No need to reach for panic button, that's just baseball
Someone unfamiliar with the whys and wherefores of baseball might have
taken a peek at the Boston Red Sox, losers of four straight, seven of
their last 10, and 11 of their last 16 as they entered last night's
contest against the Cleveland Indians, and made a similar call. But it was
never that bad. .
Really.
It's never good to lose 11 of 16, and if the Sox hope to make the
playoffs, they can't let it get too much worse. Sooner or later, they've
got to reverse this trend.
(Click here for
American League Standings on May 13,
2002)
(Click here for American League Standings on June
28,
2002)
But that's the thing about baseball. What exactly constitutes a trend
in a sport where each team has to play 162 games? Losing 11 of 16 will
bury the Patriots and will cause significant problems for the Bruins and
Celtics. Losing 11 of 16 in baseball means you've had a bad two weeks out
of 26. A good team can live with that, and the Red Sox are a good
team.
Things happen, or don't happen, in baseball as in no other sport, which
is why a baseball season is such a dramatic event compared with the
campaigns in the other three major American team sports. When you're going
good, the chalk flies up when your guy hits one down the line with two on
in the eighth, the wind turns a potential three-run game-winning homer
into a ''7'' in the scorebook after your pitcher hangs a breaking ball,
and the plate ump rings up the opposing ox with the .600 slugging
percentage on a pitch 3 inches outside with the tying run on third.
But they haven't been going good. They're going bad(ly). Clutch hits
have been in very scarce supply. ''The team is not getting a lot of hits
when we get opportunities to score,'' observed Grady Little during
yesterday's pregame schmooze with the notebook, camera, and microphone
set. ''We're not getting hits we got earlier in the season, and will get
later on, and it doesn't matter who's at the plate.''
So it was that the Red Sox came to bat in the fifth inning last night,
trailing, 4-0. It was starting to look like another one of those
nights. But Jason Varitek singled to right. Brian Daubach, mired in a
brutal slump, knocked one off the left-field wall, and when the ball
eluded center fielder Milton Bradley, Varitek scored. The Red Sox had
actually caught a break.
Trot Nixon singled Daubach to third. Jose Offerman walked. And now
starter Ryan Drese was staring at Johnny Damon, one run in, the bases
loaded, and still no one out. Could he? Would he?
Yup. Damon, almost undoubtedly the team's positional player MVP for the
first three months of the season, ripped a liner into the right-field
corner. The only way this wasn't going to be a triple would be if Offerman
were to fall down.
''When [Damon] was running, to be honest with you, I didn't pay that
much attention to him because I assumed it was a triple,'' said
Little. ''I was watching Offy to make sure he got around.''
Finally. A clutch, game-tying hit for the Boston Red Sox. And still
there was no one out.
''Something to build on,'' said Varitek, who would later homer into the
Sox bullpen for the final insurance run. ''We haven't played that badly,
even though we've been losing. We just weren't hitting. It was just a
matter of time with this club.''
Carlos Baerga walked. Nomar Garciaparra followed with a sacrifice fly
to bring home Damon. Baerga stole second without drawing a throw
(something that happened three times for the Sox last night, and has
anyone ever seen that before?). Finally, Manny Ramirez singled to
left for the sixth run of the inning.
''Nothing was happening,'' explained bench coach Mike Stanley. ''We've
been searching for a long time. But when Johnny got that hit, all of a
sudden the whole atmosphere in the dugout changed. You get tired of
saying, `We didn't give up on this game,' because we haven't given up on
games all year. But we were still losing.''
The five-game lead? A memory. The nice loss-column cushion over the New
Yorkers is pretty much gone. There is more wild-card competition now with
Oakland and Anaheim back in the hunt. It hasn't been a very pleasurable
couple of weeks. That's all unfortunate, but it is not catastrophic. We
haven't even hit July yet.
The bright side is that Ramirez is back, and sooner or later he will
hit. The bright side is that Pedro Martinez, Varitek, and Garciaparra, all
of whom were absent from the roster at this time last year, are back. The
bright side is that Rey Sanchez should be back after the All-Star Game,
and that will be like making a major trade in which you get a whole lotta
something for absolutely nothing.
''I told somebody when [Sanchez] left the lineup that we were going to
miss him more than our No. 4 hitter,'' Little points out, ''and we have.
We were turning double plays.''
The Red Sox team on display in April was a very nice, balanced team
that could pitch, defend, and hit. There is no real reason to think that
balance cannot be regained, including the hitting part.
''What's going on is nothing uncommon in the game of baseball,'' Little
said. ''Hopefully, it's something that doesn't very often, but you know
it's going to happen. I'm surprised it didn't happen before this.''
It's baseball. The Patriots go 5-11, it's a disaster. The Red Sox go
5-11, it's annoying.
So don't worry. The ship can still float.
This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 6/27/2002.
Copyrught 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.