Sox Fans Viciously Turning on Each Other
In the Globe,
Dan Shaughnessy already starts apportioning blame.
Theo Epstein is in for his share of finger-pointing if the Sox are eliminated by the Tribe. It's never a good thing when your $143 million payroll bites the dust against a team with a $61 million payroll. Dan Duquette assembled half of the 2004 champs, but what we are looking at today is almost exclusively Theo's team and it's his most recent acquisitions who have been exposed thus far in October.
I'm going to stick up for fellow Eli Theo here, and not just because he went to a fine school in a lovely New England town (have you been there lately?), with a kick-ass football team, but because it's an indirect way of sticking up for the Yankees.
Whenever the Yankees lose a playoff, you hear some pundits say, as Shaughnessy just did, How dare a team with a fill-in-the-blank payroll lose?
To which I've always said that beyond a certain point, your payroll bears a diminishing correlation to the excellence of your team.
The Yankees, for example, consistently overpay for free agents; their payroll could probably be 20% smaller than the 200 million or whatever it is and they'd still field basically the same team.
But in any case, there are lots of other factors involved in a team's success besides being able to pay players the most amount of money (as the Red Sox are finding out).
Team chemistry, young players, finding the right young pitchers—none of these things are guaranteed by having a big checkbook, and one could argue that sometimes having a lot of money to spend works against these intangibles.
Granted, on balance having a huge payroll gives a team a significant advantage in being able to sign the players it decides are essential.
Nonetheless, I think that the correlation between payroll size and winning is less automatic than Yankee (and now Sox) critics like to assume.
If you look at the Yankees now, for example, the most exciting players (Chamberlain, Hughes, Cano, Cabrera) are the ones being paid the least, and the most underperforming players (Clemens, Giambi, Mussina, perhaps Damon) are being paid in the eight-figures....
That said, I do enjoy Sox fans turning on each other like starving, rabid dogs.
