For all those teams’ success, there’s a notable local organization lagging behind in terms of hype: the Red Sox. Few people seem to be talking about them right now. It’s been an unusually quiet offseason across the MLB, but perhaps the only Red Sox talking point of note right now is the extended stare-down with free agent J.D. Martinez. After that, it’s… Mitch Moreland’s two-year deal? Yikes.

I’m not used to feeling so unenthused about the Red Sox. They were the team that brought me into Boston sports, after all. In a manner of speaking, I suppose I’m sort of a bandwagon fan, but it wasn’t one of the championship teams that brought me here. No, it was the 2009 team that did that — if you remember, that’s the one that got swept by the Angels in the ALDS.

It was a simple decision: “Maybe I’ll give baseball a shot.” I was in high school, and football wasn’t quite cutting it for me, so I felt it was time to branch out. The Red Sox and Angels were on, and it didn’t take long for me to get hooked. I loved Dustin Pedroia’s fiery demeanor, David Ortiz’s easy confidence, and most of all, Kevin Youkilis’ completely absurd batting stance. Jon Lester’s triumph over lymphoma was incredibly cool, and Josh Beckett looked liable to beat up an opposing hitter at a moment’s notice, which was also pretty cool in its own way.

The season ended too soon after, but it was a busy offseason for me; I needed to learn more about these players, this franchise, this city. I knew about The Curse and the legendary 2004 team that finally ended it. I didn’t know about the comeback against the Yankees, or Kevin Millar’s endless quotability, or Manny’s tendency to always be Manny. I didn’t know they went back and did it again in 2007 with plenty of new faces, including the undefinable Pedroia, the Laser Show and the Muddy Chicken, who I did know was a man after my own heart as soon as I read about his “Ask Jeff Francis who the fuck I am,” quote.

I’m on my ninth year with the Boston Red Sox now, and I’ve seen my fair share of highs and lows, from fried chicken and beer to getting a chance to watch a Boston championship myself. I got to see David Ortiz’s famed postseason heroics live before my eyes, as he was engulfed in flames against the Cardinals and drove the team of beards and Koji Uehara high fives to their third title in ten years. Those 2013 Red Sox rebounded from the worst record in the AL East the year before, which in some ways encapsulates what its been like to follow this team over that time.

If the Red Sox built my Boston fandom, then the Celtics cemented it. My timing wasn’t any better with them — I started following just late enough to miss the dominant 2007-08 championship team. Still, over the next several seasons, I was hooked. The “Big Three” Celtics were a team of dominant personalities — Paul Pierce’s unshakable confidence, Kevin Garnett’s frenzied barking, Ray Allen’s unflappable consistency — and even as they all began to grow old, there was a pridefulness to them. The decrepit Celtics were an annoyance, the team that would give too much effort every night and use their veteran saavy to frustrate younger, more athletic teams. They took LeBron James and the eventual champion Miami Heat to seven games in the 2011-12 Eastern Conference Finals, and it was sort of a last hurrah for the group. LeBron might have buried them, but they went out swinging.

Since the Celtics’ loss to Miami and the Red Sox win over St. Louis the next year, the two franchises have seemed to trend in different directions. The Celtics hit rock bottom in 2013-14, going 25-57 and finishing 12th in the Eastern Conference. They’ve made the playoffs and improved their record in every season since. Meanwhile, the Red Sox have been, to some extent, treading water. They’ve posted two losing seasons since the championship, followed by consecutive 93-win campaigns where they never really felt like a legitimate contender.

It feels as though there’s just more of a plan behind the Celtics than the Red Sox. Danny Ainge has spent years meticulously compiling and flipping draft picks, capitalizing on undervalued players, and finding the right opportunities to spend. The two most significant free agent signings in franchise history — Al Horford and Gordon Hayward — came in the past two offseasons. Ainge avoids panic moves and trades from a position of strength as well as any GM in professional sports, to the point where he’s often teased for his reluctance to part with his assets. This past summer, the Celtics passed on a number of potential deals for superstars who changed teams. Paul George was available, but is also on the final year of his contract, likely to bolt for Los Angeles this coming summer. It was a bad bet for Ainge to pay up for a player he couldn’t guarantee he could keep, so he didn’t.

