The Red Sox lost again last night. I didn't watch. As a native of Boston I spent the better part of 25 summers obsessing over the results of Red Sox games – I found out ways to get Sox scores when I lived in places as far away as Uzbekistan and Mongolia – but I haven't been able to watch the team for more than a few minutes at a time all year. No sports team has ever been more unlikable, not even that disgusting Washington Redskins team from years ago, when Dan Snyder tried to buy a Super Bowl with overpriced free agents like Bruce Smith and Deion Sanders and instead got the most expensive and depressing 8-8 team of all time.

These Red Sox are worse, and as a long-suffering Sox fan I feel like it's my duty, in case the team's squinting, four-faced owner John Henry happens to be Googling himself today, to explain why it is that once-obsessed fans like myself simply can't watch his product anymore. I say this without meanness or hostility: it's not that I won't watch the games, it's that I can't watch them. I've tried. But the team's owners have made the vibe around this team so miserable that watching even one game is a little bit like watching someone die of small-cell lung cancer.

A few months ago, there were three insurmountable negatives that made following this team emotionally impossible for die-hard fans like myself. Of those three things, only two are still true. But let's list them anyway:

1) The 2012 Red Sox for most of the year were not only losing, but they were doomed to continue losing.

This was because the team's budget was maxed out for the next 4-5 years with monster contracts to four players, three of whom were not only not performing like stars, but performing below waiver-wire/scrap heap level. Before he got traded, Carl Crawford's $140 million contract was like an oozing, two-centimeter boil that you wake up one morning to discover has grown up right between your eyes.