Sox cling to false hopes

Back-to-back AL East titles enable a stand-pat mentality

Not sure if you’ve heard, but the Red Sox won 93 games each of the last two seasons.

And you know what else? They won back-to-back AL East titles.

I know.

It’s amazing and it’s true and, I’d like to add, it’s also a tired and lame cop-out that also seems to serve as a curiously timid rationalization for what the club has failed to accomplish since the end of last season. They’re not any better. All offseason and continuing into the beginning of spring training, the entire Red Sox organization — from chairman Tom Werner, president and CEO Sam Kennedy, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski, new manager Alex Cora and the players who have reconvened in Fort Myers — has seldom failed to remind us about the glorious deeds of the 2017 team.

Seldom does the club spend much time dwelling on how the Red Sox failed to advance beyond the Division Series the last two seasons.

Or that in the last two years their record in the postseason is 1-6.

Sure, the phrase “unfinished business” gets tossed around but the main spin has been the back-to-back 93-win seasons and the AL East titles. That’s the wrong message, one that sounds much more like a ceiling than a floor.

Yes, technically the team finished first in the AL East but really, so what?

The Yankees had a 3-0 lead in the 2004 ALCS, but so what?

Or, to put it in terms local sports fans really care the most about, the Falcons were up 28-3 over the Patriots in the third quarter of Super Bowl LI, and so what?

The Red Sox were no better than the sixth- or seventh-best team, maybe fifth-best if I’m feeling generous, in baseball last year.

The Astros, Dodgers, Yankees, Cubs and Indians were all better teams, and maybe the Nationals as well.

So change your tune, Red Sox.

As your players used to like to say in recent years, whether following a championship year or last-place season, it’s time to turn the page.

Try harder, Red Sox. Reach higher, get better and get over your underachieving 2017 selves. Stop trying to sell the deeds and feats of last year’s team as a point of pride, and then rehire and rebrand nearly the identical squad and sell it as a launching point for a brighter and better 2018 team.

The franchise could flip the prologue to the 2018 script by ending its staredown with J.D. Martinez and coming up with at least a five-year contract for the free agent slugger. But by not locking up Martinez or trading for his equivalent, that will represent the failure of this franchise to think big and bet boldly inside a closing window for winning with its current, very promising and talent-laden core. True, such a failure would be a victory in the battle for fiscal restraint, but a bruising loss for a club hoping to win back its fans, regain its sizzle and demonstrate that it understands what it will take to keep up with its foes, win more games, play deeper into October and keep the Red Sox relevant in New England.

What does a victory party for fiscal restraint look like?

I imagine after great deliberation between whether to uncork the Chateau Lafite or Chateau Margaux, someone says, “Screw it, let’s open both,” and merriment ensues.

Meanwhile, more young fans will shrug their shoulders about baseball and the Red Sox. They will wonder why their grandparents cared so much about the Sox even as they intuit why their parents and most adults can’t stop talking about 40-year-old Tom Brady.

Meanwhile, the Sox will be left to explain why they didn’t want to risk more than five years or spend more to enable the 30-yearold Martinez to come in and mostly DH.

And all summer, Fenway’s bleachers and grandstands will fill again with tourists and casual fans and the club hopes that its 2018 squad — same as it ever was but better, because nobody’s going to get hurt and all the young players will make great strides — comes out ahead in that proverbial playoff crapshoot.

Sounds like a plan. Poor Chris Sale appeared in the first postseason series of his career last season and got roughed up in his start before coming back with a strong but futile relief effort in the elimination game against the Astros. And yet when he showed up at Fort Myers for Year 2 he fell in line and echoed the company logic that if a first-place team ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

“I like exactly where we’re at right now,” Sale said last week. “We basically, for the most part, have almost the same team that we did last year and we were the best team in our division. I know people like to talk about this and that, but we were the best with what we have, so I think we’re right where we need to be.”

Wait. The Red Sox were the best with what they had? I don’t believe Sale means that. I really can’t.

When it comes to Dombrowski, by now we expect the team’s architect, dealmaker and Martinez negotiation hardliner to focus on what went right last year vs. where the team fell short. Yet after a postseason autopsy in which he conceded the need for a power bat, Dombrowski spent much of the winter taking pains to publicly show that not having Martinez in camp by now is no big deal.

While we all understand the limits to scrutinizing his public comments rather than judging him by what is done in private texts and phone calls with Martinez’ agent, Scott Boras, all we have to go on is what he says.

And just as his success to date in improving the team looks unremarkable, his circle-the-wagon comments sound unbelievable.

“First of all, we don’t have the same exact team because we have a lot of injured players back, which I think is very important for our team because I think we have a lot of pitching that was not healthy last year,” Dombrowski said. “If that remains healthy, I think it improves your ballclub and hopefully it will be. We’ll see what happens.”

We certainly will. Because, from the sound of it, nothing at all has happened to make the casual or intense Red Sox observer believe that anything will change this season.

But if another 93 wins and another AL East title (because the Yankees, of course, clearly can’t climb past this returning crew) floats your duck boat, then the 2018 campain is going to be a smashing success — with plenty of time for mid- to late-October trips and Patriots viewing parties without a high risk of missing any Red Sox games.

Then, it’s, “See you in

2019!”