On the flip side, the Red Sox have seen three executives in charge of baseball operations since 2011, and few baseball executives are more different than one another in terms of philosophy than the latter two — Ben Cherington and Dave Dombrowski. Cherington, though he had his own faults, was more similar to Ainge — building up the farm system and avoiding bad contracts that would kill flexibility… right up until he signed two awful contracts that destroyed his flexibility in Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez.

The Red Sox have seen three executives in charge of baseball operations since 2011, and few baseball executives are more different than one another in terms of philosophy than the latter two.

Enter Dombrowski, who, to a fault, loves the big splash. Dombrowski was hired in August of 2015, and by November, he’d already shelled out $217 million to David Price and shipped four prospects away in exchange for Craig Kimbrel. That’s not to say these deals were the wrong things to do at the time, but considering Dombrowski’s body of work, it’s a fair critique to say that he often opts to throw money and assets at problems until they go away.

Subsequently, this current offseason isn’t terribly surprising. Dombrowski is locked in a staring contest with J.D. Martinez, who is a player this lineup desperately needs. The Red Sox are starved for power, and previous deals have left the farm system depleted enough to make trades for top-end talent difficult. If Martinez ends up elsewhere, there may not be another move to be made right now.

And in some ways, that’s the point. Danny Ainge didn’t need Paul George. He was building on a team that made the conference finals the year before and months later is sitting in first place in the conference right now, all while sitting on a treasure hoard of draft picks and young talent. He’s a strong, independent GM who don’t need no blockbuster trade. There were dozens of pathways open to the Celtics this past summer, and all Ainge had to do was find the one he liked the best. The one he chose has the Celtics competitive right now without sacrificing virtually any long-term upside.

This kind of result is difficult to achieve without consistency, and, in essence, the Red Sox have been an organizational roller coaster. Cherington took charge and immediately had to address missteps by Theo Epstein, most notably the infamous Carl Crawford contract. Since his departure, Cherington’s carefully cultivated farm system has largely either graduated or been shipped off by Dombrowski. Conversely, Dombrowski has had to struggle with those albatross contracts for Sandoval and Ramirez, the latter of which is still owed $44 million over the next two years, assuming his option vests. They’ve been tying knots and challenging the next guy to unravel them. Is Dave Dombrowski the guy to lead a franchise to sustained, long-term success? Tigers fans of the past three seasons might have some thoughts on the matter.

This is all a long way of saying that, as a fan, the Red Sox don’t give me that feeling of utter confidence the way the Celtics do. Remember the feeling we all had when that large contract for Pablo Sandoval looked likely, even though the case against that signing was obvious? It’s certainly unrealistic to expect any team to operate as efficiently and with as high of a success rate as the Celtics have over the past 10+ years, but there’s an unavoidable aura of “I hope this doesn’t blow up in our faces” in place.

My point is not to predict doom and gloom with the current state of the Red Sox. Far from it. They’re more likely than not to win 90+ games again this season, and they have a collection of young stars like Mookie Betts, Andrew Benintendi, and Rafael Devers that will be anchoring the lineup for years to come. They have two Cy Young winners in their starting rotation, and those guys aren’t even as good as their ace. If you’re going to have problems with your baseball franchise, these are probably the ones to have — it certainly beats being the Derek Jeter-led Marlins.

But following the Red Sox transformed my sports fandom, and not long after that, the Celtics did it again. It’s impossible not to compare the two. I love watching Mookie Betts and Chris Sale, but on the macro level, something’s just fundamentally off with the Red Sox right now, and it’s never more apparent than when the Celtics are on TV. With as much as the team has going for it right now, it’s telling that they’re receiving so little buzz — and that’s without mentioning how the Yankees appear to be rising fast.

