We’ve talked about the Red Sox enough. It’s time to start seeing what they’ve got.
The 2024 Sox will be better and more entertaining than we think, but only to a point.
COMMENTARY
The Red Sox play their annual exhibition with Northeastern on Friday afternoon, beginning the daily ritual that carries fans of even the worst baseball teams to the autumn.
It brings many hopes. Mine begin with hoping their pants won’t be see through.
The nicest thing I can say about Major League Baseball’s new uniform fiasco is it’s nice to use “fiasco” in a baseball story not solely about the Red Sox offseason. And it means we can go a few more paragraphs without yet addressing a group colleague Chad Finn rightly noted “are easy to project as the last-place finishers in the American League East for the third straight season.”
Uniform news is, even here, a niche for obsessive weirdos — as one, I say that with love. At best, some normals will notice when the knockoff-looking names and numbers on the reimagined duds start hitting game broadcasts.
They’ll get over it. Player concerns about their pants, which used to be tailored and which used not to be tissue paper, will be mollified. Those in my niche, angry about iron-on insignias — “heat pressed” is the modern nomenclature — for prices that used to deliver stitched ones, will mutter in the corner like we always do.
Rob Manfred’s owner bosses will get their money from uniform designer Nike, their money from an equity stake in uniform manufacturer Fanatics, and have another sherry. It’s a “pay more, get less” world, and Ol’ Piece of Metal would thank you not to question baseball claiming its piece.
Ah, the post-shame world. Where the man who ostensibly runs baseball says, out loud, that spurned A’s fans about to lose their team should be relieved they still have the rival Giants as an option.
And the man who runs the Red Sox, asked by reporters to answer a few questions about his franchise’s fall to second class, laughing and walking away.
Earlier this month, Matthew Gross on Over the Monster compared John Henry (who also owns Boston Globe Media Partners, including Boston.com) to Harry Frazee, the man who sold Babe Ruth. It’s a ride, built around the conceit that Frazee “decided that other endeavors were not only more important than his baseball team, but were apparently so important that he was going to use his baseball team to funnel cash into those outside pet projects.”
You see where he’s going.
I revisited it Thursday, when I saw Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner call New York’s 82-80 2023 “an embarrassment.” Imagine a world where that feels a notable declaration.
We don’t have to imagine, of course, and said feeling does exist inside Red Sox corners as well. Outside, though? From Michael Silverman’s recounting of Boston’s first full-squad workout in Fort Myers.
Henry had already said “no” when asked by reporters if he had a few minutes to talk about the team. . . . Asked how the meeting with the players and staff went before the workout, Henry said it went well. As for what was discussed, he offered with a smile, “Netflix?”
Henry and a small group of reporters he was standing with all turned around when Kennedy, standing about 10 yards away, appeared to be taking a photo of them. “Smile, John,” Kennedy said. “Because you’re never around!”
Later, when he walked by a reporter, Henry gestured toward a camera crew and joked, “You know us, just following the cameras.”
If I may be eloquent for a moment, yeesh.
Now, Henry was reclusive and introverted in the highest of times, and even a sliver tongue could only talk up this 2024 Red Sox roster so much.
“We probably should just do less talking, because our frustration sometimes comes out and maybe in some less-than-articulate ways,” Sox CEO Sam Kennedy told reporters in Henry’s stead. “We know where we’re picked to finish . . . we’ve got to go out and start playing games.”
Still, though. We’re five years into this manifestation of the franchise, as proven by the above. Performative outrage? Why bother? You’re still here, aren’t you?
Pay more, get less.
I have made the optimist’s argument about the team in this space. Contrary to the opinion of some of its more fervent detractors, I really do believe it’s possible, though I’d hardly call it probable. The 2024 Sox will be better and more entertaining than we think, but only to a point.
As we have become accustomed in recent years, it’s unlikely that all of the best-case scenarios this team is going to need — Trevor Story and Tyler O’Neill’s health, Devers and Triston Casas’s defense, Vaughn Grissom and Wilyer Abreu’s breakouts, the pitching and the pitching and the pitching — will all come to fruition.
And that well-trod trail, well, is the point. Five years of this, going into a sixth. They told us who they intended to be when they fired Dave Dombrowski, after which a well-meaning idiot opined “we will forgive . . . because they spend, they win, they care, and they’ll do all those things again.”
Not really. Not really. Not in any way that matters. And Rafael Devers calling them out isn’t likely to end any differently than David Ortiz doing it or Pedro Martinez doing it or anyone else.
The games, at least, offer the same saving grace they always have. It’s a roster bursting at the seams with players sporting something to prove, led by a manager whose last year under contract will be a defining one in his career, one way or the other.
The Red Sox, red in the face as they’ve made us over another winter, will still be something to see.
Even if it’s just to check if anyone split their pants.
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