The story of the 2022 Red Sox is a pitching failure, and not easily solved

August has brought no respite from this team's maddening inconsistency.

Hirokazu Sawamura was designated for assignment by the Red Sox after another rough outing on Sunday. Steven Senne/Associated Press

By Jon Couture

August 29, 2022

4 minutes to read

COMMENTARY

The horror show at Fenway Park this season has been a pitching one first and foremost. That can be easy to lose with all the losing, but the evidence Sunday spread across the megalopolis.

On Sunday afternoon in Washington, Patrick Corbin won. This was notable, at least in the mind of a person still marveling at the whipsaw nature of the 2022 Red Sox.

For one, Corbin hasn’t done much winning since the 2019 World Series, even by Nationals standards. He lost 16 in 2021 and is 6-17 with a month left to this year, putting just the second 20-loss season since 1981 firmly on the table.

More notably, it was the first win by a Nationals starting pitcher since July 6, ending a run of 43 straight games without that shattered the seven-decade-old MLB record of 35. That ring any bells, class?

The Red Sox made a run at it not even a month ago. When Josh Winckowski won on July 31, it ended a 29-game winless run for their starters. Feels like a million years ago, given that August has brought no respite from this team’s maddening inconsistency.

There would have been something so perfect about the Red Sox achieving a .500 homestand by getting swept, then sweeping someone else. A team that has consistently felt like it’s underachieving on its way to the 80-something wins it absolutely deserves.

Alas, they’ve been out of the sweep business since the start of that streak, getting within a game of one three times this month and squandering them all. Their last sweep came June 26 in Cleveland.

Their last lots of stuff came that day, the capper to a seven-game winning streak that had them third in the American League. The rotation, sporting the fifth-best ERA in the majors, was about to not win for four weeks. The record, 10 games better than .500, would never look better as the Sox lost an AL-worst 35 of 55.

Austin Davis had a 2.54 ERA on June 26 and looked every bit the part of a win-win trade from the 2021 deadline for Michael Chavis despite some iffy walk numbers. Hirokazu Sawamura had a 2.96 ERA, and though he was in a low-leverage role and allowing just about every runner he inherited to score, he certainly fit the bill of his two-year, $3 million contract.

The Sox dropped them both Sunday night, after each needed 37 pitches in an inning of the 12-4 loss to Tampa. In their place are two lotto tickets from Worcester, Zack Kelly and Kaleb Ort, because may as well see what they can do given the bar they have to clear.

Nick Pivetta’s lucky he’s not leaving, too. In a 55-game stretch wracked by injuries, he’s made every scheduled start, and pitched to a 6.14 ERA. There’s bad luck in there, to be fair — he has a 5.05 FIP and a .349 batting average on balls in play those 11 games. But the Sox are 2-4 in his six starts against AL East foes, and in one of those wins he didn’t get out of the fourth.

“I always talk about his fastball. I do believe his fastball plays. Regardless of what the velocity is, you have to establish that and go from there,” manager Alex Cora told reporters, trying to decipher Pivetta’s 7.24 ERA against divisional opponents this year. “The Rays did a good job of hitting offspeed pitches in the zone. That’s how it works in this division. In any division.”

And in any division, allowing 338 runs over 55 games is not going to win you much. It’s a truly staggering number, in excess of six per game in a depressed offensive environment.

No other MLB team is within 25 of that 338 since June 26, and no other AL team is within 50. No team in the majors has posted a winning record allowing that many runs in a 55-game stretch since 2008, and no team has made the playoffs with a run like that 1996 — when runs were about 15 percent easier to come by.

It is a striking thing, given J.D. Martinez didn’t hit his 10th home run of the year until Sunday. Given that Boston’s wins above average (as calculated by Baseball Reference) for its non-pitchers is 10th in the AL. That of the only two positions it’s above average this year, third base and shortstop, one is manned by a player who admitted he’s been lost most of the year.

All true, but so’s this: Boston’s OPS in losses this season (.647) is the best in the majors. The Sox have lost 26 games in which they’ve scored four runs and 17 in which they’ve scored five, each the highest totals in the American League.

I don’t think that points to some grave injustice about their fate . . . again, this is a mediocre team and they’re gonna finish firmly in mediocre land. But it’s a form of underperformance that makes me wonder, again, about just how much change we could see this winter within the organization.

It all leads to something else that crossed the transom this weekend.

In his Sunday notes, the Globe’s Peter Abraham discussed what’s likely to be an active winter of manager shuffling, and threw perhaps a mild surprise into the mix: Alex Cora. His logic being that Chaim Bloom, three years into a tenure where recent team architects have gotten four, could point to Cora not truly being his choice as a way to buy some extra time.

It’s, at minimum, well-reasoned conjecture. Yet something like that doesn’t usually end up in a place like that, from a well-connected reporter like that, out of thin air.

At least we’ve got palace intrigue to keep us going through September. Nothing else seems like it’ll fit the bill.