BOSTON — There is a photo in the Red Sox press box, black-and-white and faded, of the 1918 team, the group that won the World Series over the Cubs that year, Boston’s third championship in a four-year span. The faces are grainy, the expressions mostly dour. With good reason — with World War I underway, some of the Red Sox had already been drafted into action, including team captain Dick Hoblitzell, who’d been sent to the Dental Corps in June.
After the completion of that series, all members of the team were expected to be swept up into the military to join the bloodiest war in history, while at home, a mysterious epidemic of Spanish Flu was spreading, and would kill 34-year-old Boston Globe beat writer Eddie Martin after the season. The players could have no idea that their team, for 86 years thence, would be transformed into a symbol of franchise futility.
They were more concerned with surviving. Eight big-league ballplayers were killed during the war. That 1918 team knew a bit about real-life pressure.
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A century later, today’s Red Sox are playing under pressure of a different sort. They were the best team in baseball for the bulk of the year, and after starting 17-2, they led the AL East for all but about two weeks’ worth of days. They led MLB in runs scored, batting average, on-base and slugging percentages, and Boston’s pitchers were seventh in ERA, and fourth in strikeouts. Most important, the Red Sox won 108 games, most in franchise history and seventh-most in history.
For the Red Sox, having won, 7-5, on Sunday night and now tied with Houston after two games of the ALCS, this is pressure of their own making. This team put forth a remarkable six months, but if it can’t convert that into a World Series, those six months won’t matter much.
The Red Sox aren’t just trying to win a championship, they’re trying to avoid a trip into history’s dustbin. There’s a nearby team that has some familiarity with that sad fate — the Patriots, who, in 2007, were 18-0 in the regular season and playoffs before flopping against the Giants in the Super Bowl. Not winning this World Series would not sting quite that badly for New Englanders, but it would come close.
The players, though, aren’t reconstructing the regular-season record into that kind of pressure cooker. There’s always a drive to win.
“I don’t think anybody here looks at it that way,” said shortstop Xander Bogaerts, one of four players remaining from the Red Sox’s last champion, in 2013. “The goal here with this franchise is always the World Series, always to win everything. So if you don’t win, that’s too bad, everyone’s going to be disappointed. But you have a good season, doesn’t matter how many games you got, how many wins, if you don’t win, it’s sad.”
Certainly, there is pressure attached to every postseason in baseball, where a team that gets hot at the right time can pull off an upset and win a surprise championship. No team enters October baseball written off completely.
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But with their record-setting win total, the Red Sox have raised expectations in and around Fenway Park, especially after Boston dispatched the rival Yankees in the first round. No matter that they’re playing the Astros — the defending champs, winners of 103 games themselves thanks in part to a 21-6 September, which was followed by a three-game drubbing of the Indians in the Division Series.
No matter, either, that the Red Sox have gotten shoddy pitching through six postseason games, especially from the bullpen, and that even their starting rotation is in tatters against Houston.
Ace Chris Sale is still not recovered from a late-season shoulder injury. He struggled with both velocity and control in Game 1 (he lasted just four innings, giving up four walks, a hit batter and two runs), then spent Game 2 at Mass General Hospital battling a stomach bug.
Lefty David Price, winless in 10 postseason starts, has struggled so badly that he got a standing ovation for lasting 4 2/3 innings and giving up four runs in Boston’s Game 2 win. Nathan Eovaldi will get the Game 3 start. “Wasn’t the line I had dreamed of to have tonight, but everybody rallied together,” Price said.
That’s what it will take for the Red Sox to slow this Astros juggernaut. It’s a strange position to be in for a team that just had the best season in franchise history, reduced to finding ways to scrap and scrape their ways to wins.
“That’s what they have to do, just find a way,” Red Sox Hall of Famer Jim Rice said. “No one wants to be the team that won the most games in team history then does not even make the World Series. I am sure it is not something they think about all the time, but it has to be in the back of their minds, knowing that pressure is there. How could it not be?”
Boston’s star outfielder Mookie Betts, the leading MVP candidate after winning the batting title with a .346 average and scoring the most runs in baseball, dodged the idea that the team would be a failure without a World Series ring. But as for pressure, Betts admits that is a factor, especially for him. He was just 4 for 20 in the playoffs before breaking through with two hits in Game 2.
“The sense is that we have a limited amount of games,” Betts said, “and if you don’t get it done now then, it’s like, never. Where in the season, you have 162 to get it done, so I guess there is some sense of pressure there. But I have to understand that I can only do what I can do.”
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Betts has been boosted through his starry season with the help of cleanup man J.D. Martinez, whose career-best 130 RBIs can be directly linked to Betts’ run-scoring totals. Martinez has also developed a close friendship with Betts, with 26-year-old Betts frequently asking Martinez (who is 31) questions about the finer points of hitting and sharing information about pitchers.
Martinez has marveled all season at what he called the Red Sox’s “bubble.” It’s a close-knit team and, in a change from the Manny Ramirez-David Ortiz-Pedro Martinez versions of the Red Sox, lacks both egos and big-mouthed personalities. That’s helped to deflect talk of setting records and the attendant pressure.
“On this team, you are in a bubble,” Martinez said. “Everything else is kind of the distractions and everything else is kind of noise.”
There is another layer to the urgency the Red Sox must be feeling, besides the need to back up a record-setting season with a trophy and a Duck Boat parade. This Red Sox team has a distinct window to be a contender, and though there is young offensive talent on hand, the pitching staff will need an overhaul in the coming years.
Team president Dave Dombrowski, who was hired in 2015, has invested heavily in the franchise’s present and has had to cough up some of the future to do it. Boston’s farm, which produced its current wave of stars like Betts, Bogaerts, Rafael Devers and Andrew Benintendi, is now depleted. There are few potential big-league starting pitchers in the system, and Boston had only one big-league pitcher — oft-injured 25-year-old Eduardo Rodriguez — who was younger than 27 when he made a start for the team.
Sale, Bogaerts and Martinez are slated for free agency in 2019. Closer Craig Kimbrel, who has been hit hard in the playoffs, reaches free agency this winter and presents the Red Sox a tough decision on his future. Betts will be a free agent in 2020, and the Red Sox will need a bank-breaking contract to keep him.
The future could get grim in Boston within two years. There’s enough pressure on this record-breaking team as it is to tug themselves past the finish line in an especially challenging series while carrying hefty expectations. But challenges in the minor leagues and free agency loom, further turning up the pressure on the Red Sox.
Martinez, one of those who will be facing a contract year next season, shrugs off talk of expectations and pressure. Boston has been consistent all season, so all Martinez and his teammates can do is return to those habits.
“It doesn’t really change,” Martinez said. “We still prepare the same way, we still go about it the exact same way as we did for, say, a day game in the middle of April or something. It doesn’t really matter. I think we have always done a really good job of preparing the exact same way and not getting ahead of ourselves.”
That may be the case in the Red Sox bubble. But for Boston fans and baseball observers, the question of possibly unmet expectations after such a remarkable season dominates.