White Flag: It's time to close the book on the 2024 Red Sox
Fourteen days ago, I wrote an article saying that the Red Sox were in a perfect position to make a postseason push. They were getting healthier, their schedule was easing up, and the team they were chasing, the Kansas City Royals, were about to face a gauntlet of playoff teams.
And yet, despite the Royals dropping seven games in a row, the Red Sox not only failed to make a postseason push, they completely self-destructed. The Red Sox have lost 11 out of their last 14 games, dropping them all the way down to a lowly .500 record. A year that promised to be different is going the exact same way as the last three seasons: An embarrassing and pathetic second-half collapse.
Now, I have plenty of thoughts on what precisely has gone wrong, and I will dive into all of it during the post-season autopsy. Every part of this team needs to be questioned, from the leadership in the clubhouse to Craig Breslow’s disastrous trade deadline to, yes, even Alex Cora. But above all else, this collapse is once again due to negligent ownership that gave a half-hearted attempt at building a roster.
The Red Sox easily could have competed this year. If they had signed a right-handed bat, gone after an actual top-end starting pitcher, supplemented their middle-relief corps: They may not have won the World Series, but they would have been better equipped to handle the inevitable ups-and-downs and injuries of a baseball season.
Yet the Red Sox chose to sign only Lucas Giolito and Cooper Criswell, with only Criswell making it to Opening Day. Nobody could have expected the avalanche of April injuries that wiped out Trevor Story, Triston Casas, Garrett Whitlock and others, but due to their lack of top-end depth, the Red Sox were forced to desperately scour the waiver wire for the likes of Dominic Smith and Garrett Cooper and turn to Josh Winckowski to fill rotation holes. That is not who contending teams should be playing on a regular basis.
The Red Sox have hidden behind the curtain of “the north star” and “better days ahead”, but those days are over. Rafael Devers, Casas, Tanner Houck and Jarren Duran are all in their prime. Roman Anthony, Kyle Teel, Marcelo Mayer, and Kristian Campbell, who were recently ranked top 26 prospects by Baseball America, are waiting in the wings at Triple-A. There is no excuse for waiting around. The time to win is now.
We as Red Sox fans, especially those of us who live and die with every game, deserve better. We deserve to have a team that can compete on the field and financially with the other big market teams and doesn’t spend the majority of the season hovering around the 500 mark. There are numerous things that went wrong with the 2024 Red Sox, but the first step to getting back on track in 2025 is for ownership to stop playing us for fools.
