SB Nation Reacts: The surprises of the season

Welcome to SB Nation Reacts, a survey of fans across MLB. Each week, we send 30 polls to plugged in fans from each team. Red Sox fans, sign up HERE to join Reacts.

We are back with another week of fan polling from our SB Nation Reacts polls. This week, as always, we have a look at the confidence of Red Sox fans. For some context, this poll went out last Thursday, so right after avoiding a sweep at the hands of the Astros. In addition to the latest confidence polls, we also take a look at some of the biggest disappointments and surprises so far this season.

Red Sox fans’ confidence rising

The last time we took this kind of fan confidence poll was right before the sweep of the Yankees in the Bronx, with confidence starting to falter. We had reached a 59 percent mark, the lowest for Red Sox fans since the second week of the season. Things have recovered a bit since then, including with that sweep, and confidence is back trending in the right direction. This week confidence sits at 76 percent, not quite to the height it had reached at the end of May, but certainly closer. That puts them 11th among all baseball fans, and actually third in the division behind the Rays, which is to be expected, but also the Orioles. I’m honestly not sure what’s going on there.

Biggest surprise team in 2021

The Red Sox are certainly a big surprise this year, having come back from a putrid 2020 to stay in contention to this point in the season with no signs of slowing down. That said, even if the expectation wasn’t that they’d be this good, pretty much everyone thought they’d hang around for at least a little bit. The Giants, meanwhile, appeared to be at a cross-roads in a difficult division. Fast-forward to today, and they lead the NL West. It’s an easy choice to give them this one, and they did run away with it getting 69 percent of the votes. The Red Sox grabbed 15 percent.

Who will miss out on October

The thing about being the biggest surprise is that often people will still expect you to falter as the season continues. So it makes sense that the Giants would win this poll as well. I’m actually a bit surprised they didn’t win by a larger margin. I can see the cases for the others listed here, but the Giants seemingly have the least talented roster while also battling the most talented divisional competition.

Who’s the biggest disappointment?

This is another one where I think the right answer was reached, but the close margin surprised me. Yes, I’ve been disappointed by both the Yankees and Braves, who I saw as clear title contenders. But they’re still in the race. I saw the Twins as division favorites and title contenders as well, but they have already played themselves out of the race unless something whacky happens. I feel like they are an incredibly easy choice here.