Finally home, Red Sox can reset their season

The Red Sox finally make it back to Fenway Park on Tuesday afternoon, playing their first home game on Jersey Street since Game 2 of the World Series against the Dodgers. By then they were on their way to a postseason record of 11-3. They'll show up at Fenway to celebrate all that having won three of their first 11 games. And it’s worth noting that the way their starting pitchers have pitched, it wouldn’t matter if they had played their first three series of 2019 on the moon.

The best nine innings the Red Sox have gotten from their pitchers came against the D-backs on Sunday, when Hector Velazquez and Brandon Workman and Marcus Walden and Matt Barnes and Ryan Brasier shut out the D-backs on a day when Boston won, 1-0, on a Mitch Moreland home run. Moreland also hit a big three-run homer against the Mariners to get the Sox their one win in Seattle. For now, then, Moreland is all that is standing between the defending World Series champs and a record of 1-10.

Until Sunday, Sox starters had an earned run average of 9.13 and had given up 16 homers in 10 games and looked as if they had just reported for pitchers and catchers in Fort Myers and not what we like to call The Show. Well, yeah. A horror show in this case.

And having said all that, and not even having talked about the way the Red Sox have kicked the ball around in the field and even seen a ball that could have been caught drop between two gifted outfielders in Mookie Betts and Jackie Bradley Jr., there is something you might find rather interesting about the Red Sox being asked to play their first 11 games on the road:

According to the Elias Sports Bureau (they know everything!), it has never happened before to a defending World Series champion. Ever. The closest any defending champ came was 96 years ago, when the New York Giants played their first nine games on the road. By the way -- they won eight of nine. It means they pitched a lot better than Chris Sale and Eduardo Rodriguez and Rick Porcello and David Price have pitched so far for a team that started 17-2 a year ago. The schedule isn’t an excuse for the way the Red Sox have performed so far, and the way they go staggering home on Tuesday. But the Sox do have a right to look at their schedule and wonder if it was conceived by the Yankees.

Here is the high-road response from Dave Dombrowski, the baseball boss of the Red Sox, about the road his team has taken to its home opener:

“Tough trip, but, you play the schedule that you are given. As you know, it evens out over the whole season.”

Of course this has been a fascinating season already. We woke up on Monday morning and saw that the three best records in the American League belonged to the Rays, the Tigers and the Mariners. The Red Sox had the record they had. The Cubs are 2-7 and make you wonder if Joe Maddon is going to make it if they don’t pick it up soon. The Dodgers, who probably wish they’d shown this kind of pop against the Red Sox last October, can’t stop hitting home runs. They’re loaded. So are the Brewers. Mike Trout has come out of the blocks looking better than ever, if such a thing as possible. Go ask Phillies fans and Padres fans how they feel, so far, about having Bryce Harper and Manny Machado playing for their teams. The National League East is shaping up to be the deepest division in baseball.

But there has been no bigger early-season story than the struggles of the Red Sox, unless you’re living on the North Side of Chicago and suddenly feeling as if the Cubbies winning the 2016 World Series is starting to feel as distant as 1908 once was. Boston really is those two Moreland home-run swings away from being 1-10. And if they don’t get that 1-0 bullpen victory in Phoenix on Sunday (remember when it was the Red Sox bullpen that had everybody in Red Sox Nation mildly hysterical, from the Duck Boat parade all the way to Fort Myers?), they’d be coming home 2-9.

Here’s what Alex Cora said in Phoenix on Sunday:

“One thing for sure, we’re not going to get caught up in the, “If you win it’s a relief, and if you lose it’s life and death.’ We don’t play that here in this clubhouse. ... Hopefully when we talk about this road trip a few months from now we can look back and say, ‘You know what? It was a learning experience that made us better.’”

Cora’s team now gets six at home now against the Blue Jays and Orioles. So it’s now out of the realm of possibility that the Sox could be 9-8 before they hit the road again. But you have to know, in the words of “Sweet Caroline,” that Fenway will look so good, so good, so good to the Sox on Tuesday afternoon when it’s time to hand out World Series rings at the 108th Fenway opener, to a team that won 108 last season. The Red Sox keep telling themselves their New Year starts then, as they try to ring out the new and ring in the old.