![]() ![]() Perennial contenders like the contemporary Los Angeles Dodgers, the Golden State Warriors, and the Pittsburgh Penguins foment the same expectations, because a playoff berth has become their status quo. The Fenway faithful are far from the only contingent of fans to believe that unless their team finishes first, it may as well have finished last. Such a historical precedent doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in this season’s Red Sox. And winning the regular season has been far from a harbinger of World Series titles: In the 23 seasons since Major League Baseball introduced the Wild Card, the team with the outright best regular-season record has won the championship just five times. Whereas in sports like college football, in which the thrill of an upset victory over a superior rival can sustain a fan base for an entire disappointing season, baseball’s glorious slog ensures that it’s only the stars of the postseason that ever get remembered. Such an attitude is particularly onerous in baseball, where the 162-game regular season seems designed to identify the most well-rounded and successful team. In fact, the last time all four of Boston’s major sports teams were locked out of the postseason was in 2000, after the Patriots coach Bill Belichick’s inaugural year as New England’s leader.īut expectations undeniably follow repeated success, and all the victory parades have stoked a feeling among some Boston fans that an entire season is a wash if it doesn’t end in confetti. The Celtics, the Bruins, the Patriots, and the Red Sox all made the playoffs in each of the past two seasons, a feat no other city’s teams can lay claim to. Since Tom Brady, then 24 years old, hoisted the Lombardi Trophy over his head for the first time in February 2002, Boston’s four major sports teams have won nine titles. Read: The Red Sox managed to turn the Yankees into baseball’s most improbable underdogs. The Hub has arguably been the most dominant American sports city of this millennium, and the competition isn’t even close. Still, for the past two decades, nowhere has Boston’s presence been more outsize than in the athletic arena. Not only does it host several of the nation’s top colleges and universities, but it’s also home to some of the country’s best hospitals and a technology sector poised to give Silicon Valley a run for its money. But as the Mariners, who fell to the Yankees in that year’s ALCS, learned, all those regular-season wins don’t matter in October, and especially not in Boston.įor a city of its size, Boston consistently punches above its weight. No team has finished the regular season with a better record this millennium since the 2001 Seattle Mariners won a staggering 116 games. By the time the sun set on the 2018 slate of regular-season games, Betts, Jackie Bradley Jr., and company had won a league-leading 108 contests. The team announced its dominance early, winning 17 of its first 19 games during a blazing hot streak that would set the tone for an elite ball club’s outstanding year. Though the Red Sox dropped their Opening Day contest, they never flew under the radar. There may have been 153 games left to play during the regular season, but as “ Dirty Water” blared over the loudspeakers and jubilant fans poured out onto Lansdowne Street at the end of that brisk Sunday contest, the expectation in Boston was already clear: For this team, anything but a World Series ring would be a failure. But it would have been impossible to intuit the relative irrelevance of that particular game from the intensity that cloaked Fenway Park that day. ![]() The 2018 Red Sox-whose record improved to 8–1 on April 8 and who will face off against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Tuesday in Game One of the World Series-were still in their infancy. It was the feeling that inspires normally levelheaded people to throw on tattered baseball caps and declare a lifelong allegiance to a ball club. And then a long fly ball was crashing into the Green Monster’s scoreboard, and Mookie Betts was rounding third to give the Sox the lead and, later, the victory. Out of nowhere, Christian Vazquez was hustling as fast as his catcher’s legs could take him toward home, narrowly shimmying around a tag at the plate to tie the game. The Red Sox may have lumbered through the game’s first seven innings and found themselves in a five-run hole in the bottom of the eighth, but suddenly the team’s bats came alive.
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