Sagging Sox

The 1997 Red Sox are the best-hitting team in the major leagues. But they may be facing the grimmest future.

by Tom Scocca

MO VAUGHN

FOR A WHILE, in the nightcap of last Tuesday's doubleheader with the Yankees, it looked as if a miracle were in the works for the Red Sox. Not a glorious, season-saving miracle -- which had been ruled out once and for all by the Sox' loss in game one -- but a minor miracle, the kind you can put in the bank for next season.

Robinson Checo was looking good.

On the day the team was eliminated, the same day the Globe reported that Mo Vaughn wanted to leave town, the Sox needed something to go right. The major-league debut of the 26-year-old Dominican right-handed pitcher -- who'd been signed for $3 million from the Hiroshima Toyo Carp in December -- had been so long delayed (visa problems, unexplained absences, a toe blister) that he had acquired an air of grand implausibility, like Sports Illustrated's fictitious Mets pitching prospect Sidd Finch. The more the Sox front office hinted they had something marvelous under wraps, the less likely it seemed that they did.

But there Checo was, in the Bronx, alive and real and going after the defending world champions. Thick gold chain flopping around his neck with each pitch, he set down the first three batters in order, and the next three. He fanned Cecil Fielder on a high fastball; he backed Charlie Hayes off the plate with an inside pitch, then struck him out on the outside corner. He hopped around in triumph and swaggered to the dugout.

The necklace was gone by the bottom of the third inning, at the umpires' behest. The mystique lasted only slightly longer. Checo took the mound in the fourth with a 2-0 lead, and immediately started missing the strike zone. Rey Sanchez blasted a 3-1 pitch off the top of the wall for a double, then Mike Stanley, the former Red Sock, followed with another, a moon shot off the fence in deepest center field. An inning later, obscure Yankees Andy Fox and Scott Pose had doubled and tripled, respectively; New York had the lead, and Checo gave way to mop-up pitcher Joe Hudson.

So went the last bright chance for the '97 Red Sox. It was by no means a disgraceful outing; Checo pitched aggressively and showed a strong arm, and he didn't walk anyone. Plenty of successful big-league pitchers have started worse. But he didn't prove that he belongs in the Sox' starting rotation next year. Once again, in a season built on hype and optimism, the Red Sox tried for easy success and came up losers.

If Sox fans are easily deceived -- and there's plenty of evidence that they are -- they could look at this year's squad and see the foundation of a better future. There's the .292 team batting average, an outstanding infield, and Nomar Garciaparra, the shoo-in AL Rookie of the Year. Factor in the wealth of young minor-league talent at Pawtucket and a promising relief pitcher in Tom "Flash" Gordon, and you've got . . . a fourth-place club. As things now stand, the Red Sox are four front-line players shy of contending for the pennant, and they're one player -- namely, Mo Vaughn -- away from the abyss. And the current administration, out of either cheapness or cussedness, seems satisfied with that.

The four front-line players the Sox need are the same ones they've needed all season long: two starting pitchers, a left fielder, and a center fielder. The pitching problem has been obvious -- the Sox haven't begun to recover from the loss of Roger Clemens. Even if he'd stayed fat and gone 16-15, the Sox could have built their staff around him. Instead, they went with a string of pitchers whose abilities were mostly hypothetical, gambling on damaged arms (Brett Saberhagen, Butch Henry, Steve Avery) and erratic youngsters (Aaron Sele, John Wasdin), till finally, with the season in ruins, they turned to Checo. Adding a pair of proven major-league winners would be expensive, but it would save the Sox from holding so many midseason pitching auditions.

Fixing the outfield is just as pressing. Troy O'Leary, with a .318 average and 80 runs batted in, is now officially a very good second-rank right fielder. Pennants have been won with guys like O'Leary in the starting lineup. But not with the likes of center fielder Darren Bragg, or left fielder and alleged wife-beater Wil Cordero. Bragg is tough to criticize; he's fairly fast, fairly good with the glove, and a fairly good hitter. But if the Sox mean to challenge the Orioles and Yankees -- well, the Orioles have Brady Anderson in center, and the Yanks have Bernie Williams. And the Atlanta Braves have Kenny Lofton, backed up by prodigy Andruw Jones. Fairly good doesn't wash. Meanwhile Cordero, criminal problems aside, is just a pellet. He can hit some, but his fielding is terrible -- though his habit of lunging picturesquely after the balls he misplays has led some sportswriters to praise his defensive abilities.

