The Red Sox Are Living A Duel Existence Thanks To The Third Wild Card

Being mediocre is insidiously unsatisfying.

It’s September 17th, and against all odds, the following two scenarios, while each unlikely, remain legitimately on the table for the 2024 Boston Red Sox:

• The Red Sox make the playoffs.
• The Red Sox finish in last place.

This should be impossible, but here we are with just 12 games to go.

Somehow, the Sox are still just four games behind the collapsing Minnesota Twins, who come to Fenway this weekend. As noted last week, the existence of this series is keeping Boston’s faint playoff hopes alive. If the Sox sweep there, they would be just one game back of the Twins with the tiebreaker. As long as that path remains open, we can’t quite close the book on their playoff chances, even though at this point, they clearly don’t deserve it. Until Boston loses a single game this weekend, the combination of a weak AL, the triple Wild Card playoff structure, a scheduling quirk, tiebreakers, and the complete inability of the Minnesota Twins to beat good teams, this door is going to remain ajar.

(Now it should also be noted that Detroit could leapfrog into the final playoff spot with a Sox sweep of the Twins as they are playing the best baseball of anybody in this “race,” but given the fact they are on the road in Kansas City and Baltimore this week, wins from that squad are no guarantee either. Can you feel the excitement generated by this third Wild Card?)

The worse the Red Sox play, the more the bar is lowered for them. Sadly, this is the main takeaway I keep coming back to over and over again over the last month. The Red Sox shouldn’t be a playoff team in the sense of the greatness we want playoff teams to represent, but the triple Wild Card system just won’t allow them to die. Mediocre teams are now teams in playoff contention, and I just can’t acquire a taste for that. In fact, if anything, the 2024 Red Sox second half experience has made this reality even more objectionable to me. In a sport where teams are in your face 162 times a year, that’s a really unsatisfying product. You can’t fake greatness, and no matter how much owners want to push the playoff experience on more teams, you can’t possibly tell me as a Red Sox fan that what’s happening right now is in the same solar system of excitement as wild card chases like 1999, 2003, or even 2021.

And yes, I know I’ve hit on this playoff structure before, and initially, I didn’t want to hit on it again this week. But then I looked at the standings Monday night and realized something ridiculous that made me blow a gasket: The Red Sox have lost so much of late, they’re now closer to another last place finish than a playoff spot. Take a look!

We now live in a world where last place finishes and Wild Card spots can coexist as real possibilities for teams into the second half of September. This makes me physically angry because it’s so, so stupid!

And amazingly, the teams around the Sox in the standings that could send them either up into the playoffs or down into the basement represent are all the remaining games on the schedule. The season closes as follows:

3 games @ Rays

3 games vs. Twins

3 games @ Blue Jays

3 games vs. Rays

If the Sox get swept by Toronto, they’re tied with them. If they go 2-4 against the Rays, they’re tied with them. And as noted above, if they sweep the Twins, they’d be just one game behind them. What are we even doing here?

In reality, none of these series are probably going to end up as sweeps, because as Pod on Lansdowne’s own Liam Fennessy pointed out, mediocrity rules the day.

But still, we can look at something else as a possible harbinger of how this is going to end. Thanks to the folks at pennant-race.com, we can graph baseball seasons, and this particular graph shows how uncomfortably close the 2024 Red Sox are following the trajectory of the 2023 Red Sox.

So even with all the little signs of promise internally, and the seemingly better place the Red Sox are in as a franchise going into 2025, this 2024 team is still in other ways the exact same club that runs out of pitching in the second half every single year and collapses.

In fact, the trajectory from last year to this year has been so similar that the 2023 Red Sox and 2024 Red Sox have never been more than three games apart from each other through number of games played at any point this entire season.

Knowing that and looking ahead, let’s note that last year’s team crashed so hard that they finished just 3-8 over their last 11 games and fell to last place. Given who is on the schedule, there’s a good chance the Red Sox would finish in last place again if they go 3-8 to close out 2024.

Personally, this pisses me off, but I guess it’s also fitting in some way. The Red Sox are of course the team living the double existence as the franchise with the most World Series titles this century, and the franchise with the most last place finishes over the last 12 years (see the chart below). Why not also live the double existence of being a possible last place team and a playoff team for as long as possible too?

Thankfully though, this resolves one way or the other in 12 more games.