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By the time they clashed in the middle of the bright green field of the Dodger Stadium, no Red Sox player thought of the legacy. You dream of winning the World Series at seven. If you have the chance to realize this dream, you celebrate as if you were seven years old.
But the Boston World Series win over the Dodgers in five games has marked more than the culmination of a great season. This is the key moment for one of the most prestigious franchises of baseball. Never before have the Sox won as much as 108 games in one season. Never before had they celebrated a third consecutive division (or league) title. By winning their fourth world series in 15 years, the Sox have established themselves as the best team of their time. This period extends from Curt Schilling's last big year to big things start for Andrew Benintendi.
With the recent winners of the World Series, including the very small Kansas City Royals, the Chicago Cubs and the moribund Houston Astros, the Major League Baseball has seen a lot of parity over the past two decades. With these four rings of the World Series and a significant gap from one year to the next in the sport, it's no exaggeration to call the Red Sox the last decade and a half … a dynasty.
What you do not usually see in a dynasty is a part of losing baseball. Yet that's exactly what Boston has proposed from 2010 to 2015. In six seasons, the Sox have played the playoffs just once. While this playoff spot earned the World Series title, two rounds were played in third place and three in last place. He also laid the foundation for the all-time behemoth that paved the way for the 2018 playoffs. The foundation of this foundation was the 2011 amateur project.
A year after running three years in which they won no less than 95 games each time, the 2010 Red Sox were still a competitive ball club. They won 89 games, but narrowly missed the playoffs. Given that the draft directive is reversed, the Sox may not have seemed very well prepared for the 2011 draft under normal circumstances. But Boston has done something atypical for the franchise this winter, letting several premium players soar for free will.
The result? Four selections in the first 40 places of the repechage, the kind of bonus usually reserved for teams with money, forced to say goodbye to key veterans because they can not afford them. The first four selections were going to make the big leagues with the Sox.
The first of these four big groups was Matt Barnes, a ruthless right-hander who was also a member of his family, who played both at high school and college in neighboring Connecticut. The hope was that Barnes would one day become a top starter. Unfortunately for the Sox, this has never happened. What has happened is that Barnes has become a full member of the market, one of the many fire-breathing right-handers who have made life hell for opposing players this year. Barnes was the seventh artist among the most prolific players of the majors this year, with 36.2% of the batters he faced; Two of the six players above him were also Red Sox, in Craig Kimbrel and Chris Sale's staff. None of the following two Red Sox rookies has had a major impact on the show up to now, even though both have done so far. Henry Owens has suffered defeats between several organizations since he made 16 starts for Boston in 2015 and 2016, while Blake Swihart, a much-vaunted hope, did not do it further than he did. striker number three for the Sox, although it 's a number three grab a ring in the spring.
Boston's two biggest successes in the draw would come with the 40th pick, and then deep down, at 172nd. It was at this point that the Sox wrote two pieces of their young dynamic field and two members of their core Killer B: Jackie Bradley Jr. and Mookie Betts.
Bradley came out of the University of South Carolina as … if not a five-player tool, maybe a six-player tool, once you've included his excellent eyeball. This striking skill did not translate immediately into the big leagues, however. During his first full season, Bradley was the victim of a grueling .198 / .265 / .266 score, managing only one home homeroom in 127 games during this bad 2014 season. The good news is that he simultaneously established himself as a Gold-rated defensive player, playing a strong enough defense to make him a viable starter, even if he never found his shot, and elite if he relearned to crush.
Since then, it's a roller coaster ride. Bradley beat .249 / .335 / .498 as a part-time player in 2015, then exploded for a breakthrough at 26 homers in 2016. Just when it seemed like the Sox could have multi-faceted terror that they were hoping Car Bradley has retreated to reach 11% and 10% less than the league average in 2017 and 2018. But he then found his place in this year's ALCS, scoring two circuits, scoring nine points and winning the honors of the MVP for the series.
Although Betts did not arrive before the fifth round, this was due more to the cautiousness of the rival teams than to his lack of skill. Although tiny compared to modern baseball standards at 5 feet 9 inches and 180 pounds, Betts has accumulated impressive power and a mighty tug on the traditional tools one would expect from a hopeful light and nervous, making him the kind of power-speed-defense perspective that has attracted the attention of his original school, the University of Tennessee. In one of the more modest but punchy financial assertions that the Sox would deploy en route to the 2018 World Series, Boston paid much more than usual levels for the 172nd overall pick, causing Betts to leave Volunteerdom for 750 $ 000.
Betts has done nothing but impress the baseball world ever since. He finished in the top 20 votes for the most valuable player of his first full-league major season (2015), then finished second and sixth in the two following seasons, winning two All-Star Games, winning two gold medals. Gold and a Silver Slugger, reaching 55 home homers, stealing 52 goals and (if you like team dependent stats) 222 points scored and 215 total in two years. All he's done this season has been beaten by .346 / .438 / .640, leading the league on average to batting, slugging and scoring while playing his usual stellar defense, which has given him earned a virtual lock for honors MVP AL. Although Betts did not do much in the playoffs before winning the Boston 5 game, the Sox do not count close to 108 regular season wins without their excellent right field player, one that can enlighten you. on the basketball court, throw a 300 in his role as a professional bowler in the moonlight and torment you in every way imaginable on the baseball field.
