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It was a special west-coast trip for the Red Sox, but their reality is always close at hand
The depth already is being tested for the Red Sox, who are the last MLB team to hold their 2024 home opener.
COMMENTARY
The 2024 Red Sox home opener will be the last in Major League Baseball this season, every other team having rolled out the bunting and the bombast before Boston does it Tuesday.
The team certainly made the most of the runup, Sunday’s clobbering of the Angels capping a 7-3 West Coast trip. Those don’t come around often — in the wild-card era, the only better three-city Pacific runs came in 2022 (8-2) and 1995 (8-3). To begin a season out there? Nothing close. (Hard to forget the 3-8 start to the title defense in 2019, given the franchise is still clawing about in the hole.)
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Hope springs eternal? Alas, reality remains apparent. Trevor Story is shelved indefinitely after he mangled his shoulder Friday night. And literal rows of tickets remain available for Tuesday afternoon at Fenway Park, to say nothing for the rest of the homestand.
Charging $81.50 (including the fees) for a 36th-row bleacher seat and even more for the outfield-facing grandstand wood will do that. Even in years when the recurring theme of the winter wasn’t the apparent folly of spending money.
It’s hard not to be critical, but also not to feel weird about it. Story got hurt Friday. The Red Sox lost Saturday on a Rafael Devers error. David Hamilton’s first chance at shortstop on Sunday was a mishandled ground ball. The defensive renaissance appeared to not even have made it back to Eastern time.
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No matter, yet. Hamilton homered minutes later, the first of four in the aforementioned clobbering. Tanner Houck threw six more shutout innings, handling another bad lineup with sliders and dropping the team ERA to an out-of-this-world 1.49. Bring on Baltimore.
The Orioles arrive off back-to-back walkoff losses in Pittsburgh, which is 8-2 after opening last year 20-8. That those Buccos finished 76-86 . . . fitting reminder of how little the start can mean, but there we go again. Raining on the parade. (On Eclipse Day no less.)
This is a practical matter, first. ESPN’s David Schoenfield rolled out watchability rankings last week, rating teams on categories that “fit into the general idea of, ‘What makes baseball exciting?’ ” — star power, youth, baserunning, plus the possibility of highlight-reel catches, monster homers, and a few others.
The pilloried Red Sox ranked eighth. Eighth!
“Faster, better defense and a whole lot more entertaining,” he wrote, in part. “Red Sox fans are understandably cranky … but I think they’ll grow to like this team — it has a chance to surprise.”
Story’s loss doesn’t chunk all of that, but it certainly hits a lot of sectors. He was to be at minimum a steady hand in the middle of any surprise, saving Alex Cora at least one shuffle on his daily lineup card.
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Cora used nine starting lineups in the first 10 of 2024. The only players yet to miss a start are Triston Casas, who DH’d for the middle game in Oakland, and Jarren Duran, whose twice shifted to center and yielded left field to Tyler O’Neill.
Now, the depth already is being tested. It was from the start, with Enmanuel Valdez playing a solid second base while Vaughn Grissom ramps up in Florida. He hasn’t hit a lick, though, coming home 4 for 32 with 11 strikeouts against one walk.
Again, it hasn’t mattered, yet. Tyler O’Neill’s five homers, Reese McGuire’s 8 for 24 trip, Duran’s 15 hits and six steals, and the outstanding pitching carried matters. O’Neill, specifically, has been as advertised, tied with Boston’s old right fielder for the MLB homer lead and ably handling the outfield aside Ceddanne Rafaela.
The Cardinals fans know the feeling. Maybe this will be the 400-plate-appearance follow-up to his breakout 2021 that they spent two seasons chasing.
The Orioles will be a sterner test than the foot-out-the-door Athletics and plan-less Angels, hitting immediately with Corbin Burnes to oppose Brayan Bello on Tuesday. Burnes’s uneven start last week can be excused by the five-hour delay that preceded it, and the thought of him with the benefit of the mid-day shadows . . . yeesh.
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Again with the weight on the hot-air balloon. To me, it’s an unavoidable function of operating the way they have. It is, at least relatively, the little talked-about part of the flaw in building as the Red Sox have.
Optimism should be rampant in this sport, especially when the playoff conversation had been dumbed to well below the 95 wins that Terry Francona and Theo Epstein were shooting for every year. The Red Sox could split their last 152 and be an 83-win team . . . that means wild-card standings on NESN postgame until the last week of September.
The shortsightedness of playing only for the future, though, forces doubt into every corner. If the team’s close at the deadline, does anyone think they’ll meaningfully supplement? Of course not. Right or wrong, the cool stove has burned all our hands enough by now.
It goes deeper, though. Let’s say the youth comes through this year, and provides on the promise they’ve shown late night. Let’s say the prospect cavalry, some percentage of Mayer and Anthony and Teel and their friends, arrives for 2025. There remains this idea that when that day arrives, things will go back to normal. The Red Sox will again be the Red Sox of 2002-18.
Will they? Who can say? The people who aren’t saying, and letting Sam Kennedy not say for them.
It’s the consequences you think you’ll deal with later that linger these days. Major League Soccer stuffing nearly its entire league behind a $15/month paywall for massive short money, and perhaps teaching a generation of fans to live without it. The constant barrage of gambling creep in every game, further detaching the ideas of winning and enjoyment the way fantasy sports started decades ago.
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I could go on, and I will at some point, but not today. Home openers are always special things, even in the most dimmed baseball cities. Especially in this one, where the start’s been relatively bright, albeit in the middle of the night.
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