The early season Red Sox roller coaster is back on the upslope
The three Oakland wins exposed the fluky nature of baseball, but were also a solid step forward.
COMMENTARY
Three games, three wins, by a 21-8 aggregate. The Red Sox dominated the Athletics, flipped a switch on this homestand, and are poised to be the team we all expected them to be.
Maybe. But maybe the real lesson of these uneven 31 games is the reminder there’s more to this stuff than fits in a narrative arc.
Before the Oakland series, I mentioned in this space last season’s Washington Nationals, an NL East lock and genuine World Series contender that managed only 80 wins. Specifically, a quote from their GM Mike Rizzo.
“You play 162 games. It’s a marathon, and it shows you who you are. … We’ve earned the record that we have.”
It’s a degree of cliche, but so too were those Nats. There were injuries. Bryce Harper underachieved. They lost one-run games. They lacked, in Rizzo’s words, “the attention to detail, really embracing and realizing every 90 feet is important.” It happens. But throughout that year, they felt right there multiple times. A 20-7 May was the turning point … until a 9-16 June. Nine wins in 12 early in August, then nothing.
I thought of Rizzo’s words again on Tuesday night, after Rick Porcello’s eight-inning gem fueled the middle game of the sweep: 9-4, 5-1, and, on Wednesday afternoon, 7-3.
“It was just a bad start for everybody,” manager Alex Cora told reporters. “I mean, people can point out our spring training or whatever. I don’t think that’s the thing. Judge us over 162 games.
“See what happens.”
Cora was speaking specifically of the starting pitchers, but it’s a point with wider meaning. Because of just how good the 2018 Red Sox record said they were, and how bad the 2019 record said they started, there’s this increased focus to have an answer for everything. They’re losing games because they took spring too easy or because they’ve lost their edge. They’re winning games because losing so many woke them up or because they stopped playing Fortnite or because Cora got lucky.
The truth is always pieces of all of it, of course. And in so much as I think the slow start was a function of the spring, I’m like everybody else, trying to write the whole book report after reading three pages. Hey, it’s fun to turn everything into a turning point.
Feels like we’re at one now, too, with Boston winning 5 of 7 and 8 of 12, heading out on a seven-game road trip against the mediocre White Sox and dreadful Orioles. The 2011 Red Sox opened 2-10, NESN reminded us on Wednesday afternoon, and were in first place by Memorial Day. (They were also, NESN missed, 14-17 after 31 games.) Maybe it happens again. These Sox certainly have the pedigree.
And maybe, in either direction, it’s not about anything other than what we see between the lines. Maybe it’s as simple and as unsatisfying as Cora declared it on Wednesday, when he noted, “I honestly think that we played well against Tampa, just … we didn’t win those two games.”
They didn’t. And what feels like forever ago now, on Monday against an A’s team just swept in Toronto and with its closer and slugger reeling, the Sox trailed 4-0 behind a didn’t-have-it Eduardo Rodriguez in the bottom of the second.
From the pits to the penthouse on a six-run, third-inning rally. A rally that, for everything the Red Sox did to make it, doesn’t exist if the crumbling Jurickson Profar doesn’t double clutch, then spike the throw on a routine inning-ending double-play grounder.
That doesn’t even account for what came after, including a disputed safe call on Andrew Benintendi and Xander Bogaerts literally getting one over on Ramon Laureano when the latter misread what became a three-run double.
Profar and Laureano, the former quite possibly due to a Knoblauchian-type case of the yips, weren’t affected by anyone’s approach in Fort Myers. Their lack of execution shifts a whole game, and quite possibly changes the whole tenor of a series.
These things happen all the time, in all directions. If Tuesday night is warmer, Robbie Grossman’s deep fly to left-center off Porcello in the first inning is a solo homer. (So is the J.D. Martinez ball that Laureano dropped in the fifth.) Boston’s first run on Wednesday was directly attributable to Michael Chavis’s double-play grounder hitting the second-base bag, much the same way the Sox snuck a win in Oakland when Mookie Betts hit third.
The point is results don’t always reflect the worth and worthiness of those who created them. Sometimes, the cop really is just looking down at his watch when you whizz by doing 65 in a 40. Sometimes, the one-foot drop shatters your phone.
We are only starting to be able to say some things about this team. The starters are at the very least stabilizing, with a 3.14 ERA in the 15 games prior to Hector Velazquez’s opener blip on Wednesday. The offense is starting to be rewarded for some positive peripherals — they’re tied for fourth in average exit velocity, 10th in percentage of hard-hit balls (as calculated by Statcast), and up to 17th in runs. Mookie Betts went hitless on Wednesday, but is on a 12-for-26 run with four doubles and a couple homers.
Chavis cracked .300 on Tuesday and is edging closer to flipping “send back to Pawtucket” to “must keep.” Rafael Devers cracked .300 on Wednesday, which makes his routine errors at third base easier to stomach.
Tyler Thornburg? A wasted roster spot, given exactly one of his 12 appearances has come in a close game and he still has an 8.53 ERA. Two clean innings in 12 tries and the bottom 10 percent of the league for hard-hit contact allowed, easily the disappointment of the year in the relief corps. Chris Cotillo of MassLive put it succinctly: “There’s a case to be made that Travis Lakins, Bobby Poyner and Jenrry Mejia should be on the roster over Thornburg, and that’s on a team with two extra spots due to injuries to Brian Johnson and Nathan Eovaldi.”
Trade rehashes will be en vogue the next few days, given Yoan Moncada’s hot start (.301/.368/.540, with 14 extra-base hits and 20 RBI) for the White Sox. No one in Boston would rescind the trade that sent Moncada in the package to Chicago for Chris Sale, and the South Side certainly has no gripes.
Sale’s old team gets him on Friday, starting against the surging Reynaldo Lopez, who fanned 14 Tigers last week with a 96-mph fastball and a put-away slider. It’s David Price on Thursday, with Rodriguez and Porcello on the weekend. By which point, the feelings of right now could all be completely different.
All the Red Sox can do is what they’ve been doing. Hit the details like those Nationals didn’t. It’s the only way out of the hole they’ve dug, however they dug it.
“You start doing the little things and then, little by little, probably good things are going to happen,” Cora told reporters on Wednesday. “Just do your part, and they know that if we start doing the little things, big things are going to happen.”