Although Betts, Bradley and Barnes eventually become full members of the winning Red Sox teams, Boston still has a long way to go before it can complete a turnaround. This included the last places in 2012, 2014 and 2015, followed by a 2013 season among the winners of the World Series, one of the most abnormal seasons of all time. The most important ranking-dependent score among the three projects that followed these three seasons of last places came in 2015. It was then that Boston, who finished seventh, found the third member of his field Outside Killer B: Andrew Benintendi.
Few players in franchise history have matched the pedigree of Benintendi, the Ohio-born athlete who won National Player of the Year and University Player of the Year awards, as well as the prestigious Golden Spikes from the University of Arkansas. Like Betts, Benintendi had an almost instantaneous impact in the major tournaments, finishing second in the 2017 rookie vote in 2017 before beating a sturdy .290 / .366 / .465 this season for the Sox. He did not play a lot in October, but still managed to make the most memorable playoff, a dive shot that saved the game and slammed the Astros' door into the playoffs. fourth match of the ALCS.
When a big-income team, like the Red Sox, faces several hits in the repechage (and in the international market), the rest of the league can be caught in a world in pain. Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte, and Mariano Rivera were the young local stars who paved the way for greatness in the Bronx; a handful of expensive acquisitions completed what would become the Yankee dynasty of the 1990s.
In August 2015, the recruitment of Dave Dombrowski as President of Baseball Operations was decisive. More than any other leader of the game today, Dombrowski has earned the reputation of connecting to the players he covets and then acquiring them. Not one, not two, not three, but four members of the 2014 Tigers – the team established by Dombrowski prior to his arrival in Boston – became key members of the 2018 Red Sox.
Three of these players, Rick Porcello, J.D. Martinez and David Price, highlighted the financial strength that the Sox could play after bringing together the young players who could bring them back to the glory of the playoffs.
The Red Sox actually acquired Porcello as part of a deal with the Dombrowski Tigers in December 2014, sending the reverse to the star championship player Yoenis Cespedes. He then signed a four-year extension of $ 82.5 million in April, a gesture that seemed dubious at the time given that Porcello had had only one season above his career average. in the major league, after four consecutive years of ERA in the middle-high four. Porcello won the AL Cy Young Award in 2016 and ranks 12th among AL beginners in the Wins Over Substitutes category over the past four seasons.
Martinez's deal looks minimal compared to how elite sluggers have been compensated in the past. But the context and the timing are important here. When Martinez arrived on the open market last season, the traditional big spenders in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco were determined to evade the luxury tax threshold of the league, making distant big contracts even for a big carrier like Martinez. Add to that that the teams had become wiser in the face of the power explosion that hit all baseball (making Martinez's pop a rarer commodity), and that the Red Sox were at the helm. So when the Giant / DH Soldier demanded a six-year contract, Dombrowski simply sat back and waited … and waited … and waited … and finally got his man on February 26 of this year, well beyond the time when the marquee was free agents usually sign. The cost? Five years and $ 110 million, an agreement that seems like a good deal after Martinez almost won the Triple Crown in his first season in Boston.
It is likely that Dombrowski outbid his nearest competitor with a decent margin when he launched a gigantic seven-year deal worth $ 217 million at Price after the 2015 season. Of course, Price was the Skyscraper of a left-handed mid-90s, winner of Cy Young at the height of his career. But he had also had a history of struggles as a starter in the playoffs. In addition, the baseball world, which was increasingly analytical, was beginning to understand how even the best launchers could be time bombs of injury and wear, and how seven-year agreements for weapons were often a recipe for disaster. Dombrowski still pulled the trigger. And after tough sessions in this year's 2016 and this year's ALDS playoffs against the Yankees, Price has finally found his pace. He has won his last three postseason starts this year, crowned by a jewel in one inning and seven innings in the global series that has reprimanded the recent trend of quick hooks for the playoff debutants.
That's not all the history of the 2018 Red Sox, of course. If the Sox had not been too aggressive at the signing of Cuban prospect Yoan Moncada, they might not have the means to acquire Sale, the stick as / Game 5, the final hammer whose staff pitching needed. If the Blue Jays had not been in the middle of the losing season, the Sox would have had to pay more than a mere 23-year-old hope to get the services of a guy who would have incredibly muscled his way to third place in the formation of Boston, throw three huge circuits home from the World Series and become the MVP of the autumn classic. Damn, maybe the Sox's will never come here without the contributions of rookie manager Alex Cora, a $ 800,000 a year robbery for a team full of heavily paid stars, but that nonetheless contributes to essential to Boston's success.
Despite all the success that the Royals have had a few years ago and that A have had from time to time in recent years, there is no more scary prospect in baseball than seeing one of the financial superpowers of this sport score when acquired. development of young talents. Bradley, Betts and Benintendi set the stage for Boston to be great again. A ton of money, a one – stop shop and (as is always the case with any winner of the World Series) a little luck has allowed the rest to arrive.
While six of the nine novice players are still in their twenties and few notable free agents are about to leave, the Red Sox dynasty could well add another chapter in 2019.
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