I can’t say for sure how good the Red Sox will be this season — too much depends on Martinez’s status, first and foremost. Players like Price, Ramirez, and Pedroia are aging, Chris Sale has two years remaining on his contract, and younger contributors like Betts and Bogaerts are into their arbitration seasons. Jason Groome and Michael Chavis are nice prospects, but even Groome is still a-ways off, and the system around them is thin. Major roster decisions are coming in the next few years, and it’s hard to divine the greater plan in place here — if in fact there is one.

I know the Celtics will be very good, though. They already are, and there isn’t much reason to think they won’t continue to be for years to come. Danny Ainge has put together a well-oiled machine that has missed the playoffs only three times since the 2003-04 season. For a Red Sox franchise in need of some year-to-year consistency and sustained success, looking to their sibling franchise for some ideas might not be the worst idea.

Photo by Greg M. Cooper — USA TODAY Sports

But there’s good news, everyone! The Red Sox, if you haven’t heard, have lots and lots of money. $95 million spread out over half a decade isn’t all that much in the grand scheme of things to this ball club. In addition to a lucrative farm system that has recently developed some ready-made stars, the Red Sox profit from a massive fanbase and repeated successes to have one of the largest payrolls in baseball, one that rubs shoulders with the luxury tax threshold from time to time. This all might seem like me reciting things you already know in a slightly condescending tone, but I promise I’m going somewhere with this.

Think of all the big, awful contracts the Red Sox have had since the beginning of the decade. Carl Crawford, obviously. Josh Beckett’s extension is a plausible one. Daisuke Matsuzaka’s posting and deal were pretty bad. Hell, if you wanted to be really petty, you could say Julio Lugo’s four-year, $36 million deal was big and terrible due to the player they offered it to, and you’d have some compelling arguments. Looking back on those deals, could you honestly say any one of them crippled the short- or long-term future of the Red Sox? Probably not. Definitely not, if you consider the state of the payroll in 2017.

The Red Sox have effectively recovered from all their major contract screw-ups because they are a factory of money. It gives them a ton of leeway to make these huge deals in the first place. If those transactions don’t pan out, the torrent of cash that flows in allows the Sox to either cut those players and eat the money, or trade them away and still get something of value back, since they’re still paying a large percentage of the contract. Money gives the Red Sox a large margin of error, and the payroll can effectively tank the hit of a couple bad deals.

It isn’t just the exorbitant bidding in free agency that boxes out small-payroll teams – it’s the extreme regression risk that comes with any mega-deal.

This is the benefit of having a luxury-tax-pushing payroll that isn’t discussed very often. The inequality between the Red Sox and a team like the Rays or Athletics usually comes in the form of being able to make those deals. The Red Sox can price out those teams for any given player, if they felt compelled to do so. What isn’t talked about enough is what could happen after that deal is struck. A team like the Sox or Yankees can be saddled with a failure of a mega-deal (see: Ellsbury, Jacoby) and continue to compete and win. For the Rays and A’s, however, a player falling off on a huge deal would utterly cripple their short-term payroll and outlook, and might adversely affect their long-term plans. It isn’t just the exorbitant bidding in free agency that boxes out small-payroll teams, since deferments are a thing – it’s the extreme regression risk that comes with any mega-deal.

Pablo Sandoval would’ve earned an even $17 million this year. The Rays could fit Chris Archer’s, Kevin Kiermaier’s, Wilson Ramos’, and Corey Dickerson’s salaries into that with room to spare. The A’s would have wiggle room if you combined what Jed Lowrie, Yonder Alonso, and Rajai Davis are all getting paid in 2017 and shoved it in there. For those teams, having a player implode with $17 million attached to their name would deny them quite a lot of useful additions and potential trade chips. Now imagine losing out on getting good players on one-year deals – and the potential prospects that you’d receive by trading them – for four more years. That’s catastrophic at best, and a front office house cleaning at worst.

Sometimes, though, even the big payroll teams reach their limit. Burdened with Beckett’s contract extension, Crawford’s albatross contract, and the first year of Adrian Gonzalez’s extension, the Red Sox were hurting for salary relief. In a move that was the polar opposite of the Sandoval deal, Cherington offloaded all three of those contracts (plus Nick Punto) to the Los Angeles Dodgers, and while the prospects they received didn’t amount to much, getting over $250 million of salary off your books is still pretty damn good. The Red Sox were saved from a decade of payroll crunches due to a very shrewd waiver trade in August. They found the limits of the margins their money made for them.

