What .500 has meant before in baseball, and what it could soon mean for the Red Sox
It will take profound changes to make the Red Sox into something more like a contender.
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COMMENTARY
The 2024 Red Sox belong to the ages now. And after feeling forgettable in February, ascendant in June, and impossibly frustrating down the stretch, they settled as an unquestioned leader in at least one small way.
They were the most average team in franchise history. Among the most average ever in baseball, frankly, at least by the numbers.
This has been a meme for a while, the Red Sox having sat on .500 at 25 different points this season. Go figure they are just the fourth squad in 124 years of Red Sox baseball to finish there, their 81-81 after Sunday’s third-place clincher over the Rays joining them with 1985 (81-81-1), 1944 (77-77-2), and 1934 (76-76-1).
The others, however, all scored at least 45 runs more than they allowed. The 2024 Red Sox?
Four.
That’s 751 runs scored, and 747 allowed. It’s as close as any team came to zero this season, regardless of record, and the closest any has since . . . the 2023 Red Sox, who were a minus-four (772 scored, 776 allowed) in going 78-84. It’s the closest a .500 club has come since the 2012 Phillies — with Shane Victorino a year before his Sox tenure, and Jonathan Papelbon a year after his — also finished on four.
Alas, the Sox did not quite reach the magical ideal of the 1983 San Diego Padres, who went 81-81-1 and both scored and allowed 653 runs under old friend Dick Williams. (The 1922 White Sox, for the completionists out there, are the only other team to match that.)
May they match even a portion of San Diego’s follow-up success. The 1984 Padres won the National League pennant, Tony Gwynn hitting .351 in his first full season and Goose Gossage — signed in January 1984 to the then unheard of sum of $5.5 million over five years — finishing fifth in Cy Young voting as a 25-save reliever.
Two years later, as we first noted back in May, the Red Sox turned a similar trick. The .500 bunch of 1985 begat the 1986 American League champions, and it didn’t require a record-breaking free agent deal. The Sox already had Wade Boggs, whose career-best 240 hits and .368 average were the most compelling thing to watch down the 81-win stretch.
They were about to get MVP-level Roger Clemens, who’d pitched two partial seasons around labrum surgery in 1984-85 and was finally healthy in ’86. Add in Jim Rice and Dwight Evans, Bruce Hurst’s best Boston season, and then adding Tom Seaver and Don Baylor and Dave Henderson late in the year . . .
Voila. Your late 80s Red Sox contender had arrived.
Alex Cora might not remember specifically, but he’s certainly feeling the idea.
“Personally, I do believe this is the last struggle,” the manager told reporters Saturday. “Moving forward, the offseason we’ll compete, spring training we’ll compete, and roster-wise, it’s going to be a lot of tough decisions.”
History has, of course, no bearing beyond after-the-fact narrative building. The eye also has a way of drawing from it what it wants to see.
The above, however, aren’t outliers.
The ’44 Red Sox were contenders into that war-addled late summer until stars Bobby Doerr and Tex Hughson were drafted to fight in World War II, but the fact remains it’s another .500 finish two years before a young core coalesced into a pennant winner.
The .500 Red Sox of 1934 were, like their descendants 90 years down the line, winners by simply not being terrible. (The Sox finished last nine times in 11 years from 1922-1932, bottoming at 43-111.) They are perhaps best remembered for where, not how, they played — “New Fenway Park,” the yard renovated at high cost by Tom Yawkey, a year into his five decades of ownership.
Costs that got even higher when a five-alarm fire just about leveled the reconstructed bleachers that January.
Yawkey’s early years, and in fact much of his tenure, was about him flinging money around. Awash in inherited funds, he bought future Hall of Famer Joe Cronin from the Washington Senators for a record $250,000 to be his player/manager, beginning a decades-long relationship today immortalized by the No. 4 on the Fenway facade.
“The determination of the Boston Red Sox to build an American League pennant winner, regardless of the cost,” wrote the Associated Press after the move, “is emphasized.”
Before you jump to conclusions regarding future owners of the team, a mild reminder: Yawkey spent 44 years trying to buy a World Series champion and died without. He got closer than he did with Cronin as a player, though. That addition, plus another $300,000 on players in 1935 alone, resulted in a jump to . . . 78-75.
The Sox were, however, at least on their way up. Second four times from 1938-42, it wouldn’t be the aforementioned 1946 — Cronin’s first post-playing year, and the nation’s first post-war one — that the Series finally beckoned.
On Monday afternoon, the modern club will hold the all-too-common breakup press conference at Fenway, optimism at the fore. Jarren Duran, breakout star. Tanner Houck and Kutter Crawford and Brayan Bello, all 30-start homegrown arms. Anthony and Teel and Meyer (and Kristian Campbell) looming in Worcester.
Breaking news, but there’s nothing that’s going to be said that will make anyone feel any better about the team. It will feel like spin even if it isn’t.
We’ve seen what the 2024 team was. Better than what we thought, but not by enough for it to matter all that much when it mattered the most. That is the new narrative around here. The new normal.
It will take something more than average to shake it.
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