Sox throw in the towel on 2010
Sunday, August 01, 2010
Allow me to tip my cap to John Henry and Tom Werner.
This is probably the only ownership group in professional sports that can kick its collective fan base in the junk the way it did Saturday afternoon and still sell overpriced grandstand seats at $52 a pop to watch an underachieving team that has all but waved the white flag on its 2010 season. These guys are either utilizing their savvy business acumen or feasting off a fan base too gullible to read between the lines. I'd say it's a little bit of both.
You can’t help but laugh at the sheer hilarity of NESN – the regional cable sports network owned by the Red Sox and Bruins – hosting a one-hour trade deadline special yesterday to announce all the great moves made by everyone else while the team that owns a whopping 80 percent share of its broadcast rights sat back and played pocket pool.
With the team sitting 6 ½ games out of a playoff spot on Saturday morning, the Red Sox decided long ago they weren’t going to deal one of their valued prospects for a three-month rental, yet they still plopped Tom Caron and Nick Cafardo in front of the cameras on Lansdowne Street yesterday to tease fans into thinking something big was brewing on the horizon.
At the end of the day, the Sox were sellers, not buyers, shipping reliever Ramon Martinez to San Francisco, unless you count the acquisition of catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia – a former first-round draft pick who can no longer throw the ball back to the pitcher’s mound – as a sign of proactive movement.
The worst part is the Red Sox have brainwashed their fans into believing that Dustin Pedroia’s eventual return from the disabled list is somehow equal to – if not better than – a trade, which is nothing more than glorified loser talk from a front office unwilling to invest in a team it no longer believes can win.
Getting old players back is nice, but getting new players at the deadline shows a level of commitment often reciprocated on the field. There’s no actual timetable on Pedroia’s return and it’s obvious the Red Sox are incapable of winning with what they have now, so they’re basically willing to risk falling further out of the playoff race in hopes that one player can save the entire team in less than two months.
The bottom line is if the Red Sox believed in this year’s team, they’d have made a move yesterday to strengthen the bullpen or add some pop to the lineup. Cheap rentals were available; the Yankees scooped up sluggers Austin Kearns and Lance Berkman and reliever Kerry Wood without making a significant financial investment or depleting their farm system. Those moves would’ve been much more exciting if it was still 2003, but can Wood be any worse than Hideki Okajima?
While the fans are the real losers in all of this, Henry and Werner come out on top again because they know no matter what they do they can still put asses in the seats, sell membership to “Red Sox Nation” and peddle lousy reality shows without any fear of repercussions.
Instead of getting up off the stool between rounds, the Red Sox flipped a giant middle finger to their fans Saturday and threw in the towel on 2010. What’s worse is they did it live on NESN in front of more than 80,000 viewers – in high-definition, no less.
At least the sight of failure and resignation looked crisp on your plasma TV.
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