Another homestand wasted, another weekend lost by the Red Sox
Even Alex Cora seems to be coming to terms with this team's reality.
COMMENTARY
A year ago, Chris Owings would’ve homered in the ninth inning. Owings would have Brandon Phillips’d it, had his jersey torn off in celebration, and Guerin Austin would’ve had to reference her “getting BodyArmor out of fabric” protocol following the requisite sports drink shower.
“We’ve got a shot to go to the World Series, and you’re part of it,” Alex Cora reportedly told Owings, Arizona’s first-round pick of a decade ago, prior to Sunday’s finale with the Angels. “You’ve been around the big leagues, and you’ve seen it from afar. Just come here, don’t get caught up on what you see or what you hear. We’ve got a real shot.”
We know now Owings went 0 for 5, fanned three times, and the Red Sox are 7.5 games in back of Tampa with 42 to play. It would have been a heck of a story today, though, as we pieced together just who this Owings guy is (28 today, a fringe major leaguer who’s impressed for the PawSox), and how he got here in both the macro (Kansas City dumped him in May after he hit .133 in 40 games) and micro (driven from Toledo, Ohio, to Detroit in the wee hours of Saturday, slept three hours, flew to Boston, landed after 7 a.m.). We know how little sense it made to bat a guy hitting .226 with Pawtucket against lefties like Sunday’s Angels starter Patrick Sandoval — never mind leadoff — and how it somehow didn’t matter.
It’s not last year, though. There was a Brandon Phillips on Sunday, but he wore just what the current Mexican Leaguer wore that day outside Atlanta: Road grays.
Anthony Bemboom was also called up from Triple A just in time for the matinee, with the added narrative benefit of being an eight-season minor leaguer with six MLB plate appearances. Bemboom’s flight from Detroit got him to Boston around noon, meaning the Angels didn’t plug him behind the plate until the eighth inning.
At which point he threw out Mookie Betts trying to steal second with a dead-on-the-money throw, then cracked literally the only pitch he’s seen with the club that drafted him seven years ago, that lost him in the Rule 5 Draft three years ago, and that got him back a month ago, for a 107-mph, game-winning single.
“Honestly, I just came in and tried to do my job,” Bemboom told Fox Sports West after the win, just LA’s fourth in its last 16 games. “And what a cool place to do it, you know?”
Cora was relatively cowed afterward, the memories of a resurgent Chris Sale on Thursday and bludgeoning bats on Friday feeling far away after back-to-back losses to a sub-.500 team that had been on an 0-7 road trip. Frankly, he said the sort of thing he’d just hours before told Owings to ignore.
“It’s something we’ve been doing the whole season. Been inconsistent,” he said. “That way, it’s tough to make it to the playoffs.”
Even Cora had to acknowledge the math for a moment. The National League has seven wild-card pursuers closer than that. One of them, San Francisco, has gotten 12 home runs and an .821 OPS in 67 games out of Mike Yastrzemski, who needed six-plus years and 700 minor-league games just to reach the majors.
On Sunday, the Giants won on a two-RBI single by Will Smith, their 30-year-old star reliever who hadn’t batted in a game since community college.
Another, the Mets, finally lost on Sunday. Meaning they’ve only won 15 of 17 now, with a huge chunk of those featuring late heroics, and have only gained seven games in the wild-card chase since July 24. From 10th in a two-team race and a reasonably obvious deadline seller to fourth and favored to nab the NL’s last October spot.
Cleveland was 11 games behind Minnesota in the AL Central on June 16, 36-33. (Boston, for reference, was 38-34.) Both they and the Yankees are 35-14 since, the Indians winning three of four in Minnesota this weekend and tying the Twins on Sunday despite closer Brad Hand blowing a two-run lead in the ninth. After the greatest relay play you’d hope to see kept the game alive, No. 3 hitter Carlos Santana got a bases-loaded spot and sent a ball 400 feet.
“It was a fun series. I think our players enjoyed it,” Terry Francona told reporters. “They’re a good team over there. We know that. Now, we’ll enjoy it for a plane ride and then we better get ready, because Boston will be ready for us [Tuesday] when we get home.”
Tito never has been one to rip Red Sox in the media, even when it’s warranted.
It all feels so vaguely familiar, and so foreign to this season’s chapter of Red Sox history. Neither Rick Porcello nor Andrew Cashner should survive the starting rotation shuffle Cora’s promised is coming. Matt Barnes, whose 4-for-11 save conversion rate after blowing another on Sunday is worse even than Cashner’s Sunday strike percentage (24 in 51), shouldn’t get another bite at the apple this season. Starting Owings and batting him leadoff was just as off-the-wall as it seemed, even understanding the logic behind not disrupting your whole lineup to give Betts a day off.
The solace, perhaps, comes later. It’s a sport of ebbs and flows, of adjustments and counter adjustments, and this season is merely the latest reminder. Cora knows that better than we do, but maybe it’s easy to let a little bit slide when your first season was as a bench guy for a world champion and your second was a magic carpet cruise to another ring.
Steve Pearce. Nathan Eovaldi. Ryan Brasier. Brandon Phillips. Steven Wright. Heck, Joe Kelly in the playoffs. Cora won the trust of the room. He also won the extended love of the Baseball Gods, who rewarded him pinch-hitting Eduardo Nunez and relieving with all of his starters and everything else.
A year later, he’s got a team with an MLB-best seven wins by 10 runs and a negative run differential in the other 113 games, 18 starts of fewer than three innings, 22 blown saves, and a .500 mark at Fenway. Pearce flipped back from 2007 Mike Lowell to a 36-year-old who has played for seven teams and managed 100 games once in 13 years.
This time, career year Andrew Cashner turned back into regular Andrew Cashner.
It happens, in New York and Cleveland and San Francisco and everywhere else. It’s never always your turn, even if you have the talent. For the first time in a long time, Cora’s public comments felt like they reflected that a little on Sunday.
Owings didn’t deliver any hits, but there might be more value in hubris. There was definitely some walk-off hubris on Jersey Street as the buses headed for Logan.
