Red all over

The pundits said the 2000 Red Sox were supposed to win the World Series. The pundits were smoking crack

by Jason Gay

WHAT THE HECK just happened?

Major League Baseball's regular season is over, and as you read this, your beloved Boston Red Sox are cleaning out their lockers, polishing their golf spikes, and making plans to spend the winter months with their families and favorite cocktail waitresses. Meanwhile, you -- you poor, pathetic sap -- are forced to plop yourself in front of the tube and grudgingly watch the competition -- the dreaded Yankees, the Mariners, the A's (the freakin' A's! ) -- compete for a World Series title.

What went wrong? This, after all, was supposed to be the year -- the end of the drought, the jinx, the Red Sox' World Series curse. The 2000 Sox, we were repeatedly told last spring, were supposed to have the arms, the legs, the firepower, the vets, the kids, the karma, the juju to seize the trophy that has eluded them so resolutely since 1918. Even that puppy-paper-training rag Sports Illustrated thought so: it anointed the hometown nine with the hyperbolic (and, in retrospect, ominous) cover line WHY THE RED SOX WILL WIN THE WORLD SERIES -- REALLY!

Yeah, well, so much for that. Instead of a World Series ring, or anything close, we got a Red Sox season less satisfying than a Dunkin' Donuts bagel, more bizarre than Anne Heche after a long drive in the desert, more dramatically frustrating than Kelsey Grammer's summer turn as Macbeth. Instead of Nomar Garciaparra holding up a championship trophy, we got a guy

named Izzy Alcantara dogging it around the bases like a gimpy mule. Instead of manager Jimy Williams joining the Red Sox' pantheon of bench legends, we got rumors that he'd ditch the Hub for Seattle or Tampa Bay. Instead of newcomer slugger Carl Everett leading us to a title, we got newcomer slugger Carl Everett going bonkers in full public view. Instead of Jeff Fassero, well, we got Jeff Fassero.

It was a season of disappointments, and yet the Sox were in it until the final week of the season. Kind of. The mighty Yankees weren't as mighty as people expected, and the Toronto Blue Jays -- really, did you ever take the Toronto Blue Jays seriously? The final record shows that the Red Sox finished only two and a half games from the playoffs this year. In the course of a 162-game season, that's not missing by much. But if you thought these 2000 Red Sox were really going to take a piece of the World Series pie, well, there's a gentleman named Rick Pitino down the street who's got, um, a championship basketball team to sell you.

OF COURSE we wanted to believe. Yes, we did. Just as we thought The Perfect Storm was going to be an intelligible movie, or that Rudy was going to win Survivor, so we all thought the Red Sox were going to go out and get the big one.

But really, when you think about it, why? The 2000 Red Sox, with a few exceptions, were built just like the 1999 Red Sox, the 1998 Red Sox, and, for that matter, most of the Red Sox teams of the 1990s. That is to say, they were a team of a few select stars (Nomar, the great Pedro Martinez), a handful of budding gems (Everett, relief pitcher Derek Lowe), a posse of overachievers (Jason Varitek, Rich Garces), and more spare parts than Chewbacca stashed aboard the Millennium Falcon. This turnstile approach served the Red Sox well last year, when the team took its Hugo Boss-meets-the-Garment District,
Nomar & the Nobodies-style line-up to the post-season and a first-round playoff win over Cleveland. In retrospect, though, this patchwork team-building philosophy was horribly chancy -- not unlike, say, driving from Boston to Baltimore in your friend's beat-up blue Civic. You might get there, but then again, you might not get anywhere at all.

But this is the way things are under Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette, a perplexing man with an Amherst College pedigree and the wardrobe of a junior-high-school science teacher. As a GM, Duquette combines a Strat-O-Matic addict's eye for number-crunching with the people skills of Smithers, Monty Burns's Boy Friday on The Simpsons. Players are hired and fired strictly on the basis of things like on-base-percentage averages and strikeout-to-bases-on-balls ratios, instead of intangibles like maturity and locker-room presence, and this has made the Red Sox an inward-looking, rudderless bunch. Remember, two years ago the Sox cast aside their fearless leader, Mo Vaughn, who had warred repeatedly (and sometimes immaturely) with Duquette over the zeroes in his paycheck. Vaughn bolted for the antiseptic Anaheim Angels, and the team has lacked an anchor ever since.

