_PNG.png)
There Is A Lot To Love About Boston Sports
Negativity gets attention. The Boston sports media has picked up on this trend and they’ve capitalized on it.
It seems like the negative story is always getting the most attention around Boston sports teams, especially the Red Sox, even when they are doing well. Heck, two of the most prominent stories around the Red Sox during the 2017 season were how “terrible” David Price is and that the team supposedly wasn’t likeable, both of which I completely disagreed with.
Part of what makes it so bad in this market is that many of the people who cover the teams are either fans themselves or very much in touch with the thoughts and opinions of Boston fans.
We Boston sports fans have a reputation as being annoying and entitled. As a matter of fact, it even showed during the recently-ended J.D. Martinez saga. The longer that Martinez remained unsigned, the more fed up that fans became with the whole thing. The man who began the offseason as a must get for the Red Sox eventually became “too soft” and “undeserving” to play in Boston. Like it was unreasonable for the best offensive player on the free agent market to want to be paid as such. In the end, it all turned out to be a negotiating tactic and both sides got what they wanted: the Red Sox, a slugger for the middle of their lineup and Martinez, to be paid thusly.
There seems to be this attitude where we feel like we’re so great that everyone should want to play here and as soon as they get here, they need to put up the best stats of their careers and then some. Because what else would happen when you play in the great city of Boston, right?
This attitude has tarnished the general consensus on some really good and even great players that have played for the Red Sox: J.D. Drew, Pablo Sandoval, Hanley Ramírez, Carl Crawford, John Lackey, Adrián González, and David Price, just to name a few. And people will be ready to add J.D. Martinez to this list as soon as he has an 0 for 10 slump.
Given, Sandoval and Crawford didn’t perform well at all during their time in Boston. But they were both at least above average players before they came to Boston and were both ruined by the time that they left, largely because “they couldn’t handle Boston.”
But all the others on this list take a lot more heat than they deserve. Drew was a steady and above average hitter and fielder who had a huge moment in the 2007 ALCS with his Game 6 grand slam. His only knock is that he was soft-spoken and wasn’t flashy.
Hanley has not been nearly as bad as people like to make it seem he has been. It started poorly with a failed left field experiment which led to an injury. And injuries have been the biggest knock on him. When he’s healthy, he performs well and is a really fun player to watch, because he has fun. Also, he gives a lot of time to fans before games or during spring training.
John Lackey had a bad year, a poor year, a missed year because of injury, and then a year and a half that were really good and included a World Series win in which he won the clinching Game 6. It’s always been my opinion that if you’re an instrumental part of a World Series victory, then your contract was worth it.
Adrián González produced MVP-like numbers in 2011, but was part of the September Collapse team that year. The only “problem” with him was that he said that it wasn’t in God’s plan for the Red Sox to make the playoffs that year. To this day, I still don’t understand the problem with that comment.
Finally, David Price. The guy has a $217 million contract, so people expect him to go 35-0 with a 0.20 ERA. Obviously, that’s not gonna happen. But he deserves so much more respect than he’s gotten in his two years in Boston. Before coming to Boston, he was known as one of the best clubhouse guys in all of baseball, so why would that be any different now? Well, it’s not. The media would just like to make you think that it is. David Price is a great pitcher who is coming back healthy this year and I am very confident that he will get back to his old form.
Every time I see another article, tweet, or video that is being needlessly negative, I am tempted to give up on being a Red Sox fan. I love baseball and I love the Red Sox too much to ever actually do this. But the negativity by the media just gets to me sometimes and something needs to change. Somehow. There’s a lot to love about the Red Sox and I’m choosing to focus on those things.