By then, the Red Sox were being called the best team in baseball, or close to it. Except the A\u2019s\u2014who, for their part, had finished the month of July with a lowly record of 5\u201319\u2014won the next game, too. And then the Toronto Blue Jays took the next three, handing the Red Sox their second five-game losing streak of the season. The bleeding wasn\u2019t done: although the Red Sox beat the Blue Jays on Thursday to avoid a sweep, they got pummelled the next day by the Pittsburgh Pirates, who sat last in the National League Central. Teams get hot, then cold; they get lucky, then unlucky; injuries always play a part. Records rarely paint a full picture of a season. But normally the thermodynamics of a baseball season find some sort of homeostatic balance. If a team is really good, it is not also really bad, unless there is some big event or clear explanation.<\/p>\n
Surely, the postmortems of the team this fall will tell a story, with compelling causal details. Caleb Durbin started working with a private hitting coach. The video co\u00f6rdinators made a hype video of the fans at Fenway Park, to remind the players of what the stadium sounded like when the team was winning. Jarren Duran shouted at Willson Contreras at the end of an inning for no good reason. Credit might be given to Ceddanne Rafaela\u2019s cleats and arm sleeves, as bright as a French\u2019s yellow mustard bottle.<\/p>\n
Maybe it will all add up to something that sounds plausible. And yet it seems to me that the 2026 Red Sox cannot be made to make any sense at all.<\/p>\n
True, for most of the first three months of the season, the Red Sox were probably better than their record. Before their turnaround, they were on pace to win only around a third of their games, but their expected wins\u2014calculated using a formula that relates the number of runs they scored to the runs they gave up\u2014would suggest a five-hundred team, a reflection of some bad luck. Play enough games, and the luck swings; balls that were caught in April started falling. You could justify, too, some of the team\u2019s more recent cooling. Durbin played through the hot streak with a dislocated left pinkie; when he came to bat on Thursday, the finger poked through his torn left batting glove\u2014a sign that the swelling was becoming harder to tolerate. The bullpen, which had been baseball\u2019s best for a long stretch, was wearing down; eventually, the cost of so many innings comes due. And so on. The Red Sox were never as bad as they looked, and never as good. Their over-all record right now\u2014the good and the bad jammed together\u2014may tell us who they really are and who they\u2019ve actually been all along. (They\u2019re currently projected to win around eighty-seven or eighty-eight games\u2014right around where many analysts\u2019 models had them during spring training.)<\/p>\n