What is wrong with the AL East’s ‘most talented team’?
What if before this season we told you that the Red Sox’s trades for Chris Sale and Craig Kimbrel would prove golden? That Sale would be the best pitcher in the AL — and not by a little bit — and that Kimbrel would be the best reliever in the league as well?
You combine that with Boston’s excellent young core of position players, and even in a post-Papi world, that team would dominate the AL East, right?
Except Sale is going to win the AL Cy Young award easily and Kimbrel has struck out more than half the batters he has faced, and the Red Sox awoke Saturday morning a second-place team awash in controversy and with their head of baseball operations, Dave Dombrowski, saying there are no more big moves coming via trade.
“They really should be winning by a large margin,” an AL official said. “They don’t have a sense of unity. They don’t play with structure. They have a weird team dynamic. All the drama is distracting.”
The drama includes dealing with the horrible free-agent signing of the 2014-15 offseason, Pablo Sandoval, who played so poorly that the Red Sox
released him on July 19 with roughly $49 million left on his pact.
It also includes the horrible free-agent signing of the 2015-16 offseason, David Price, who temperamentally fits Boston like skinny jeans on Sandoval. He has warred with the most provincial baseball media in the country, notably
laying into Red Sox broadcaster and Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley on a team flight, which has led to weeks of back-and-forth on who said what and who needed to apologize and didn’t.
That would all be fine if Price were excelling on the mound. He’s not. He has not pitched liked a $217 million man, and
just went on the disabled list again with a forearm issue amid growing concern he will ultimately need Tommy John surgery.
Besides all of that, an offense that led the AL in scoring by a staggering 101 runs in 2016 is seventh this year, largely because Boston had nine fewer homers than any other AL squad entering Saturday. It turns out David Ortiz meant more to this lineup than the color blue means to the American flag.
Still, on July 7 the Red Sox led the AL East by 4 ¹/₂ games. The Yankees were reeling, and when Boston rallied to beat Aroldis Chapman a week later to open the second half, the Yankees were braced to be knocked out with three more games in two days looming at Fenway Park. Matt Holliday’s tying ninth-inning homer off Kimbrel the next day, and the Yankees’
eventual 16-inning triumph might be remembered as the key pivot of this season.
“The Red Sox are easily the most talented team [in the AL East],” an NL executive said. “I thought they were going to pull away in July and then it stalled. The Price thing is such a dark cloud and emphasizes the perils of signing in a place you hate.”
Boston still has the talent to right itself and soar to the division title. But after a bunch of prospect-dispersing, win-now deals, Dombrowski has indicated the spigot is off. Dustin Pedroia has had to stand in front of the media and give a state-of-the-Red Sox, I-am-the-leader message. And the questions persist around the sport — why is such a talented team playing so uncomfortably and below its skill level?
