Andrew Bailey had a good idea. He probably needs another one.
I’m a born-again F1 fan, largely thanks to COVID and Drive to Survive, so I know not to get too excited when a middle-tier team starts a season off unsustainably hot. While the end product of auto racing is “cars go vroom,” the teams themselves are like slow-moving ships, capable of adjusting slowly and laboriously.
So it’s not a surprise to me, per The Athletic, that Andrew Bailey’s “don’t throw fastballs” gambit, which worked so well for the first half of the season, is reaching the end of its usefulness as the league finalizes its adjustments. The Sox’s pitching, specifically the bullpen, is a shambles, giving fans no real reason to expect a quick turnaround.
The upshot is that tactics are fine and all, but they have to be married to talent and forever evolving short- and long-term plans to get a midfield team — exactly what Boston is right now — into contention. The idea of Kutter Crawford being a Cy Young Award contender was preposterous on its face; there’s only so much you can tweak before talent regresses to the mean. As other teams have figured out the Sox, it has been, well, a mean regression.
It obviously doesn’t help that Boston’s backloaded schedule means that they wasted their party trick on lighter competition, only to see it backfire against the big boys. And “wasted” is probably not the right word, because a win’s a win in April or May or September, but without another silver bullet, it’s easy to see how the Sox fritter out of contention simply by lack of having a Plan B.
Does that mean Bailey’s plan was bad? No! It was great, but it ultimately looks like a flash in the pan. You can be sad it’s over and be happy that it happened, but it would be silly to expect things get better from here minus another, wilder adjustment that we can be fairly sure isn’t coming. If it was, it would be here by now, and we wouldn’t be.