Here’s something odd to ponder.
Will fans, media and even perhaps members of the actual team (the ones who have remained at least) look back on the end of the 2011 season, along with all of its traumatic aftermath, and think to themselves, “we’re all better off that things went down the way they did?”
It’s not a normal way to view things that one finds to be so agitating. Make no mistake about it, unless you were one of the people for whom their actual job changed or was at least altered as a result of last season’s Red Sox implosion, then it really wasn’t that bad.
Don’t get me wrong, it was bad. It was the worst way to end a baseball regular season that I can remember. Even worse, was the fallout. Red Sox fans had to endure the departures of long-standing favorites. Symbols of success had become ones of failure. It was a major bummer.
With that in mind, there’s no way it could be looked at in any way as a good thing, right?
There’s no explicit rule about what exactly makes a team mentally strong. There’s no magic formula for toughness. Bobby Valentine has arrived in Fort Meyers and has brought with him a new ban on beer in the clubhouse.
His style is going to differ dramatically from that of the more laid back Terry Francona. Managers of all types have had success in Major League Baseball. Billy Martin was far more high strung than Valentine, yet he found success. Bobby Cox was not known to be the same sort of high-strung presence that Valentine is, but he was also wildly successful.
Tony La Russa was controlling but also very cerebral. Joe Torre offered up a similar personality to that of Terry Francona. All men found varying degrees of success and failure as managers. That’s because there is no magic formula for success.
A lot of it is on the players. Yes, there are the tangible things like maintaining physical conditioning. There’s also an attitude and a group dynamic worth thinking about also. Every team that losses doesn’t lack that cohesiveness, but those that ultimately win often do.
The one thing that’s most apparent from last year’s collapse wasn’t that the players were fat or drunk, it was that the bond—the unity in thought and on-the-field attitude—had somehow become fractured.
This year’s current Red Sox team has yet to play a game or even really play an inning of baseball, but already they’ve displayed something that, from the outside looking in, last year’s team lacked: unity.
There really does seem to be an edge to the team. You can see it in the nearly identical takes from members of last year’s Red Sox when it comes to the more publicized aspects of the collapse.
It goes beyond that, though. In today’s Boston Globe, Red Sox slugger David Ortiz gets noticeably angry at long time Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy over a case of mistaken identity. It seems that Shaughnessy and fellow Globe writer Kevin DuPont had made an online video discussing the 2012 Red Sox, and in that video DuPont drew a comparison between the current David Ortiz and now-retired Red Sox slugger Jim Rice.
The comparison wasn’t all that flattering, and Ortiz was angry about it. It’s not the anger so much as what he says to Shaughnessy at one point in the column. After Shaughnessy inquires as to why Ortiz was so angry, he snaps.
“I am still here for a reason, right? Anybody can have a bad season. I work my ass off to get better every year. I always come hungry and I try to make things happen.”
Clearly Ortiz is fired up. It’s not even March and he’s already pissed off at the press and the fans and anyone who doubts him. This attitude was alluded to by Clay Buchholz over a week ago, when he first showed up in Fort Meyers.
“I think a lot of the guys have come here with a chip on their shoulder about it and we want to do well and we want to go to October this year.”
Is it a stretch to suggest the possibility that a unified and somewhat angry Red Sox team with a chip on their shoulder and something to prove could be a more dangerous team this year? Is it a stretch to also suggest that their manager, who has been absent from a major league dugout for nearly a full decade, also has something to prove? Could that mix result in 5-to-10 more wins?
That’s all it really has to do. The Red Sox, in spite of the highly publicized collapse, finished with 90 wins. A 95-100-win season would likely assure the team of, at the very least, a playoff berth. After that, who knows? Who knows whether or not last season’s collapse was the end of a great era or merely the spark to begin a new one?
As of now, no one knows. We’re going to find out soon enough, though.
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