He didn’t make the Opening Day roster, having started the year in Pawtucket following an ugly 1994 season in which he put up a 5.84 ERA for Pittsburgh’s AAA team in Buffalo. Of course, in Wakefield’s case, we didn’t even get to see that. Wakefield was just one of a number of scrapheap pickups we’d never heard of, guys like Troy O’Leary, Erik Hanson, and Luis Alicea, names we wouldn’t be able to pair with faces until we finally tuned into Channel 38 on Opening Day and saw them trot out to the first baseline. But back then - when neither the internet nor interleague play existed and ESPN was just something you came across in sports bars and hotels - the National League was little more than an urban legend to us. This might surprise you if you look at his Baseball Reference page today and see that he put up a 165 ERA+ as an outstanding rookie on an outstanding Pirates team just three years before. Like much of the rest of that team, he seemingly came out of nowhere. And the magic of that season was supplied by one man above all others: Timothy Stephen Wakefield. And while we griped about the team and hoped for more, we never actually expected more - not in the way we would later, when Nomar and Pedro burst onto the scene and turned World Series hopes into something more than mere delusion.įor all these reasons, the 1995 season exists as a weird and singular moment in Red Sox history, an improbable glittering jewel of a season scattered amongst faded trash, disconnected from what came both before and after. The Red Sox would always disappoint we knew this and accepted it. ![]() For two straight summers, Scott Cooper and his 98 OPS+ was the team’s only representative at the All-Star Game. Pitching rotations that relied on 37-year-old Danny Darwin. Lineups filled with one-dimensional hitters whose one dimension wasn’t all that impressive: Phil Plantier, Jack Clark, Carlos Quintana. The early 90s Red Sox were paragons of mediocrity. They were bums, every last one of them, up to and including (especially including, actually) the Texas fireballer who would one day retire as the most accomplished pitcher of all-time. We still loved the Sox - we watched them all summer, talked about them all winter, and counted on them to create community in lower middle class exurban New England - but we didn’t believe in them. ![]() While I was too young to actually have witnessed the atrocity of Game Six in 1986 myself, the toxic miasma of the game still hung over the fanbase as I awakened to baseball consciousness a few years later. I came of age as a baseball fan knowing with absolute certainty that the Red Sox would never win the World Series.
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