Human beings want to believe that things are ordered. You see this in people's fascination for conspiracy theories, in their after-the-fact rationalizations of mistakes: "I knew that I should have sold that stock when it got to $40 per share...", in the oft-heard assertion that "things happen for a reason".
Well, lots of things don't happen for a reason. They just happen. And most "turning points" are only identified after the fact. Things are a lot more random than we like to think.
In this regard, the last couple of nights' losses to the Jays tell us, well... that the Sox have lost two games to the Jays. Benefiting from good luck and their innate talent, the Sox could go on a roll from here, in which case we'll be ascribing personal qualities like "grit" and "character" to the team and its players, or, with bad luck, the same players making the same effort could continue to lose, leading us to determine that they don't have what it takes. Other than the actual implications of the wins and losses (i.e. a team which is in first by five games is much more likely to get to post-season than one that's last), the recent past is the past and it tells you much less about the future than you'd think.
Consider two things:
If I flip a coin, say, six times and call heads a win and tails a loss, more often than not I'm going to end up with a discernable pattern. Examples would be W,W,W,L,L,L; W,L,W,L,W,L; W,W,W,W,W,W; W,W,L,L,W,W; W,W,L,W,W,L; the list goes on and on. If we want to assume that coin-tossing is a skill, we can look for information about my character in the tosses: I couldn't stand prosperity; I was never able to get a consistent streak going; I was awesome, dominating the opposition, etc. In fact, though, we know that these "patterns" exist only in hindsight and they tell us nothing about what would happen if I tossed the coin a seventh time. There is, of course, a lot of skill involved in playing baseball, and over the course of 162 games, it generally serves to separate the best teams from the others. But there's a hell of a lot of luck too, and over a short stretch of games, luck can dominate skill. We won't have a really good sense of the 2006 Sox' "character" until the season is over, if then, and attempts extrapolate it from near-term events are, I think, a waste of time which could otherwise be productively spent drinking beer and blogging.
Also, imagine that Jorge had been one-tenth of a second faster in getting the ball to second base in 2004, something the Sox had absolutely no control over. That team, now seen as a brilliantly constructed juggernaut, would instead have been perceived as fatally flawed , doomed by an unbreakable curse, lacking the qualities necessary to get to the promised land.
