After winning 10 of 11 games, the Boston Red Sox have now dropped seven of their last nine and five straight overall. Panic has set in across the Nation.
“Backing into the playoffs is horrible,” some say.
“They’re playing terrible baseball and will get swept out of the first round,” others argue.
When giving the team the eyeball test, these assessments may seem right. But looking at history, how the team has been playing over the past 10 days may not really matter at all.
The most recent history says otherwise, with the 2008 World Series champion Phillies ending the season on a 13-3 run before going 11-3 in the playoffs.
The year before that, however, you may remember a little team known as the Red Sox, who essentially ruled the AL East from start to finish. That Red Sox team was a force to be reckoned with, yet it ended the regular season on a sour note, going 8-7 over its final 15 games, including a four-game skid to the Yankees and Blue Jays.
The 2006 Cardinals were even worse. That team had by far the fewest wins of all playoff teams and ended the season on a 4-10 stretch. That period included a seven-game skid to the Brewers, Astros and Padres – teams that finished a combined 245-241.
That fact didn’t seem to slow the Cards down, however, as they rolled past those Padres, outlasted the Mets in seven games and made short work of the Tigers in the World Series.
Looking all the way back to the strike, only the 1998 champion Yankees played particularly well in the season’s final two weeks. That team went 10-2 down the stretch and won seven straight at one point. The only teams to even come close to that mark were the ’01 Diamondbacks (10-8), ’05 White Sox (9-5), ’04 Red Sox (9-5) and ’03 Marlins (8-6).
Even those teams had their issues. The ’04 Red Sox lost on the final game of the season to Bruce Chen, the Diamondbacks’ success was part of just a 14-14 stretch, while the Marlins’ six losses were all within the division.
(Can a World Series champion really lose a game to Bruce Chen? Is that allowed?)
The two teams that most closely resemble this year’s Red Sox team are the 2002 Angels and the 1995 Braves. The Angels rode a six-game winning streak in mid-September, only to lose eight of the season’s final 13 games. Similarly, the Braves had a five-game streak heading into the final two weeks, but ended the season on a 5-6 stretch.
Other teams proved that they could be flat-out awful and still win the World Series. The out-of-nowhere Marlins in 1997 hardly looked like champs at the end of the regular season, going 2-7 to end the year. That team went on to sweep the Giants in the NLDS, take care of the Braves in six games in the NLCS and prevail over the mighty Indians in seven games in the World Series.
The 2000 Yankees didn’t inspire much hope for a three-peat at the end of the 2000 season, going 2-15 in the final 17 games in a period that included a seven-game losing skid. They still went 11-5 in the playoffs and dominated the Mets in five games.
Those Mets, by the way, finished their season on an 8-1 stretch and a five-game winning streak.
So what does this mean for the 2009 Red Sox? It means that the past two weeks don’t really matter. Jon Lester’s feeling fine, Josh Beckett’s sleeping in his own bed, and the offense, which is putting up 5.5 runs per game in September, is doing just fine.
The final two weeks of the season will go down as a mere footnote in the history books. Next week, the results actually matter.
