What the hell happened to the Red Sox?

About three weeks ago, I talked about a stretch of 20 games facing the Red Sox that would make or break their season. It started with the Baltimore series and ends with the West Coast trip that has the Sox currently visiting Oakland. I had said at the time that the Sox needed to go 12-8 during these games to stay in the race for the division and the wild card.

What has happened is that they are 6-11 with three games left against the AL West leading A's. After a sweep of the Orioles, the Sox lost two of three to the Tigers at Fenway, followed by the excruciating five game sweep by the Yankees. Then, after taking two of three against the LA Angels, they were swept by the last place Mariners over the weekend. Turn that record around to 11-6 and they are no worse than 1 and 1/2 games behind the Yankees and 1/2 game behind the Twins going into tonight. Instead, they are 6 and 1/2 behind the Yanks and 5 and 1/2 out in the wild card race.

So what happened? Injuries certainly played a role: Wakefield, Nixon and Varitek were key losses. A legion of other guys are playing hurt. Kyle Snyder and Kason Gabbard are making way too many starts.

The finger is continuing to be pointed at Theo for not making a move at the trading deadline. Given the August collapse of the team, it's pretty easy to say that he should have done something, but I still think selling out the farm system to get a mediocre pitcher was not the way to go (now if you really can get Roy Oswalt, that's a different story).

So here we are; it's the end of August and, barring a miracle, the Sox are pretty much out of the playoff picture. Not exactly how things were supposed to work out, was it?