A Very Bad Start To An Important Stretch

Bad but not season ending. Yet.

It’s hard to pin an entire season on a single baseball game. That happens in the playoffs all the time, of course, but the regular season is too long and complex for that. It’s like a baseball game itself in that there are too many inflection points to pin the final result on any one moment.

So to be clear: that is not what happened to the Boston Red Sox yesterday. It’s just not. The Red Sox season is not over. The Red Sox lost a game to the last place 100+ loss Baltimore Orioles, a game they needed to win, a game in which they had their ace on the mound, a game in which they had a two run lead going into the bottom of the sixth. It was a bad loss. Terrible, in fact. I try not to swear in this newsletter, so I’ll let Chris Sale handle those duties for me:

Chris Cotillo @ChrisCotillo

Chris Sale: “That fucking sucked.”

It sure did.

It was that bad and more, but it was not a season ender. I saw people on Twitter saying the Red Sox don’t deserve to make the playoffs, and in the moment I absolutely get that feeling. But deserve has nothing to do with making it or not. The cold unfeeling standings are all that matter, and right now, well, look.

The Red Sox are in.

That said, they’re on the verge of not being in, and as important as yesterday’s game was, today’s is even more so. Yesterday’s was important because it was winnable but also because losing it meant that today’s would be that much more important. Always nice to stay ahead of that kind of thing, but nope, the Red Sox didn’t stay ahead, not of that kind of thing and not of the Orioles.

And so here we are.

So the Red Sox are still in playoff position, but if they keep playing this way they won’t stay there. There are too many teams playing well around them in the standings for the Red Sox to be able to back themselves into a Wild Card spot. That happens some seasons but the American League in 2021 won’t be one of them.

By losing Tuesday the Red Sox playoff odds fell from 86 percent to 74 percent, according to FanGraphs. That’s a pretty big hit for one day, one game. But 74 percent is still a pretty high percentage. You take those odds all day long if you could ever get them. And the Yankees still have two games left in Toronto while the Red Sox get two more in Baltimore.

It’s time to start taking advantage of the situation. The Red Sox looked and were as weak and ineffective at the bat as I’ve seen this season. You’d love to shut a team like the Orioles out every game but that’s just not realistic. The Red Sox finished up a sweep of the Orioles a week ago, winning 8-6. Nobody thinks about it, but the pitching (and defense) gave up six runs to the Orioles in that game, but nobody notices (or cares) because the Red Sox scored eight. The bats came through. If the Red Sox had hit yesterday, if they had scored eight runs on one of the worst pitching staffs not just this year but in the last couple decades as they did 10 days ago, nobody would notice or care that the Orioles scored an extra run in the bottom of the eighth. But because the Red Sox didn’t hit worth a damn yesterday, that run was huge. So were the first three.

This is all by way of absolving the pitching staff. They weren’t perfect but if you give up just four runs with this lineup you should win most days.

Another thing I saw on Twitter was people claiming the Red Sox poor performance was indicative of a team that’s gotten spooked by the lights. Were they gripping their bats a bit too tightly? Maybe. Were they making quick outs? Absolutely!

Alex Speier @alexspeier

Since the 6th inning, the Red Sox have seen 2.4 pitches per PA: 2 (Renfroe HR) 4 (Devers K) 3 (Bogaerts K) 3 (Martinez groundout) 4 (Schwarber K) 1 (Dalbec flyout) 3 (Iglesias groundout) 1 (Verdugo groundout) 2 (Hernández groundout) 1 (Renfroe popup)

Two things. First, this isn’t a patient team. The Red Sox have swung at 48.8 percent of pitches they’ve seen this season, fifth highest in baseball. They swing a lot. And sometimes those swings produce outs. I’ve written here before about how increasing the patience of the lineup is a job that GM Chaim Bloom must work on this off-season, and this is indicative of that. But swinging early in the count doesn’t mean this team can’t stand up to the moment.

Second, not all of those pitches, but a number of them were hittable pitches, or at least located in or near the center of the strike zone. In other words, in numerous cases Red Sox hitters were right to swing.

Here’s Enrique Hernandez’s first-pitch ground out to third in the eighth.

It’s not over the middle of the plate, but it’s right there. And here’s Hunter Renfroe’s pop out to Orioles catcher Pedro Severino one pitch later.

It’s difficult for me to get too upset about choosing to swing at those pitches (and there are other at-bats too). Yes, some guys did swing at some pitches that were less than ideal to swing at, but again, that’s this team. They do that. They also attack pitches in the strike zone, like the pitches above. The problem wasn’t swinging at them, it was not hitting them hard.

And anyway, that’s a small thing. That’s yesterday. The big thing is today at 7pm. The Red Sox are still in good position as I write these words, thanks to, of all teams, the Yankees beating Toronto yesterday. Lose today though and those standings are very likely to change. The tenor of this season, the way it is remembered, and the way the organization and fanbase feel about the team going into the offseason and the expectations both by the front office and ownership will all have a lot to do with what happens over these last five games against bad teams. It’s not asking too much for the Red Sox to show up and put up a fight.

Thanks for reading. If you don’t already, please subscribe. The newsletter is free, it’s about the Red Sox, and it’s by me, so, as the Red Sox will hopefully be saying after tomorrow’s game, two out of three isn’t bad.