The End of the Fury Road

It’s hard for me to express how excited I am about the Red Sox right now. It’s not because Craig Breslow is a genius, necessarily, just that he’s motivated and average to above-average and that’s all they really need. Also he didn’t trade Mookie Betts. That helps.

You know in Mad Max: Fury Road when, at the beginning, the parched masses line up for Immortal Joe to briefly release gushes of water? That he keeps it from them, lest they covet it? That was like Chaim Bloom and good deals. Don’t get used to them, was the party line. It’s a long-term project. Let him cook, over the lowest flame possible.

Nah. Maybe it was worth trying, but he was the wrong guy, and the Sox’s luck ran out. Not every GM is going to win a World Series. That the Sox managed three in a row who did is something of a miracle.

That era is over. Whatever comes after 2018 and the Mookie trade has looked, and will continue to look, like something completely different than the quasi-dynastic Sox from 2003 (that team counts for this exercise) to 2018. It’ll look more like everyone else, at least everyone else in Boston’s relative caste.

As much as I’ve known it for a while, it’s hard for me to gather how the 2018 was a crescendo, somehow outdoing all that come before it while also being perfectly complementary. The 2004 team was on the knife-edge; the 2007 and 2013 teams were both wire-to-wire winners, albeit in polar opposite, apparently not fatally-flawed ways. The 2007 team may have been even more dominant than the 2018 squad, but I’d take 2018 over 2007 in a heartbeat. The 2018 Sox squashed the mighty Dodgers and managed to turn the only game they lost into a singularly iconic game for the franchise. The 2007 Sox destroyed an overdue-for-implosion Rockies team that had, inexplicably, won 21 of their last 22 games before the World Series started.

But here I am blabbering about the past again. I’m so thirsty for fun Red Sox news that I can almost taste it, but our functionary savior isn’t back yet from traveling the Fury Road. At the end of the movie (spoiler alert, of course, but you’ve seen movies, you’d understand it immediately) Imperator Charlize Theron turns on the faucets for good. We hardly need that much to survive these days, which is why every extra drop is going to taste that much better. I’ve been furious for the last few years, but if the water’s finally flowing well, who am I to argue?