It Took The Red Sox 18 Hits, 9 Runs, And Brock Holt Hitting For The Cycle To Snap Their 7-Game Losing Streak
Seven losses in a row, your hottest hitter and the guy with the most power are both sitting on the bench, and you score 9 runs on 18 hits. Baseball, man.
And that right there is why this season has been so god damn frustrating. Although their record indicates otherwise, this wasn’t supposed to be a bad team. I don’t think anybody expected a championship, but I also don’t think anybody expected them to be double-digit games under .500 in mid-June, either. And no, it’s not just because this is the highest payroll in team history. That doesn’t really mean anything. You can pay a guy a ton of money, but that doesn’t make him good at baseball.
It’s because, believe it or not, there’s a lot of talent on that 25-man roster. Or there was at one point, at least. That’s why the fans boo as loudly as they do when this team continues to sink to new lows. That’s why we tweet cynical things when something good actually happens. That’s why we mock cheer you when you make routine plays that you previously failed to make. We expect better because they are better than how they’ve played. Most fans know that, and most fans are angry about that. When you play 162 games a year, the diehards invest a lot of time, money and emotion into this team, only to realize two months in that we’ll have to suffer through yet another lost season. As a fan, it’s depressing to think that — before the summer even starts — you already know that you’re not going to see even one meaningful baseball game this year. After the snowiest winter in Boston history, spring training was that beacon of hope that the misery was coming to an end, and then we get this shit.
But it’s games like this one that remind you how good they could actually be, if they finally got things going. Of course they’re not an 18-hit a night kind of team, but this lineup should be somewhere in between that and what they’ve been to this point, if not a little bit better. Every player in the starting lineup had a hit, six of which had multi-hit games, including Brock Holt, who hit for the cycle. Just a little consistency from the start of the year, and we’d be talking about a pennant race. Instead, we’re talking about where this team ranks among the worst teams in Red Sox history.
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