Did the Red Sox Beat the Yankees?

This guy's arm hurts.

The 2012 Boston Red Sox season was as disastrous as crashing your uninsured car into a bus filled with handicapped children, in a school zone, coked out, with a trunk full of heroin, after being fired from your job, and some other bad stuff. It was that shitty. Despite their last-place finish and laughable play, the Red Sox beat the best team in the American League: the New York Yankees. Hear me out.

Right now Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman is facepalming in his office, waiting for a rival GM offer to relieve him of A-Rod… that is, if the Yankees pay most of the remaining on his massive contract. On the off chance that A-Rod does leave town, it’s almost definitely the case that the team will get little in return aside from a lousy prospect or two and an open roster spot. It’s commonly said that teams like the Yankees and Red Sox can afford to make mistakes in the form of extending enormous contracts to players who will likely decline, but both clubs have made it clear these past couple seasons that they want to stay under the luxury tax. (Not that they’ve consitently managed that.) In the past, the Yankees or Red Sox could send an overpaid, underperforming player elsewhere and eat his contract, but now they need those dollars for their own rosters. This means making tough decisions on productive players, so even a True Yankee like Nick Swisher (he was getting booed in October but is still good) will most likely trade his pinstripes for a four-year deal somewhere else.

A couple hundred miles to the north, Red Sox GM Ben Cherington just acquired John Farrell to be the next Red Sox manager after basically lusting after him publicly when he was running things in Toronto. That was coming of the Sox's worst season since 1965, one that started with—no shit—expectations not unlike the ones Star Wars nerds had before the first prequel. Even though the Fenway Faithful knew Bobby Valentine would be go over worse than Jar Jar Binks, a good number of idiots were hopefully anxious, thinking that the stink of the 2011 season could wash off with a little grit.

This guy is back.

The problem was that didn’t happen. Starting with the puzzling hire of Bobby V and his eyebrows, the Red Sox braintrust made moves that contradicted a franchise philosophy that hews towards statistical analysis. The team traded outfielder Josh Reddick to the A's, where he's become a star, and while that looks bad now, it made sense since Boston had some talent in the farm system at that position. But they signed crappy old no-hit infielder Nick Punto to a two-year deal and relied on shitty starters who don’t strike anyone out—strikeouts being something you need to to in baseball if you want to not suck. Neither of those moves seemed like ideas hatched by Cherington, who helped run the show when the Sox had one of the more forward-thinking front offices in the game. Was he getting overruled by ownership here, too?

Both the Sox and the Yanks had pretty shitty seasons by their standards, but the glaring difference here is expectations. Red Sox Nation is familiar with failure, and the past two disastrous finishes seem to have resigned the fan base to a period of at least mild rebuilding. It's a bit more unrealistic in New York. The Post ran a front-page breakup letter to the Yankees: Win now or we’re going to jerk off some Mets players. OK, that’ll never happen, but Yankees fans are pissed off, and aren't going to wait for the team to rebuild.

Not that the team could. Former Yankee blue-chip prospects are locked up playing elsewhere—in the World Series!--or on home team's DL, or underperforming, or about to reach free agency and command stupid money that the Yankees don't really want to pay. Yikes.

If Cashman does manage to jettison some bad contracts, it'll be a miracle, but the downside is he’ll also be getting rid of players who are actually decent—if overpaid—without getting comparable talent back. A-Rod leaving would help things in the Bronx in the long term, but they’ll miss his bat in the short term. And they've got way more to worry about than just His Rodness. The Yankees will need to make some big-time decisions on Eric Chavez, Russell Martin, Mariano Rivera, Ichiro, Swisher, Raul Ibanez, Andruw Jones, Hiroki Kuroda, Freddy Garcia, a bunch of role players and relief pitchers, and Andy Pettitte, who might really retire this time. CC Sabathia, the staff ace, is being seen by Dr. Andrews aka Dr. Death, and is probably headed towards surgery.

These assholes are all gone.

The Red Sox dealt with their own aging, soon-to-be-incredibly-overpaid stars (like Adrian Gonzalez) by trading a good chunk of the team’s talent to the Dodgers for scratch-ticket prospects and a crappy first baseman. The fickle and irrational fans on Yawkey Way could have reacted a number of ways to the deal, but it turns out they were fucking stoked to see a chunk of the Popeye's crew gone, with no one sticking up for Adrian Gonzalez, who's as exciting as a Bon Iver concert.

Basically, despite some crappy moves, everything worked out for Boston. The team will be competitive next year while rebuilding if it plugs in some stopgap players from the crappy upcoming free agent class and holds off on trading touted prospects like Xander Bogaerts (whose name is cool as hell). The Red Sox only have about  for 2013, and even counting arbitration raises, . Boston’s rotation doesn’t look much worse than New York's, especially if CC goes under the knife, and the best Red Sox players aren’t 100 years old and coming off major injuries. The team also sucked so bad that the organization will have the seventh pick in next year’s draft. They might finish third in the division to the Yankees and the Rays, but the fans will take that after last year.

Yankees fans, however, won't be satisfied by a second-place finish, next year or any year. The team has 27 World Series rings to stroke, but that’s not enough… ever. Fans hate their playoff team and their billion-dollar stadium, and Brian Cashman has to make a big, flashy, probably-irresponsible-in-the-long-term deal. Cashman will have to make the sour hearts of Yankees Universe swoon, and unfortunately he can’t just hope it will all “work out in time.” With around $157 million in payroll committed, counting arbitration, and more holes than a steampunk's lobster bib, Cashman has to remake the franchise into one that fans won’t boo and throw things at. That’s the shittiest job in baseball. Cherington and his boy Farrell just have to make the Red Sox suck a little less.