What's Wrong With The Sawx?

As the Sawx have struggled to tread above .500 in the baseball season's first month, sportswriters have piled on in their downbeat assessments. Ben Shpigel, the Times' Yankees beat writer, wrote they just "plod along"; Amalie Benjamin, the Globe's beat writer for the Sawx, wrote the clubhouse is "confused and conflicted" with a "distinct lack of joy" and "an unsettled feeling after wins and an unsettled feeling after losses." (How's that for an approximation of a Zagat's review?)

The team's lineup still looks good on paper, especially once outfielders Jacoby Ellsbury and Mike Cameron return from injuries, and the starting rotation seems even better. However, the whole team seems to be afflicted with a case of Mets-itis, where everyone is incapable of playing well at the same time. One week, the infield is playing sharp defense but the outfield stinks and the next week, everyone is hitting great but the pitching stinks, and so on. It's really tough to experience this as a fan, but the Sawx appear to have a good enough of a team to surmount it.

The main issue is a perception one. This year is truly the one where the team leaves behind its persona of the past decade -- fun-loving and personable but sometimes moody or grumpy; rough around the edges yet hard-working. The problem is that personality suits Boston very well, particularly its committed baseball fans, and nothing has emerged to replace or replicate it. So while the remaining veterans from this era reach the end of their careers and struggle or no longer start, the franchise's face is the statistics-loving, attractive but annoyingly overachieving general manager, Theo Epstein, whose party line about "run prevention" has looked very shaky as the defense and pitching have struggled. As good as infielders Kevin Youkilis and Dustin Pedroia are, they alone don't make a team, and closer Jonathan Papelbon is no longer very well liked because it's clear that after the season he'll sign as a free agent with whichever team pays him the most money. (It won't be the Sawx.) Even if the team revives its fortunes, it probably won't be a fan favorite.

The Sawx's struggles and the resulting agonizing also confirms something about Boston's sports fans. Yes, they've always been (in)famously obsessive. But during the past 10 years, when all four major franchises have had at least periods of sustained success and three of them have won championships, they've become quite privileged. The truth that all franchises' fortunes move in cycles is now foreign to fans because almost all four teams have been at the cycle's top simultaneously and for longer than the typical spin. David Margolick put it well in a recent guest column in the Times: "But as the current cyber-stonings on the Red Sox message boards attest, creeping Yankeeosis has spread to Red Sox Nation. There is the same petulance, the same arrogance, the same intolerance for imperfection, the same obnoxious impatience...But modern Red Sox fans, with no sense of the team’s history, have paid the ostensibly hated Yankees the sincerest form of flattery and become an evil, entitled empire themselves."

Maybe there isn't much wrong with the Sawx.