How Did We Get Here: One Plate Appearance And Falling Completely Apart

my gosh you guys

You may feel like you’ve read this before. I feel like I’ve written this before. Heck, you may feel like the Red Sox game last night was one you had watched before. None of that is true, you haven’t read this before, I haven’t written it, and the Red Sox had only lost that game once. But my gosh if it didn’t feel like we’d done this one already, a little bit of Groundhog Day in our Red Sox season. The Red Sox have hit a rut and then hit that rut again and then again and again. They are a car caught on a snow hill, rocking back and forth, tires spinning wildly, smoke everywhere, unable to free themselves.

Last night it was Matt Barnes. In fact, a bunch of the previous nights it has been Matt Barnes. Like the Red Sox, Barnes is in the midst of a fantastic and somewhat unexpected breakout season. Barnes specific form of greatness involved attacking the strike zone more than he’d ever done with both his pitches early in counts. Getting ahead in the count forces batters to chase outside the zone. That leads to more swings and misses, more weak contact, more outs. It’s a good strategy but it relies on Barnes being able to get ahead in the count in the first place. Lately, defined as the last week, he’s struggled with his command and has been repeatedly fallen behind in counts.

Last night Barnes struggled with his command again. He entered in the ninth and after giving up a leadoff double to Randy Arozarena he went strikeout, walk, strikeout, walk to load the bases with two outs. He was ahead in the count 1-2 in both at-bats that resulted in strikeouts and behind in the count 3-0 in both at-bats that resulted in walks. In that last strikeout, surprisingly, inexplicably, Barnes threw Yandy Diaz a changeup. Matt Barnes doesn’t throw changeups. But this was a changeup. And it was a beauty too! Faster than his curve but slower than his fastball, it dove down and in and Diaz swung over the top of it for strike three. Barnes is pretty much a fastball or curveball guy. In fact, Barnes has thrown his changeup 0.7 percent of the time this season. That’s less than one percent! No wonder Diaz wasn’t expecting it.

Barnes then walked the next guy to load the bases which brought up Rays catcher Francisco Mejia. Barnes started him off with two changeups.

Let me repeat that: Matt Barnes, with the bases loaded and two outs in the ninth inning of a tied game against the first place team that happens to be directly in front of the Red Sox, threw two changeups to the Rays batter to start the at-bat. I know the one he threw to Diaz was great, but Matt Barnes gets by with a devastating curve and a blow-you-away fastball. I love the idea of the change once every 25 pitches or so and when he’s up in the count it’s a great idea (very occasionally) but this wasn’t that. This was a pitcher with two put-away pitches eschewing them both for a pitch he barely ever throws. Twice! Yikes!

The first one was up in the zone and Mejia took it for strike one. The next one was way outside, and fortunately too because it also was up in the zone. Up in the zone is not where you want to throw a changeup, for the record. So they weren’t great pitches, but fine sometimes you don’t throw it perfectly. But, answer me this: what in the heck was Matt Barnes doing throwing two straight changeups to Mejia in that extremely important situation? At a certain point the element of surprise isn’t worth the risk. That second changeup was awful close to Barnes standing on the mound and shouting “I can’t command my fastball or my curveball!” Not great when such an important game is riding on the next few pitches. Kinda makes you wonder why he was in the game at that point.

The next pitch, the pitch Mejia hit down the first base line for a bases-clearing, mind-bending, wall-punching, computer-slamming single, wasn’t a changeup. But it effectively was! It was a hanging curveball, a meatball, a pitch by its very nature begging, pleading to be crushed, and it (labeled “3” in the image below) was the same speed as the changeup and the same location.

If Barnes throws that awful awful pitch to Mejia to start the at-bat Mejia probably crushes it. It was a very bad pitch! But if he starts Mejia with a fastball, a curve and then a fastball, something to mess with his timing, something that makes him rock his weight one way or the other, then maybe, just maybe he doesn’t crush it. Maybe he’s out in front of it and fouls it off, or maybe he’s looking fastball and takes it for a strike. Maybe something else happens!

