Commentary

Red Sox just keep adding more possibility of change to the pile

Will this be Xander Bogaerts's team into 2023 and beyond? Should it be?

Not even Rafael Devers could keep the Red Sox from a dispiriting loss to finish another loss to the Blue Jays on Thursday night. Barry Chin/Globe Staff

By Jon Couture

August 26, 2022

3 minutes to read

COMMENTARY

It’s hard to lose a game the way the Red Sox lost on Thursday. Genuinely hard.

Teams that accumulate 15 hits in a game are 130-10 this season. Teams that reach base at least 18 times, as the Red Sox did against Toronto, are 302-32. Each of those is nine-out-of-ten stuff, and yet that’s somehow only a part of the tale.

Going 3 for 20 with 10 strikeouts with runners in scoring position, in the same game where your entire starting lineup had a hit, is hard. Not scoring after a leadoff triple, then the next inning not scoring with the bases loaded and none out, is even harder. The chances of scoring in each of those spots individually are each better than eight out of 10, and the chances of scoring in one of the two makes not scoring in the 10th not even merit inclusion.

Truly bad teams don’t do these things. Truly good teams don’t lose this way. The 2022 Red Sox are in neither of these camps. (The last team before the Red Sox on Thursday to lose a game with 15 hits? The Red Sox on Aug. 19, in that 25-run cavalcade in Baltimore.)

The hardest thing to believe is that some of us out there continue to be frustrated by this. It sprouts from that stuff up there: They have proven they are not more than this over many months, while continuing to show signs that there remains more in them.

It’s an intriguing thing to consider, at an intriguing time for the near-term future.

Think back to how this season began. Projections were not terribly high, their 92-win 2021 viewed as a bit of a fluke. The lineup essentially plugged in Trevor Story and replaced Hunter Renfroe with Jackie Bradley Jr. The rotation was Nate Eovaldi, Nick Pivetta, and hope. The bullpen was to be built around Matt Barnes, Jake Diekman, and Garrett Whitlock.

It has failed in every conceivable way, yet only to mediocrity. Too much was asked of Bradley Jr., but he likely wouldn’t have met even modest expectations. Chris Sale and James Paxton never materialized. Neither did Josh Taylor — the John Schreiber-like revelation of last season, lest we forget — or Barnes, who has at least presented himself as an option for 2023.

As covered at the beginning of the week, the 2022 Red Sox have almost universally underachieved. A core that was critical in producing 119 wins in 2018 will long be celebrated around these parts, but not for much of anything that they did this season.

Reading Xander Bogaerts go over his frustrations with his 2022 was striking, even when it wasn’t surprising. A 30-year-old among the best at his position in the majors, about to take a taste of true free agency for the first time, outlining that he’s basically been out of form since May and that “it’s been a hard one. It’s been a different one. . . . The circumstances, the situation, all of that — it’s just been a little different.”

Indeed it has. Leading into a different winter.

Will this be Xander Bogaerts’s team into 2023 and beyond? Should it be?

Priority No. 1 this winter is securing Rafael Devers, whose defense has continued to excel even as he’s slumped hard in August (.202/.269/.357) while playing through something. With so much money coming off the books, it remains hard to believe Chaim Bloom and Co. will not figure out a long-term agreement.

That’s what really matters, full stop. Even if it means, and it probably will, watching Bogaerts go. It doesn’t have to be that way, of course . . . look no further than Atlanta, which has efficiently locked up big pieces of its young core the past few years.

We’re just at the point where it would be a surprise if it ended any other way. Pure conjecture on my part, but a good-number season that’s been bad under the hood seems like a place where Bloom will let himself be outbid.

There are possible future shortstops in the system, as we know. More importantly, there are trades to be made this winter and a roster to truly reshape.

It’s a hard truth, but a truth all the same: Nearly every player on the 2022 Red Sox right now has constructed a reason to not be a part of that future roster. Of that next great Red Sox team, to borrow from the Ben Cherington era.

The degree to which we could truly be seeing a retilling of the field just grows more stark by the day, as the limitations of the players here become harder to ignore.

Nights like Thursday happen over the course of a season. Individually, you wear them and move on.

This team has been involved in too many of them for it to be a fluke. It sets a frightening, yet intriguing table for what’s to come.