A horrific start to the season for the Boston Red Sox has one of the most prominent members of the media who roots for the team in a state of hopelessness.
On Sunday, after the Red Sox were swept by the Minnesota Twins in one of the most painful one-run losses in recent memory, Bill Simmons of The Ringer took to X (formerly Twitter) to excoriate his favorite baseball team.
“There have been bad Red Sox seasons these last 50 years, but this feels like the bleakest,” wrote Simmons, a few moments after Connor Wong was tagged out at home plate as the potential tying run in the bottom of the ninth inning.
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Is Bill Simmons right about Red Sox’s 2026 outlook?
Simmons is notorious for paying less attention to Major League Baseball than he does the NBA or NFL. When he gives his 4.9 million X followers a glimpse into his thoughts about the Red Sox, it’s typically to air his grievances about how the ballclub has been run since the end of the 2019 season, when superstar Mookie Betts was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers to lower future payrolls.
In recent memory, the Red Sox had awful years in 2012, 2015, and 2020. Any “bleak” outlooks after those first two years were quickly erased by World Series titles within the next three calendar years, so if the current season is worse than the pandemic-shortened 60-game campaign, we’d have to go back even farther to find an example that could compete with this one.
Rather than litigate whether Red Sox fans had reason to feel worse in 1992 than they do now, we should just note that the Red Sox somehow won 89 games last season, and right now, they’re on pace to win 69. And the scary thing is that although there’s still plenty of time to turn things around, there seems to be little to no faith around the fan base that Boston can right the ship.
A brief tweet from one of the world’s top podcasters doesn’t mean much to the actual trajectory of the Red Sox’s season. But they’re facing a tall task if they want to keep the more casual members of the fan base involved for the rest of the year, including Simmons, and that should matter to ownership.
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