It's been one week since the Boston Red Sox were crowned World Series champions. The champagne is flat. The Duck Boats have rolled through the streets of Boston. Those scruffy beards are about to meet their makers at local barbershops (if they haven't already). Fenway Park is silent, bracing itself for a long, snowy, winter break, waiting for the sights and sounds of America's pastime to return in April. Soxtober is over.
It's weird. The baseball season is always like that. There's a game almost every day for six straight months, not including spring training or, if you're lucky, the playoffs. It's a constant presence, dominating TV and radio and barstool banter. There's always another game, another pitch, another at-bat. Then, when the weather becomes too cold and the days too short, it disappears. The music comes to a screeching halt. And for the next four months: silence.
Boston's magical, improbable and unlikely-to-be-repeated championship run of 2013 is history. Now, the Red Sox must turn their attention to 2014 and focus on putting the team in a position where it can contend again. The key pieces are already in place. Assuming nobody gets traded away, almost all the bearded heroes of last year will be back. Unlike last winter, Boston doesn't have to reshape its roster on the fly.
Still, that doesn't mean general manager Ben Cherington can afford to sit on his hands for the next few months. No team has won consecutive championships in this millennium, which speaks as much to the parity of the sport as it does the sheer randomness of baseball. Cherington knows as well as anybody that in order to win it all, everything needs to break right. Your starting pitchers have to stay healthy. Young guys need to break out, and the veterans must ward off age. You must make the plays in the field, get big hits when you need them and have that unflappable reliever who can get you out of a tight spot in the late innings.
A lot of luck is involved - an unquantifiable amount of luck. The smartest GM in the world can't prepare for that.
What's more, free agency has made it impossible to keep entire teams together. There's a revolving door of complementary players plugging holes and rounding out the roster. The best GMs can do is commit to a core, like Boston did with Dustin Pedroia, David Ortiz, Jon Lester and Jacoby Ellsbury, all of whom played key roles on the 2007 championship squad. But even when you keep a nucleus intact, getting back to the Fall Classic is incredibly difficult. Injuries crop up, older players regress and prospects go bust. Look at the San Francisco Giants - World Series winners in 2012, but 10 games below .500 in 2013. You can't predict baseball.
The Red Sox are going to be a different team next year. Maybe they'll win the World Series again and become the first Red Sox team to win back-to-back titles since the 1915-16 editions. It depends on what they do over the next several months. Will they shell out big bucks for Ellsbury, a player as injury-prone as he is fast? Who else will they (or won't they) re-sign? Who will they pursue in free agency? There's not a whole lot out there, so maybe it makes sense to keep as many guys as possible and see if they can catch lightning in a bottle again?
With the offseason only a week old, the Red Sox have plenty of time to figure that out.
Tyler Maher is a junior who is majoring in economics. He can be reached at Tyler.Maher@tufts.edu.
