The Boston Red Sox have truly been baseball’s biggest enigma over the past decade.
When you expect them to be good, they’re bad. Think about that ‘Best Team Ever’ Boston Herald cover from January of 2011. The team went on to win just 69 games that season, finishing dead last in the American League East.
But when you expect them to be bad, they’re good. The season after that implosion, the Red Sox stormed back and won the World Series with an incredibly random collection of bargain-bin players.
And then there’s last year’s team. Boston traded away Mookie Betts ahead of the COVID-shortened 2020 season and predictably laid an egg, going 24-36. The expectation was that it would take them a few years to turn things around and they came into the 2021 season with lower odds to make the playoffs than the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
Instead, the Red Sox put together a 92-70 record and reached the American League Championship Series. In very 2013 Sox fashion, their WAR leader was Enrique Hernandez, a player they signed out of the bargain bin the previous winter.
Of course, the big addition for Boston between 2020 and 2021 wasn’t Hernandez, it was actually the return of Alex Cora, who was suspended for the 2020 season because of his role in the Houston Astros cheating scandal. You can do the math in your head on what’s more than likely going on here.
Anyways, what’s next? The Sox have expectations this year, so is it time for another implosion? Or can Cora squ …
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Author: Cam Lewis / Blue Jays Nation