WTF happened to Boston this year (and could it happen to us?)

It makes no sense: How could a team with so many breakout stars become so irrelevant? The defending champs... done by mid-September. Wow.

With 11 games to play, Boston's big testicle pooh-bahs trail in the Wild Card by 9 - with the 13th best record in baseball, (a mired-in-mediocrity finish that is still three games above the Mets.) But how, how? Look at that lineup... and tell me... how? 

There's Rafael Devers at 3B, at age 22 a future MVP. "Humphrey" Bogaerts at SS, with 31 HRs and 106 RBIs (more than any Yankee, btw.) Christian Vasquez - 21 HRs and .273 - best catcher in the AL East? Plus Mookie Betts, JD Martinez and Andrew Benintendi. Across the lineup, the only rubber-tipped doink is Jackie Bradley Jr., and he's still a gold glove CF. 

How... how does this team miss the playoffs?

Obviously... it's pitching, pitching, pitching. Eduardo Rodriguez - 17-6 with an ERA of 3.46 - became an ace. But from him on, it's Tomato Soup Tuesday in the school cafeteria. The lug nuts of 2018 - Chris Sale, David Price, Nathan Eovaldi and Rick Porcello - fell apart like Kleenex in a Maytag, and the owner's refusal to run up his luxury taxes to buy a bullpen kicked this team in the nuts from Day One.

But for my money, 't'wasn't those planes that killed the Beast. Nope. 'Twas that two-game blitzkrieg in London. Boston scored 21 runs, a month's worth of base-runners, and couldn't hold us to a football score by the Jersey Giants. (We scored 29.) From that day on, the writing was on the wall: REDRUM!  

We tweaked more gonads than the cast of a Syracuse dinner theater performance of Chorus Line. But it was Boston that played the year under a toxic cloud. They lost five out their first six, eight out of their first 10. Steve Pearce disappeared early, as did Sale's fastball. Price was in a fog. Porcello was terrible. Eovaldi did what he always does: get hurt.

Could it happen to us? (Note: For starters, we're not the defending world champs, so technically, we cannot yet be dethroned, and we could go into the winter already humiliated and pissy.) Of course. You know how I feel about negativity: It's our spiritual armor, the suit of cynical iron that protects us from mortal wounds. But no matter what happens next month, the Death Star should be much stronger in 2020 than Boston was coming into this season.

Instead of an overworked pitching staff, the Yanks could be amazingly healthy. At the most, Luis Severino will throw 40 innings this year. Dellin Betances might throw 20 (assuming we re-sign him.) Domingo German could be hard-pressed to return, considering his workload. Happ and CC? Good luck. Tanaka and Paxton? Who knows? But we will have plenty of young, MLB-quality position players to trade for pitching. And even if El Chapo walks, it shouldn't be a death knell to the bullpen. 

I don't know how the Yankees will fare next month. But there is no reason to think this team will collapse next year, as the Redsocks have done. The question, though, is whether we can cut into their 4-1 lead in World Championships during this millennium. If we squander this season - that is, anything less than a ring - Boston's dismal fate should stand as a warning: You never know when the tide will roll out and leave nothing but wreckage behind. This had better be our year.