Team Timelines: How the 2004 Red Sox Were Built to End the Curse of the Bambino

A look at the different franchise eras that led up to the iconic champion — and the moves that made it all possible.

Today, I’m introducing a new series that I’ll periodically do here on the Substack called Team Timelines. The idea is to break down how a particular iconic team came into being by looking at the distinct roster eras that led up to it, and which players came and went along the way.

What other teams do you want to see a Timeline for? Let me know in the comments below, or in a note or DM.

Twenty years ago today, the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees had a moment that — in retrospect — came to represent the turning point in baseball’s greatest rivalry. With the Yankees leading 3-0 in the third inning, Bronson Arroyo drilled Alex Rodriguez in the left arm with a pitch; A-Rod had words for Arroyo, catcher Jason Varitek stepped in, and the rest was history:

Varitek got tossed from the game for the glove he delivered to Rodriguez’s face, but he also created an iconic image — and sent a message. As the late Tim Wakefield told The Athletic in 2019:

For me, personally, I think that was a turning point for us of not being the younger brother or stepbrother or whatever, the guy that always got picked on. It was a moment that ‘Tek and us as a team stood up and said, “We’re not going to be pushed around anymore.”

The Red Sox went on to win in a wild, 11-10 walk-off from the bat of Bill Mueller against Mariano Rivera, a bit of foreshadowing for how Boston would come back against New York again in the postseason and end nearly a century of heartbreak. But roughly a decade of team-building preceded those events, leading to the collision course between the Yankees, Red Sox, A-Rod, Varitek and more.

The Eras, 1995-2004

For the purposes of these stories, I’ll be working backward from when the first player on a particular team — in this case, the 2004 Red Sox — joined the franchise, and tracking how often the team turned over its roster (losing the majority of its original production)¹ at different points along the way. In the lead-up to 2004, Boston turned things over three different times before coalescing into the group that made up the eventual championship roster:

In tracing Boston’s path to the title, we’ll turn back the clock to 1995, when Wakefield debuted with the club after being released by the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Part 1: Beginnings (1995-1996)

After a nightmare 1993 with Pittsburgh and a ‘94 season spent entirely in the minors, Wakefield revived his career with a great season for Boston in 1995, establishing a relationship with the club that would last for many years. But aside from the game’s preeminent knuckleballer and career debuts for franchise icons Nomar Garciaparra and Trot Nixon, the mid-’90s Red Sox were led by a talented yet completely different cast of characters than the version that would win it all a decade later.

The cornerstones of that group were 1B Mo Vaughn, the 1995 AL MVP; former MVP and Cy Young ace Roger Clemens; and underrated SS John Valentin, who is somewhat forgotten now but played at a 9.3-WAR pace per 162 in 1995 and was one of the best hitting and fielding infielders in the game during that era. This Boston team was an offensive powerhouse not too dissimilar from the ‘04 squad, and they made the playoffs for the first time in five years in 1995. But they were swept by Cleveland in the ALDS and failed to return to the postseason in ‘96 when the pitching and (especially) the defense collapsed.

This, in turn, led to a major roster churn: Gone by 1997 was Clemens — who Boston general manager Dan Duquette infamously said was in the “twilight of his career” — along with nomadic slugger Jose Canseco, fan favorite Mike “Gator” Greenwell, big righty Erik Hanson and others. Duquette was in the midst of reshaping the Red Sox into what would be a kind of early prototype for the teams that would contend during the 2000s… and he wasn’t done yet.

Part 2: Pedro Rising (1997-1999)

With many of Duquette’s big offseason acquisitions failing (Steve Avery?), the Red Sox fell to 78-84 in 1997 under new manager Jimy Williams and once again missed the playoffs. But the offseason that followed contained one of Boston’s most important moves along the path to 2004: the November 18, 1997 trade that brought defending NL Cy Young winner Pedro Martinez to the Red Sox. Martinez instantly finished second in his new league’s Cy balloting in 1998,² then produced arguably the two greatest pitching seasons ever over the next two years, cementing his place as the ace of all aces in the American League.

And Boston came along for the ride. To go with the dominant Martinez, Garciaparra’s development into an MVP candidate and the ongoing production of Mo Vaughn and John Valentin helped the Red Sox return to the playoffs in ‘98, even snapping a 13-game postseason losing streak that extended back to Game 6 of the 1986 World Series before losing three straight to again fall to Cleveland in the ALDS.

The high point of this era came in 1999, when — despite losing Vaughn to the Angels — Boston won 94 games, the most by the franchise since 1986, and finally returned to the ALCS. While the Red Sox were steamrolled 4-1 by the dynasty Yankees once there,³ perhaps exposing the weakness of a team that was 25-6 in the games Pedro started and 73-68 in all other games, Boston seemed as close to ending its curse as it had been in a long time.

Part 3: Upheaval (2000-2002)

The success of 1999 was short-lived, however. In spite of Pedro’s continued heroics — his 1.74 ERA in 2000 is tied for the lowest relative to the league in AL/NL history — the Red Sox fell out of the playoffs at 85-77. And the composition of the roster around Martinez and Garciaparra was also changing.

With Vaughn out of the picture, Valentin declining sharply in his early 30s and Troy O'Leary’s glove no longer covering for his bat, Boston’s lineup was reliant on a volatile mix of more recent Duquette pickups: LF Manny Ramirez, CF Carl Everett, 1B Brian Daubach, 2B Jose Offerman, OF/DH Dante Bichette, and 3B Shea Hillenbrand.

