Eh, just call it a massacre already

After thinking about it for far longer than a guy my age should, I think I’ve finally found the faint silver-lining in the five-game, four-day beatdown the Red Sox suffered at the hands of the Best Team Money Can Buy this weekend at Fenway. No more of our guys got hurt – though, in keeping with the spirit of this unbelieveable catastrophe, the jury is still out on Manny and his hamstring.

As a pessimist, I’m rarely surprised by how bad things turn out. I believe behavioral science has proven conclusively that people as a matter of course exaggerate how bad or how good outcomes will be. So it’s amazing when something like this comes along and a part of you just shakes your head and is surprised that happened. My friend John had morosely predicted last week they’d loose four out of five, which I thought a bit skeptical, but probably on target.

The horror of this series, as any fan will tell you, was that it was perversely much closer than it looked. Baseball is aggravating like that – each of these games had discreet moments when things could have gone one way or the other. And the specific horror of baseball fandom is those moments keep coming back to you until you somehow push them out of your mind.

And it is perhaps a bit harder for me because I am not buying into any specific scapegoats. I remember 2004 too well to get down on Mike Timlin for long, and I just feel bad for those kids in the bullpen who were thrown at this buzzsaw like a batch of conscripts on the first day of the Somme. And I can’t even get on the case of management, because I am one of the few lonely voices that agreed with the decision to stand pat. There really wasn’t much on the market, and grossly overspending on junk at the deadline is what the Bad Guys do, not us. Remember this motley crew was in first place in the AL East most of the year, and was only down by one and a half when this bloodbath started. So I can stick with Theo Epstein and company because I remember that we won it all in 2004, and I believe that Willy Mo will work out, that Damon was overpriced, that we have to be smarter and more patient than the Yanks, and because two of their most recent screw-ups – acquiring Edgar Renteria and letting Doug Mirabelli go – were rectified as quickly as possible. For all these reasons I can handle a season going awry with a certain amount of faith. Which leaves nothing but the black kernel of hateful desire to see the Yankees not win anything. Not only are they the embodiment of everything that is wrong with baseball, they also are everything wrong and perverse about America. I’ll probably have to get into this later in the season.

Which, I might add, has awhile yet to go. Things are very dour, of course, but not out of reach. Key players can go cold, and they can get hot. In a few weeks we’ll (hopefully) have Varitek, Nixon, Wakefield back. And as the Yankees have proven every season since 2001, a baseball team is not always the sum of its parts. Besides, August is always a bitch.