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scrutinize individual performances after the game, they often lose track of the larger objectives. In baseball, sacrifices are easily overshadowed, particularly in the absence of group success.
    "I went through the bad years there. I remember when, on a Friday night, you were lucky to have 10,000 people in the stands," said Hall of Famer and Red Sox great Carl Yastrzemski, who succeeded Williams in left field. "If you didn't go three-for-four or something like that, you could throw meat up into the stands and they would have devoured it. I mean, God, it was tough to play."
    Once Williams retired, the Red Sox became Yastrzemski's team,
and then the property of Jim Rice when Yaz left. Like Williams, both Yastrzemski and Rice were left fielders and accomplished hitters whose individual performances would land them in the Hall of Fame; like Williams, each played an entire career without winning a World Series championship. All three players spent their entire careers playing for a Red Sox organization owned by Thomas A. Yawkey, his wife, Jean, or the Yawkey Trust, which endured well beyond the deaths of the Yawkeys. Tom Yawkey drew much criticism for how the Red Sox seemed to coddle their star players. Aside from being the last organization in baseball to integrate, the Red Sox often were accused of operating with a country club mentality, a suggestion that the inmates ran the asylum. The perception that the elite players often had more power than the manager for whom they played created both great instability in the manager's office at Fenway Park and a culture that placed the individual before the team. Beginning in 1948—just short of the midpoint of Williams's career—the Red Sox would not have a single manager last as long as five consecutive full seasons until after the turn of the century, and that was hardly a coincidence. In the Fenway Park clubhouse that served as both a sanctuary and a locker room for Red Sox players, the Red Sox had a clear hierarchy. Williams handed his crown to Yastrzemski, who handed it to Rice, and so forth. The organization was segregated on many levels.
    Those policies began to change in the late 1980s, but only because Rice placed the scepter in the hands of a pitcher instead of a positional player. Clemens made his debut for the team as a highly touted rookie in 1984, but he did not fully blossom until 1986, the last productive year of Rice's career. Just as Rice was about to begin fading, Clemens ascended. Triggered by a historic 20-strikeout performance against the Seattle Mariners on April 29, 1986, Clemens raced off to an unforgettable 14–0 start that season and finished the year at a sterling 24–4, winning both the Most Valuable Player Award (his first and only) and the Cy Young Award (his first of seven) while bringing the Red Sox
this close
to a victory over the New York Mets in the 1986 World Series. Though the Sox ultimately failed—again in seven games after a crushing collapse in Game 6—there was nonetheless a sentiment that the
Red Sox had entered a new era in their history built on the young, bullish Clemens, the kind of ace and cornerstone pitcher the Red Sox had so often lacked.
    Clemens, in fact, frequently referred to pitching as having been "a second-class citizen" before his rise to power in Boston—and he was right.
    Following his breakthrough season of 1986, Clemens spent ten more seasons in Boston and won two more Cy Young Awards (1987, 1991), which only added to the individual awards won by Williams (American League MVP in 1946 and 1949), Yastrzemski (AL MVP in 1967), and Rice (AL MVP in 1978). The Red Sox qualified for the postseason three more times during Clemens's stint with the team—in 1988, 1990, and 1995—but they never again reached the World Series. Clemens left the team via free agency following the 1996 season in what proved to be a landmark change in the club's history—unlike Williams, Yastrzemski, and Rice,