I probably said a lot of things in the spilled beer-scented aftermath of my personal 2004 World Series championship celebration.
Some of them were mildly coherent, some dreadfully embarrassing. Others I don’t pretend to remember.
One thing I’m sure that I offered in that raspy, quivering voice — if only because I repeated it in 2007 and on countless, bitter occasions since — is that watching the Boston Red Sox win or lose wouldn’t matter as much anymore.
And I lied. Like Prince Fielder’s overweight carcass, face down in the third-base line after tripping over his own overpaid, ungrateful feet, I lied. (Yes, every English teacher I’ve ever had, I suppose that would be ‘lay.’ It’s called poetic license.)
Of course it matters. I realized that in ’07 when I found myself rooting for J.D. Drew and Josh Beckett, two guys with all the charm of a case of hives. I recognized it when a mere, subliminal-injection, on-screen image of Bobby Valentine on any sports talk show made me want to go kick farm animals.
Matters? Heck yes, it matters. This unforeseen journey (to think, all year I patted myself on the back for saying this team would win 88 games) has taught us that so many intangible things matter.
Character matters. Don’t kid yourself: The gateway to the 2013 American League pennant was the August 2012 trade in which the Sox unloaded their bubonic plague of smothering salaries and caustic personalities upon the Dodgers.
I’m still not sure which baseball god thought the Sox were worthy of that break after getting into such an absurd arms race with the Yankees — the same sign-the-best-available-free-agent strategy that cost the Pinstripers their 86 years of being our daddy — but I light a candle to him every day.
Chemistry matters. While in the process of throwing money in the air and hoarding with all the subtlety of a fantasy-team owner on crack, it’s as if Sox management whacked its head and lost a decade of institutional memory.
We fans, surely spoiled by the first five years of the Francona era and soured by the Valentine massacre, acted as if we forgot, too. As news of Boston’s free-agent acquisitions trickled across the wire this past winter, we mumbled to one another and shared that rolled-eyes look as if to wonder who passed gas.
Far as we knew, Mike Napoli was a strikeout machine with an arthritic hip. Jonny Gomes was a guy who played for every other team in the majors and had a heart attack, all before age 30. Shane Victorino was the prototypical “nice player” who reached his statistical peak in 2009 on a club that was stacked to the gills around him. Koji Uehara looked like a situational dude who could come on and dismiss a right-handed hitter with two outs in the seventh.
We processed those pickups as if that sum-of-the-parts thing were some sort of old wives’ tale or urban legend. The same fan base that celebrated Trot Nixon, Kevin Millar, Bill Mueller and Mike Timlin summarily dismissed the arrival of guys who instantly should have induced goose-bumpy memories of them.
Luck matters. Did any of us wish for Joel Hanrahan and Andrew Bailey’s arms to fall off, thus opening the door for Koji-san to channel a 1990 Dennis Eckersley? Were any of us willing to bet that the increasingly brittle Big Three of Ellsbury, Pedroia and Ortiz all would stay relatively healthy? Raise your hand if you imagined that Joe Maddon and Jim Leyland, two of the superior managers in baseball, would mismanage their pitching staffs with the efficiency of our elected officials balancing a budget?
From Torii Hunter’s off-the-mark swan dive into the bullpen to Stephen “.085” Drew’s diving stab up the middle to Fielder’s untied shoelace, we can pick out at least three dozen cases the past week in which the game of inches tipped the Sox’s way.
Baseball is the funniest game on the planet. No matter how well constructed the roster is, the better team often doesn’t win, even in a best-of-seven or a best-of-162. Chalk it up to the “Boston Strong” phenomenon, perhaps, but there has been some seriously ethereal stuff going on in the playoffs.
Farm systems matter. The glut of left-side infielders in Double, Triple and Quadruple-A allowed the Sox to shop Jose Iglesias and land Jake Peavy, who, myopia and Game 4 hiccup aside, was a bulldog that fit in perfectly.
I don’t even know what to say about Xander Bogaerts, other than if I ever hear the Sox entertaining talk of using the Aruban God of Walks as trade leverage again, I might have to take hostages.
And let’s not forget that chicken, beer, obscenely ill-advised contracts and the Blabby V administration aside, the core of this pennant-winning team — Pedroia, Ellsbury, Jon Lester, Clay Buchholz, Will Middlebrooks, Bogaerts, Brandon Workman, Felix Doubront, Daniel Nava, even Craig Breslow a few times removed — is homegrown.
You don’t buy championships. You build them. And how it’s done, matters.
Matters like I never could have imagined.
Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.
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