COMMENT
It was a good weekend for the Red Sox. Relatively speaking, of course, this is a time in their history when real emotion can be evoked amid games that don’t matter. When injury, the annual spring training mood killer, has already hit hard.
Lucas Giolito is scheduled to get a second opinion Monday on his right elbow, which was reported last week to have a partially torn UCL. Good news would be, what? A few months off? If you go for it, is the recovery season coming despite the constant worries, will the surgery be necessary anyway?
I’m not a doctor, but it seems like a bad prescription. Better to focus on an actual positive.
The sort in Red Sox history that made their presence in the Dominican Republic Series possible. That made it as important as it did.
Baseball matters in the Dominican Republic. Specifically, Red Sox baseball, given that two of the country’s five Hall of Famers — Pedro Martinez and David Ortiz — are iconic here and there, Adrian Beltre’s Hall of Fame journey really began in Boston and even Juan Marichal made a cameo late in his career in red. (Before you ask, Vlad Guerrero is the fifth.)
When MLB played exhibitions on the island in 2000, the Red Sox were sent. Pedro and brother Ramon each pitched a scoreless inning, and Carl Everett hit a light-tower homer.
Fun fact: The second of two games with Houston this spring was won with a two-run homer by a little-known minor leaguer, a month after his MLB debut and about a decade from his place in Red Sox history. Julio Lugo.
The joy of it all came from the television screen this weekend, in horns and happy faces. The Red Sox players loved it. The Rays players loved it. Any of us who have spent months listening to this song since the off-season have enjoyed it.
Brian Bello will never forget it. Nor did anyone who read Alex Spier’s in-depth look at the path Bello took to get to the Red Sox and the six-year extension that thousands chasing the dream he never came close to.
“I don’t compare them and I haven’t seen Pedro play a lot, but I feel like he has that natural swing, that natural presence on the mound that nobody else can match,” Rafael Devers, the Red Sox’s established All-Star Samana, DR, told reporters of his teammate. “It’s natural. . . . The way he walks, the way he throws.”
That’s the thing. What percentage of the hopes that these Sox can be lifted from their current slump, descending from a region that in good times is higher than several others, rests on two players from a Caribbean tourist center 1,600 ocean miles from Boston ?
There are no guarantees they can do it, the increasingly comfortable face at the spot and the home starter with one full season under his belt. But there’s a much better chance they could than, say, Giolito, whose contract — with a $19 million player option in 2025 and a subsequent club option in 2026 — meant he would likely be gone in a year if it was still a punching hand.
Or, for that matter, Scott Boras’ big clients, who waited until mid-March and seem likely now to want short-term deals that will mean another free agency next winter.
Would these be bad moves? Not entirely. Not when the finite number of baseball seasons in our lives will be spent with this one as one of them. They, as a healthy Giolito would have, allow a mediocre team to fish for October and maybe take out Arizona.
The real question is deeper. It’s every franchise’s old desert, waiting for prospects to save it for whatever reason: Who will be part of the next great team?
Masataka Yoshida is signed through 2027, with Tanner Hawk under team control until then. Trevor Story and Garrett Whitlock, 2028, with Triston Casas a free agent after this year. (For now.) Bello, by 2030. Devers, 2033.
We know the turnaround in baseball can come quickly, especially in this modern era of playoff hype. From a broader perspective, New England’s golden championship era came from considerable depths. (Remember the lows of those Dave Lewis Bruins of 2006-07? Another best last-place team in their league that featured David Krejci, Patrice Bergeron, Tim Thomas and new captain Zdeno Chara.)
The road doesn’t always go as expected – the third great Red Sox from Samana brought home a championship, although Hanley Ramirez did it in exchange for Mike Lowell and Josh Beckett. It also might not be quick, as those who remember what happened since the last time the Red Sox won a championship in ’18 prefer not to think about it.
Giolito is already injured. Vaughn Grissom, too, and the 2023 bullpen surprised Chris Martin. We’ve seen back-to-back 78-win teams and know this drill well. There are needles in the haystack of 162 games. There is hope there too. But there will be a lot of hay to find it.
It’s best to enjoy things like this weekend. It will make the future even sweeter.
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