In baseball’s best division, the Red Sox are a deserving last place team
Sunday brought the Red Sox smiles, but as is their custom, the success was mostly outside the lines.
COMMENTARY
By all accounts, Sunday in Williamsport, Pa., was a highlight of the Red Sox season. Major league players embraced their day with the Little Leaguers in most every way, with the smile on Alex Cora’s face as he careened down the Lamade Stadium hill face-first a universal one.
“It was great. Something that I will always remember. This is baseball at its purest,” Cora told reporters postgame, right before he played some impromptu catch with a young fan. “It was an outstanding day, regardless of the results.”
Those results will fade from the memory, as the eighth inning Matt Barnes/John Schreiber blowup that keyed Sunday’s loss isn’t going to look much different from a dozen other nights that got away from a middling team.
But that’s a nice future thought that’s going to look great on a NESN season in review that no one’s going to watch.
The Red Sox trailed from the jump, though Nick Pivetta looked good after giving up two in the first. Franchy Cordero went the other way to tie the game, but it was for naught when weeks of overuse continued catching up to Schreiber.
Schreiber’s thrown as many innings in the past month as he had in any MLB season before this one. His season was a success before that month and remains one now, in so much as bullpen pieces are consistently reliable.
How many other Red Sox can say that ‘S’ word when it comes to 2022?
Even in a bad season, there’s always someone who breaks out. When Andrew Miller became a lights-out middle reliever in the mid-2010s, netting a big free-agent contract with the Yankees and helping key Cleveland’s most recent World Series run, it could be traced to Bobby Valentine and the abysmal 2012 Red Sox.
This season isn’t that, and the good tidings aren’t as rare, but some analysis makes it pretty easy to understand why this remains a last-place team in baseball’s best division.
Rafael Devers (and Xander Bogaerts?)
This should probably be a double feature highlighting Boston’s pair of infield All-Stars, as both are top-20 players by Fangraphs’ WAR — Devers tied for 12th at 4.5, Bogaerts 17th at 4.2. But Xander’s offensive numbers are down considerably from his career 2019, though the .810 OPS (vs. .939 in ’19) and 10 homers (vs. 33) are still about 26 percent better than league average.
The saving grace in those WAR numbers is defense; Bogaerts has been league average at short, as opposed to well below it three years ago. Same goes for Devers, whose third-base defense is all-around solid after plenty of hard work at the same time his offense is as great as ever.
Speaking from the heart after Sunday’s loss, Bogaerts noted “I know I’m playing bad” when talking about how much the Little League experience meant to him. He remains among the top shortstops in the game, making for an intriguing whirl through free agency this winter.
Devers, meanwhile, has firmly established himself among the game’s top players, period. The sky still feels like the limit.
And I’m not just talking about his potential salary.
Michael Wacha
The Red Sox bought low on the veteran righty based on a strong finish to the 2021 season with Tampa and have been handsomely rewarded. They’ve won 11 of his 15 starts, the most recent Saturday in Baltimore, his second straight scoreless outing after missing six weeks with shoulder inflammation.
He’s kept the four-seamer/changeup mix that coincided with his late-season surge a year ago, and while his strikeout and walk rates have each moved in the wrong direction, Wacha’s allowed a career-low 6.7 hits per nine innings thanks to drawing softer contact than all but 20 percent of the league.
He’s not missing bats, but the dearth of hard-hit balls have helped Wacha, at 31, pitch into the sixth in more than half his starts.
“His numbers are real,” Cora told reporters in Baltimore after Wacha’s ERA dropped to 2.28, sixth among pitchers with 80 innings. “We missed him for a while.”
Some of the advanced metrics don’t agree with Cora given the lack of missed bats — Wacha’s expected ERA and FIP are both above 4.00. But Boston’s team ERA during the 40 games between Wacha’s 13th and 14th start was 5.81.
That run was about more than Wacha; Kutter Crawford, Josh Winckowski, and Brayan Bello were needed for 17 starts, and both Pivetta and Nate Eovaldi had ERAs north of 6.30. But Wacha’s certainly put himself in line for no worse than the $7 million the Red Sox are paying him in 2022.
A bit of a hodgepodge
Beyond the few names we’ve already mentioned, I don’t think there’s anyone whose going to look back at this year as a bold-letter huge season. Perhaps a bit stingy, but we’ve watched them for three-quarters of a season now and Bogaerts really does feel like their spirit and soul.
He’s been good, but . . .
Trevor Story made the transition to second base look ridiculously easy, but his power numbers took another hit and he’s missed six weeks (and counting). J.D. Martinez continues to be a positive presence in the clubhouse, but that we’re leading with that speaks volumes about his production.
Garrett Whitlock has delivered another strong year, but the team waffled him between the rotation and bullpen. Tanner Houck solidified the closer spot, but he remains an awkward fit somewhere between starter and reliever. Winckowski and Crawford took first steps toward establishing their major-league bonafides, but just steps.
It’s a $200-plus million team that lacked a real identity, leading into a winter where everything we’ve known them as and for the past five years is on the table to disappear. They’ve been fun to watch at times, but frustrating to watch at more, Friday’s ghastly loss at Camden Yards feeling like the moment where even the optimists among us came to accept October’s out of reach.
I just hope Cora found them all a late-night Friendly’s near Williamsport in the wee hours of a Sunday all the same.
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