Through the first 21 games of the season, the Red Sox are an impressive 17-4, leaving little doubt to anyone with a brain that they are currently the favorites to win the American League East. This narrative has been pushed down the throats of T&L readers, so I don’t want to focus on their success too much. Instead, let’s take a look at a couple of the negatives that came out of an 0-2 stretch against a pretty garbage Oakland A’s team over the weekend.
If you hadn’t already heard, the Red Sox got no-hit by dirty Sean Menea. Pretty shameful, honestly. You’re probably hearing a lot of “dude, honestly, Sean Menea is pretty good. He’s like super underrated.” That’s a classic pink-hat baseball fan reaction to somebody throwing a no-hitter or making a nice defensive play. Another example of that is my dad still loving Daniel Nava because he hit a grand slam in his first major league at bat. Does that say anything about how good Daniel Nava was? No, he put one good swing on a ball and now weirdos everywhere love the guy. For heaven’s sake, Dallas Braden once threw a perfect game and he throws about 82 miles an hour. Throwing a perfect game does not make you good, so don’t let the pink-hat fans justify Boston’s embarrassment by pumping the tires of a guy that had 4.37 ERA last season.
My take on them getting no hit is that it isn’t good. Scorching hot, right? It’s not good at all. It’s only one game of course, so it barely affects them in the win-loss column, but you have to worry about the psyche of a mentally weak Red Sox team. This could easily spiral the entire squad into a slump just because this group loves to listen to the media noise more than any other professional team in Boston.
We’re also playing with bad mojo here. Stupidly, we went out and tossed a middle finger to the baseball gods. As it turns out, the last team to win the World Series after being no-hit in that same season was the 1988 Dodgers. Bad optics. Really bad optics.
Oh, and wanna know what else is bad optics? Losing two games in a row to Daniel Memgden, a guy who uses mustache wax in the 21st century. It honestly wouldn’t have been that bad if the Sox had been able to rebound in the following game, but David Price puked all over himself in the 8th when Khris “with a K” Davis took him to yak town with a three-run bomb in the bottom of eighth.
Overall impression on the weekend for the Red Sox: bad.
(Stats via Baseball Reference)
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