This isn’t something that should be touted, honestly. It’s more of an unspoken benefit, a representation of the disparity in revenue between some of the teams in baseball. That kind of money allows for teams to not just go out and get players they want, but to make mistakes, and quickly recover from them. Sometimes big contracts work, and sometimes they don’t. The difference here is that when they don’t, the Red Sox can deal with it.

My final game in Fenway Park was amazing. The emotions from the first at-bat and a standing ovation to the moment Nick Punto, one of my closest baseball friends, came out to run for me is indescribable. Red Sox fans that day gave me the most amazing sendoff a player could ever ask for because it was not scripted. No speeches or pregame ceremonies were needed. It was just the beauty of a fan base showing theirappreciation and I wish I could’ve shown them more love, but the game had to go on.

Fenway Park, a departing icon, standing ovations, emotions, history, reverence, and, somewhere somehow, Nick Punto.

Punto announced his retirement from baseball on Wednesday, making official what was suspected after he sat out the 2015 season. Because players don’t sit out seasons when they have decent offers on hand, and teams don’t give good offers to players in their late-30s who just sat out a season. But still, Punto is hanging them up, and as such, it’s time to offer a retrospective of what Nick Punto meant to the Boston Red Sox. Here. Let me sum up Nick Punto’s time with the Red Sox as best I can in a single word.

Nothing.

That was the essence of Nick Punto’s contribution to the Red Sox. During his 65 games with Boston, Punto came to bat 148 times. With those chances, Punto amassed a slash line of .200/.301/.272. And yes, before you ask, that slugging percentage really is lower than the on-base percentage. His entire contribution was worth -0.2 WARP. In other words, he actually cost the Red Sox a fifth of a win. As for highlights, well… he had one home run. It came on a 2-0 count in the ninth inning of a game the Red Sox were leading 6-4.  Even his high points almost literally didn’t matter. He was utterly expendable, replaceable, inconsequential.

That’s not to say Punto had an inconsequential career. On the contrary, he played in the majors for almost a decade and a half! Sure he was only worth a total of 5.2 WARP during that time, but a decade-plus in the majors in and of itself, regardless of any measurements or statements of quality, is impressive. So why did he last so long if he wasn’t very good? There are two reasons. The first is his versatility. Punto was the guy you wanted on your team because he could play all over the diamond. During those paltry 65 games with the Red Sox, Punto played every single infield position. He even played shortstop (all of 44 innings!). (Yikes!) He was short, squat, and powerless, but you could put him just about anywhere in the infield and your team wouldn’t automatically lose the game, and that had value that maybe wasn’t captured in his WARP total. That was the first reason then-GM Ben Cherington gave Punto a two-year contract.

The second reason Cherington signed Nick Punto was that he was a great teammate. If you were trying to build a good clubhouse, Punto was a positive step towards that goal. So it was all the more ironic when he was traded to, among many other reasons, improve Boston’s clubhouse chemistry. The 2012 Red Sox were managed by Bobby Valentine. Also, there were clubhouse problems. Those two things may have been related! Come July, the team was struggling and Valentine was awful and some of the players weren’t happy and attempted to go over Valentine’s head to fix the situation. This didn’t work, unless the goal was to make everything worse. If so, then it was a resounding success! But otherwise, nope.

If you were trying to build a good clubhouse, Punto was a positive step towards that goal. So it was all the more ironic when he was traded to, among many other reasons, improve Boston’s clubhouse chemistry.

We go round and round for another month or so with the team not improving on the field or in the clubhouse, and it became clear that something had to be done. What was done was huge. Then-new GM Ben Cherington took a box of dynamite to the roster. It was like a plan conceived by Wile E. Coyote, except this one worked. The end result was one of the biggest trades in team history. Gone were franchise cornerstones Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett to the LA Dodgers. In return, the Dodgers sent the Red Sox young pitchers Allen Webster and Rubby De La Rosa. But most importantly they agreed to pay every penny of the the almost $270 million owed to those three players. $270 million!! And LA took it all! Oh my gosh!

