With the Red Sox so far gone for a large part of the 2009 season, people started to look for interesting storylines to supplement those that had developed throughout the year. We had hoped that we could say “we won even without Teixeira” but that didn’t work out. Varitek and Martinez aren’t going to make such a big difference for each other’s future prospects as we had previously thought. The fact that one of them just exercised his option for this year actually has little to no influence on whether the other one can come back. So what to make of this year? It means that we need to think a little bit more about position players. We need to get some more of the big bats going. It’s a tough year, but we will be back in it next year with some better players and some of the heavy hitting that we’ve been looking for.