Red Sox: That’s All, Folks

By Bill Littlefield | Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Red Sox catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia reacts in the dugout in the ninth inning of Wednesday's game. Baltimore won 4-3, and Boston was eliminated from the playoffs after the Rays beat the Yankees in extra innings minutes after Boston's loss. (AP)

Red Sox catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia reacts to Wednesday's loss to Baltimore. Boston was eliminated from the playoffs after the Rays beat the Yankees later that night. (AP)

And so the final bell has rung; the Sox can leave the stage,
And some will feel disgruntled here, and some will no doubt rage
Against the fates that left their team so shredded and so battered
That they could not produce another win when winning mattered.

Oh, some will blame the manager, and some the pitching staff,
And some a bad bounce here or there, though that hands me a laugh.
The sad truth is that once September dawned, the Red Sox tanked.
They couldn’t beat the Rays, okay, but also they got spanked
By Baltimore! The Orioles, a team stuck in last place!
The couldn’t hit, they couldn’t field…they couldn’t find an ace.

They earned their ignominious departure from the light
That shines upon October baseball late into the night.
They tumbled from security to somewhere south of bad -
Some found it entertaining, and many found it sad –
For since the month began, they’ve not done much that’s been much good.
Perhaps they’ve felt neglected, miffed, or just misunderstood.
If so, they’ll have the winter to console themselves, I guess,
For making of the season’s final month an ugly mess.

We know they didn’t mean to fail. That wasn’t their intent,
But none of them are broken, though a few of them are bent.
They’ll heal from now until the spring, when each of us will say
We cannot wait to see the Sox come out again to play.

More MLB Coverage

Only A Game’s Doug Tribou spent Wednesday night talking to the Sox fans following the ups and downs of this turbulent season. See what the fans had to say after the team’s final loss.

Tags: Boston Red Sox, Commentaries, MLB

http://profiles.google.com/elizabeth.sweetman Elizabeth Sweetman

Argh. This was terrible and if Francona’s gone as a result, it’s even worse.
http://lizybee.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/end-of-the-season-end-of-an-era/
Blittlef

Let us all take a deep breath.�
Long ago, when I was a student in a Shakespeare class, I was told that the message of tragedy is “The rest is silence,” (Hamlet) and the message of comedy is “Here we all are again.” At the end of the regular season, nobody had died, and the rest certainly hasn’t been silence. It has been lots of noise about why the Sox lost all those games, whether Terry Francona should have been retained – or whether he should have wanted to stick around to give it another shot – and so on. Meanwhile, in a few months, all of Boston’s fans will be saying, “Here we all are again,” or something to that effect. It will be the beginning of another baseball season, which is a metaphor for comedy if there ever was one.�
And so I say “Go, Rays!” because I’m for any team that begins their post-season run with a pitcher whose Major League record is 1-0…and what fun that the guy threw seven innings of shutout baseball and his team prevailed. Sad for the Rangers, certainly, though not tragic, and great fun for fans of a team with a payroll of about a buck three eighty.
Yours in moving on,
Bill Littlefield, Host, “Only A Game”