Ooh, that smell...

Someone's tossing the horsehide around...

Oh, baseball. You are so close and yet so far away. But close enough that your curly-headed detractors have begun their song of discontent. See, Dan Shaughnessy's knickers are all twisted up again. Seems the Red Sox don't have anyone on the club who hit 30 HR last year. And thus we are doomed to once again watch the Yankees dance about and engage in totally non-phallic champagne popping come late October.

Baseball's a simple sport, really. And not even in the "you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball" way. You play a nine-inning game, and whoever has the most runs at the end, wins. Every team does this 162 times, and the eight teams who were the best at it get to go to the playoffs. So it would seem that the key to this particular sport would be scoring more runs than the other teams. Danny's worried that the Sox won't score enough runs without a giant Manny/J-Bay/Big Papi-type masher in the midst of their lineup. And that might be true. (It's actually not, but we'll get to that in a paragraph or three.)

There are, as it turns out, two ways to improve your team's run differential. One, the traditional method of Sox teams from time immemorial, is to hire as many mashers as possible, thus increasing your runs scored and clubbing the opposition into a pasty substance. The other is to reduce the number of runs you allow. Admittedly, this is the recourse of (ugh) National League teams, and is equivalent in the eyes of the Boston sports media to moving to P-Town and opening a bed and breakfast. But it's also effective. For proof, ask the 2008 Rays. Or even last year's Mariners and Giants, who both damn near made the playoffs despite lineups that would have had trouble outhitting most American Legion squads.
And man, oh man, will the 2010 Red Sox prevent runs. Their pitching staff's got three of the top ten starters in the AL, and their 4 and 5 guys would each have a legit shot at the #1 spot on about ten major-league clubs. The bullpen should be solid, and is anchored by a dude who, though gleefully, batshit insane, is probably the best closer alive. And every single fielder on the team, as opposed to last year's "please God, don't hit it to the left side" club, can be described as somewhere between "above-average"(Scutaro, Ellsbury) and "best to ever play the position"(Beltre, maybe Cameron) defensively. Leather will be flashed at Fenway this year, which is a new and intriguing concept. I still remember being in the grandstand in 2003 and participating in a half-sarcastic standing ovation when Manny Ramirez made a running catch on a routine liner.

So the Sox look to hold their opponents to very few runs this coming year. But what about the offense? How will the Sox, those under-30 HR-hitting weaklings, ever plate enough runners to take advantage of their potentially scary-brilliant pitching and defense?
Partly, of course, with their BP-projected .360 OBP. And, perhaps, the fact that 6 of the Sox' projected starters have a pretty good shot at hitting 20+ HR. And the three who haven't done that at some point in their career are an absolute base-stealing monster, an MVP 2B who's also the player that everyone seems to think David Eckstein was (i.e. short, scrappy, and awesome at baseball), and Marco Scutaro. Who knows how to draw a walk and will be batting 9th anyway. These guys are going to wear out a lot of starters, and pound on a lot of bullpens. And this is without factoring in the benefits of seeing the Monster in left 81 times a year.

The thing that really grates on me, though? Not the implication that defense doesn't count, nor the complete panning of the Sox offense because none of their above-average to awesome hitters hit over 30 home runs last year (Ortiz hit 28, Youk hit 27. Beltre and Cameron have both hit over 30 in their career, and we all remember Papi's glory days. Those limp-batted wusses.).
No, it's that writers of Shaughnessy's type (I bet even Dan himself, but I'm too tired to hunt all over teh Google for the right link tonight) were the ones who used to praise the late 90's Yankees for being a TEAM, not centered around a single superstar. And their proof of this was always that no member of those NY squads hit over 35 HR. But hey, maybe there's some quirk of baseball that makes deep lineups where everyone puts up a .290/.360/.460 only work in the Bronx. It is a funny game.