Sox Summary

Well the Sox season is over, after watching game 1 I didn’t think they had much of a chance of beating the Angels, basically what we saw was a case of good starting pitching, bad bullpen pitching and really quiet offense. I checked the stats and when your top hitter average wise is Jacoby Ellsbury followed by J.D. Drew with .250 and .222 averages respectively you know something is wrong. Overall I think what went wrong was a culmination of what has been going wrong all year, the Red Sox have had trouble hitting against good pitching and the bullpen has been on and off, Papelbon, while arguably very good is not the best closer in baseball and his ineffectiveness which was shown in July was again shown in this series. While the season had its ups and downs (mainly downs towards the end) it was fun to watch and being new to watching the Sox on a regular basis I enjoyed it. I especially enjoyed Lester and Beckett developing as pitchers, mainly Lester as Beckett is older. Another highlight is Wakefield’s first All Star nomination. Lastly were the late acquisitions of Alex Gonzalez and Victor Martinez. I didn’t watch the Sox in 06’ so I never saw the defensive genius of Gonzalez, I only heard stories of the “vacuum” we had at short, and Martinez elite hitting was well appreciated too. Also J.D. Drew had his best year offensively for the Sox hitting 24 home runs and getting 68 RBI’s and compiling a .279 average, and also having a second best (to his .994 in 03) .992 fielding percentage. On to next year, honestly, I think unless the Red Sox spend some money (and by that I mean they can’t be penny pinchers like last year) they will be roughly the same team and will produce the same results, which doesn’t give too us much hope for a better season.