All had their moments — some more than others (Ramirez hit 41 HR with a 1.014 OPS for his Fenway debut in 2001) — but the team fell further, to just 82-79 in 2001. That ended up costing Williams his job midway through the season, while Duquette was axed as GM in the spring of 2002 when the Red Sox’s sale to John Henry was finalized. Under new manager Grady Little that summer, Boston started the season 40-17 with a 90 percent playoff probability in early June, only to go 39-43 in June, July and August to see their odds cut below 20 percent by September (and to zero by season’s end).

Still, this discouraging and chaotic period yielded a number of players who would become integral parts of the 2004 team, including Ramirez and Johnny Damon, the speedy center fielder who came to Boston from Oakland after the 2001 season. Nobody knew it at the time, but the Red Sox were just a few pieces short of building the core of their long-awaited championship roster.

Part 4: Champions (2003-2004)

Those final pieces came as the roster was turning over one more time headed into the 2003 season, this time under the watch of wunderkind GM Theo Epstein, who was elevated to the role at just 28 years of age.

Epstein kept many of the core players from the team that won 93 games in 2002, though a number of expensive, underperforming veterans from the Duquette era were shown the door. In their place, Epstein snagged young pitcher Bronson Arroyo off waivers, 3B Bill Mueller via free agency, 2B Todd Walker via trade, 1B Kevin Millar in a sneaky breach of gentlemen’s agreements around free agents headed to Japan, and — most significantly — DH David Ortiz after he was released by the Minnesota Twins.

In fairness to Minnesota, Ortiz had shown few signs he was going to stay healthy and hit well enough to ever truly be valuable as a 1B/DH type, and they wanted to avoid paying him what seemed like too much in arbitration. But Boston gave him a 1-year deal to prove himself, and he ran with it. His 31-homer season typified the incredible offensive production of a team that scored an MLB-high 961 runs:

Of course, the Red Sox still fell short against the Yankees in the end, maximizing the sting of defeat when Aaron Boone hit a walk-off HR in extra innings of Game 7 in the ALCS. Little was fired days after the decision to leave Martinez in Game 7 a bit too long, to be replaced by former Phillies manager Terry Francona. Boston swung deals to improve their pitching with elite starter Curt Schilling and, later, closer Keith Foulke; they also picked up Mark Bellhorn to play second base with Walker departing.

But the Red Sox also went hunting for a new superstar to add to the lineup: Alex Rodriguez, who was put up on the trade block with the Texas Rangers feeling financial pressure.

The Red Sox agreed in principle to a deal that would ship Ramirez, Garciaparra and pitching prospect Jon Lester to Texas for A-Rod, Magglio Ordonez and Brandon McCarthy, with Rodriguez agreeing to restructure his contract to reduce its burden on Boston’s payroll. But the MLBPA stepped in to scuttle the deal, around the same time that Boone injured his knee playing basketball — opening up a hole in New York’s lineup.

And so, the Yankees did what Boston couldn’t, putting together an A-Rod deal at the expense of their rivals, the latest in a seemingly never-ending string of devastating blows they would inflict on the Red Sox.

That backstory is what makes the Varitek/A-Rod scuffle important in the lore of the 2004 Red Sox. Rather than cheering on Rodriguez in a Boston uniform, A-Rod had come to symbolize all of the baggage associated with the Yankees rivalry for the Red Sox and their fans. (Rodriguez’s own personality, simultaneously arrogant and desperate for the approval of his new team, didn’t help matters.) Everyone knew the Red Sox and Yankees were on a collision course that season — and that A-Rod would be in the middle of it, for better or worse.

The rest of that season saw even more important moves, including the crucial acquisition of speedster Dave Roberts and the trade of Garciaparra to the Cubs for Orlando Cabrera and Doug Mientkiewicz — a deal that would have seemed unthinkable a few years earlier, but whose way was paved by injuries, declining defense and Nomar’s inclusion in the failed A-Rod trade. And as beloved as Garciaparra was, Cabrera started every postseason game for the ‘04 Sox and hit .288 with a .377 OBP, so the move was far from a flop.

By the end of the 2004 regular season, the Red Sox had a higher Elo rating than the Yankees and were as ready as they were ever going to be. They just needed to win.

History will remember that group for their epic 3-0 ALCS comeback against A-Rod and the rivals from New York — overcoming a 2 percent series win probability at their low point — capped off by a dam-breaking 10-3 blowout win at Yankee Stadium in Game 7, then a sweep of St. Louis in the World Series that felt both surprising (the Cardinals were 7 games better during the regular season) and inevitable. The 10 days between Game 4 of the ALCS and Game 4 of the World Series have spawned countless books and documentaries,⁴ with good reason.

But that was the tip of a decade-long team-building iceberg that started when Wakefield joined Mo Vaughn and company, spanned through multiple eras containing both highs and lows, and finally ended with the self-described “Idiots” of 2004, a project that took 10 years of smarts, guts, chaos and luck to put together.

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Filed under: Baseball, Team Timelines

1. I’ll be using my WAR-based Win Shares for this, as they operate from a baseline of zero wins rather than negative values (like WAR), making them easier to deal with as percentages.

2. Behind (who else?) Roger Clemens, now with the Toronto Blue Jays.

3. One of the lone bright spots being a 13-1 demolition of Clemens and the Yankees at Fenway in Game 3 with Pedro on the mound, which we can all enjoy watching here.

4. The best of which was obviously Jimmy Fallon’s journalistic masterpiece known as Fever Pitch.