Are The Red Sox Really This Good?
Answering the sustainability question everyone is asking
There may be no bigger surprise on the baseball landscape than the Boston Red Sox. Boston has the fourth best record in baseball, a 3.5 game AL Wild Card lead, and are just a game and a half behind the division-leading Rays. They have one of the highest scoring offenses in baseball and a pitching staff that defines the non-word “cromulent.” All this after their horrific 2020 showing that has them picking fourth in the upcoming draft. It’s safe to say not many expected this kind of success for the Red Sox. But should they have? Or maybe did the experts get this one right and the Red Sox, riding an early season hot streak, are set to crash and burn over the next half of the season?
Before the season began, I made this handy little chart for all the big pre-season projections.
[BP is Baseball Prospectus, FG is FanGraphs, and CD is Clay Davenport.]
So where do the Red Sox fall right now? Through last night’s game (June 8th), they’re on pace to score 796 runs. That’s right about in line with where most of those projections saw them, just a hair under the average of those three projection systems. Nothing too shocking there. Oh oh! Now do Runs Allowed!
The Red Sox are on pace to give up 669 runs. That’s significantly less than any of the projections showed. That’s almost 100 runs fewer than Baseball Prospectus foresaw and 137 runs fewer than FanGraphs projected. So the improvement is all on the pitching side!
Or is it! [cue scary music]
It’s actually kinda not, because the run environment in baseball is very low this year. Teams are scoring fewer runs that they typically do, and that’s because hitters aren’t hitting as well as they typically do. In 2019, MLB hitters as a group slugged .435. This season MLB hitters slugging is down to .396. The average hitter’s on-base percentage has dropped 11 points as well from .323 to .312 between 2019 and 2021.
That overall drop in the offensive environment isn’t a part of those projected runs scored and runs allowed numbers, so you have to sort of mentally adjust them. That the Red Sox are at their projected runs scored means they’re actually exceeding the projections a bit. That they’re so far under their projected runs allowed isn’t quite as impressive as it otherwise would be, though it’s fair to point out that in light of the 2020 season, it’s still pretty impressive.
So let’s talk about individuals a bit.
The Offense
As I talked about above, the Red Sox offense is hitting for more power on the whole than they were projected to. Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, J.D. Martinez, and Alex Verdugo are all out-slugging their projected power output, and by a pretty good bit. The back half of the lineup though (I’m going to call this the back half even though a bunch of these guys have hit in the leadoff spot) has gone the other direction. Enrique Herandez, Marwin Gonzalez, Christian Vazquez, and Bobby Dalbec have been below or, in a few cases, well below their power projections. Hunter Renfroe is more or less meeting his projection, and Christian Arroyo’s recent hot streak has put him over his projections.
You’d think some would be over and some would be under, and that’s mostly what we’ve got. The big players are beating their projections, but not in silly over-the-top ways (no .455 BABIP to be found here) and the secondary guys are mostly the other direction. But again we have to come back to the run environment. When Bogaerts is projected to slug .488 and he actually slugs .535, that’s not just a .047 point jump, it’s a bit more than that because of the run scoring environment.
Beyond that though, and more to the point of this article, there’s nothing here to indicate the Red Sox offense is getting lucky. The good hitters are hitting well, performing to their historical track records as well as, generally speaking, the projections, and the worse hitters aren’t hitting as well, again, to their historical track records etc etc etc. It’s no surprise Devers is crushing the ball or that J.D. Martinez is hitting for a high average. It’s also no surprise that Marwin Gonzalez isn’t hitting well, or that Enrique Hernandez doesn’t have a high on-base percentage. The projections called those and they weren’t really going out on a limb when they did.
There’s plenty of time in the season for the numbers to change, for guys to go cold, or get hot, or get hurt (something the Red Sox haven’t dealt with too much) or what have you, but on the whole this is roughly the offense the projections saw before the season began, or maybe a slight bit better.
Perhaps it’s worth delving into the injury thing a bit more here though, because the Red Sox haven’t had any major injuries [knocks on every piece of wood in the house] to important members of the lineup. Everyone has missed a few games or a few more than a few with various smaller injuries, but there hasn’t been any IL trips from the big four hitters or even the lesser guys so far.
If they all stay healthy all season long the Devers/X/JDM/Verdugo foursome could propel the Red Sox to some offensive heights, but it’s worth pointing out the dangers of the Red Sox style of roster construction. If one of the big guys gets hurt and misses a lot of time it becomes a pretty big problem, and results in a relatively large drop in offensive production. That kind of thing evens out over the course of a season and if you look at the projected games played numbers, the Red Sox best hitters are all on pace to exceed them. That might be where the surprise, if there is one, enters into the conversation. Again, that JD Martinez is hitting isn’t a shock. What might be more shocking is if he played 160 games.
That all said, when I look at the projections and the current numbers, the Red Sox offense has been roughly what we thought it could/would be through the first two months of the year.
That leaves the pitching, and I mean that literally because it’s 12:40am and so I’m going to leave the pitching analysis until tomorrow.
Thanks for reading, everybody!