This is a bit of a strange claim, and it's of a piece with your work in the other thread. I thought it might be worth parsing out the underlying difference that you seem to have with a lot of other people on the board (although I will speak for myself). In both instances, the argument is about how quickly expectations should be adjusted when they don't immediately come to fruition.
- Let's stipulate for the sake of argument that, last off-season when they named him the starter, Bloom and co. thought that Dalbec could be a useful regular at 1B with a SLG-heavy .800ish OPS: hardly a star, but a useful player, worth maybe 1 WAR; a good value on a pre-arb salary. I don't have any special insight into their projections, but I think that's plausible. Let's say the season starts and he posts monthly OPSes of .619, .672, .780, .540, 1.205, and (so far in September) 1.001, as he in fact has, and now has a .786 OPS for the season and is trending up. The question becomes: were they right about Dalbec? Your view seems to be that because they *should* have given up on Dalbec after his poor first half, they are wrong and thus "lucky" when he does what they initially thought he was going to do, only later than they thought he was going to do it.
- Similarly, in the other thread (about "disappointment"), your view is that the people who thought in March that the Sox were a high-80s win team, like me, should nevertheless be disappointed with a team that looks likely to be a low-90s win team, because "a reasonable observer" would have adjusted expectations upward after a strong first few months. It is the sequence in which they won the 90-odd games makes it a disappointment.
I don't think your view on these issues is indefensible or anything, but my view is different on both questions, and I don't think that that is as irrational as you're making it out to be.
- I think that young players' development is routinely non-linear. I think Dalbec is showing, however belatedly, that the front office was right to think he could be a useful regular. He just had to make some difficult adjustments to major league pitching, and it took him a couple hundred PAs to do that.
- There were leading indicators that may have led them to stick with him, such as improvements to his contact% and particularly his z-contact% that were apparent before his strikeout rate started falling. (Albeit, improvements from very bad to merely mediocre.)
- The glove emphatically still needs work, and may ultimately be what dooms him as a player.
- My view on the overall team situation is that the prevailing preseason view has been proved out. I include links to old posts of mine just to demonstrate that these were views held ex ante:
- The team will go as far as their pitching depth will take them.
- Me, on March 26, in response to the E-Rod dead arm crisis: "Just in general, nobody threw enough IP last season, so every team is going to have their pitching depth severely challenged."
- By its very nature, this is a problem that can pop up at any time in a season. For the first half we were incredibly lucky with the health of our big league rotation, but 60 percent of the Worcester rotation and Thad Ward hit the IL, with Mata and Ward having surgery. The returns to health of Sale, Houck, and Seabold help a ton here, but we were really hanging by a thread for a few weeks there, even in the first half as the team was cruising.
- A number of pitchers, especially Matt Barnes (who was really holding the room together in the bullpen), hit a wall after exceeding their 2020 IP number by 15 or so.
- Our COVID outbreak — not an unlikely event during a pandemic! — hit our SS depth hardest, but our pitching depth quite hard too: Pivetta, Sale, Perez, Barnes, Sawamura, Valdez, Taylor... that's a lot of innings to replace.
- The commissioner changing the policies on sticky stuff mid-season and pulling the rug out from under Garrett Richards didn't help us very much, either.
- The defense is a big problem. This has also been the case all season, and matters are actually considerably betterby some measures (such as BABIP allowed) than they were in 2020.
- Me, on April 5, after the first few games: "The defense... looks pretty awful. I think we're going to need to overhaul the infield next off-season, and luckily there are a ton of great shortstops on the market to help us do just that. Devers is a DH, and Bogaerts would be better served at third, where his steady hands and good arm will serve him well and his limited range will be less of a liability. I wanted Lindor, but I'd be delighted with Story or Seager, both of whom should get to free agency."
- The defense has in fact been bad (Fangraphs says 20th, but by some measures it is 29th or 30th), but as long as our pitching staff was near the top in strikeouts (we've since dwindled to fifth), the impacts were obscured somewhat.
- An imperfect but vivid measure: we allowed 37 UER through the first 81 games, and 40 in the 66 games since. 0.45 UER/game is pretty terrible; 0.60 UER/game is a hard way to make a living.
I just don't agree that those views are really contradicted by the team exceeding expectations over the first few months in a way that argues for the kind of volatility in expectations you're proposing.
If I'm not disappointed with the team, it's because the emergence of controllable players like Whitlock, Arroyo, Pivetta, Renfroe and Dalbec (and another ~3 win season from Verdugo), a promising draft and some pretty great performances on the farm all make us look closer to sustainable contention than I thought we were pre-season. The week to week vicissitudes from veterans like JD Martinez, Kyle Schwarber or Garrett Richards tell us much less about the proximity of the "next great Red Sox team," as Ben Cherington used to say. The 2023, 2024, and 2025 Red Sox look much better now than they did in April; there's just a lot more value in the organization at all levels.