Dissecting A Lost Series

What we can learn from dropping three of four in Texas

This is old news now, but the Red Sox lost three of four games in Texas to the rebuilding Rangers. Not great! Hopefully you enjoyed a day off from thinking about it, though if you’re like me, you spent a good portion of the off-day thinking about it. A first place team, even on the road, facing a rebuilding last-place squad should do better than losing three of four. Right? They should! But stuff that should happen doesn’t always happen. Take, for example, this series! Also, life!

So what did happen? What can we learn from it?

Here are some facts.

1. Despite losing three of four, the Red Sox were only out-scored by two runs in the series.

2. Despite losing three of four in Texas, the Red Sox split the road trip, going 3-3 combined in New York and Texas, and, oddly, breaking exactly even in the run differential department.

3. The starting pitching was quite good! Three of the four starters allowed just one run to the Rangers, the exception being Eduardo Rodriguez who gave up four runs in five innings, not good but hardly a disastrous outing.

4. If you include the entire road trip, a shocking five of six Red Sox starters gave up just one run or fewer. That’s some incredible starting pitching against, admittedly, perhaps not the most stellar of lineups.

5. So how do you split a road trip in which five of six starters give up one or fewer runs? The bullpen was not good! In Texas the bullpen gave up nine earned runs in 11.1 innings. That’s a 7.15 ERA for those of you scoring at home, which, like your cousin Jeremy, is way too high.

No one part of a team is ever fully to blame for a loss, and the same goes for a series. This was true even on Sunday when Adam Ottavino gave up three runs and the lead in the eighth inning. Why?

Well, the offense fell asleep against a pretty hittable pitching staff. The defense made some (more) key errors. And the vagaries of baseball are always in the mix as well. David Dahl’s ground ball single is a single only about half the time according to Baseball Savant. Brock Holt’s single, while clearly vengeance for past sins perpetrated on our dear sweet Brockstar by the organization, is a single only about 45 percent of the time. Neither of those are crush jobs by the Rangers offense that indicate domination of any sort. They’re instead just the middle ground of grey area that encompasses most baseball games, a beautiful haze in which we strain to see the truth threw a fog of uncertainty. That’s the baseball season. These bounces, these luck demons, these baseball gods, they smile on whomever they smile upon in the moment, and then, fickle as a cat, they turn the other way. Or perhaps the Red Sox were temporarily blinded by Brock Holt’s beauty. I mean, let’s at least be realistic here, right?

And if we can be honest, and I see no signs preventing that here, the Red Sox bullpen has been due for a stretch like this for a while. I talked with Cliff Corcoran about this exact thing a few weeks ago on the Sox Outsider Podcast, in fact. We discussed how the Red Sox pen was on an unsustainable run, and now that run has been, uh, de-sustained. That’s not to say they’re not good, just that they were good and getting lucky. At some point one of those would change and now it has.

The good news is the starting staff has taken a step forward. I’m not worried about Eduardo Rodriguez. Place him in the ‘good’ pile, pat him gently on the head, and give him some ice cream. The same is true of Nate Eovaldi, though I still hold my breath on each of his pitches, something that does not jive well with ingesting food or beverage during his starts. Regardless, when he’s on the hill, the Red Sox are generally fine and competitive.

Beyond those two though there were real reasons to be concerned about Nick Pivetta, Martin Perez, and Garrett Richards. I’m still concerned to varying degrees about all of them, and I’ll get into that more in another piece soon, but for now I’m happy to report they’ve all performed well over their last few turns. Richards in particular has turned his season around, giving up two runs in his last 12 innings to go along with 17 strikeouts and just one walk. It’s what we want. Pivetta’s numbers are all pointing in the right direction as well, if not as much, though I remained concerned about him long term (again, more on that later). Perez is what Perez is, and so there will be good starts mixed in with stinkers, a delicious stew with cat toys and old socks inexplicably cooked in. Sometimes you get a bowl without cat toys or old socks and those days are your lucky ones!

The end result was fantastically effective pitching from the rotation, and though the bullpen wasn’t quite up to the level it has been, it can’t shoulder all the blame. It was the lineup’s fault! Right? Maybe! Let’s examine that. The entire team didn’t show up against Kyle Gibson in the first game. It wasn’t a good look, but Gibson has been on a bit of a run this season so far so I’m inclined to give him some credit. The Red Sox scored six runs in each of the next two games, a win and a loss. Can’t blame the offense for either. Six runs should be enough to win. So really it’s just the last game of the series.

In that final game, the Red Sox had nine hits, a walk, and a hit-by-pitch. They had three extra base hits as well. They had at least one runner on base in six different innings. That’s not an offensive onslaught, but it should be good for more three runs. So the problem seems to be one of sequencing. The Red Sox didn’t string their hits together effectively enough to generate the required number of runs to win. Want that in a more readable and relatable format? They went 2-for-11 with runners in scoring position.

That happens. It’s not indicative of some fatal flaw in the team. Could the lineup be better optimized? Maybe. Could there be some changes made to the back of the lineup? Let’s hope! Is the offense being carried by the middle of the order? Absolutely! Yes! A thousand million times yes yes YEEES!

But while stewing in the brown sauce of this series loss, keep in mind that there is a difference between a fatal flaw and just flaws. The Red Sox have plenty of the latter. It remains to be seen about the former. For now though, despite their failure to properly mess with Texas, they’re still in first place. They still have the best run differential in the division (note: dah! they just got passed by the Blue Jays while I was writing this; just two runs back though). Which is all to say those three losses against an underachieving Rangers team were three (or more) missed opportunities, but three (or more) missed opportunities in a vast sea of thousands of opportunities still to come. That in and of itself should be heartening.