Go ahead, pour your Kool-Aid, Sox fans
It’s worth getting teased again
The schedule sets up perfectly for theRedSoxtoone more time do what they have done best during their title defense. Fill your glass half-full with your favorite flavor of Kool-Aid and prepare to be teased again.
After all, the Orioles are in town for a three-game series starting tonight and all you really need to know about them is that Andrew Cashner was their ace. They bring a .322 winning percentage into town and are primed to be swept out of Fenway Park. Plus, the Sox finish the regular season with three games in Baltimore, by which time, the script of the final tease tells
us, they’ll be within striking distance of the second wild card.
More fodder: Nathan Eovaldi finally is rounding into shape and nobody has more nuclear stuff than he does. In his past eight relief appearances covering 10⅔ innings, Eovaldi has gone 1-0, 2.53 with four walks and 13 strikeouts. Unless he’s needed out of the bullpen, the plan calls for Eovaldi to return to the rotation. As with most clubs in the armstarved majors, the Sox pitching plans are on the fluidside.
Remember, when Eovaldi is on, he can overpower the best hitters in baseball, as he proved in taming the Dodgers during the World Series. So just imagine how intimidated those September callups will feel facing him, and there will be plenty of those because so many of the Red Sox remaining opponents dropped from contention long ago.
J.D. Martinez is heating up. Rafael Devers is doing things that haven’t been done in more than a century of record keeping. Keeping pace with Devers, Xander Bogaerts is in the midst of a season that would make him an MVP candidate most years. Mookie Betts has one more hot streak left in him. Cashner is flashing signs that he just might make a decent reliever.
Tired of hearing it? Not going down that hope road that dead-ends with a mirage again?
Take a healthy hit of that Kool-Aid and check this out: The Sox have 39 games remaining, including the completion of a suspended one with the lowly Royals, and just 15 of those are against clubs that took a winning record into yesterday’s schedule. On second thought, the Rays have 40 games remaining, just 14 against clubs with winning records. So much for that flame of hope.
The Red Sox have four games left vs. the Rays, one of the two teams (the A’s are the other) ahead of them in the race for the second wild card. The Rays are 7½ games ahead of the Red Sox. A four-game sweep of the Rays makes the numbers far less daunting.
Now throw back the rest of the Kool-Aid, let it take its effect on your gullibility, and consider this: The numbers tell us that the Red Sox don’t have to do any better over their final 39 games than they did during their best 39game stretch of the season (25-14), provided the Rays also can match their worst 40-game stretch (17-23) of 2019. If that happens, the Red Sox finish a game ahead of the Rays.
Another way to look at it: The regular season lasts 45 more days. In the 45 days starting June 11 and extending through July 25, the Red Sox gained 7½ games on the Rays, who went 17-23 in those six weeks, compared to 23-14 for the Sox.
Admit it: The reality that neither the Red Sox nor Rays need do anything they haven’t already done for them to square off in a onegame playoff to advance to one game against the first wild card entry allows you to believe there’s still a chance. It makes the weekend’s three-game series a little more interesting, unless and until the Sox lose a game to the Orioles.
The A’s? If the Sox get hot enough to pass the Rays they’ll pass the A’s.
No point in tuning out yet, especially if the Sox execute the sweep. After all, as any Orioles fan could tell you, it’s better to have been teased and left alone, dusted by the ashes of false hope, than to have never been teased at all.