Oh, and they took Nick Punto too.

It was an amazing trade. It completely reset the Red Sox roster, giving the team flexibility they hadn’t dreamed was possible. It allowed them to supplement the roster that coming off-season with a whole bunch of upside plays, nearly every single one of whom was a smashing success, like a David Ortiz World Series at-bat. This led directly to the improbable, cathartic, and just plain fun 2013 World Series win the following season.

All that was amazing, strange, wonderful, but what about Nick Punto? He may have been the strangest, the most bizarre aspect of it. Of Beckett, Crawford, and Gonzalez, all were multi-millionaires on multi-year contracts paying them tens of millions of dollars per season. All were stars, Beckett from the ’07 World Series win with the Red Sox, and before that, the ’03 World Series with the Marlins, both of which wouldn’t have been won without his dominance on the biggest stage. Gonzalez was perhaps the preeminent first baseman in baseball, a player the Red Sox had just traded almost their entire farm system for before bestowing a massive $20+ million-per-season contract on him. He was to be the centerpiece of the Red Sox. Crawford combined superior speed and defense with surprising power. He, along with Gonzalez, was the big, sexy pillar of the new Red Sox.

And Nick Punto who signed for $3 million over two years and was balding and pudgy. He was the coaster hastily shoved under the drink minutes after the fact. He was completely an afterthought.

Ned Colletti [Dodgers GM]: We really want Gonzalez, Ben.
Cherington: You can have him, but like I’ve been telling you for months, you have to take Beckett and Crawford too.
Colletti: You know what? I’ll do it!
Cherington: Great! We’ll have the paperwork drawn up and we’ll notify the commissioner’s office. Talk to you soon [goes to hang up phone]
Colletti: Wait Ben!
Cherington: What?
Colletti: Throw in Pinto too, wouldya?
Cherington: You mean Punto?
Colletti: Yeah, Punto.
Cherington: Uh… sure?
Colletti: Great! Can’t wait to make this official!

It was the biggest trade the Red Sox ever consummated, both in terms of total dollars and in terms of the 180 degree directional change of the franchise that it not only symbolized but engineered. It led directly to the team’s third World Series championship in a decade, a thought that would have been unimaginable in August of 2012. It featured three All Stars, and a local World Series hero. And what do people call it? The Punto Trade. Because of all the significance dripping from the deal, what sticks out perhaps most of all, is Punto’s inclusion. It’s just so… strange, such an afterthought, so utterly inessential, replaceable, inconsequential. And yet, there he is, on a private jet  with Beckett and Gonzalez, a two-time World Series winning ace and perhaps the best first baseman in the league. In a time of great seriousness, here was Nick Punto in this trade, and it was… funny.

#dodgers doing it first class! pic.twitter.com/DRPr2HH7

— Nick Punto (@Shredderpunto) August 25, 2012

In a way, Nick Punto was the great artist who died young and unknown. Decades later his work is discovered tucked away in a dusty attic somewhere and his genius is recognize and appreciated. Nick Punto meant nothing to the Red Sox while he was in Boston. He was by definition replaceable by any run-of-the-mill Triple-A middle infielder. It was only by leaving that he became important. But by going, he became more than important; he came to symbolize the first chapter of the rebirth of a franchise, and the first step towards a World Series win. He took with him the distrust, animus, and backbiting of the Valentine era, and wiped it away with the efficacy of an industrial strength cleanser.

As a player with the Red Sox Nick Punto is meaningless, that is, except for what his name connotes. But it is that very implication that, as far as Boston is concerned, is the most consequential thing he ever did.

