Boston Red Sox: The 2021 Sox may be a team of destiny
No one should count this underrated Boston Red Sox team out in the American League Championship Series (ALCS) or thereafter if they get there. You could be very, very mistaken.
Sometimes teams are teams of absolute dominance. Sometimes they get all the breaks. And sometimes, on rare occasions, a team of maybe lesser talent may just be a team of destiny.
The 2021 version of the Boston Red Sox certainly isn’t a powerhouse that drove through the American League East. And it isn’t a team with mega-superstars who just cannot be stopped.
Yet, in examining what’s already happened, and what just might, something else might be at work here.
This team was patched together by their brilliant Chief Baseball Officer (couldn’t they come up with a better title than that?) Chaim Bloom, in a fantastic display of personnel acumen.
It was managed by a super-manager (it says here, the best in the business), Alex Cora. And perhaps for those reasons, it just may be a team of destiny.
The 2021 Boston Red Sox, a team of destiny
Look, this space is not going to predict anything about the ALCS winner. First, the predictions herein usually flop. Second, we wouldn’t want to jinx the Sox.
Third, The Houston Astros are a very, very good baseball team. They took the Red Sox out five games to two during the regular season. Not a good portend for Boston.
Disclosure: have to confess, even as a long-time Red Sox fan, this writer is a big fan of Jose Altuve. (So sue me.) Yes, I think this player, now a 31-year-old veteran is just fantastic.
At 5’6″ tall, this All-Star plays the game as a possible future Hall-of-Famer should play the game. Can’t help it, think he’s great.
Back to the Boston Red Sox. That comment about Altuve notwithstanding, let’s go out on a short limb and write, there may just be something special going on here with this 2021 Red Sox team.
It’s feeling, rather than any statistical analysis of which I am most certainly incapable. It’s a feeling. Yet, with every surmounted hurdle, the feeling just gets that much stronger.
This may just, as the 2004 bunch of “Dirt dogs” was, be another team of “destiny”. So what does that mean? Well, there is no exact answer.
But the aura around this group of players, this “Dirt Dogs 2” bunch (sounds like a movie sequel), is just so darn strong it demands that it be recognized.
No one really thought this 2021 team put together with duct tape and super glue by Bloom would really do anything special at all.
That includes this space and the sumptuous crow dinner served very, very cold which this writer had to chow down upon because of his lack of faith.
Somehow the Boston Red Sox came together as a team and excelled
Yet, somehow, after all the tumultuous ups-and-downs, highs and lows of this roller-coaster ride season, Bloom and Cora have been unexpectedly able to fashion, let’s be frank, a winner.
Who would have thought it? Yet, it happened. A club that had tremendous highs, and amazingly bad lows (how about numerous, not just a few but numerous players out due to COVID) just managed.
And Cora, a favorite here whose re-hiring was strongly lauded in this space, somehow managed to get his team into the ALCS.
Excuse me? This is a club that had to scrape its way into the Wild Card game. Then, they surprisingly dispatched their long standing rival, the New York Yankees (never gets old saying that!).
Then, even more astonishingly, they took down the American League East runaway winners, the Tampa Bay Rays, in four games in a best of five series. How odd is that?
So, there is no analysis, no prediction, nothing like that in this space though at least one and probably more experts think the Sox may be able to prevail.
Next. If Sox can replicate their ALDS, they are World Series bound. dark
But there will be one thought offered for consideration; when a team is a team of destiny there ain’t nothing any other team can do about it, no matter how good they have been.
Not saying here that this particular team, the Boston Red Sox, is a “team of destiny”. They’re certainly not the strongest team of the last four standing, that’s for certain.
Yet, when you are a “team of destiny” none of that matters. At all. And maybe, just maybe, this particular 2021 Boston Red Sox team, like their 2004 predecessors, is that team. All it says here is, don’t be shocked.