Boston weeps today because it has the Red Sox but not the Yankees.
At least that’s how we outworlders view this American League Division Series – through the network television prism of “the only thing of value baseball ever provides is Red Sox-Yankees.” In fact, if national television had its way, the Yankees would have been given the same bye the Red Sox earned, and then both the winner and loser would have advanced to the ALCS, and then the National League would have been relegated so that the Red Sox could play the Yankees in the World Series.
And the prevailing argument for this would be, “Don’t think of it as game-fixing. Think of it as an unprecedented event, over and over and over!”
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But none of the suits who run our lives are ready to be that brazen quite yet, and the Yankees couldn’t figure out a team that used 23 pitchers in one game, so it’s Red Sox-Athletics instead.
We can only apologize.
Boston Red Sox
The Athletics are here to bedevil your brains only because they are the one good team in American sports defined entirely by the thing they have almost none of – in this case, starting pitching. They hit tons of homers, they have a lineup that plays every day, they catch everything hit and they throw true and straight wherever they need to do so. They won 97 games, for God’s sake. They’ve got a lot of this baseball stuff down right.
But they are framed across the nation by the one thing they have next to nothing of – starting pitching.
The rotation is genuinely a shambolic mess, at first because of a serious of catastrophic arm injuries that kept elbow surgeons on time with their yacht payments, but it is now entirely by design. They are the baseball equivalent of the old football line, "If you have two quarterbacks, you have no quarterbacks." In this case, "If you only have three starters, you actually have 10." They became the first postseason team ever to willfully bullpen a game ahead of time, and thus the first team ever to win while doing so.
And it was the Yankees, playing at home with the most power-stuffed lineup ever, whom they beat. Boston doubtless cheered.
And then it dawned on the town – after all those months of planning and hype and hype-planning, the Yankees are out of the playoffs, and have been replaced by a team whose mascot is an elephant being forced to stand on a ball without crushing it. A team that has spent so long repelling fans by threatening to leave that it couldn’t convince people to come watch them at even a Pittsburgh Pirate rate.
I mean, if we’re speaking about things that the A’s don’t have and are defined by as a result, let’s go all the way.
The problem for Oakland, of course, is that the longer you go in the postseason, the more the things you lack come back to expose you. And even though the Red Sox will only be bullpenned once, max, the starting pitching that does exist is still the worst-rated of the ten . . . err, nine . . . oops, sorry, eight remaining teams. Their best Cy Young candidate, Blake Treinen, is the last pitcher you will see if all goes well for Oakland.
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In short, Boston, you will have to come to grips with trying to be better at baseball than a team that approaches the most important part of baseball backwards. You will have to deal with a team that still is fighting corporate decisions of years ago even though the other two teams with which they share their town are leaving. You will have to use your mind's eye to make Khris Davis replace Giancarlo Stanton, and Stephen Piscotty replace Aaron Judge, and Matt Chapman replace Miguel Andujar, and Jed Lowrie replace Gleyber Torres. You had your collective heart set on your most familiar hatred, and seen it replaced by strangers.
And not just strangers, but magicians. You will see some surprisingly powerful hitters and excellent fielders, capable of making their strengths evident while you’re focusing on their glaring weakness, one Bob Melvin trip to the mound at a time.
Maybe this is easier for the Red Sox in postseason advancement terms, but losing all that visceral loathing will be hard on Boston. We know this. We understand.
But the hell with it. The Patriots play tonight. The Bruins don’t play at home until Monday and the Celtics don’t start for 12 more days after that. Sure, the A’s aren’t the Yankees for you, but what else have you got to do? Seriously. What else do you have to do? Celebrate the lunacy. We have.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for NBCSportsBayArea.com