But the idea that throwing Mejia (or any hitter) two straight pitches that you almost never throw in that situation is, to be as gentle as possible, extremely questionable! But, it also lead directly to Mejia being right on that hanging curve because the previous two changeups were effectively the same pitch!

But this isn’t all on Matt Barnes. There’s plenty of blame to go around here. After the game, Alex Cora took the blame, which, while he didn’t throw the pitches, he’s the guy who put Barnes out there in that situation and (important point coming!) left him out there as his pitch count approached the mid-20s despite pitching in his fourth game in three days. That’s a lot of appearances in not very much time and it’s not surprising Barnes was running on fumes. In fact, that almost makes me feel better about Barnes, as if he was dominant in that situation he’d probably be ruled ineligible to pitch anymore on account of being an actual robot.

Alex Speier @alexspeier

This was Barnes’ fourth appearance in four games. Cora suggests he can’t lean on him as heavily as he has.

So Barnes didn’t get the job done, but he was also set up to fail by his manager, who despite obvious problems, kept sending him out there and, despite obvious problems, left him out there until the damage had became permanent. But, his manager wasn’t exactly given a ton of choices. He’d already burned Sawamura, Whitlock, and Taylor to get to Barnes. I don’t know about you, but I would’ve been hoping mad had Cora brought in Martin Perez instead of Barnes to face the Rays in the ninth. This wasn’t the case in every game Barnes came in, but it was in most of them.

You don’t want to say there wasn’t anyone else for Cora to go to there, but there kinda wasn’t anyone else for Cora to go to there. The two deadline acquisitions, Hansel Robles and Austin Davis, having given up a combined 16 hits and 8 runs in 7.2 innings pitched for the Red Sox, weren’t legitimate options. I’m not saying trade Tristan Casas and Jarren Duran for a season and a half of Craig Kimbrel, but Richard Rodriguez of the Pirates was right there. Paul Fry of the Orioles was right there. Rasiel Iglesias of the Angles was right there.

It’s become a tired point by now, that the Red Sox needed to do more at the deadline. I don’t think even the most pessimistic Red Sox fan would’ve said, if Bloom doesn’t get a good starter and a good reliever the rotation is going to fall apart and the bullpen will implode, so there’s definitely some Monday morning quarterbacking being done here, but even so that’s kinda what’s happened.

Alex Speier @alexspeier

In the last 6 games, the Red Sox bullpen has allowed 21 runs in 21 innings.

Since the deadline the Red Sox bullpen has imploded. The starting rotation hasn’t been able to pick up the slack and hold opposing offenses and the lineup certainly hasn’t done enough to give the bullpen the breathing room it clearly needs.

This isn’t on Matt Barnes. It’s not on Alex Cora. This is an organizational failure. The players aren’t getting it done, the manager isn’t putting his players in the best position to succeed, and the GM hasn’t given his manager the players he needs to be successful. You don’t lose 10 of 12 in the fashion this Red Sox team has and put the blame on one or two dudes. This isn’t one or two dudes. This is everyone.

The particularly galling aspect to this is when it happened, immediately after there was a shot to do anything to fix it. So what can they do now? They could panic and call up any or all of Connor Seabold, Kutter Crawford, and Caleb Ort from Triple-A Worcester, but that would mean cutting a bunch of guys on the major league roster and thrusting a bunch of rookies into important roles in a pennant race, and neither of those seem like Chaim Bloom’s style much. Also, truth be told, none of those guys is really lighting the world on fire.

Maybe we’ve reached the panic point though. The Red Sox have somehow lost 10 of their last 12 games. They’ve gone from 2.5 games up in the division to five down. Yes Chris Sale is on the way, but that’s not for four days. How many games will they have lost by then? Yes, Kyle Schwarber is supposedly on his way, but clearly not anytime in the immediate future. How far back will they be when he finally shows up?

I’m rambling now, but this doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better. It was a terrible terrible loss. It was a terrible terrible loss in a series of terrible terrible loses. It’s threatening to answer the question, how quickly can a team detonate four months of hard and impressive work?

There are no good answers now. There are no more words of encouragement, no more positive spins to put on things, no more of any of that. The A’s won again. The Blue Jays won again. The Rays, we know, won again.