Ouch.

I'm still not 100% decided on a topic for my blog, so I'm going to flop around a little bit until I find something I enjoy writing about. When I need to think of things I would enjoy writing about, I need to think of things that I enjoy in general, and, from there, I start with sports. In this case, baseball and, specifically, the Red Sox season this year. It was and has been, in a word, painful. This applies both literally and emotionally, for many reasons.
This 2010 group of Sox has been absolutely decimated by injuries, almost to the point of being funny. They have had to deal with everything from fractured feet to mononucleosis. And these injuries aren't to random bench players. The Sox haven't played their opening day lineup since April 11, when Jacoby Ellsbury went down with broken ribs after colliding with Adrian Beltre, his own teammate. That was just the beginning. 3 of the 5 starting pitchers have been on the disabled list at some point this year as well as 1/2 of the infield, 2 catchers, 2/3 of the original outfield, and more non-everyday players.

The above is only the half of it. Along with all the injuries, this season has been painful emotionally. Going into the year, we didn't have very high hopes for the guys on Yawkey Way, as we were lead to believe that 2010 would be a "bridge year" to the future. Our entire offseason was based on the idea of "run prevention," we wanted good pitching and good defense, with an okay offense. The season started and we were a pretty good ball club. Contradicting the preseason rumblings, we scored as many runs as anyone, while getting by on iffy pitching and inconsistent defense. We stayed in the playoff races until the injuries came. One after the other after the other. We still managed to stick around even with the likes of Darnell Mcdonald and Ryan Kalish in our everyday outfield, guys no one had ever heard of. We were never going to play deep into October with those young guys starting daily, but what makes it worse is that we showed how good we could be. Without the injuries, the Sox could've made the playoffs and been much better. But hey, that's what life is sometimes. Painful.