COMMENTARY
A decade ago this week, the golden era of Red Sox baseball bottomed out in Baltimore. It then spent the next year doing exploratory drilling of said bottom, but that’s a narrative device for another day.
The 2011 Red Sox were, in the most significant way, the anti-2021 Red Sox. The 2021 Red Sox took money from the Twins to fit deadline exclamation point Hansel Robles under the luxury tax threshold. The 2011 Red Sox signed Carl Crawford a week after trading for Adrian Gonzalez.
They were offseason champions and everybody’s spring favorite, and played that way (lest you have forgotten) for four months.