Almost every other Major League Baseball team would have wanted to trade places with the Boston Red Sox over the last 10 years.
MLB.com’s Will Leitch ranked the Red Sox No. 2 on his list of the most successful MLB teams of the 2010s decade Wednesday. Boston was among the seven teams that won World Series in the last 10 years and among the 12 teams that appeared in the Fall Classic. However, the titles the Red Sox won in 2013 and 2018 put them in a higher echelon than other clubs, who had more than the 4 playoff appearances Boston boasted between 2010 and 2019.
“The Red Sox fluctuated wildly this decade,” Leitch wrote. “They were either dominant — like they were in 2018, which, in my opinion, was the best individual team of the decade — or in some sort of dramatic freefall. On the whole, though, the Red Sox reached heights in the decade that most teams could only dream of. And they had that 2013 season that may have ended up nearly as fun and emotional as 2004 was.”
Leitch only ranked the San Francisco Giants, who won three World Series and reached the playoffs four times, higher than the Red Sox. Arguing Leitch should have ranked Boston first because San Francisco enjoyed all of its success in the first half of the decade seems futile because it has the edge in championships.
Nevertheless, there’s no denying the 2010s were better to the Red Sox than they were to just about the entire remainder of the field.
