As a baseball fan I have come to learn that every fanbase considerers themselves to be the most tortured/screwed over team in sports and that no matter how your season is going it's the worst ever and every other team is the '27 Yankees, but the Red Sox over the last few years have been particularly weird:
The Red Sox are about to finish in last place again, for the fifth time in 11 years. This has been, by any measure, a dreary and disappointing and ultimately lost season at Fenway Park. But when you look at the big picture with them, something really hard to do at the end of a season like this, when you look back at the last 20 years, would you rather be a fan of them, or the Yankees? Or a Dodgers team that has won 110 games this season with two still left to play? Or even the Astros?
The Red Sox might be the most complicated and maddening team in the sport and maybe all of professional sports, because of the way they keep rising and falling. Since 2004 they have won the Series with three different managers, three different general managers and two team presidents. Since the ’18 title, which ended with the Red Sox beating the Dodgers in five games, Dave Dombrowski was fired and Mookie Betts, as talented an all-around player as the Sox have ever had, was traded to -- wait for it -- the Dodgers.
Red Sox fans don't seem to mind this - maybe that comes from having a nice 86-year break between championships - which is totally fine for them but as someone for whom the daily rhythm of Yankees games is a part of my life, I don't think I could deal with the feast or famine mentality, and agree with this fellow Yankees fan:
“I don’t do last place. I’ve had too many empty autumns in the time you’re talking about, but I don’t want to do empty summers, either.”
I know the Yankees are The Evil Empire but to be clear it's not that as a Yankees fan I demand World Series rings; as a Yankees fan I demand relevance as long into the season - ergo, the postseason - as possible every year.
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