Back in April, when the Sox couldn’t seem to lose, I wrote this:

“Simply put, on almost every night, the Red Sox will start the better starter, field the better lineup, replace their starting pitcher with better relievers and replace their position players if needed with better role players than their opponent. It’s a simple and simultaneously alarmingly effective means of achieving baseball success.”

Of course if you happened across that excerpt plowing through our archives in say, June, you would have thought me an imbecile. And you might be right but that’s neither here nor there. With respect to this particular quote, I just want to say that this 18-4 stretch the Sox are currently in the midst of has been a bit vindicating for me. All season my attitude was that teams that hit and pitch as well as the Sox do win at a far greater clip than they did for three months. Patience was not always easy and admittedly, I lost mine in brief fits of anger from time to time. But on the whole, I remained confident that wins would come and they would come furiously. I wrote this on June 30th:

“Hang in there, Sox fans. Your team is too talented to fade.”

And I wrote this on June 24th:

“I can’t wait for this club to go all 2002-A’s on the rest of the league this summer.”

So it took until late summer but here we are taking on all comers and winning in a variety of ways, a true mark of a great team.

Conventional wisdom might have it that they are playing over their heads. But are they? When you look up and down the Red Sox August statistics, only Jason Varitek is really going crazy and I would submit that this is more than offset by disappointing months from Gabe Kapler, Doug Mientkiewicz, Orlando Cabrera and to a lesser extent, Johnny Damon. On the pitching side of things, there has been clear improvement but just mean progression really. Derek lowe has been far more consistent but his E.R.A. for the month is just about right on his PECOTA weighted mean projection. Wakefield is still far below his norm for the month but that is only because of his 6 home run shelling he took in Detroit. He was phenomenal yesterday. Quietly, Pedro has become Pedro again and Schilling is looking as strong as he has all year too. The bullpen is once again looking strong and is there a better fifth starter in baseball right now than Bronson Arroyo?

It would be irresponsible to dump all this praise on the Sox without noting that their competition in August has been terrible. The true test lays ahead. Their next nine games are against their main playoff competition (although the Yankees are close to joining this group), the Anaheim Angels and Texas Rangers at home and then three against the Athletics in Oakland. Luckily for the Sox, they miss Anaheim’s two most formidable starters, Bartolo Colon and Kelvim Escobar and Texas’ only formidable starter, Kenny Rogers. Anything less than 4-2 this week would undoubtedly be a failure.

Get ready for the home stretch, folks.