Photo by Greg M. Cooper/USA Today Sports Images

The baseball season is over, and as it falls into history, the new season steps forward to take its place. This process is essentially instantaneous. The Red Sox went from nothing during the playoffs and World Series to the center of the baseball world in a single click of a second hand. Boston is in the unique position of having a stacked farm system, a talent-laden roster, and a GM who had no part in assembling any of it. As such, he’s not nearly as attached to the players in Boston now, thus making it much easier for him to make them players who used to be in Boston. Dave Dombrowski is here to shake things up.

While there is likely to be much wheeling and dealing, the free agent market hangs over Boston’s head like an axe at a beheading. The reason is simple: the last two Red Sox general managers (generals manager?) lost their job due to their failures in the market.

In 2011 John Lackey was coming off his first season in Boston, a 2010 season that saw him throw 215 innings of 4.40 ERA baseball. His strikeouts dipped and his walks jumped. But improvement was expected! It was then not delivered. In fact, Lackey was even worse, throwing 160 innings with an ERA of 6.41 before getting shut down for Tommy John surgery. Lackey had been GM Theo Epstein’s big addition to the pitching staff and now it looked like the Red Sox would pay Lackey three seasons worth of top-of-the-rotation money for a bit under two seasons of awful pitching. What’s more, had Lackey been anywhere near good the Red Sox would have made the playoffs instead of missing in excruciating fashion on the last day of the season.

Then there was Carl Crawford. Crawford showed up to Boston with a new seven year $142 million contract having forgotten how to hit and field. In April Crawford hit .155/.204/.227 and there was no looking back. He wasn’t exactly horrible with the bat after that though he wasn’t fantastic either, but he the overall appearance was a shell of the player who had played All Star-caliber baseball in Tampa just the season before. This was Theo Epstein’s big addition to the offense. Then Crawford got hurt, which, purely from an on-field standpoint, was probably for the best. It was those failures along with some others that signaled the end of Epstein’s time in Boston and with him fellow 2004 hero manager Terry Francona.

Epstein was the GM who had ended the curse not once, but twice. He’d bested the Yankees, he’d built the team and franchise he’d set out to build, and he’d made the Red Sox the greatest organization in baseball from the time he’d taken over to then. But after Crawford and Lackey showed up and sucked horribly, he was gone. That’s a bit of a simplification of course, but it’s roughly correct. Without Epstein’s failures in the free agent market, it’s entirely possible he might still be here.

Time waits for nobody, and in fact, it speeds up like hell when you’re a GM who just gave $90 million to a guy who can’t hit or field.

But he left and was replaced by assistant GM Ben Cherington. Cherington’s Red Sox finished in last place in his first season in charge. Then he hit the market hard. He brought in Stephen Drew, Mike Napoli, Jonny Gomes, Shane Victorino, Mike Carp, David Ross, Ryan Dempster, and Koji Uehara. That team won the World Series. Cherington didn’t hit fully on each player, but he got something productive out of each, and in the world of free agency that’s no sure thing. Cherington had turned to the market, supplemented the talent on hand with free agents, and won a World Series. Then 2014 happened and the team failed on the field once again.

Following that failure, for the 2015 season, Cherington decided he needed to upgrade the talent on hand. He went back to the free agent market to bring in Hanley Ramirez, Pablo Sandoval and Justin Masterson. As it turned out, all were horrific failures on a scale that seemingly couldn’t be predicted (maybe Masterson could have). The team cut Masterson mid-season but Sandoval and Ramirez were and are on long term contracts. And they were and are both awful. And the Red Sox finished last again. And that was it, the GM lost his job. Again. Less than two seasons removed from mastering the market and winning a World Series, Cherington had been given the boot hard.

Like Epstein before him, that was it. Unlike Epstein, there wasn’t really any other reason. Epstein squabbled with team president Larry Lucchino, had recently failed in the draft, and a few of his contract extensions were looking like expensive busts. Cherington had no such baggage. He was put out on his backside mostly because Pablo Sandoval went from above average hitter and above average fielder to downright awful at both as soon as he put on a Red Sox uniform. Hanley Ramirez, beyond April when he crushed homer after homer, stopped hitting and put on a display of fielding in left that would make little league teams look away.

