I don’t like to be the rabbit who leaps out to lead the division in April and May. It’s a long, grueling, grinding season and damn near impossible to stay hot from start to finish. If you recall, the Yankees got off to horrible start last year, much like our start this year. They danced around the .500 mark. Their bullpen looked horrendous. After spending half a billion dollars in the middle of the biggest recession since the Great Depression they looked they might be a bigger failure than Bear Stearns. Unfortunately, the 2010 Yankees turned out to be too big to fail.
The Red Sox find themselves in a similar position at the moment. We humiliated the Yankees at the beginning of last season. I would hope certain members of the Red Sox feel rather humiliated today. If you remove the inning horribilus (the 9th inning Papelbon nuclear implosion if you’ve been under a rock today) from last night’s game, and chose to overlook (once again) Dice K’s shortcomings, the game was not a complete disaster. It just happened to end that way. The club has the talent to be successful. Last night they were down early and rallied like champions. The ending sucked, but there were positive things that happened.
This team seems to have much more life and personality to it than last year, but overall, the offense was not really improved. Dropping Bay and adding Beltre was pretty much an even trade at the plate. The Red Sox didn’t have what was needed to get the job done last year and we’ve been prepared for this team being a possible failure. Or bridge, if you will. We were told to expect a sub par year over the winter by Theo Epstein himself.
I have largely ignored this evenings soggy proceedings, but saw Beckett got pulled with tightness in his lower back. Not good news, but not fatal. Lester and Lackey can anchor the rotation and Tim Wakefield can step back up to the starting role he never should have relinquished to Matsuzaka. I’m going to borrow the mantra used by Florida Gator football. Finish Strong. The season is far from over. We haven’t played ourselves out of contention for anything, yet. There are some tough series ahead in the next few weeks, it’s gut check time. This team will either find an X factor to stand up and fight for or collapse like the weak bridge it was built to be.
