Mookie Betts made a spectacular throw, the Red Sox lost, and 2019 stayed its course
A supremely talented team kept having its moments in Tampa, but has nothing to play for in the season's final week.
COMMENTARY
Mookie Betts, as reigning (at least for a little bit more) MVPs do, definitively answered the question of why we still watch on Monday night.
“I didn’t know I could do that,” Betts told reporters. “It’s fun to kind of do stuff you didn’t know you could do.”
Of course, you didn’t have to be watching Dave O’Brien and Jarrod Saltalamacchia on Monday to see that 305-foot bit of magic from the Tropicana Field warning track. The highlight show still exists to enough of a degree, the playoff races quiet enough on a night with only five games, that it’ll be plastered everywhere in the moments not dedicated to what was a pretty pedestrian football game in Landover, Md.
Frankly, you’re probably better off if you only get the snippet. I’ve always found games in the St. Petersburg Pinball Machine just soul-sucking on television, even when they aren’t played in front of fewer people — an announced 8,779! — than watched the PawSox play out the string on the final Saturday of their penultimate Rhode Island season. (In Tampa’s defense, it was Team Poster and Autograph Night at McCoy.)
A reminder: The Red Sox drew 16,441 for a 12-minute day game in August https://t.co/TFRrUNrIQn
— Rob Bradford (@bradfo) September 24, 2019
Jhoulys Chacin started Monday, his fifth appearance in a Red Sox stint you’ll have entirely forgotten happened six months from now. A 4-0 lead disappeared in a 6-run Tampa fourth; Chacin gave up the lead, then departed to allow Bobby Poyner to allow the third home run of said fourth. And, ultimately, allow a Red Sox reliever to take the loss for the sixth time in Boston’s last seven defeats.
Even this much play-by-play feels excessive, frankly. The hope of October baseball formally expired on Friday night, minutes before the Red Sox lost the first of back-to-back, 11-inning, nearly-four-hour games to a Rays team who’ll possibly play into next month at a cost less than one-third of that of the no-longer-defending world champions.
“It’s not that we feel like we have to redo things or do things differently,” manager Alex Cora said Saturday, before Nathan Eovaldi won as a starter for the first time all season. “But at the same time, there’s a few things.”
The winter, of course, hinges first and foremost on how whomever the Red Sox put in charge of the thing answers a critical formative puzzle of the 2020s Red Sox: Betts, J.D. Martinez (presuming he opts out of the final three years and $62.5 million of his contract), both, or neither? How Cora responds to the first major professional failure of his post-MLB playing career is prominent among the other things to think about; that we needed a clarifier on Cora’s job status during Sam Kennedy’s post-Dombrowski media tour seems silly, but it does seem like the state of things given Cora got his job from a guy fired after back-to-back division titles.
Baseball’s glacial wintertime pace, however, will offer plenty of time to muse on that. This flawed, fun mix of Red Sox have only six days left together, for better and for worse. It’ll forever be the group that was there for Rafael Devers’s breakout, fueled at least in part by Xander Bogaerts, who bought in to becoming a benchmark player for this franchise and unquestionably backed it up.
It was there for Betts, ninth in the majors in fWAR, with a .293/.390/.521 slash line and .911 OPS, putting up a contender for the best season most of us thought was a disappointment for most of it. It was there for Jackie Bradley Jr. doing a few more Jackie Bradley Jr. things, and for Andrew Benintendi hopefully setting the stage for a resurgence.
It was there for six MLB debuts, Michael Chavis far and away the most notable, though Darwinzon Hernandez fanning 57 guys in 30 innings is worthy of some attention too. Brock Holt furthered his case as indispensable without much concern about how he plays, Dustin Pedroia’s future remained unresolved and yet clearer than ever, Marco Hernandez finally resurfaced and showed a flair for the dramatic …
And the pitching made it all moot, and made the 2019 Red Sox a supremely talented group with zero to play for in the season’s final week.
They will help Texas say goodbye to Globe Life Park now, then they will come home for their own farewell before tumbling into the packed dustbin of Red Sox teams whose offense couldn’t save a truly dreadful pitching staff. Three times in the last dozen years, the franchise has gone from a world championship and boundless optimism to doubt and questions in just 12 months. The young core of 2007 came close to another pennant in 2008, but never won much together again. The magical coalescence of 2013 was just that, though the minor-league cupboard was still stocked enough that the next great Red Sox team began falling together even while 2014 was spinning down the tubes.
We can’t know yet whether any of that is true for this bunch, at a crossroads both contractually and philosophically. A year ago, the Red Sox kicked off a run where there was genuine discussion about a Championship Grand Slam in Boston.
Today? They’re the first of the Big Four to miss the playoffs since the 2015-16 Bruins, and for as captivating as they have been at times, they’ve already dealing with the plenty they’ve got to answer for.
