When the Red Sox began the year 2-8 -- and later, 6-13 -- a sense of panic set it around the team.
Were the Red Sox running themselves out of contention in the first few weeks of the season? What sort of hangover were they facing from last year? Why hadn't they anticipated this problem in spring training?
These and other questions were asked, along with plenty of comments covered with anger.
But what the Red Sox went through was nothing new. It may not exactly be commonplace for a team going to the World Series to execute a face plant early in the next season, but you don't have to go back very far to find a team going through the same challenges.
Not far at all, as a matter of fact. Meet the 2018 Los Angeles Dodgers.
The Dodgers, of course, went all the way to Game 7 in the 2017 World Series before losing to the Houston Astros. They then lost six of their first eight. They were 12-16 at the end of April and didn't get over the .500 mark until June 8, exactly one game shy of the one-third mark of the season.
As we now know, the Dodgers eventually figured it out. They tied for the division title, then won it outright with a one-game tiebreaker with Colorado, then beat Atlanta in the NLDS and then held off Milwaukee in the NLCS to win their second straight National League pennant.
Though the rough start in the season's first two and a half months, they managed to avoid panic.
"We felt it,'' recalled Josh Byrnes, the Dodgers senior vice president of baseball operations, who was once Theo Epstein's assistant GM with the Red Sox. "I think we were 16-26 at one point, if I remember correctly. But (team president) Stan Kasten has seen a lot of baseball seasons and never gets too high or too low. (President of baseball operations) Andrew Freidman is very patient and knows it's 162 games and a long season. And (manager) Dave Roberts is unfailingly upbeat. They all believed in our group.
"That's all great, but when you're 10 games under, that's a large hill to climb and your margin for error shrinks as the season goes on. When you get to 42 games with that kind of record, I guess you do feel, at some point that there wasn't much room for error and I think we knew we had to start playing better quickly and couldn't stumble again.
"But generally, I think we believed in our team.''
That confidence, as it turned out, was well-placed. After falling 10 games below .500 and dropping 8.5 games out, the Dodgers played .592 baseball the rest of the way.
At about the same time the Dodgers hit bottom, they lost shortstop Corey Seager for the season and started to think about making a deal for Manny Machado.
"That indicated that we had some belief that we were going to get it back on track,'' Byrnes recalled. "The mood internally was as good as it could have been. But there was definitely a sense of urgency.''
It helped that the Dodgers have been through some tough times before. In 2016, Roberts' first year in the dugout, the Dodgers found themselves five games out with ace Clayton Kershaw heading for the DL. Nonetheless, they made up ground and won the division.
"I think this group's battle-tested enough,'' said Byrnes, "and they know it's never easy and it's never over and no one's going to hand us anything and we've got to win a six-month race.''
Looking back, Byrnes isn't sure there's any singular season for the team's poor start. Instead, it was a combination of factors. But a World Series hangover wasn't one of them.
"Our group was hungry,'' he said. "Losing Game 7 of the World Series left a bad taste, so I don't think it was because of complacency or easing off the pedal. It might have been more emptying the tank -- physically and mentally -- in October and April comes a lot sooner and for whatever reason, we didn't play well at all for the first month and a half.''
It helped, too, that the Dodgers had their share of veterans, including Kershaw, who had been through the wars before and understood the need for urgency.
"Those guys are battle-tested,'' noted Byrnes, "so they don't follow the narrative of excusing bad play. They know when it's time to create some sense of urgency.''
The fact that the Dodgers are in Los Angeles -- and not in a less-forgiving media market -- also kept the level of outside noise to a minimum.
"Every market -- and the impact the media and fans have -- is unique and it's real,'' Byrnes said. "In Boston, when you lose three in a row, you're going to hear about it. Our market is different than Boston, no doubt. But we don't want to be this team that's Hollywood-soft; we want to be a team that fights every night for nine innings.''
Eventually, that mentality helped the Dodgers dig out. And Byrnes, from a distance of some 3,000 miles, believes the Red Sox are on their way to doing the same thing.
"I thought the job that Alex (Cora) did a year ago was incredible,'' said Byrnes. "As a leader, he set the right tone, no matter what was in front of them. This year's a different test and it looks like he's going a great job again.''
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