Have the Boston Red Sox very quietly become the best team in baseball?
Don't be surprised.
This has been a strange season. For the last six weeks or so, ever since they fell behind the Yankees and ended up in a wild-card chase with both the Rays and the Rangers, it was as if we were all too aware of their flaws. It also was like we sort of stopped paying attention to them, what with the NFL starting and the sense that there really wasn't a pennant chase, so wake me when the playoffs start, if the Red Sox are there.
But guess what?
It's no longer six weeks ago, and this is not the same Red Sox team.
That's the mystery of baseball, the fact that it's always fluid, always changing, the stock market in doubleknits and spikes, never staying the same. Baseball, where the season is so long and there are so many games that just when you think you've got it all figured it out it changes again.
So it is with the Red Sox, who are a very different team than they were in the beginning of the year, back when Victor Martinez was in Cleveland, Clay Buchholz was in Pawtucket, Billy Wagner was in limbo, and Dice-K was about to self-destruct. Back when John Smoltz and Brad Penny were both in the rotation and David Ortiz was in a big-time funk. Back when the Red Sox were a different team.
So how good are they now?
Interesting question.
It's not the easiest thing to judge, since they've spent this month fattening up on the Orioles and the Blue Jays and other weaklings.
But they are flat out great in Fenway Park, and they have an appreciably better rotation now than they did earlier in the season, and that's not even counting Tim Wakefield, a question mark if the playoffs started tonight. They also would start any playoff series with Josh Beckett and Jon Lester, as good a one-two punch as there is in the game, even with Beckett's late-season problems.
So I suspect they are as good as anyone in the game, a statement that would have been foolish six weeks ago.
Which is not to say they're as good as they were in 2007. Not without a Manny Ramirez and a Big Papi in his prime in the middle of the lineup. Not without a big-game pitcher like Curt Schilling.
But do they have to be?
That's the real question.
A month or so ago, it might have seemed like a foolish question, in what was being unofficially billed as the year of the Yankees. Why not? The Yankees had overcome a slow start to become the best team in baseball, certainly had the best everyday lineup, the new Murderer's Row. They were the best team in baseball, their record a testimony to that.
They also had overcome being the Yankees in New York, the heavyweight that drags down any Yankee team not having great success. The heat was off Joe Girardi, no one was booing A-Rod, there were no more derogatory stories about how expensive the good seats were in the new stadium, life was good. The New York tabloids were alive with stories that everything was on schedule for the Yankees to win their first world title since 2000.
Now?
Now the coronation's put on hold for a while, and no one really believes in the Angels, right?
Now there's the growing theory that, yes, the Yankees have the best lineup in baseball, but they might be a team better suited for the long haul than a short series, better suited for the regular season, not the playoffs. It's the theory that after CC Sabathia it's a rotation full of questions, everything from the erratic A. J. Burnett, to Andy Pettitte's tired shoulder, to the perplexing Joba Chamberlain.
In short, the Yankees seemed better a month ago.
And the Red Sox seem better now than they did a month ago.
They are better because the acquisition of Martinez has made them better. Not only is he a solid No. 3 hitter, but he can catch, which makes the struggling Jason Varitek a part-time player. That takes pressure off everyone else in the lineup. It also moves both J.D. Drew and Mike Lowell further down the order, strengthening it.
Most of all, they are better because their pitching is better.
The bullpen has been good all year, arguably as deep as it's been in many a moon. Buchholz has given them a dependable third starter, Dice-K has now been solid in two consecutive starts. All this in back of Josh Beckett and Jon Lester.
In short, it's a team that seems more designed for the playoffs than the Yankees are, for any team going into a playoff series with Becket and Lester back-to-back goes in with a certain advantage.
How this all plays out is still in the future, of course.
But the landscape has changed. The last six weeks or so tell us that.
Are the Red Sox now the best team in baseball?
We're going to find out.
But just the fact that we can now have this discussion tells us that things have changed. It tells us that right now the Red Sox might just be the best team out there, record be damned.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
column
Must credit The Providence Journal
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