There are so many nutty revelations in the Red Sox's self-serving/self-defeating exercise in blame and vengeance—and the revelations are so thoroughly unexamined by the Boston Globe reporters who wrote them down—you might think it would be hard to pick out the most ridiculous. The attacks on Adrian Gonzalez (.338/.410/.548) and Jacoby Ellsbury (.321/.376/.552) for their inadequate intangibles? The overdetermined tales of year-long slackness and sloppiness from a team that went 20-6 in July? The failure to notice that the whole litany of wrongdoing adds up to less misbehavior than Manny Ramirez used to fit into a single seventh-inning stretch, back in the golden days of Boston Baseball Played Right?
But the winner, the point at which the Globe simply turned off its brain and let someone dictate an irrational grudge straight onto the page, is this:
Other than [Jason] Varitek and [Tim] Wakefield, the only holdovers from Francona's 2004 championship run were David Ortiz and Kevin Youkilis.
Yes, the Boston Red Sox had lost that gritty spirit that wins a World Series. Except for, you know, the players who were holdovers from Terry Francona's 2007 championship run: Ortiz, Youkilis, Varitek, Wakefield, Ellsbury, Dustin Pedroia, J.D. Drew, Clay Buchholz, Josh Beckett, Jon Lester, Jonathan Papelbon, Hideki Okajima, and Daisuke Matsuzaka.
The reason there aren't more 2004 heroes on the 2011 Red Sox roster is that the average 2004 Red Sox player would have been 37.4 years old this season. Does the Globe believe that 39-year-old Kevin "Cowboy Up" Millar would have provided more inspiration and leadership down the stretch than the playoff-untested Gonzalez did? Or is it just helping some anonymous owner or executive try to spin one month of failure into a fable of a seven-year decline?