In his place, the Sox this year got Everett from the Houston Astros in a trade. At first glance, Everett looks like the Duquette gold standard. He hits like a man possessed -- and indeed, he batted over .300 and led the Red Sox this year in home runs and RBIs. He plays a decent center field. He's a terrific competitor, and off the field, he more or less keeps to himself. There's just one thing about Everett: he's nuts. People around the league knew this (the outfielder had pretty much worn out his welcome in previous stops in New York and Houston), but it took a full-scale public unraveling in front of 33,000 fans at Fenway Park on July 15 (Everett head-butted -- sorry, head-collided with -- an umpire and earned a 10-game suspension) for Boston to figure it out. Everett remained remarkably unrepentant about this incident, and though he continued to hit the bejesus out of the ball, he sulked in the locker room, cursed at reporters, and, in one stretch-drive incident, exploded at teammate Darren Lewis, a soft-spoken role player who is regarded as one of the nicest guys in the game. As blow-ups go, Everett's snapping at Lewis was as indefensible as John Silber's going nutty on Natalie Jacobson -- and once he did it, he lost a lot of supporters.

But this is professional sports, remember, and because Darren Lewis can't hit the high heat into Lansdowne Street as well as Everett can, Red Sox management turned the other cheek. Duquette publicly defended Everett, saying that what really mattered was his performance on the field, and undercutting Jimy Williams (who had backed Lewis) in the process. Duquette's posturing was hypocritical bullshit, of course (if on-field performance were what mattered to him most, Mo Vaughn would still be here). Duquette's real message was that if Carl Everett was, in fact, a lunatic, he was his lunatic, and unlike Vaughn -- whose Red Sox debut had preceded Duquette's hiring -- he would be protected. Fine. I like having Everett in the line-up as much as the next guy. But what price lunacy? As a friend recently yelped into my answering machine, if Everett had helped the Red Sox win just three of those games that he got suspended for because he needed to make his, er, point, the hometown nine would still be playing right now.

All this has to be a strain on a player like the amazing Pedro Martinez, who -- make no mistake, gang -- is the finest Red Sox player since Ted Williams. Martinez is a joy to watch, the best at what he does -- you should crawl over hot coals to see him while he's in his prime -- but he lost six games this year in which his teammates scored a total of seven runs. Meanwhile, Garciaparra fought off a rash of injuries (and an unlikely late-season slump) to win his second consecutive batting title, and has been forced to play with a string of second basemen whose defensive skills are equivalent to those of those life-sized "Herb" placards they used to place outside the checkout lines at Burger King.

Still, somehow the Red Sox managed to stay in the thing. Even when they weren't getting any pitching besides Pedro's. Even when they weren't getting any offense besides Everett's and Garciaparra's. Sure, there were some arid stretches this season when reading Red Sox box scores was like analyzing ASCII computer code -- lots of zeroes, lots of ones. Yeah, they had a lot of guys hurt and used a ton of players. And still, they were within shouting distance of the wild-card slot heading into the final week of September, and Fenway Park remained rowdy and full.

BUT WE should have known better. The 2000 Red Sox were like a pair of dress pants from Banana Republic -- from outward appearances, they looked a lot better than the competition, but upon closer analysis, they had a lot of shortcomings in craftsmanship (and, yeah, they were pretty overpriced). They could hit a little, but they couldn't hit for power. They could run a little, but they couldn't steal bases. They could throw strikes, but aside from Pedro the Great, they had trouble throwing those strikes past (or at least away from) the hitters -- which is, ah, kind of the point.

And that has led to where we are now, which is nowhere. The Red Sox did not win the World Series this year. Now think about it. That was supposed to be a surprise?