FanPost

Do They Even Care? [Promoted Diary]

[editor's note, by Randy Booth] This is sparking a lot of discussion. Let's see how it works on the front page.

I've got my emotions so vested in the race for winning the division that I couldn't sleep at all after the games Friday, Sunday and Monday. But watching the way the team is handling these games, I'm starting to wonder if I should bother. Consider--

Manny's still not playing, in spite of being able to hit in the cage. I'm certainly no expert, but my guess is that he'd be playing if this was winner-take-all for the postseason.

Youkilis sits out again. See above.

Dice-K pushed back in the rotation by three days to allow the playoff rotation to take shape this weekend.

Eric Gagne comes in tonight when a rested Okajima was ready. This comes on the heels of Francona saying he needed to get Gagne consistent work to be ready for the postseason.

There seems to be a pretty clear pattern developing here. The Red Sox don't really care whether they win the division or go in as the wild-card. When I say 'don't care', I don't mean to imply that they're not trying to win. I'm sure each individual player is giving his best and wants to win. And I'm sure if you asked any of them, they'd say they want to win the divison.

But anyone can say that in and mean it as long as its just vague pieties. The test is whether you mean it when the rubber hits the road and you have to make decisions like the ones Francona made above. All of them can be defended and look perfectly rational if you are viewing this as tuneup time. None of them (at least not the last two) can be remotely defended if it's a pennant race.

Last fall, even after the five-game sweep and subsequent West Coast collapse, I stayed in it during September, pulling for us to beat out Toronto for second. By the end of the year, watching lineups of mostly Triple-A players, I figured out I was pulling for something the organization didn't care about, and I vowed that wouldn't happen again. History seems to be repeating itself.

If it were me, I'd make a moderate push to win the divison. It'd be nice to know that no matter what happened in October, a shiny white banner would be going up  outside Fenway. I wouldn't risk not having Beckett ready to start the playoff opener, but I'd certainly pitch Dice-K tomorrow, and I'd give up the Gagne experiment, and if Manny and Youk were able to go, they would go.

But I'm not running things, and from this angle it looks like all the emotion that so many of us are pouring into winning the AL East isn't shared by the people who make ironclad decisions necessary to make it happen.

Reasonable people can disagree about how far you should go in pushing for the division as opposed to just getting the house in order for October. But we may as well get our emotions in line with what the hiearchy seems to have decided. And that's that the AL East title is a nice goal, but not one to sacrifice anything for.