Mediocrity is one thing, but the joylessness of watching the Red Sox is the real surprise
We are well on our way to Alex Cora's 2025 Red Sox team once again being a fundamental disaster.
COMMENTARY
The 2025 Red Sox were 17-16 on May 2, the day of Triston Casas’s season-ending knee injury. They were 25-26 on May 23, when Alex Bregman strained his quad to a degree we’re talking months, not days, until he returns. They are, headed into a three-game series beginning Friday in Atlanta, 27-31.
No, I’m not writing one of those two trains math problems. Though if you’ve watched the 2025 Red Sox, you’re used to the feeling of a surprise three-hour calculus exam. Or, given the older demographic in which we baseball fans reside, a colonoscopy.
That’s the overarching surprise of this season, isn’t it? Not the mediocrity — which, as the above meant to show, existed before the loss of two Opening Day starters in much the same way it did after it. The joylessness of it all.
“I truly believe this is the last struggle . . . where we’re going as an organization, it’s going to be fun again,” manager Alex Cora told reporters at last season’s postmortem press conference. “We’re shooting for the division, and I think we’re going to be capable starting next year.”
His team went from second to fourth, 9.5 games behind the Yankees, in their current five-game losing streak, capped with back-to-back walkoff losses in Milwaukee. (Boston’s been walked off five times in its last 19 games, more than all but one other team has all season.) Their odds to make the playoffs, if that does anything for you, have halved in the last month, down to roughly 1 in 7.
How they did that seems just as significant.
The Sox blew three distinct leads on Wednesday against the Brewers, made three errors, and played just dreadful fundamental baseball. Ceddanne Rafaela ran through a stop sign and ended up the second runner on third base. The game-losing Milwaukee rally began when Arlington native Sal Frelick got his fourth hit by beating Justin Slaten to first base, then really gained legs when Kristian Campbell threw 10 feet wide of home from second base.
There’s a case to be made that Campbell is playing through something — he had a .902 OPS when Cora scratched him from the lineup on May 1 with rib discomfort, missed three games, and is 9 for 75 (.120/.175/.160) since. (He’s denied it’s an issue.) There’s an easier case that, like Baltimore’s Jackson Holliday and dozens of other top prospects, the adjustment to the major leagues takes time and he could do with a break back in Worcester.
Instead, as you’re likely aware, Campbell will likely make his pro debut at first base on Friday.
“We talked a few days ago, and he’s like, ‘I feel confident,’ ” Cora told reporters Wednesday afternoon. “He’s like, ‘We’ll never know if I don’t play.’ I love that. He feels convicted about it. So one game in Atlanta, he’ll be over there.”
It is a staple of the post-2018 Cora regime, this throw stuff at the lineup card and see what sticks, and, wait, how are we this deep in it already? On Wednesday alone, the Sox used Hunter Dobbins as a reliever for the first time, put Marcelo Mayer at cleanup in his fifth MLB game, and saw Trevor Story drop his first sacrifice bunt in nearly a decade. (Two strikeouts stranded the runner on second.)
Much of it, especially in prior years, felt necessary. Full credit, of course, to Campbell for his “whatever the team needs” spirit, which would make you smile even without Rafael Devers’s relative intransigence on the subject.
Ah yes, Devers. How have we gotten this far.
For starters, a key point: Devers was arguably their best hitter even when Bregman was healthy, and he certainly is now. Looking at that bottom-of-the-lineup bingo tumbler of Sogard and Hamilton and Wong and Toro is enough to make anyone look at Devers’ line, throw up their hands, and say, “Whatever he wants is fine.”
But Cora, at least from the outside, felt like he was doing that before Bregman’s injury. It has felt, from the beginning, like he was way too willing to let Craig Breslow be the fall guy. That he wasn’t going to play bad cop with the player he needed to be the tentpole of his lineup.
“I think we’re going to see the fruits of Raffy being a DH,” Cora told the Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy on Thursday, reminding that Devers played all of last season with shoulder issues certainly not helped by being in the field.
He’s probably right. It’s also right that Mookie Betts, an inescapable name around these parts, was a multi-time Gold Glove outfielder who spent the last two years playing middle infield out of need. Jose Altuve, a declining defender at second base, sucked it up, went to left field, and is holding his own.
Besides, what feels like a lot less shaky of an argument is, even without Devers on defense, we are well on our way to Cora’s team once again being a fundamental disaster. Despite the best outfield in the game, the only team with more errors than the Red Sox is the 9-47 Rockies. Campbell’s minus-9 runs saved are tied for third-worst by any position player in the majors.
There’s a lot of statistical noise still in their start, most easily noted by their 15 one-run losses — most in the majors. Some of the advanced metrics love their offense, which is top 10 in weighted on-base on contact, barrel percentage, and hard hit rate. Of course, those are predicated on actually hitting the ball, which the Red Sox aren’t much doing — they’re tied for fourth-worst in contact with pitches in the zone, while also swinging at the third-highest rate of any team.
Want it simpler? How about 522 strikeouts, or square on nine per game? The third-worst total in the majors, and the sixth-worst by rate, and the nicest thing you can say about it is they were third in both a year ago.
“We’ve got to put the ball in play,” Cora told Shaughnessy. “We know we live in an environment that strikeouts are part of it, but when you strike out is what matters. It has happened a lot. You saw what the Brewers did. They put the ball in play and things happened. That’s something that we have talked about for a while, but we haven’t been able to execute.”
The chatter about the team moving on from him is silly; we’re a year removed from being worried he’d leave as a free agent, and he signed a three-year, $21.75 million contract not even a year ago. But the time for a shakeup feels increasingly past due.
These Red Sox have done nothing to eliminate themselves from October chatter; baseball’s full-on embrace of mediocrity through expanded playoffs saves them from that. But they’ve also done too little to show they’re all that much more than what we’ve grown accustomed to.
There’s been no step past the struggle yet, and those clocks on the proverbial train platform click louder by the day.
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