I’ve been avoiding writing this all day, because this must be rock bottom. And if it’s not rock bottom, I don’t want to see how far down this team can go. The Sox are now the fourth-worst team in baseball by run differential, and the worst in the AL East by 74 runs. The only positive way to spin that is to note that we’re not as far back in the race as you’d think, knowing that stat.

When I was a kid, I’m not sure what I thought about baseball, and how you win. I can guarantee that I think about it differently now. Now, i think of the entire season as an aggregate, based on percentages and averages and consistent performance – if you have [insert player here], he’s going to give you this many doubles, or this many strikeouts, or this many stolen bases. And if you throw enough of those parts together, you’ll have a team that wins more than it loses. Every team tries to do that, unless you’re rebuilding. And the Sox have the luxury of a lot of money to spend in order to go find the right players. But it’s not working.

I don’t know what’s going on with this team. I don’t know if they should wait for things to turn around, because statistically they must (even though I’m pretty sure that’s a logical fallacy). I don’t know if they should start cutting some people loose to shake things up. I was fully on board for waiting for the tide to shift for two and a half months and now I’m starting to reconsider. If you have six guys who have the pedigree to bat .300 and only one of them’s doing it, is that a sign of a deeper problem?

There’s a part of my mind where baseball is still just about execution, about going out and being better than the other team. This is easier to grasp in a game like basketball, where you can physically exert your will on the opponent. But baseball is so random, so luck-based that the only way to beat luck entirely is to hit the ball 400 feet in the air. It is all about the stats, isn’t it? Players are about as good as they’re expected to be, trending up, and then down, and then they lose it completely at the end. And maybe that’s good for this team. Maybe these guys still have gas in the tank, so they can’t possibly be this bad over an entire season.

But as much as this is an aggregate sport, about numbers accrued over time, it’s also a game with tests that take place moment-to-moment. And right now, there are a lot of guys on this team who don’t show up for every moment. That could change. And I hope it does, and I hope the Sox find some luck. But at this moment, it seems like the Sox are shit out of it.