Baseball’s return is always welcome in Boston
Red Sox fans have plenty of reasons to be hopeful, despite the team's flaws.
COMMENTARY
Because I’m in a carefree mood on this morning of baseball’s return, I’ll spare the accomplished cynics among us a prolonged recital of the usual Opening Day clichés.
So there will be nothing here beyond this quick, warm acknowledgement about Fenway’s mesmerizing shades of green.
Not a single chirp about the return of the Red Sox being our confirmation of the desperately anticipated arrival of spring.
No soliloquies about the sunshine days and cool autumn nights to come on Landsdowne Street, when the Red Sox win and Boston feels like the only place you’d want to be in that moment.
Not a syllable of lyrical if saccharine sentimentality about baseball beginning again when everything else begins again.
And definitely nothing about how baseball has been the one constant through all the years, Ray. Definitely nothing about that.
Because that would be sappy, Ray!
All right, maybe just a quick something about that. But that’s all:
Now, I’ll ignore the reason that these scuffed old clichés that perennially coincide with the beginning of a new season became clichés in the first place. They’re true, all of them, and they’re truths that are satisfying to revisit and reconfirm. Yeah, I’m in a good mood. Fenway is open for business. At last, our best days of the year are near.
I do, however, want to talk about hope, but not in regard to it springing eternal or that sort of thing. I mean in the context of this particular baseball team, the 2017 Red Sox, and our different ways of calibrating it.
As I was reading the Globe baseball preview this morning – an annual edition I’ve anticipated and devoured since before my age hit double digits and one I absolutely cherish contributing to now – I couldn’t help but notice that all six of the staff writers who made predictions in the section picked the Red Sox to make the playoffs, but not one pegged them as the 2017 World Series champs.
I think this is correct, which makes sense since I was among those writers. I imagine this could be a source of aggravation for someone searching for such a thing: “There goes the Globe again, trying to ruin our summer before spring even shows up.”
That perception seems silly to me, though. In the eyes of the national media, these Red Sox seem to be regarded as essentially co-favorites in the American League with the Cleveland Indians. I agree that they should be a terrific team, especially if Chris Sale is everything he was in Chicago, minus the Edward Scissorhands tendencies. But for those of us who follow the team daily and devour even minute details. – I’m including fans and media here – it’s apparent that some important matters must be resolved.
David Price has a sore elbow. Hanley Ramirez has yet to play first base. David Ortiz stubbornly remains retired. The bullpen ranks have thinned before the first official pitch of the season is thrown. And perhaps they’re not as deep as they have been in previous years given that relative unknowns Ben Taylor and Steve Selsky made the club.
They’re going to be good, maybe great if certain things fall right. But the flaws and concerns on April 3 are more abundant than I believe most of us expected when the players arrived in camp a half-dozen weeks ago.
If you told me you have a functioning crystal ball and it informed you this morning that the Red Sox will win 97 games this season, I’d believe you. If you told me they’d win 87, I’d begrudgingly buy that too. Crystal balls are very easy to find on the dark internet, I bet.
For a team with so much high-end talent, the Red Sox seem to have an unusual number of potentially volatile variables. Dave Dombrowski built some supremely talented, fundamentally flawed rosters for years during a mostly successful run in Detroit. The injuries are contributing to this vibe – Price is so incredibly essential, and if you can’t see that, say hi to Henry Owens for me at your family reunions – but right now this feels to me like one of his top-heavy Tigers teams.
Of course, hope is not distributed equally among major league cities, even on Opening Day. The Rays clobbered the Yankees Sunday, and I suspect this will stand as the pinnacle of Tampa Bay’s season, at least in terms of pure this-could-be-our-year optimism. The Angels are starting Ricky Nolasco in its opener, a bold choice, albeit one that also inspires pity. Are we sure Mike Trout can’t pitch, too?
Here, hope is always in abundance, even if it’s not always an antidote for our inherent wise-guy prove-it-to-me skepticism. We’re fortunate that the Red Sox in this century are always built with the intention of true contention, even if the best-laid plans might go unexpectedly awry every couple of seasons. At the worst, the Red Sox are at least relevant. At their best, the duck boats roam the streets, our literal and figurative vehicles for celebration.
You want hope? Brothers and sisters, you’ve got hope, and it begins with this: The Red Sox have two incredibly talented, dedicated, and sharp 24-year-old cornerstones in Mookie Betts – the second-best player in the league last season — and Xander Bogaerts, plus 22-year-old rookie of the year favorite Andrew Benintendi and 26-year-old center fielder Jackie Bradley Jr.
Those guys are freakin’ hope personified. The Red Sox have not had this much high-end young hitting talent in their clubhouse since Fred Lynn and Jim Rice arrived alongside Dwight Evans in the mid-‘70s, or since the first time Ted Williams was alone in the room in 1939.
I don’t believe that the Red Sox will win the World Series this season. I don’t know that they won’t, either, and we’re fortunate that such a dream is at least legitimately possible. It’s a familiar blessing for Red Sox fans to begin a new season with hope, and now comes the real fun: The daily slow reveal from April through September on our way to discovering whether that hope will be fulfilled in October.
No, it’s not heaven. Heaven reveals itself each October. But it’s not Iowa, either, Ray. It’s baseball season in Boston, finally and at last. Baseball might be a constant. But it sure does go away for too long. Welcome back.