Over the next few weeks and months you’re going to hear the Red Sox connected with just about every free agent there is. There will be David Price rumors, Zack Greinke meetings, Johnny Cueto whisperings, anonymous mentions of Jordan Zimmermann, and outright discussions of Chris Davis, Darren O’Day, and anyone else who plays baseball and has no contract. Dombrowski has his preferences and he will try to remake Boston’s roster in that image over the off-season and as he’s already said, that image includes a top-of-the-rotation starting pitcher. He may want to upgrade the offense with something more certain at first base than Hanley Ramirez, who it just seems like the Red Sox would rather pay to explore water on Mars than to play first base for them next season. It’s possible Dombrowski can do all this through trades but that seems unlikely. He’s probably going to have to sign a free agent or two. Or six.

If Dombrowski is going to give $200 million to David Price or $150 million to Johnny Cueto or whoever or whatever, he had better be certain. No, scratch that. He’d better be whatever word means three times the power of ‘certain’ before doing so. He just got here, and guys who just arrived typically get some time before being held to the fire, but Ben Cherington won a World Series two years ago. Two years ago! Two! And he’s now a visiting professor at Columbia University. Time waits for nobody, and in fact, it speeds up like hell when you’re a GM who just gave $90 million to a guy who can’t hit or field.

If Dombrowski wants to remake the roster and win now at the expense of tomorrow, he’d better be sure about the choices he makes when it comes to free agents. What I’m saying is Dave Dombrowski had better be immune to iocane powder.

Photo by Mark L. Baer/USA Today Sports Images

Three months into his contract, he’s been fine. The problem, of course, is that he’s being paid to be more than “fine.” As these things tend to go, with the Red Sox struggling all year, he is the easy scapegoat. Sure, there are other guys involved with the organization who are seeing the dark side of the fan base, but Sandoval is receiving more than his share of the blame. In fact, the dreaded Carl Crawford label has even been thrown around. Say what you will about Sandoval’s performance relative to his expectations, but comparing him to one of the worst acquisitions in team history is beyond unfair.

The strangest part about all of this is that the third baseman has been far from a disaster. The problem for him has that he’s looked completely lost at times, which hurts the perception of his play. Specifically, he suffered through a miserable May in which he hit .200/.242/.311. Unfortunately for him, that coincided with an atrocious stretch for the entire team, making his poor play even more glaring. However, this is far from an anomaly for him. While with the Giants, Sandoval was a notoriously streaky player. In his six full seasons in San Francisco, he had six months in which he hit for an OPS below .600 and ten months in which his OPS was greater than .900. It’s not an ideal style, but in the end, his numbers always ended up solidly above average.

Although they’re not up to his typical standards, Sandoval’s overall numbers are once again good enough. To wit, he’s hitting .279/.329/.416 with a .266 TAv, essentially making him an average hitter. Is that the kind of hitter they paid $18 million a year for? Of course not. With that being said, comparing that kind of performance to that of Crawford’s is asinine. It’s slightly disappointing, but not mind-numbing.

Arguably the most surprisingly disappointing part of Sandoval’s season has been his defense. Despite his body-type, he’s always been a plus defensive player at third base. He’s had a rough stretch this year, though, and is actually costing the team runs with his glove. Of course, all it’s been is a stretch. Back in April he looked like the surprisingly adept fielder we all expected. I think it’s fair to expect him to get back to that form sooner rather than later. Possibly due to the lack of a truly reliable defensive statistic, slumps on that side of the ball seem to be brushed away. While good hitters go through rough stretches regularly and people typically brush it off as an abnormality, rough patches with the glove always bring panic. Intuitively, however, defensive slumps should be possible as well. That’s not to say that Sandoval will definitely get back to his former defensive prowess, but we’re dealing with far too of a sample to determine that he and his weight are no longer cut out for the hot corner.

A good way to tell if someone is a dumb dumb is if they compare either Pablo Sandoval or Hanley Ramirez to Carl Crawford.

