Hansack for Rookie of the Year!

Wowie wow. A no-hitter on the last day of the season! A no-hitt...what? It wasn't official? Five innings? Come on. The kid threw a no-hitter. He probably staved off a still-probable journey to baseball oblivion. That saved him from having to go back to fishing for lobsters off the coast of Nicaragua. Come on, throw him a bone. Call it official. At least that way we can claim to have kept as many rookie pitchers that threw no-hitters this year as we gave away. Don't tell me you'd rather have Anibal Sanchez than Devern Hansack right now. There's enough room on this bandwagon for all of us.

So that was that. The 2006 Red Sox season. The front office is already working on the marketing campaigns for the winter. "Red Sox: We know that sucked. We'll be better. Promise." Not only did the Sox finish third in the East, but they finished with, overall the 8th best record in the American League. You can say that's pretty lousy, and I'd agree with you, but let me also point out that it would have been good enough for the 4th best in the National League. And only a last-week flurry by both the Padres and Dodgers kept the Sox from having a better record than everyone in the NL except for the Mets. That means very little, of course, because the awful Cardinals are getting to play in October, and the merely lousy Sox are not. But then again, neither are the decent-yet-disappointing White Sox, the sorta-surging-but-still-mediocre Blue Jays, the not-quite-good-enough Angels, and the deeply-disappointing Indians. It's a fact of life that most teams are going to get disappointed and get to fuel their early fall-drinking with lots of fresh anger at the Yankees. Tomorrow night, I'll join them as the Yankees take on the Tigers, who fell just short of the Central Divsion title.

I know this will brand me as even more of a Theo/front-office sucker, but I think they're taking too much criticism for this season. Dave Heuschel of the Hartford Courant had a big feature article in Sunday's Sports section called "It's Epstein, not Einstein" that detailed all of the supposedly bad decisions Theo made. People forget that Theo tried, even before he left the Sox before returning to the Sox last fall, that this was going to be a time of transition that required patience. He knew that lots of things could and probably would go wrong before they started to go right again. The worst thing for him that happened this season (well probably not the worst ,but follow along) was that the Sox got off to such a good start. This team wasn't as good as it appeared in the first half. In the second half, they probably were close to being as bad as they appeared, but that was a combination of the plexiglass principle and a huge rash of injuries. Like the Sox, Theo himself is also probably not as genius and visionary as he seemed his first couple of years. Fortunately, bringing Keith Foulke and Curt Schilling in worked that first year. Trading Nomar panned out. It could just as easily not have worked- and Nomar is now providing great offense and gold-glove defense (at first base) for the Dodgers. He'll be in the post season, along with Derek Lowe, Grady Little, David Wells, Cla Merideth, Josh Bard, Dave Roberts, Johnny Damon, and sort of Pedro Martinez. Go Ex-Sox! I think I've got the Los Angeles Sox over the San Diego Sox in the NL.

I've lost my train of thought here. I think I was trying to talk about how Theo isn't as terrible a decision-maker as we think, but rather that our expectations were so high after 2003 and 2004 that any reduction from that level would be a collapse, rather than a sorta-messy retooling. So retool we will, with the heat of an angry and disappointed Red Sox Nation breathing down the neck of the front office. I know I've said this before, but I expect this offseason to be a good one. We're going to see some things that will give us plenty of hot-stove fodder.

And even if we don't, I'll probably still find some things to blather on about.