The Red Sox season — and Joe Castiglione’s career — is over.
You can’t force the summer. You can try to, and I always do. I uncover the patio furniture on the first sunny weekend of March, even though I should know that more snow flurries are on the way. I get my first ice cream cone sometime in April, and end up eating it under a rain-pelted umbrella. I head to the beach in late May, when the ocean isn’t ready for guests yet.
You can’t force it; summer arrives whenever it wants to and is often fashionably late. But it does get here eventually. And when it does arrive, it announces itself subtly: you’re in the car with the window rolled down; the sun is setting just behind the trees; you turn on the radio and you hear Joe Castiglione’s deflated balloon call to end a threat: Swing and a pop-up. Volpe has it just behind the second base bag and the Sox leave two men on. No score after three here at Fenway.
That’s when you know it’s summer.
Joe Castiglione’s voice has anchored me to summer for my entire life. I heard it in the backseat of the car, sitting on a towel driving back from Horseneck Beach. I heard it in the backyard on Sunday afternoons, helping my parents stake the tomato plants in the garden. I heard it playing in the parking lot after little league games, while the dads leaned against the hoods of minivans and the kids played tag and swatted away mosquitos.
For six months (seven if you’re lucky, and we have been) baseball keeps the time for you: 7:10 PM on weeknights, 4:10 PM on Saturdays, 1:35 PM on Sundays. Opening Day to Patriots Day, Memorial Day to the All-Star Break (which always comes too soon), then the trade deadline, September call-ups, the final weekend of the season, the playoffs. Baseball — and Joe Castiglione — are there for you, every day.
And then, suddenly, they’re not.
You may not miss them at first. You might even be ready for them to go away. If it’s been a bad six months — if, say a shortstop injury destabilizes the infield defense for months on end, if a first base injury ends a breakout season before it can even begin, if a third consecutive offseason of unaddressed pitching issues burns out the bullpen and leads to a second half collapse — then you might think you’re ready to move on. You might welcome having your nights back, going out to dinner without checking the score on your phone, catching up on some streaming show you’ll moderately enjoy but stop watching after four episodes.
But eventually you’ll realize that, without Joe and without baseball, you’re adrift. The offseason can have something of a rhythm to it (the winter meetings, LIDOM highlights, posting deadlines) but it’s unpredictable. The offseason is the unknown. It’s cold, it’s long, and, lately, it’s been extremely underwhelming.
The Red Sox enter the 2024-25 offseason having failed to finish above .500 for three seasons in a row. This is the first time this has happened in 30 years, and only the second time it’s happened over the course of Joe Castiglione’s entire Red Sox career. The team’s needs are clear: front-end starting pitching, right-handed power, improved defense, a stronger bullpen. But these needs have been clear for a while now, only to continually go unaddressed. For five straight years the front office has held back, reading the minor league prospect rankings like a celestial chart and waiting for the perfect alignment of stars and moons before daring to sign a free agent pitcher.
For 22 years dating back to Dan Duquette’s trade for Pedro Martinez, Red Sox offseasons operated much differently: the team identified its needs, then aggressively dove into the market to fill them. For 22 years, Red Sox offseasons were all fire and fury: the free agent signings of Manny Ramirez, Keith Foulke, Johnny Damon, JD Drew, Daisuke Matsuzaka, David Price, and JD Martinez; the trades for Curt Schilling, Josh Beckett, Mike Lowell, Coco Crisp, Adrian Gonzalez, Chris Sale, and Rick Porcello. The offseasons didn’t always work out (hello, Pablo Sandoval!) but they always kept the fire burning as we waited for the snows to melt, when both Joe Castiglione and baseball would usher the summer back.
Today we brace ourselves for the unknowns of the offseason. If, at some point in the next few weeks, you find yourself feeling unmoored, like the days have lost their reliable rhythm, well, yeah: that’s what the end of the baseball season does. Summer is over now. It’ll come back eventually, and so will the Red Sox, though we don’t yet know in what form. But Joe Castiglione won’t come back. That particular tie to the last 42 years of Red Sox baseball — and of your life — has been cut.
We’re all adrift now. 178 days until Opening Day.