Supposedly, the 1927 New York Yankees — generally viewed as the best team in baseball history — never had a winning streak of 10 games or longer.

I forget where I heard that, but rest assured I did. Assuming its veracity, I can only suggest there had to be a ton of eight- and nine-game streaks, and that the Bronx Bombers were models of consistency that season. 

I bring this up because the Red Sox went through July and early August winning, at one point, 31 of 36 games. Your temptation, after something like that, is to project that the Sox will just keep rolling through the rest of their schedule en route to a World Series title.

But wait. There’s always a joker in the deck. The Sacramento A’s threw a bucket of ice water on them, and after losing two games to them, the Sox went to Toronto and lost three more before Payton Tolle provided the Band-Aid to stop the bleeding.

Going through this more recent five-game experience was a master class in how easily we jump off the wagon. And I certainly include myself here. Suddenly, I was referring to them by my unprintable team name again when I checked Major League scores online. In the time it takes to flick a switch on and off, I hated them again.

Former NFL coach Bill Parcells, who is a big baseball fan, used to say that, in most cases, the 162-game schedule is the truest indication of how good or bad a team is, and I daresay baseball is the only sport where you can say that.

You can even say that now. As of Friday, going into a three-game series against the Pirates, the team is nine games over .500, 9½ games out of first in the AL East but in the second wild-card spot.

The Red Sox have pretty much lived in this spot forever, haven’t they? They’re like the weekend warrior who has taken two-plus years to build that deck. They’ve gotten there and they’ve missed the mark. But they’re always sniffing around the periphery.  

Ah. But they were sniffing around last place and a disastrous season through June. Forget about the weekend warriors. They were me, trying to put up the basketball net my father bought for our son. I tried so many things, broke some of my father’s best tools and finally gave up. The hoop and net never got put up.

Bad though they were, the Red Sox did not give up. They found a spark somewhere and took it as far as they could.

I like to identify players who stay the course and fight the fight. In the Patriots’ heyday, that would have been Troy Brown. Derrick White has established that reputation with the Celtics. And my favorite Bruin back in the day was Donnie Marcotte. They were guys you could count on to come through even if they were not necessarily the go-to players on their teams.

The Red Sox now have Caleb Durbin, the third baseman they got from the Milwaukee Brewers. He’s parked two grand slams just since July, and he’s playing through a finger injury he suffered while sliding into a base. Just recently, broadcaster Lou Merloni, who does the best job of any of the color commentators, talked about the example Durbin sets for the rest of his teammates when he does that. All the while, the camera stayed on Roman Anthony.

As long as the Red Sox have a few guys like Durbin, they should be OK.

Meanwhile, fans such as I have to remember that over a long, 162-game season, there are going to be course corrections that go both ways. They used a huge one to climb back into the race for a spot in the postseason and went through another one to come down from that rarefied air.

Bette Davis once suggested in “All About Eve” that we fasten our seatbelt because it was going to be a bumpy night. I would suggest Sox fans do the same. You fall off this time of the season,  it’s a long way down. 

The post Krause: Fasten your seatbelts, Sox fans appeared first on Itemlive.

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