The Red Sox seem headed for another empty September
Somehow, according to Fangraphs, the Red Sox playoff odds still sit at 12.3 percent. Part of this has to do with the Royals and their seven game losing streak, but the biggest chunk of that persistent percentage is mostly tied to the remote possibility of the Red Sox sweeping the Minnesota Twins when they come to Boston for that three game series on September 20th.
If you apply that far-fetched sweep scenario to the standings right now, the Sox would jump from 5.5 games behind Minnesota to just 2.5 games behind them while also flipping the tie breaker (Minnesota will retain that tiebreaker unless they get swept).
So, as long as that path remains on the table and a sweep would place the Sox on Minnesota’s bumper, that little flame of possible playoff light on the horizon won’t extinguish itself.
However, if I’m being completely honest, I’m kind of annoyed their playoff odds remain this high in the grand scheme of things. This Red Sox team has played like toenail fungus since the All-Star break and shouldn’t be anywhere near a playoff spot! Yet thanks to the tedious triple Wild Card format, their playoff odds remain slightly better than the chances of rolling a nine with a standard pair of playing dice. In this playoff system, you have to truly suck to fall out of the race early. As long as you’re mediocre, you can’t fully die until we get to the point in the calendar where the owners don’t need to sell anymore tickets anymore. Funny how that worked out, isn’t it?
I for one can’t stand this new phlegmatic, dystopian limbo the owners, and in particular this owner, have created. The Red Sox have the third-worst record in all of baseball since the All-Star break (only better than the White Sox and Angels), their early season starting pitching approach proved to be a mirage, their bullpen has lit at least a dozen games on fire, and their offense ranks 25th in baseball in high leverage at-bats this season. This squad isn’t anything close to resembling what should be considered a playoff team, and I find it dismaying that the bar has been lowered to such absurd levels in this sport that this half baked concoction of pure mid is able to float along like a piece of trash in the ocean and still see daylight. I hate being mostly dead!
Red Sox fans probably have a better perspective on this than just about any other fanbase when it comes to what’s happening here. Back in the 1998 to 2011 era, when virtually every game played at Fenway carried a level importance not seen now outside of October, the Red Sox lived on (and mostly just north of) the playoff bubble. (They were literally the Wild Card team on seven occasions during that 15 year stretch.)
But that bubble was from a time when only one Wild Card made it into the post season. If that same format was in place now, these Sox would be a full ten games out of a playoff spot and saddled with the task of needing to jump over three other teams to make it to October. In other words, they’d be completely dead!
When you observe it through that lens, it’s not just that the Red Sox have fallen from being a team that once mostly made the playoffs to a team that mostly doesn’t. It’s that they’ve done this while MLB has spent years eroding away the relevance of the regular season in an attempt to make it easier for middling teams to be relevant.
The Red Sox can claim, rightfully so, that they’re technically competing in this new watered-down format. But you can’t fake good baseball, and this region has seen way too much of it over the last 25 years to get excited about the dreck they’re serving at Fenway Park right now. It’s bad for baseball in Boston, and it also exposes how bad the third Wild Card is for the sport as a whole when you dilute the product this much. The baseball we’ve watched for the last six weeks is now what’s considered a candidate for a playoff spot, even if that possibility is remote. What the hell are we doing here? This is trash!
Being in a Wild Card race used to feel like a high speed chase. There was extreme urgency every day for weeks (if not months), and you were at risk of death with just one truly bad stretch of baseball after the trade deadline. Now, just being a mediocre team places you in the thick of the Wild Card race, and as a result, life just below the bubble feels more like checking into long-term care. The diagnosis isn’t good, everybody knows it, but the system is going to keep you alive for a while longer, so you go along with it, even if the quality of everything sucks. The process prevents a quick death, but you’re never going to truly live ever again without a miracle. In the meantime, the people who created the system collect all the money by prolonging things for as long as possible.
But hey, at least it’s not completely dead! Right?