The big catch phrase at the time? We can win 100 games!
Big deal. Sure, people talked about winning it all and getting better and doing what they had to do to get ready for the regular season. But everybody talks about that in spring training, even the Mets.
The Red Sox seemed to almost take their success as a given. They were so good, so stacked that as long as they stayed healthy, they would win 100 games. Like that would cement their status among baseball's elite teams.
That's not a bad goal to have, for if you win 100 games, a playoff berth is all but assured and you probably have loads of confidence heading into the postseason. But don't get all fat and happy before you take that first step. It's nice to be confident. You need that confidence to do great things. Just temper it a tad. The players never did.
In a backward way, the remarkable four months that the Red Sox had in the middle of the season was their downfall. That mind-set of supreme dominance returned and there was a sense that, well, they had already met their biggest challenge. Remember, they were 2-10. And to a man, they would remind you.
What a tale of triumph, right? The rest is for the history books, right?
No, their biggest challenge was the one that loomed if they ever took their eye off the prize. It was one that both general manager Theo Epstein and manager Terry Francona said could emerge if the players didn't get their act together, even amid some of the winning streaks. If you take your mind off the matter at hand, just for a moment, the opportunity to succeed could be lost. And it was.
There was so much talk about how the Red Sox just needed to win eight or nine games this month to get in, rather than the paltry seven they produced. It is one thing to slump, but what made this one take on mythic proportions? It was because the players never had the right mind-set to begin with, and that's not something you can just conjure up in the 150th game of the year.
Francona tried, but the seed had been planted during those overly confident days in February, when a star-studded cast eyed the season ahead as a cakewalk. Good thing the Sox move to a new spring training complex next year. It's not on a dead end.
