Fixing The Back Of The Lineup

Yeah, they lost yesterday but isn’t this just the sweetest thing?

I had intended to write up a big thing on this topic this past weekend, but I got my second COVID shot (yay!) on Saturday and was knocked out cold all Sunday. I’m feeling much better now, but that’s why you didn’t hear from me. My apologies for the lack of a Monday newsletter.

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The Red Sox have ridden a surprisingly good pitching staff and four of the top 26 hitters in baseball to MLB’s best record even despite last night’s loss. It’s been fun, a long way from watching last year’s roster’s ‘crawling through the desert waiting for inevitable death’ routine night after night.

And yet we know this team isn’t without its holes, its little imperfections, even its larger imperfections. The defense could be better. Another good reliever or two wouldn’t be a bad thing either. The starting pitching depth is being tested on the back end (i.e. the part that’s supposed to be the actual depth). Then there’s the last third of the lineup, the Hunter Renfroe, Franchy Cordero, and Bobby Dalbec third.

All, more or less, have talent and some level of potential. Dalbec is what passes for a top Red Sox prospect nowadays, while Cordero is your prototypical all-tools-no-skills upside play. Renfroe’s total package remains somewhere below league average though there are obviously some skills there defensively and in the power department.

Combined, they should be somewhere in the neighborhood of league average. Instead, well, I’d show you their numbers, but I don’t want to upset your stomach. Put it this way: they’re extremely bad. Make no mistake, the Red Sox are winning despite them, not in any way because of them. But, and you knew this was coming because otherwise what’s the point of this whole article, there is a way to make this work even short of a big breakout, the kind the Red Sox were obviously hoping for, for any of the three.

How? We’ll start with Dalbec because his answer, at least as far as this newsletter goes, is the easiest. He needs to hit better. How’s that for analysis? There are reasons to think he can though. Look at his StatCast numbers on Baseball Savant. They’re awful. He’s swinging and missing a ton. He’s striking out a ton. And when he does hit the ball, it’s not all that hard, like league average hard, not nearly enough to make up for the rest of the output. So how is that good news? Well obviously it isn’t, but he’s in the big leagues. If the Red Sox thought this is who Bobby Dalbec is, a guy who basically is unable to hit major league pitching, then he wouldn’t be in the big leagues. Heck, he probably wouldn’t be in Triple-A either. But he is! He’s the Red Sox starting first baseman. The team obviously believes there’s more ‘there’ there. “The team has confidence in him” might not have been a good answer in 1975 but in 2021 with the information this organization has at its disposal, it’s a way better if still imperfect answer and, frankly better than me giving you some gobbledygook about launch angle and luck goblins. As long as the team believes in Bobby D then there’s at least opaque reason for us to believe in Bobby D as well.

The second reason to believe in Bobby D is that he’s kinda done this before. This point has been made by better, smarter analysts than yours truly, but Dalbec has hit at every level he’s been at. He hit in college, he hit in Rookie Ball, Low A, A Ball, High-A, Double-A, and Triple-A. He hasn’t posted an OPS lower than .791 since splitting time between Rookie and Single-A in 2017. He’s taken some time to adjust to new levels in the past, but if you look at his minor league track record, it’s exceptional. He has an .867 OPS with 79 homers in 383 minor league games over four seasons. It’s possible he’s a limited hitter who won’t stick as a major league regular, but I do think this guy can hit, at least better than he’s shown.

So the answer to the Dalbec portion of this problem is just wait longer, which is the fan portion of what Dustin Pedroia reportedly told Dalbec in a conversation the two had recently. Pedroia told Dalbec don’t worry about the numbers, just keep busting your butt every day. We’ll see if that works.

The Cordero and Renfroe part of this is more complicated, but in a way it seems maybe this was the way the team expected things to go all along. Renfroe is a right-handed hitting outfielder who hits left-handed pitchers very well. In his career he has a .904 OPS against lefties, about 200 points above what he does against righties. Cordero is a left-handed hitting outfielder. In his extremely limited career spanning, bizarrely, five seasons, he hits right-handed pitchers 150 points of OPS better than he hits lefties. This is a simple platoon situation that any baseball idiot (even me!) could figure out. That seems to be a perfectly workable and obvious plan except for two things.

First, the Red Sox don’t have other outfield options so they can’t platoon anyone in the outfield right now. The entire roster of outfielders at this moment consists of Cordero, Verdugo, Renfroe, and, as a backup, Marwin Gonzalez. But Kike Hernandez and Christian Arroyo are hurt which means A) there is nobody else on the roster to play outfield except Marwin Gonzalez, and B) they need Marwin Gonzalez to play second base every day because Hernandez and Arroyo are hurt and this team thinks Michael Chavis stole its puppy. This problem could be alleviated if either Hernandez and Arroyo get healthy or Jarren Duran turns it on and gets called up from Triple-A.

And second, Cordero hasn’t been hitting at all. If you sort by worst offensive outfielders in baseball (and drop the at-bat requirement to 70 so as to include Cordero, you get this list:

1. Jacoby Jones (DET)….wRC+ of 22

2. Franchy Cordero (BOS)….wRC+ of 26

3. Leury Garcia (CHA)….wRC+ of 39

That’s how bad Cordero has been. There’s one other guy who is worse than him, and even that’s pretty close. Add in his defense and… well he doesn’t get on base so it’s hard to penalize him for bad base-running, but you can make a case Cordero has been the worst outfielder in baseball.

But if he were hitting at all, it would make total sense to set up the outfield with Hernandez in center, Verdugo in right, and platoon Cordero and Renfroe and that’s actually a pretty tidy little outfield right there. Not best in baseball or anything, but fine. Unfortunately that’s not possible now for the reasons outlined above, and so while the injury situation continues and Duran continues getting his feet wet at Triple-A, the Red Sox continue to deal with the massive lead weight at the end of their lineup.

Is Cordero this awful? Maybe. The truth is he’s played 122 major league games over five seasons, and never more than 40 games in any season. If he plays three more games for the Red Sox this year it’ll be the second most he’s ever played in a season. How anyone develops under those circumstances is a mystery, or maybe in this case, not a mystery at all. While the Red Sox were hopeful, it seems some time in Triple-A might be the best course of action both for the team and player.

In the meantime, the Red Sox have some options for marginal improvement once they’re able to find some health, and maybe a bit more than marginal improvement further down the line.