Even in those bad years, those teams always put it all together for like 20-30 games to become the hottest team in baseball for a couple or three or four weeks. They had that fire for about that long in every season.
I always knew it probably wouldn’t last, but man…it felt good while it was going on, and because Ozzie had won, I always thought “well, it might happen again”. And they were always almost karmically unbeatable for that stretch. It was something about Ozzie, and whatever atmosphere he had.
There was like a 14-4 stretch in June of ‘09, that ridiculous 26-5 from June to July in 2010 and even in August of ‘11 they put together something like a 15-7 stretch to make a final push before petering out.