Uplifting Red Sox start comes amid sad reminders it’s all about more than wins
The Red Sox' solid start feels a little temporary, especially given the related storylines in baseball this week.
COMMENTARY
The Red Sox awoke on Friday morning 5-2, tops or second in the majors in nearly every pitching category. They need just one of three games this weekend in Anaheim to make their only three-city road trip of the season a winning one.
Ceddanne Rafaela’s defense is as advertised. Tyler O’Neill’s OPS is 1.145. Jarren Duran might attempt 150 steals. They are a pleasant surprise in just about every way, and every step closer to 85 wins is another toward more meaningful games in late summer, no matter when and where the wins come.
Color me not entirely on board. Not really the team’s fault. It just feels a little intangible, a little temporary, even beyond this all being just 4 percent of a 162-game schedule.
Blame the weather. Blame the schedule, where it’ll be Wednesday — Game No. 12! — before there’s a plain ol’ 7:10 start.
Blame how it feels like every major sports story this week stresses how intangible and temporary and cold it all is.
On Wednesday, the Red Sox said goodbye to Oakland by all but gift-wrapping a game to the doomed A’s. The hosts wouldn’t accept it.
“Yeah, we didn’t play well,” manager Alex Cora told reporters. “Defensively we were bad . . . we hit a lot of ground balls, a lot of non-competitive at-bats and all that, and we didn’t play good defense.”
His Sox won, 1-0. They did that a lot there, back to the days when the A’s were contenders, when Oakland Coliseum was a jewel of a ballpark. It won’t be again, and the Sox won’t be back, as the A’s formally announced Thursday they’ll spend 2025-27 in Sacramento on their way to Las Vegas.
It puts in stark relief what “bad ownership” actually means. The announcement on social media had replies blocked. A’s owner John Fisher leaned hard into the idea his new Triple-A home of 14,000-ish is “very intimate,” spin befitting a buffoon who would’ve been scuttled out of a league with better priorities years ago.
Major League Baseball, forced to share space with the Sacramento River Cats. For three years. Should’ve just moved ’em to Arizona State.
Baseball’s most itinerant franchise — formerly of Philadelphia and Kansas City, plus Oakland and whatever’s next — won’t rename itself to mention Sacramento. Vivek Ranadivé, owner of the NBA’s Kings, was wishcasting this stopover would help California’s capital cut the MLB’s expansion line. It’ll have a better chance of just keeping the A’s, their Nevada relocation feeling like a fantasy even by Vegas standards.
The Kings, of course, themselves being late of Rochester, N.Y.; Cincinnati; Kansas City; and Omaha, Neb.; and who were potentially headed to Seattle a decade ago before Ranadivé stepped in.
I have no particular affinity for Oakland, but I grew up one of those kids whose first exposure to U.S. geography was through the cities on the standings page. More than that, I grew up 25 miles north of Hartford, getting my driver’s license mere months before the NHL’s Whalers went south forever.
It still chafes three decades later, and I feel the sting with every fan who’s endured it since. More than that, with every one taunted with it. Add the aforementioned Kansas City, after its resounding no on a stadium tax referendum earlier this week.
“The future of the Royals and Chiefs in Kansas City was thrown into question,” blared the AP, among others.
Only because we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe $1 billion private corporations deserve a $4 billion handout. Or that places like still-beautiful Kauffman Stadium need to be replaced because they’re, gasp, 50 years old! (Just 15 years from its last major renovation, mind you.)
The threat, of course, is the trick. Because there’s always a Sacramento that wants in. A Las Vegas who’ll pay billions on the mere promise of a winner down the road.
A Worcester, if I may rein in my tangent to more local relevance.
Tuesday’s home opener at Polar Park, the fourth since the PawSox left Rhode Island, was somber in the hours after Larry Lucchino’s death. He was celebrated to conclude a pregame ceremony which loudly celebrated the stadium’s place in the booming Canal District. (The apartment building rising behind the outfield, we learned, will be where the players live!)
You might think this is where I pivot to castigating Lucchino’s place in the move, in building the nation’s most expensive minor-league ballpark, one that isn’t meeting its promised returns depending on who you ask.
I can’t. For one, I’ve long believed Rhode Island squandered the PawSox, and that the team tried to stay far harder than most would have. For another, Lucchino is at the core of New England’s golden championship era, and your recent Red Sox memories are not as warm without his fingerprints. (And that says nothing about his place in San Diego and Baltimore . . . a genuine tent pole figure in the modern game.)
His loss is another clear marker than an era has ended. However you feel about him, and how he did business, you never had to wonder where winning ranked in Larry Lucchino’s priorities.
With that, on to Anaheim, a clown organization of more humble means. Their superstar called for free-agent help this winter and was ignored. (Imagine that!) They held their first team meeting two days into the season. They’re rolling out Griffin Canning, Reid Detmers, and Chase Silseth to greet the Red Sox, three men who there’s a non-zero chance you have never heard of.
The marathon marches on. Some weeks, just that feels like enough.
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