The season was a noble effort, one that marked the Red Sox the second-best team in baseball (their 99 wins exceeded that of every other division winner and the Yanks went on to win the World Series) and the Sox had no quit in them. That’s a thin reed to hold onto when the best team is your archrival, when you had a 14-game lead after the All-Star break and you have to watch them celebrate on your home field.
The Boston Red Sox have become one of baseball’s model franchises in the early part of the 21st century, with three World Series titles (2004, 2007, 2013) and being a regular in the postseason. It was the end of the 1990s that saw the groundwork laid for that success and the 1998 Boston Red Sox were where the foundation was put in place.
While every team is different, the nature of every loss and win with its own nuance, we can at least look back on recent years to see how much the first week told us. In today’s MLB coverage, TheSportsNotebook reviews the last five years (2008-12) to help us determine how much weight to assign this week’s results.