The Red Sox Doomers Were Wrong

But they still might be right in the end.

Back before the season, I wondered if all the doom and gloom around the Boston Red Sox was warranted, given the club’s well-known penchant for defying us forecaster types. Certainly, Boston’s offseason failed to draw rave reviews when its front office whiffed on re-signing franchise shortstop Xander Bogaerts, contributing to the third-most net Wins Above Replacement lost of any team last winter — and a bunch of middling projections for 2023.

But team president Sam Kennedy wasn’t too far off-base, either, when he said: “As long as I've been around, [the predictions] are usually wrong. I don't put a lot of stock in them.” Lo and behold, we’re 6 weeks into the season, and Boston is tied for the sixth-best record in MLB with a 21-15 mark. I’ve been on this Red Sox roller coaster enough times to know that whenever you think this team will bottom out, they find a way to rise again.

Including Boston’s current 162-game pace for 2023 (94.5 wins), the Red Sox have seen their record change by an average absolute value of +/- 17.7 wins per season over the past 12 seasons. That’s an absolutely gigantic degree of whiplash from bad to good — and back again — on a year-over-year level, sustained over a dozen consecutive seasons.