— Matt Collins (@RedSox_Thoughts) June 24, 2015

When we talk about Crawford’s time in Boston, there are really two key components to that entire experience, and it’s especially unfair to drag Sandoval into either of these conversations. The first is simply the commitment. Crawford was given seven years prior to the 2011 season, two more than Sandoval. Not only did the former receive two more years, he was a full year older than the latter is now. In addition to that, Sandoval is receiving a smaller average annual value at a time where TV money has increased the average contract monstrously since even 2011.

While the commitment may have been the biggest sin of the Crawford acquisition, the worst result may have been the player’s fit with the city of Boston. If there’s one thing we can learn from the whole ordeal, it’s that this phenomenon isn’t some dumb narrative, and there are truly players who aren’t a good fit for this environment. That issue hasn’t been nearly as stark with Sandoval. In fact, there have been multiple times that he’s actively disputed the notion to the media. The whole Instagram situation is the one moment a critic could point to, but that was a different kind of situation. He broke a rule and deserved a small punishment for it, but it’s certainly not indicative of a poor fit with the city.

The Red Sox are undoubtedly having a poor season, and there are plenty of reasons for fans to be legitimately upset. The easy scapegoat is always the new and expensive acquisition, with Sandoval being the target in this case. While his play has deserved that kind of criticism for parts of this season, his overall numbers are actually far from this team’s issue. Even if you want to throw some of the blame on his shoulders, the comparisons to Crawford are far too much. Sandoval’s a good player who had a bad month, not a bad player who needed to be traded as soon as possible. There’s a massive difference between those types of assets.

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I bailed because I felt like the Red Sox had actively pushed me out, and I didn’t care about turning my back on the team for the second time in 36 years. This was okay last season because of the, you know, World Series championship the year prior; it was okay in 2012 because of the thick, lingering toxicity from the end of 2011, one that lingers today in the echo of the name Carl Crawford.

This year, all eyes are on the Sox, even if, in retrospect, it’s clear that this is as transitional a year as 2014 was supposed to be. It’s especially clear in the case of Hanley Ramirez, who needs to transition to DH and has landed on the one team in baseball for which that is a logistical impossibility. On top of that, his terrible defense is almost a statistical impossibility, a hardship for any sentient person standing in front of a giant wall, let alone one in Major League Baseball. He has been so bad, as Dave Cameron wrote yesterday on FanGraphs, that Manny Ramirez’ worst seasons don’t even approach his stink.

That’s bad. Move Hanley and the opportunities for improvement would open up, but in the seasons in which everything goes wrong, you can’t move him unless Ortiz gets injured — another thing gone horribly wrong. Maybe the Sox could get away with this, but on top of a bevy of other problems, they can’t hit line drives anywhere but into leather; they can’t give up ground balls without them finding the holes. If corporations are people, this one caught an early summer cold. In April.

Now the fans are getting sick, too, and sick and tired of this nonsense. I still think the team will finish above or below arm’s reach of .500 and maybe even with a playoff spot. Even if the bad luck just turns average, they’ll be able to pocket some wins here and there, and it bears repeating that the season isn’t even half over and in some lights the lineup still looks incredible. But to be fairer and at all realistic, when your BP playoff odds (11.5%) are worse than Bartolo Colon’s batting average (.154), you’ve got problems.

Now we have problems too, as fans. This is a 2012 repeat all over again; at least last year got to ride the wave before it crashed. We got euphoria, and we paid for it. Fair enough. But there was an industrial bleakness to 2012, one that was ultimately pinned on Bobby Valentine and a handful of malcontents. This year, we don’t have that luxury. The chin looks and acts like he’s in charge, but it’s becoming clear that no one at Fenway really has their hand on the wheel or the pulse of the team, should it exist.

Dustin Pedroia thinks it does, and he would, but no matter who put the Red Sox in the hole they’re in, they’re in there. We’re in there too. We see what’s happening, and we’re running out of reasons to explain the swarms of losing streaks that have come to define this era of this team. The talent is there, the bodies are there, but the life is gone. If Pedroia is right, and the life is there, we won’t miss it when it comes along. Our eyes are fixed on this once-promising team, and that’s the problem.

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