83-win team. . . this means a wild card ranking on the NESN post-match until the last week of September.

However, the myopia of playing only for the future pushes doubt into every corner. If the team is shut down by the deadline, does anyone think it will fill out significantly? Of course not. Rightly or wrongly, the cold stove has burned our hands enough by now.

But it goes further. Let’s say the kids succeed this year and keep the promise they made late last night. Let’s say the prospective cavalry, a certain percentage of Mayer and Anthony and Teel and their friends, arrives for 2025. There remains this idea that when that day arrives, things will return to normal. The Red Sox will once again be the Red Sox of 2002-18.

Will they? Who can say? People who don’t say anything, and who let Sam Kennedy not say it for them.

It’s the consequences you think you’ll face later that persist these days. Major League Soccer is putting almost its entire league behind a $15/month paywall for a huge amount of money, and perhaps teaching a generation of fans to live without it. The constant barrage of gambling creeps into every game, further detaching ideas of winning and fun like fantasy sports did decades ago.

I could go on, and I will at some point, but not today. Home openers are always special events, even in the darkest baseball towns. Especially in this one, where the start was relatively bright, albeit in the middle of the night.