Red Sox pitcher Chris Sale makes about $30 million a year. The other night on the mound he celebrated pitching 5 innings. For sale, pitching 5 innings, pitching at all, has become a cause for him to take heart about his career.
He has been injured much of his time as a Red Sox.
He is a fighter and a star but he has been unable to deliver over the course of his contract.
Those five innings recently pitched must have cost the Red Sox something like $100,000 for each inning or some incredible sum of money like that.
The 2023 season has been entertaining but largely it has been a flub.
As the season comes to an end, there is not much to celebrate if you are a Red Sox fan.
If you are Sale, you are celebrating having pitched 5 innings near to the end of the season.
If you are the Red Sox, you are wondering how to move forward to be in contention again.
Being in contention is not about winning a championship – it is simply about fielding a team that can win enough to be in the race as the season comes to a close.
The Red Sox are personified by Sale’s inability to play let alone to win.
Back in the days of the Brooklyn Dodgers, “wait ‘til next year” became the unofficial slogan of the long suffering Dodger fans. They won pennants in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953, but would fall to the New York Yankees in the World Series all five times.
For Sale and the Red Sox, it is again, “wait til next year.”