The Boston Red Sox aren't just limping to the finish line, they are hobbling on one leg. Their season is spiraling down the drain like a flushed toilet washing away an ugly mess. I could continue on with more analogies, but I think you get the point. Things are going bad, historically bad, for the Red Sox this month.
The Red Sox were the pre-season favorites, a team on paper capable of winning 100 games and cruising to the top spot in the American League. Now it looks like they may struggle just to win 90 games a back their way into a playoff spot. They recovered from a troubling 2-10 start to dominate for the majority of the season until crumbling in the home stretch. On September 3rd, Boston led Tampa Bay in the Wild Card race by a seemingly insurmountable 9 games. No team in history has ever overcome that large a deficit this late in the season. Thanks to a 5-16 record in the month of September, that lead is now down to 2.5 games. It could have been an even narrower lead if not for a little help from an unlikely ally, those division leading Yankees. Yet Boston's lead in the race remains close - too close. Close enough to also allow the Angels to jump back into the race, as their winning streak has pulled them even with Tampa.
So where did it all go wrong? It may sound like a cop out, but some of it has actually just been bad luck. A blown call here, a broken bat hit there or an ill timed error have all contributed to the late season swoon. More than anything though, it's been the pitching. Red Sox starters have a horrendous 6.77 ERA this month. That's unfathomable for a team boasting two aces, in Josh Beckett and Jon Lester, but the starters behind them in the rotation have been awful. John Lackey is having one of the worst seasons ever for a Red Sox starter. Tim Wakefield is finally starting to look like, well, a 45 year old pitcher. The long term injury to Clay Buccholz has deprived the team of a dependable 3rd starter in the second half of the season. Erik Bedard, who was brought in at the trade deadline to fill that void, has missed more starts than he's made due to a variety of injuries of his own. When a team is forced to fill in a far from ready Kyle Wieland during the late stages of a pennant race, you know your rotation is in trouble.
The bullpen has been just as troubling. Dan Wheeler and Bobby Jenks were supposed to add solid depth to the back end of the bullpen, but both have been injured and ineffective for most of the season. That's left the bullpen woefully thin, which has finally started to catch up to them. Matt Albers had been a savior for the bullpen earlier in the year, but he's collapsed in the second half to the point that he can no longer be trusted in key situations. Alfredo Aceves has been a vital cog in the pitching staff, capable of providing the occasional spot start while also coming out of the bullpen, but he's pitched well over 100 innings already, far more than the typical limit of a relief pitcher. Even the normally lights out Daniel Bard has been hit hard this month, with an ERA of 9.90 over the past month. Their lack of depth has forced the bullpen to be overworked, which has inevitably led to their late season struggles.
For the most part, the offense has kept on rolling. They still boast three MVP candidates (although their late season collapse will surely weaken their chances). Yet all is not completely well on that end either. Kevin Youkilis has missed most of the month with an injury, and there's no telling when he'll be healthy enough to contribute. Adrian Gonzalez and David Ortiz have both struggled with injuries that likely would have kept them out of the lineup longer if not for the pressing need to keep them in it.
Essentially everything that could go wrong at this point in the season has gone wrong for the Red Sox. Overcome with injuries and exhaustion, the team has just fallen apart. The players remain confident, or at least claim to be, but you can see their frustration as doubt begins to creep in. It certainly has for those around them. Even former Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, the man who once wore a bloody sock to the mound and became an icon symbolic of improbable comebacks, has lost hope, predicting the Sox will fall out of the playoff race. It's hard to blame him for his pessimism given what we've seen lately.
Boston has 6 games left in the regular season, with road series in New York and Baltimore. Meanwhile, Tampa has a slightly more difficult schedule, playing New York and Toronto. With a lead of at least two games entering the weekend series in New York, it should be enough of a lead to hold off the Rays. If they can split their remaining games then Tampa would need to win 5 of their last 6 games just to tie and force a 1 game playoff against the Sox. Then again, given how poorly the Sox have played lately, winning 3 of their remaining 6 games may be asking for too much. You'd think it should be easy enough to win at least 2 games in Baltimore, one of the worst teams in the league, except the O's just took 3 out of 4 games in Fenway Park. Even if they get the benefit of missing CC Sabathia in the New York series, they'll be lucky to leave without getting swept, which means they'll be in desperation mode when they arrive in Baltimore. If they can't take care of business against a bad team when the pressure is on, they don't deserve to advance to the postseason.
There may still be hope that the Sox can manage to hang on. Perhaps there is even hope that once the calendar flips to October they will turn things around again, similar to how they did after their miserable start to the season. Perhaps their stars will shine bright on the big postseason stage and lead the Sox to another World Series. They playoffs may not be as big of a disaster as this past month has been.
They just have to get there first.
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