When is 2011 Like 2004?

As we now sift through the myriad postmortems on the Red Sox season, I find myself feeling especially grateful this morning. I am grateful not just for the two World Series titles in the last eight seasons, but also for the way in which we got to watch the Red Sox lose this year. The whole model for the season was bound to fail from the start; team-owned NESN’s website went on the record comparing them to the 1927 Yankees before the season has even started!
Rather than bemoan the fate of a team that spent an average of $1.78 million per win this season, we should instead be celebrating the historically spectacular failure we just witnessed.

It is one thing to see a team of beloved players who seem like “good” guys come up short; in those circumstances, we would deeply sympathize with the team and their fans. However, this Red Sox incarnation was a team built with a slew of unlikable players: the petulant and horrendous John Lackey, the oft-injured and volatile Kevin Youkilis, and (of course!) the silent and apathetic JD Drew. And that is only just a small portion of the roster; there were plenty of guys that every other fan base simply hated. Over the course of the season, even Sox fans themselves grew irritated with the antics/poor performances of some of these same players (see: Crawford, Carl). This team lacked any fire, and seemed to take pretty much any loss lying down; I can’t recall a single player seeming angry or fired up after a tough loss. Even last night, in a pregame interview, David Ortiz looked half asleep and suggested that this was “just another game.”
The incompetence required to outspend your rival by 382.2% and still manage to lose is truly impressive. It requires a perfect storm of ineptitude: wild overspending on underachievers (Crawford, Drew, Lackey), terrible trades (Eric Bedard? Really?), paying for players who are no longer on the team (remember Mike Cameron?), and a barren farm system (Who the hell is Kyle Weiland, and why is he starting critical games in September?). I won’t pretend to have any financial knowledge, but it is truly baffling to me that with all that money, the Sox couldn’t manage to spend even a quarter of it on good value. It always seems it’s a team like Tampa who finds the scrapheap reliever or utility infielder who makes the critical plays at the right times. Instead, we get the opposite. The Sox spend big money and expect that results will naturally follow. The flashy signing- and subsequent media fawning over- of Crawford and the extension for Adrian Gonzalez echoed, although certainly not as strongly, the way the Miami Heat were treated last offseason. Before they took the field, it seemed, a championship was theirs.

And now we arrive at the collapse itself. The Sox went 7-20 in September. That is, quite simply, historically bad. Like “worst in franchise history” bad. Like “even the worst teams in baseball win more than a quarter of their games” bad. It’s the type of once in a generation- or even a lifetime- events that we have to cherish when we see it. Face it, how boring would it have been if instead of going 7-20, the Sox had simply played mediocre baseball in September and gone 13-14, easily made the playoffs, then lost to Texas in the ALDS? Where’s the fun in that? With the state of their pitching staff, this team wasn't going to get past the first round of the playoffs, anyway. At least we Sox fans can say we got to witness something the likes of which has never been seen before.
While this is obviously not as emotionally rewarding an event as the 2004 comeback against the Yankees, it is almost equally monumental. Just as a team had never come back from a 3-0 deficit, so too had a team never blown a 9 game lead with 25 games left to play. While it is the wrong side of history, it is history nevertheless! The pain that accompanies watching this collapse should be fleeting; these players never looked like they cared anyway. I grant you that a couple of them (Pedroia, Ellsbury, Papelbon) probably did want to win, but that was not enough to overcome the apathy of their teammates. Rather than lament the 100+ wins and championship parade that could have been, we should instead fondly remember (and indeed celebrate) this team for what they were: historically great losers.