Joe and SOSH's Michael Schur came out with an "Emergency Poscast" the other day about the Red Sox recent collapse. (Amazingly, it came out before the most recent horrifying loss on Wednesday night.)
Michael's epic rant is cathartic to listen to as a Sox fan, and Joe does a good job chiming in as a neutral observer who is shocked at how bad they've been, and compares this team to the worst Royals team he ever saw.
Starts at 46 minutes in:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-red-sox-emergency/id1595575940?i=1000571336811
In a related move, Joe goes over the collapse on his blog today:
https://joeposnanski.substack.com/p/the-red-sox-lost-july
On the morning of July 1, less than one month ago, the Boston Red Sox were 43-33 and tied with Toronto for the top spot in the American League wild-card race. They had a plus-60 run differential, good for third in the American League and not too far behind Houston for second.
No, they were not a serious threat to the Yankees, who were already 12 1/2 games up in the AL East, but baseball isn’t really played that way anymore. Let the Yankees win the division. Tampa Bay had won it easily in 2021 and look where it got them — Boston beat the Rays in four games in the Division Series, this after taking out the Yankees in the wild-card game …
If you get into the playoffs, you’re dangerous. We all understand that.
And Boston’s chances of making the playoffs on the morning of July 1 was hovering around 80 percent. The return of Chris Sale seemed imminent. Rafael Devers looked like a viable MVP candidate. It all seemed pretty good.
They’ve gone 7-17 since then. Their run differential is now minus-14. And I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a team collapse the way these Red Sox have collapsed.
He then goes on to look at 5 other teams that collapsed utterly, including a brief recap of the 2011 horror show-- thanks a lot Joe:
The Red Sox were 82-51 and leading the division after sweeping a doubleheader on Aug. 27. They had the best record in the American League, the second-best record in baseball, and though they weren’t thinking about wild cards, well, in case of emergency, they were NINE GAMES UP in the wild-card race.
The collapse was thorough. I can vividly remember tweeting something in the middle of the month—maybe after the Red Sox lost two or three in a row—along the lines of: “At what point do Red Sox fans start panicking?” It was kind of a joke; they were still nearly 100 percent certain to make the playoffs.
Only they kept on losing and kept on losing more — five in a row, then two in a row, then three in a row, then suddenly — after going 7-19 for the month — they HAD to beat Baltimore on the last day to get into the playoffs. They led the Orioles 4-2 going into the ninth inning. Closer Jonathan Papelbon struck out the first two batters swinging — it looked easy. Heck, some Red Sox were probably back in the clubhouse drinking beer and eating fast-food chicken.
Anyway, the Orioles came back to win the game, and everybody of note either left the Red Sox or got fired, and that was that.
Anyway, back to July 2022:
And in some ways, this Red Sox collapse does not compare with any of them because I don’t think even the most passionate Boston sports fan ever thought this was a great team. There was always a sense, even when the Red Sox were playing well, that they were keeping the pitching staff together with spit and duct tape and hope. It isn’t super-surprising to see this team fall off.
BUT … to see this team play the way they have played in July … well, you wouldn’t expect that of any team not playing the overture from the opera “Carmen.”
He goes over the collapse loss by loss. Here are some lowlights, starting with the defense handing a win to Tampa:
July 12 (Rays win 3-2): This was anything but routine. Chris Sale made his first start of the season and was quite good for his five innings, allowing just three hits and striking out five. And the Boston lineup, after getting shut down by Corey Kluber for four innings, scored two in the fifth and seemed to be in good shape.
Then came the play that probably foreshadows everything about to come—with the Red Sox still up 2-1 in the sixth, Taylor Walls hit a line drive back at reliever Matt Strahm, who turned his back to the ball. It bounced off his left wrist. One of the weirdest parts of this play was the way Strahm’s glove came flying off — it looked a bit like those comic strips of Charlie Brown losing all his clothes when a line drive gets hit at him.
Strahm picked up the ball and threw off-balance to first — it had absolutely no chance of getting even close to the bag. But, in this case, it was even worse because the Red Sox had decided to start Franchy Cordero at first. We’ll come back to this theme repeatedly over the next couple of weeks.
Cordero went racing after the ball, and the tying run scored. Then Cordero, for reasons only clear in his mind, decided to wing the ball home, even though nobody was trying to score and catcher Christian Vasquez wasn’t even looking his way. The ball bounced away and what ended up being the winning run scored.
The lead blown against Tampa a few days later:
July 14 (Rays win 5-4): The Red Sox took a 3-0 lead into the seventh but then their starter — the marvelously named Kutter Crawford, who had been pitching well — lost his stuff and gave up three consecutive hits to start the inning. John Schreiber came in and give up three more hits and hit a batter as the Rays scored five runs and Boston lost its fourth straight game and their eighth of 10.
Anyway, you get the idea.
Joe goes on to cover the 2 total pummelings dished out by the Yankees before the All-Star break, followed by the record-setting 28-5 disgrace, which I'm not even going to bother to read, and then the Toronto sweep and the Cleveland losses.
At the end... so you're saying there's a
chance?
The Red Sox won on Thursday to get back to .500, but the season is almost certainly lost now. FanGraphs puts their playoff hopes at 26 percent, which actually seems generous.
But you never know. The Red Sox clearly forgot how to play baseball. Maybe, just as suddenly, they’ll remember.
At some point you have to find a way to laugh at this disaster, so listening to the Poscast is more cathartic and enjoyable than reliving the details in writing.
