Sox Drawer: Sleepless in St. Pete

One demoralizing loss does not a season make, but three in a row coupled with other negative news sure can bring a top team down fast.

The Sox are suddenly streaking in the wrong direction, losing three consecutive games for the first time since May 23-25 in Oakland, and there has been more bad than good surrounding the club in the past week or so.

On top of Big Papi being sidelined at the beginning of the month, Bartolo Colon going on the DL, Curt Schilling undergoing season ending surgery and Hideki Okaijima falling apart worse than a poorly constructed Haiku, we've had to deal with: a brawl that resulted in three player suspensions and a dugout scuffle between Manny Ramirez and Kevin Youkilis in the same game that was caught on camera; Youk taking a grounder to the eye that sidelined him for a couple of days and left him with a nasty shiner; the Sox dropping an embarrassing 11-10 decision to Houston on Saturday, the same day Ramirez got into a shoving match with a 60+-year-old team official; a wacko making terrorist threats against Ramirez and Coco Crisp, forcing extra security for the club in St. Pete; and now this.

After spending most of the season in first or within sniffing distance of the top spot in the East the Rays have the Sox on the mat with their feet on the jugular, expanding its lead to a game and half with two games left to play in this series, and another loss could send the club into a downward spiral they may never climb out of.

Okay, so that might be a little melodramatic, but still these are somber times for a team that was on top of the world just a few short weeks ago, despite the loss of Ortiz.

On June 15th Boston owned a 2 1/2 game lead over Tampa Bay and were in the midst of a hot stretch that saw them win 10 of 14 games to begin the month.

Since then the Sox have gone 6-7 while the Rays have ripped off a 10-4 run of their own to complete a 4 game swing in the standings, giving the longtime losers the best record in baseball, the biggest turnaround at this point in a season in ages, all while capturing the hearts of the nation with the beloved "little team that could" storyline.

So what are we to make of these series of unfortunate events?

Many people will say it's karma coming back to bite Boston in the ass, for flaunting its superiority like a diamond studded watch, for having the best team in the game, one of the highest payrolls and a star-filled farm system with which to pluck key components necessary to get through a long baseball season.

And they may have a point. After all the Rays have been so bad for so long, have taken all the shit everyone's tossed their way, and they barely made a posturing peep this spring other than to tout the virtues of their new team mentality.

And the humbleness has paid off.

Everyone always hated the Sox, but now instead of hating either Boston or its biggest rival, the Stankees, people have a team they can root for to topple the new empire and give hope to the common man that middle America can win out over the upper class.

Which is all well and good.

Let the Rays have the mid-season accolades. As long as when it comes time to hand out the postseason trophy the Sox are right there holding it again.