55°
By Tony Massarotti, Globe Columnist
More than anyone or anything during the 100-year history of Fenway Park, home has been good to the Red Sox. Home is where they have been embraced. Home is where they have hit. And home, far more often than not, is where they have won.
And so today, on Opening Day of their 100th anniversary season at Fenway Park, let there be no doubt about what the Red Sox need most, more than a warm reception or Wall balls or high, slicing flies that curl around Pesky's Pole.
What they need is a win.
Now nearly seven months removed from the worst September collapse in baseball history, the Red Sox return to Fenway Park with a 1-5 record this afternoon to face the Tampa Bay Rays, the team that effectively bounced the Red Sox from the postseason last autumn. The reception may be tepid. But this really is not about the response they receive so much as it is about how the Red Sox play, because the former will undoubtedly change more swiftly than the latter.
So here are the real questions the Red Sox should ask themselves as they take the field today, to boos or cheers or something somewhere in between:
Why are they underachieving? Is it solely because of pitching? Or are Sox players prepared to be completely honest about the things that have troubled them now for quite some time, for the things that have produced a positively dreadful 8-25 record in their last 33 games?