The Year after the Year after Next Year

Boston Red Sox 2006

Copyright © 2006 Timothy Horrigan

Extra! September 1, 2006: Traditionally, the Red Sox are supposed to fall apart in October.  In 2006, the Sox fell apart in August instead.  
    Things looked very promising indeed until a five-game series with the Yankees in mid-August.  All summer, the Sox and the Yankees had been a game or two apart, trading first and second place in the East back and forth.  But then, when the much-anticipated August showdown finally happened, the Yankees won all five games in a row.
    The series began with a bizarre doubleheader on Friday, August 18th.  Game 1 was a 12-4 Yankees win, which lasted 3:55.  The nightcap was even longer.  The Yankees and Red Sox needed 4:45 to reach a 14-11 result in the Yankees' favor.  This was the longest 9-inning game (in terms of time elapsed) ever.
  1. Fri. 08/18, Gm 1: NYY 12, BOS 4
  2. Fri. 08/16, Gm 2: NYY 14, BOS 11
  3. Sat. 08/19: NYY 13, BOS 5
  4. Sun. 08/20: NYY 8, BOS 5
  5. Mon. 08/21: NYY 2, BOS 1
The Yankees series was followed by more defeats.  At the end of the month the Sox were still in second place, but a full 8 games behind the Yanks.  Even the Wild Card was almost entirely out of reach: the Red Sox were 6 games behind the defending champion White Sox.
    The losses were not the worst thing to happen to the Red Sox, however.  The team's leader, the great slugger David Ortiz, missed several games while being treated for a mysterious heart condition.  He was rumored to be about to retire, at the age of 30. His health problems seemed almost minimal compared to those of pitcher Jon Lester: Lester was diagnosed with cancer of the lmph nodes (more specifically, anablastic large cell lymphoma.)

(The rest of this page is as of Opening Day 2006...)

   

Back before the 2005 season, I put up a page about the then World Champion Red Sox. I revised it a few times over the course of the season. It's still on my site, if you really care:

My 2005 Red Sox didn't get a whole of hits, but I may as well put up a 2006 page.

For now I will just say that the 2006 season got off to a bad start. On Halloween night 2005, a man in a gorilla suit was observed driving out of the executive parking lot at Fenway Park. The gorilla turned out to be wunderkind General Manager Theo Epstein, who had just resigned.

A few weeks later, the team failed to re-sign the best leadoff hitter in baseball (and a great personality): CF Johnny Damon. He signed with the hated Yankees, and yes, he did have to cut his hair and shave off his beard. (And as always he showed a great sense of theatre: he arrived in New York sporting his old Jesus look, and his first stop was at a midtown hair salon. His second stop was his official press conference: he made his first appearance in pin stripes sporting a very nice layered do and ultra-cool Elvis Presley sideburns. George Steinbrenner later commented, “He looks like a Yankee, he sounds like a Yankee and he is a Yankee.” )

When the actual season starts in the spring of 2006, someone will be playing center field in Fenway Park. No one knows who that will be.

Theo was initially replaced with Theo-By-Committee:. The Sox named two very earnest and very Theo-like young men as co-GMs. Both of them are from Grafton County, NH: Jed Hoyer grew up in Plymouth and Ben Cherington in Lebanon. (I lived in Lebanon myself many years, and my ex used to be one of his mother's co-workers.) Both are former high school and college baseball players who went into the front-office side of the pro game after school. One odd piece of trivia: Cherington is the grandson of the late poet Richard Eberhart.

The Theo-by-Committee arrangement was reminiscent of Theo's controversial Bullpen-by-Committee experiment in 2003. (His basic idea was that the traditional concept of using your best reliever as a “closer” to be used only in “save situation” was counterproductive, since you were saving him for a situation where he wasn't really needed. By definition, a “save situation” occurs when your team is already ahead in the 9th inning. The Sox tried using the best relievers in “middle relief” situations, before the 9th inning, as well as in “non-save” situations when the team was tied or losing. Although the Bullpen-by-Committee experiment was interesting, Theo eventually made a mid-season trade with the Arizona Diamondbacks to pick up a closer, the exciting albeit erratic Byung-Hyun Kim.)

