End of season

It's Monday, September 29 and we just concluded our season with a 3-game set against the New York Yankees. We were long eliminated from the division when we visited Tampa Bay earlier and had been battling the Twinkies for the Wild Card spot and lost out by two games. I know that I am not being optimistic about our chances, but let's face reality people, the Red Sox are not a World Series team and if we are indeed the wild card team, it will take a miracle to get past the Angels who have been whipping our butts. But then, the Sox have carried around a pocketful of miracels for the past 4 seasons.

Hopefully prematurely, I am listing in order, the main reasons for the failure of the Red Sox this season:

1. Manny Ramirez. Attitude, distractions. Killer of team morale.
2. The inability to win on the road. Never thought this would happen in baseball.
3. The power outage and wrist injury to Big Papi. Not hitting them out the way he has in the past. Maybe Manny protected him, but Youk is having a monster year
4. The injuries to Mike Lowell. We really miss his bat and fielding at 3B.
5. Failures with middle relief from bullpen; inconsistency of set up man Okajima.
6. Clay Buccholz. Team was expecting big things from him....12 wins at least?
7. Injuries to pitching staff...Dice-K, Wakes, Schilling(?), and now, Beckett
8. Contributions from the center field position. Ellsbury lit up the place for awhile, but we have not had much from Jacoby and Cocoa Crisp. Flashy fielding at times, but should have gotten 20 home runs and 80 RBI's from that position.
9. The White Sox and Twins battling it out for the division and wild card. Neither one of them is going to roll over and play dead and this does not sit good with the Red Sox's chance.

So, there you have it. Sox failures point to some/all of the 8 reasons above. Tomorrow, I will list the reasons why we woke up on September 29 and made the playoffs.