Assessing the 2010 Red Sox

Well, here we are. The American League Championship Series is upon us. And our Local 9, sadly, are not partaking. But why? What went wrong?

Too much. WAY too much

If you looked at the 2010 Red Sox batting ranks amongst the league, 20 years from now, without knowing what players were on the team, you might think, "This is a pretty good offensive team." And you would be right, they were pretty good. They ranked in the top 5 in the MLB in Average (.268 - T5th), Slugging (.451 - 2nd), OBP (.339 - T3rd), Runs (818 - 2nd), and HR (211 - 2nd). This was supposed to be the weakness of the team. Needless to say, they far surpassed their expectations.

But in baseball, as Sox fans are rediscovering this year, hitting the ball will not solely get you to the playoffs. Something The Nation does know something about, though, is things not going the way we planned (Aaron Boone, Bill Buckner, can I stop now?). This year, there were 3. Let us take a painful look at where it all went sour.

Subject numero uno: Injuries spreading like the 1918 flu epidemic.

I would rather not list every player who visited the disabled list this season. It's rather sickening (flu epidemic...get it?). But come on! FIVE starting position players missed significant amount of time this season. Beltre then decided one outfielder wasn't enough, as we said goodbye to Jeremy Hermida (broken ribs and all). Not to mention Mike Lowell and Jason Varitek also falling victim to injury. That's 8 (is this a dream?) position players, out of 13, from the opening day roster who went on the DL.

That in itself is enough for any team to have some issues, so I'll shorten the pitchers disabled list by saying 3 of the 6 (we love you, Knucklehead) starters went on the DL. The bullpen had bigger problems than that.

Which is a great segue into topic two: The bullpen.

Papelbon was good when he made saves, and terrible when he blew them. Bard was great. But the trio of holdovers from '09, Okajima, Ramirez, and Delcarmen, failed us all. Scrapping for relievers in the minor leagues, though some were productive, is not a recipe for success for a team in the American League East.

And our third issue of 2010 was the story line of this past offseason: run prevention defense.

...it never happened.

Adrian Beltre and Marco Scutaro were, for lack of a better term, a train wreck on the left side of the infield. A combined 37 errors doesn't exactly correlate to Gold Glove stature. Sure, there were plays where we said, "Wow, Nick Green would not have made that play". But sometimes, we had to just shake our heads and look away; we couldn't be terribly aggravated with them; their bats were producing.

Not to mention our projected left and center fielders (wherever they were going to play..) opted not to come play with us this year.

With all that said, we should still thank this team. In some miraculous way, they managed to contend right until the end (still pissing us off, nonetheless). Kudos, 2010 Red Sox. Now, Theo, please make this an exciting winter.