Baby steps could be huge for a young team.
The Joiner brothers, of whom I’m the eldest of three, are not the least angry people in the world. We express our anger in different ways. I’m the most confrontational on a moment-to-moment basis, wile the middle one moved to Europe to avoid familial conflict forever and the youngest is the world’s nicest family man until he wants to cut your throat, at which point he’ll get nastier than you can imagine. This story is about me, him, and to a degree, all of us.
As the story goes, after one of the Patriots’s Super Bowl losses — probably 2012 — he was in a cab back to wherever he lived at the time with a good friend who is a Buffalo Bills fan with whom he watched the game. Despite being division rivals, this friend attempted to cheer up my dead silent brother, saying something to the effect of “Hey, your team has been so good, don’t worry!” To which my brother muttered, furiously, and through clenched teeth, the only words he’d speak during the entire trip:
“You don’t know what it’s like to win.” The rest was silence.
Was this arrogant? Yes. Dramatic? Of course. True? Absolutely! Success doesn’t just breed success, it cultivates it. When the success stops, the resentment starts. Red Sox fans have been dealing with this for the better part of five years: Resenting the fact that, having gotten used to winning, we were back among the losers, the have-beens and the never-will-bes. The only thing keeping anyone’s hope alive was the Chaim Bloom “great man” theory, but in its merciful absence the truth has emerged: They’re just another team now, and we’re fans of them anyway. It’s time for a Copium prescription.
Gone are the days of an unbroken line back to 2004 in the persons of David Ortiz and Xander Bogaerts (the rare 2013/2018 double-dipper). Whatever else these Red Sox are about to be, they’re going to be raw before they’re anything, and that’s fun. They’re not going to win the division and they probably won’t make the playoffs but finally — blissfully — that’s plenty good enough. Just as the team will learn to win anew, we, as fans, will (re-)learn to enjoy the journey as much as arriving at the destination, if only because we have no other choice.
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I realize this a few weeks back, in the wake of the Lucas Giolito injury, I wrote, of the Bloom/Craig Breslow doctrine:
The mission must and will be completed, even as things get worse and worse and worse. And they will.
It sounded nice, but I knew it was wrong the second it published. The Red Sox are plainly looking up. As angry as I am, I can’t argue that. The only question is how high they’re looking, and that’s something we’ll only know in time. We can only live and grow with this team, and my body is ready.
If this was a book series, the Bloom era would have had its own sordid volume and it would end with Breslow’s hiring, likely in the epilogue, as a closing note. The next book would be about rebirth — we’d call it “A Dream of Spring,” maybe — and the opening chapters would likely spend a good deal of time describing the plucky characters growing from the ruins of a previous era. The only difference from most any other story of the type, and it’s a big one, is that the Red Sox’s front office wasn’t attacked from the outside. They blew themselves up. But we survived.
Now, with a “new team smell” squad, there’s a glimmer of hope, because these games are about the players, first and foremost. Baseball is ultimately about unique collisions of skill and moment that make it interesting, and we finally have a team up for the challenge, damn the record. That’s why, for the first time I can remember, I’m not excited about what the Red Sox will do so much as what they can do. The bridge years are over and the bridges have been burned. There’s only one way to go: Forward.