Dispatches from baseball’s wide middle, where the Red Sox, lo and behold, are a little something
COMMENTARY
A pessimist would point out that this Red Sox start could be billed as a proof of team building concept. That the soundbite from CEO Sam Kennedy taking a “reports of our death are greatly exaggerated” tack feels too easy to imagine, the calendar into May and these carmine Wile E. Coyotes yet to notice the ground has disappeared beneath them.
Not here. Too bleak, even for a ’90s teen like this one. The farewells of Mike Gorman and Jack Edwards on back-to-back nights was a little much to handle.
And what the Red Sox have done is, frankly, too mystifying not to enjoy at least a little. Even the dark ones have to give this group some due.
“We’re playing good baseball,” manager Alex Cora told reporters Tuesday, after the first of back-to-back wins against the Giants. “It’s one month out of the season, and we still have a long way to go, but we’ve just got to keep continuing doing the things that we’re preaching. We’re playing better defense, we’re running the bases better. The offense is going to be better. The pitching is going to be consistent.”
Thirty-nine players used across an 18-14 start, and a 40th is expected Friday, when Vaughn Grissom debuts in the opener at Minnesota. The 39 was tied with three other teams for the most in the majors.
Two of them, the White Sox (6-25) and Marlins (9-24), have been abysmal. The other, the Mets, are a National League Red Sox, floating around .500 by pitching better than anticipated. They, however, have gotten the good versions of Starling Marte (their “if he’s healthy” guy for a few years now) and Luis Severino that they thought they needed to be wild-card chasers.
Trevor Story and Lucas Giolito, meanwhile, won’t play for the Red Sox again this year. Triston Casas won’t again for months. We, as you’re aware, could go on.
The more interesting comparable to me is the just-departed Giants. A big-market team who stumbled hard after a surprise 2021 playoff run, they took a different path to Boston this winter — kept the teambuilder, fired the field manager, and spent big.
They’re sub-.500, three games worse than the Red Sox after losing two of three at Fenway. Ace Logan Webb looked terrible on Tuesday. Blake Snell’s turn came up Wednesday, but he’s injured. The lineup? Tenth of 15 NL teams in runs, and 12th in on-base.
“We’re all kind of in the same boat. We’re all grinding,” Matt Chapman told The Athletic. “We’ve had good at-bats, but we haven’t been able to string something together.”
It’s all still statistical noise, really, but the wins count and someone — probably multiple someones! — is going to come out of this yawning baseball middle, play themselves within a small number of games of the World Series, and spend the next few years trying to tell you they really did something.
It seems less likely to be the Red Sox given their divisional competition, against which they’ll still have only played three games by the middle of May — and then comes seven against last-place Tampa from May 13-22.
But here we are still humoring the thought, and that’s not nothing.
“I think it would be really easy to look at the injuries — and specifically who has suffered from those injuries — and kind of think it would be really difficult to overcome those, and that the odds are just stacked against us. Instead, I think the complete opposite has been true,” chief baseball officer Craig Breslow told WEEI on Thursday. “I think that is a credit to Alex [Cora] and his ability to create a really positive and strong culture and connect guys and relate to them and get them to believe in what we’re trying to do here.”
“You’ve got to give [Breslow] a lot of credit,” Rob Refsnyder countered to the Globe on Thursday. “He’s come in and brought in some really, really good players and good clubhouse guys.”
Andrew Bailey and his ‘Run Prevention Unit‘ have the pitching still historic, the staff ERA (2.58) nearly a half-run clear of the field. The specific results may be unsustainable, but they are no accident. The result of a deeply structured offseason, and a focus on, among other things, attacking the zone with good stuff, creating a chance to attack hitters with a pitcher’s best.
Granular pitch data can vary from service to service, but Red Sox fastball usage is baseball’s lowest by a wide margin on all of them. It’s by design. And it’s working.
What isn’t as well is the offense — a rarity around here, but somewhat understandable given the absences. Despite sitting fourth in the AL in runs per game (4.69), Thursday’s four-hit silencing was Boston’s ninth scoring one run or fewer — only Colorado (7-24) and those White Sox have as many.
There’s those dregs again. Hey, you throw a 17-0 and a 12-2 in every so often, it’s going to help the season average. If only one salad every two weeks was just as effective.
Boston is third in OPS (.747) with the bases empty, 16th with men on (.722), and 20th with men in scoring position (.685). In “late and close” spots — seventh inning or later, tied, ahead by one, or with the tying run at least on deck; Boston’s been there in 16 games — they’re tied for 28th (.559), with only Miami behind them.
Not what you want. Ripe for a correction, especially when your third-best hitter has debatably been Connor Wong. And all this is still with the Sox looking up at what would be the playoff line.
As was made clear this winter, when Tom Werner was proclaiming “it’s about having great players” and then running from full throttle, 2024 is not specifically about that line. This was a year about hanging around the fringes and seeing if something happened.
Frankly, something already has, because if I’d told you what the injury situation was going to look like back in February, you’d have been crazy not to assume those White Sox-y, Marlins-y records were the coming future.
It’s still a baseball season in New England. A fun enough one that the ticket office scrounged a couple commercials out of it. I spied two Thursday: Highlights from Tanner Houck’s ‘Maddux’ and Ceddanne Rafaela’s seven-RBI game, adorned with nothing more than game play-by-play and RedSox.com/tickets.
Monster standing room was available for less than $50 midweek. Those unwashed masses that Lee Elia loved so much at Wrigley back in their dark 1980s would’ve had a field day.
Such is life in baseball’s uninspiring middle, waiting on a winning scratch ticket. Where it’s already been better than expected. And it could definitely be a lot worse.
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com