Outside of Bobby Dalbec, Red Sox’ patience has been rewarded
COMMENTARY
Another weekend, another quality opponent, and here the Red Sox still are.
It’s nowhere near that simple, of course. Single April weekends don’t ruin contention dreams. The abominable White Sox are 6-22, and that’s after they doubled their win total by sweeping the Rays . . . Arizona had a 7-21 stretch last summer, and all they did around it was make the World Series.
Major League Baseball is finally committed to fixing the uniforms. Were they only so committed to fixing their devalued regular season.
Be that as it may, Friday’s ugly night, with more iffy infield defense and a mortal Kutter Crawford, was a definitive beating to begin another home series. By Sunday night, it was forgotten, after 17-0 and a walkoff despite squandering Tanner Houck’s latest gem.
Ceddanne Rafaela got the star turn Saturday, knocking in seven across a 4-for-4 day. Masataka Yoshida, finally slotted back in at DH, went 4-for-5. Tyler O’Neill keeps mashing. Jarren Duran didn’t have a great weekend offensively, and I didn’t love the way he was floating off third on the final play Sunday, but his dynamism is hard to deny.
Wilyer Abreu is looking good in right field, not so sneakily climbing the defensive charts.
It’s a testament to patience and persistence. (And to a lack of other bodies thanks to both injury and teambuilding choices, but let’s shelve that for five seconds.) Abreu looked awful in the spring, unable to find his timing, and started the regular season 2 for 18. Duran’s initial months in the majors were legendarily bad.
Rafaela’s chase rate at the plate is one of the worst in the majors, but his speed and defense are unassailable, and . . . well, yeah, that lack of anyone else certainly made sticking with him easier to stomach. A day like Saturday, when he largely stayed in the zone and tattooed five baseballs, is a nice payoff. But again, context.
Alex Cora’s Red Sox do not have a history of running from players. Look no further than Bobby Dalbec.
The elegies for the bench’s Mr. Everything began in earnest on Saturday, when the Red Sox announced a trade for the Cubs’ Garrett Cooper, a 33-year-old first baseman with an All-Star appearance two years ago and a better strikeout rate than Dalbec.
Cooper is something, in all that word entails. Designated for assignment before Chicago dealt him, he plays a solid first base and can hammer the ball if he gets something in the zone before he’s chased too much out of it.
Dalbec-esque at the latter’s best, though Dalbec has been all famine and no feast. He’s 7-for-51 in 2024, with three infield hits and Saturday’s ninth-inning double — just his second extra-base hit in 20 games — coming off a position player. In 108 MLB plate appearances since the start of last season, Dalbec has struck out 55 times.
Since the start of 2020, only two other players with 1,000 plate appearances have higher strikeout rates than Dalbec — Joey Gallo, who’s bounced through five teams as a slugger for hire, and Patrick Wisdom, who at least topped 20 homers a year for the Cubs each of the last three years. (And Dalbec set a Red Sox Triple-A record for strikeouts in his 114 games at Worcester last year.)
It is certainly not for lack of effort. Dalbec has done everything asked of him, bouncing from first to third, even starting a game as a 6-foot-4 shortstop and seeing time at second. He played the outfield in Triple A last summer as he slugged 33 homers (and stole 18 bases!) for the WooSox.
He’ll be 29 this summer. The mystery of what Dalbec could be has been solved. He’s a piece. Given enough time, there’s no doubt he would get hot, and it would make a lot of people happy given how willing to work he has been.
“The power is always going to come,” Dalbec told reporters during his callup last September. “But what can I do to stay in the lineup when I’m not doing that. Get on base, steal bases, do whatever I can do to help. The swing and miss, I get that. But I’ve been able to wedge that with a high walk percentage.”
Not this year. And so, the Red Sox finally made a minor move beyond just letting their assorted flotsam figure it out. It’s been that bad. (Plus, I mean, they didn’t even have to go anywhere.)
A year ago, Chaim Bloom’s Red Sox scarcely even did that, with claiming Pablo Reyes from Oakland’s Triple A team the only real position player addition before the deadline. They left Kiké Hernández to founder through almost 500 innings at shortstop before finally pulling the plug.
Let’s not turn the weekend into a landmark over Cooper, who should be in place for the start of the Giants series at Fenway on Tuesday. But let’s not ignore the Red Sox are still here and still contentionally solvent after a month that had every reason to be their undoing.
Trevor Story. Nick Pivetta. Garrett Whitlock. O’Neill’s headbanging. Triston Casas’s “car crash within my body.” Brayan Bello. All of that, and they’re going to have a .500 month while going sub-.500 — they’re 5-8 — at home.
Yes, it’s praise so faint you’re tweaking your phone’s brightness settings. Yes, they’d still only be the first team out of the playoffs if they started today — which would be one way to make every game matter, Commissioner Manfred.
If the Red Sox are treating this season as one to simply take whatever they can get, I think it’s fine if we do the same.
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