In mid-January, Theo suddenly returned. (There were unconfirmed rumors that he had never even left in the first place.) Hoyer was demoted to Assistant GM. Cherington made a lateral move to Vice President/ Player Personnel. Aside from Damon's departure, Cherington and Hoyer performed pretty well in Theo's absence (if it was indeed an absence.) Their most interesting move was the free agent signing of a brilliant (though injury-prone) young pitcher, Josh Beckett. (This is the same Josh Beckett who, in 2003, became the World Series MVP when he led the Florida Marlins to victory over the Yankees.)

The three GMs did manage to find enough players to fill up the roster in time for Opening Day (Monday, April 3.) The team was a little short of outfielders and they traded the popular and reliable pitcher Bronson Arroyo to Cinicinnati for a talented but erratic outlfielder named Wily Mo Peña.

The Opening Day roster was as follows:

Go Sox! Active Roster
  Pitchers B/T Ht Wt DOB  
  19 Josh Beckett R/R 6-5 220 05/15/80
  30 Matt Clement R/R 6-3 210 08/12/74
  55 Lenny DiNardo L/L 6-4 190 09/19/79
  29 Keith Foulke R/R 6-0 210 10/19/72
  58 Jonathan Papelbon R/R 6-4 230 11/23/80
  54 David Riske R/R 6-2 180 10/23/76
  38 Curt Schilling R/R 6-5 235 11/14/66
  37 Rudy Seanez R/R 5-11 200 10/20/68
  51 Julian Tavarez L/R 6-2 195 05/22/73
  50 Mike Timlin R/R 6-4 210 03/10/66
  49 Tim Wakefield R/R 6-2 210 08/02/66
  Catchers B/T Ht Wt DOB  
  77 Josh Bard S/R 6-3 210 03/30/78
  33 Jason Varitek S/R 6-2 230 04/11/72
  Infielders B/T Ht Wt DOB  
  23 Alex Cora L/R 6-0 200 10/18/75
  11 Alex Gonzalez R/R 6-0 200 02/15/77
  3 Mark Loretta R/R 6-0 185 08/14/71
  25 Mike Lowell R/R 6-3 210 02/24/74
  84 J.T. Snow L/L 6-2 210 02/26/68
  20 Kevin Youkilis R/R 6-1 220 03/15/79
  Outfielders B/T Ht Wt DOB  
  12 Coco Crisp S/R 6-0 180 11/01/79
  7 Trot Nixon L/L 6-2 210 04/11/74
  15 Wily Mo Pena R/R 6-3 245 01/23/82
  24 Manny Ramirez R/R 6-0 200 05/30/72
  39 Adam Stern L/R 5-11 180 02/12/80
  Designated Hitters B/T Ht Wt DOB  
  34 David Ortiz L/L 6-4 230 11/18/75
 
 



   

As it turned out, not unlike 2004, the Sox won the World Series in 2005. However, it was the Other Sox in 2005: the Chicago White Sox.

The Chisox have been an even more accursed team than their Bostonian rivals with the similar name. They hadn't won a World Series since 1917. When the White Sox lost the 1919 series, several players, including the great Shoeless Joe Jackson (the best ballplayer never to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame) were prosecuted for throwing the series. (Just to add an irrelevant digression, the 4th and final game of the 2005 Series was preceded by the introduction of a “Latino Legends” team. One of the honorees was the legendary pitcher Fernando Valenzuela — arguably the third or fourth-greatest player not to make it to Cooperstown.)

The Bosox had a good but not great 2005 season. They ended the regular season with a series against the Yankees, and both teams finished 95-77. New York was awarded the division title on a technicality. The first round Division series between Chicago and Boston was generally well-played and exciting (aside from a 14-2 blowout in game 1), but the White Sox swept all three games.

Box Scores:

Some Red Sox links:

Official Red Sox web site: http://redsox.mlb.com  

Boston.com's Red Sox page: http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox  

Baseball-Reference.com Red Sox page: http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/BOS

CBS Sportsline Red Sox Page: http://cbs.sportsline.com/mlb/teams/page/BOS



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