Red Sox Get Walked Off By The Dbacks To Fall To 2-8, Matching Their Worst Start To A Season In Franchise History
Go ahead, haters. Drink my tears. Lap them up like the championship-dehydrated dogs that you all are. I hope you contract the mono that my high school girlfriend gave me.
To those who haven’t yet lost faith, you’ve just got to keep telling yourself that the 2019 Boston Red Sox haven’t played a home game yet, like the home opener is somehow a fountain of youth of sorts. It might not be, but it surely provides perspective on how young the season is.
Say it with me — the Red Sox haven’t played a home game yet in 2019. When the schedule came out last August, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see an 11-game, west coast road trip to start the season. In fact, I was beside myself. It’d be one thing if other teams were subjected to the same fate, but the fact of the matter is that it was only the Red Sox. The Cubs and Red Sox are the only two teams in baseball who have yet to play a home game, and they both have two wins to show for it.
Alex Cora has since been asked about it after this putrid start to the season, but neither he nor the guys in the clubhouse will use it as an excuse. He’s right. It’s not an excuse. Road ballparks aren’t making Red Sox pitchers give up monster home runs, and they’re not making the offense go dead silent when they’re needed the most. The Red Sox brought back the exact same team that won 108 games last season minus Craig Kimbrel, and closing out the ninth inning has been the least of their problems. In 2018, the Red Sox had the second best road record in the majors. It ain’t the schedule that’s gotten them off to the worst start in franchise history, although playing in front of a sellout crowd at Fenway Park can’t hurt the situation.
Every night, it’s the same thing. A Red Sox starter goes out there and gets kicked in the teeth, minus that Chris Sale start in Oakland where he went six innings of one-run ball. Even that start didn’t go without criticism, as the lefty registered the lowest average fastball velocity of his major league career. The Mariners started the season hot and the A’s are a really good club, but there’s no excuse for getting your doors blown off by the Dbacks on Friday, who traded their franchise player in the offseason, and then following that up with a walk-off loss on Saturday. That just can’t happen.
It did, though, and we’re still searching for answers. It’s not one of those flukey situations where when they hit, they don’t pitch and when they pitch, they don’t hit. They just haven’t clicked at all through the first ten games of the season. This has been a collective failure outside of JD Martinez and Mitch Moreland at the plate, who were both out of the starting lineup on Saturday. The key pitchers in the bullpen have been good too, but that doesn’t matter when you don’t have a lead to protect in the late innings.
A knee jerk reaction would be that they’re somehow complacent after winning a World Series title. I don’t buy that. Every quote out of spring training from any one of these guys was about how they wanted to win another World Series title. Now, if you’d like to point to a laidback spring training that didn’t put this team in a position to compete out of the gate, then I would be quite receptive to such a theory. You can’t take your foot off the gas at this level. You just can’t, yet it seems like that was a culprit during spring.
It’s a catch 22, though. Do you ramp guys up like normal in spring, knowing that most of them emptied the tank last October, come out of the gates hot and then run out of gas in the second half? Or, do you baby them in spring to conserve energy so that a “World Series hangover” doesn’t bite them in the end? The Red Sox chose the latter, which seemed like the right choice at the time and could still end up being the right choice in the long run. However, I don’t think anybody saw a 2-8 start to the season coming. Not you, not me, not the players, not the coaches, not the so-called experts. Nobody.
So, how do they fix this? Well, there’s one game left on this shitty ass 11-game road trip to start the season. Whether they win or they lose probably won’t change much either way. A win would be a nice way to take some of the bad vibes away before the ring ceremony, but one win doesn’t magically take away the 2011 flashbacks that we’re all currently having. They’ve gotta do some major damage on their six-game homestand against the Blue Jays and Orioles. These are divisional games against teams that have no business taking a series from the Red Sox, especially at home.
There’s no sugarcoating it here. The Red Sox haven’t held a lead through their first ten games for more than two innings. They’ve lost all three series that they’ve played to this point. But mark my words — this ain’t how the rest of the season is going to go. So, get all your chirps in now here in the first week of April, because when it’s all said and done, you’re going to be looking at a team that will be able to look back and laugh at the way their season started.
Final score: Dbacks 5, Red Sox 4