There's no reason to think the Sox will make the necessary upgrades. The teams they're chasing have built up the biggest payrolls in the game, but Sox general manager Dan Duquette congratulates himself on his austerity. While the contenders are spending piles of money so that they may rake in piles more, the Sox are maintaining, by baseball standards, a tight little budget. Team president John Harrington is not running a team of his own, for personal glory, but is managing an asset of the Yawkey estate; his job is simply to maximize the team's market value for its future sale. That, in turn, means convincing the public that the team needs a lucrative new ballpark before it can spend on quality to compete with the top teams in the league.

Which brings us to Mo Vaughn. The Red Sox' alienated first baseman has announced that he wants out of town because the team won't offer him $10 million a year to stay. From the standpoint of fiduciary responsibility and public relations, the team is making the clever move, pitting itself against a 29-year-old who thinks it's beneath him to accept a mere $8.5 million. The infinitely manipulable Fenway fans started booing him; the Globe's Will McDonough, butt-snuffler to local sports owners, helped Harrington and Duquette's cause last week with a screed calling Vaughn fat, greedy, and overrated.

But the reason Vaughn is throwing a tantrum is that he's right. He's worth every penny of $10 million in today's baseball market. He is a dominant, magnetic, game-breaking hitter, one of the five best in the sport; when he crouches over the plate, with the outcome on the line, time hangs suspended. Nobody else on the Sox compares.

Flush with arrogance over that .292 team batting average, Sox fans and Sox management seem to think they'll do fine without Vaughn. They thought they'd get by without Clemens, too. Think again. Reggie Jefferson, he of the .327 average, would be a .280 hitter if he, rather than Mo, were the guy opposing pitchers bear down on. Nomar Garciaparra? Ask the Orioles how much good it did them to have the game's greatest shortstop during the lean years between the time they hounded Eddie Murray out of town and the time they signed Rafael Palmeiro. A player as good as Vaughn is irreplaceable. The Sox should be crawling to him on their knees.

Instead, they're jerking him around. It's not that they can't pay the price -- a team that could blow $4.85 million on the washed-up Steve Avery this year could certainly scrape together an extra $1.5 million for Mo. But Vaughn might anchor a solid, successful team at a time when management insists it can't afford one. Until the fans give up on Fenway, Harrington and Duquette intend to field a team of third-raters, cripples, and rookies. As the fans go along, booing Mo, they'd better pray that Checo comes through. Before long, the erstwhile Carp might be all they've got.

The Sox-Yankees doubleheader was notable for one other reason: of 57,545 potential spectators, 29,400 -- 51 percent -- did not go. At this late-season matchup between once-bitter rivals, half the seats went unsold: foul balls rattled around empty grandstands, and the surly throngs of yesteryear were nowhere to be seen. Why? Because nothing was at stake. The Yankees were all but assured of a playoff berth, while the Sox, out of contention, had left nothing to play for.

Despite -- or because of -- expanded playoffs and interleague competition, the late season is rife with meaningless games. Baseball's next gimmick, a radical realignment of the leagues, could fix that. But only if the realignment is radical enough.

Consider a new American League:

Division A	Division B
Baltimore	Anaheim
Yankees	Milwaukee
Seattle	Detroit
Cleveland	Toronto
Boston	Minnesota
White Sox	Kansas City
Texas	Oakland

The divisions are based on the teams' 1996 records, with the better half of the league going into A, the worse into B. Most, if not all, games would be intradivisional.

At the end of the season, the winner of the A division would play the winner of the National League's A division in the World Series. No more wild cards, no more league championship series.

Instead, in other postseason action, the top two teams in the B division would play the lowest two teams in the A division, with the losers relegated to B for the next season and the winners promoted to A.

As of last week, the Red Sox would have been neck-and-neck with the White Sox, struggling to stay out of the elimination playoffs, while the Yankees would have been desperately trying to catch the Orioles. Over in the second tier, Milwaukee and Detroit would have been battling for the right to advance to the big time.

No more would the Harringtons and Duquettes, or the likes of Milwaukee owner Bud Selig, have to whine about the high price of free agents. The small-market teams, the feckless and rebuilding teams, could retreat to the B division, and develop young, cheap players to their hearts' content. If they did it well enough, they'd earn a shot at the big time. If not, at least they wouldn't clutter up the good teams' schedules.