Though it may defy belief, my absence in reporting on the Red Sox in what was supposed to be a regular Friday feature has almost nothing to do with the fact that for the first two weeks of the season the Red Sox were absolutely horrible. Instead a Vegas trip and then recovery from that Vegas trip got in the way.
That said: Eeeesh. The Red Sox had a horrible start to the season, but one that I suspected would recede into the rearview mirror over the course of a very long season. Barring some sort of cataclysm, this Sox team simply was not going to continue to flail. Their outlier came early, and while clawing back into contention became a lot more difficult after the first week or so of the season it would have been foolhardy to believe they would not right the ship. Lots of experts started pulling out statistics about teams that started 1-7 or 2-10 and came up with the same ominous result: Teams with those sorts of starts don't win championships. Well, no shit. they were bad teams that started off badly. This Sox team is a good team that started off badly. Not recognizing the two represents obtuseness. Of course obtuseness tends to reign among the sorts of folks who get paid a lot to discern that the majority of teams that start off badly don't finish well.
Since then the hitters have hit well and the pitchers have pitched well, and lo and behold, the Sox have won some games. As I write this they lead Anaheim or Fake Los Angeles or wherever the hell they hail from 3-0 after taking a big win in extra innings last night. They will be climbing out of the hole they dug early for quite some time now. But the Red Sox will be just fine just as the hot-starting Baltimore Orioles will end up wallowing in mediocrity. Ten games in baseball is a tiny sample size, equivalent to a single NFL regular season game.
[I will say this: 2004 (and 2007) made the brink seem a lot farther away than it otherwise would.]
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