Saturday, May 07, 2011

Sox are out of sync... but haven't we heard this song before?













A big market team was coming off a season where they improbably missed the playoffs. They spent big on players in the off season, shockingly signing one free agent that seemed to be heading to a different playoff bound team.

People started bitching and moaning how it wasn’t fair that they signed all of these great players but made the team the prohibitive pick going into the season.

Then things started going badly. They stumbled out of the gate, lost some embarrassing games and were a losing team in May. The team just didn’t seem to fit together. And the biggest superstar looked like a post steroid shell of his former self. People seemed to take great pleasure in pointing out that they were a great group of players but not a TEAM.

What team am I talking about?
Am I talking about the 2011 Red Sox?
Or the 2009 Yankees?

Remember how the Yankees stubbed their toe out of the gate after picking up Mark Teixiera, CC Sabathia and A. J. Burnett? They had missed the 2008 playoffs and the new pick ups didn’t look like they were going to help. The A-Rod steroid mess was the embarrassment of the off season. The new Yankee Stadium looked like a huge mistake and as late as May 13 they were on the wrong side of .500.

Then they won 10 out of their next 11 and by May 31st were in first place. By July they were in first place for good and in case you didn’t remember, they had a decent end to the year.



It took one positive stretch to put the Yankees back on track and by the end of the year they won their first World Series title in 9 years. (And which everyone reacted “They win it EVERY year!”)

So yeah, the Red Sox look out of sorts right now. Carl Crawford looks rotten now. The bats go dead one day, the pitching stinks the next.

The Red Sox look as out of sync as a Godzilla movie or an Italian Hercules film. But once thinks click, the Sox will go on a nice run and make all of us forget these bad first few weeks.

By the way, when the Yankees were a sub ,500 on May 13, do you know who was tied for first in the AL Central?

The Royals.

The Yankees went 87-42 the rest of the was and won the World Series.
The Royals went 47-81 the rest of the way and barely avoided 100 losses.

There’s a lot of season left.
Just get in sync.

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