Limping Towards Greatness
Notes on Chris Sale, COVID, Garrett Whitlock, the pennant race, the Wild Card race, races in general, generals in races, and Connor Seabold.
The 2021 Red Sox put on a show for about three months. On July 5th they were 54-32, best in the American League. Since, they’ve gone 27-32, five games below .500. Boston might not have been a [air quotes] ‘true talent’ .628 winning percentage team, but that’s still quite a drop off. Teams go through slumps, just look at the Yankees. New York won 13 in a row and are 3-12 since. The benefit of those winning streaks is they make the losing streaks less destructive in the standings. That’s true of good months offsetting bad months as well. Unless you just win every day forever, like the Blue Jays.
The Red Sox aren’t leading the AL anymore. But those wins are banked, as they say. They allow the Red Sox to play two and a half months worth of uninspired baseball and still hold on to a playoff spot.
Another series got tossed on that uninspired heap this weekend, as Boston dropped two of three to the White Sox. The good news there, such that it is, is they played the Other Sox as close as you can, three one-run games, but just fell short in two of them. The deck was stacked against the Red Sox the whole way, and not entirely the work of fate alone. Boston faced three of Chicago’s four best starters while Chicago faced Boston’s fourth starter, fifth starter, and a minor league call-up who forgot to bring his fastball. All while a chunk of Boston’s roster continued cycling through the COVID IL. And all the games were in Chicago. Feeling mad about losing the series seems a bit silly in that light.
The Red Sox are a flawed team, we know that from the past few months of play. But they’re also a good team, and we know that from the first three months of play. A bit of health, a bit of passion, and a bit of opportunity and they can still make some noise this season.
Or not! Then we get to spend the off-season picking apart those flaws in attempt to fix them.
Here are some Monday Sox notes for you.
Chris Sale
Losing Chris Sale is a body blow, or a dagger, or a living room full of children’s toys scattered around and you have to go outside to get the newspaper and step on like eight of them and fall into a side table trying to avoid another one and your wife sees you afterwards and asks what the hell happened to you and you can’t tell if she’s kidding or not, but it kinda doesn’t matter because either meaning is humiliating.
[pause for breath]
Sale might be the best Red Sox starter and he might be the second best behind Nate Eovaldi at the moment, but either way his missing time in the middle of a close fight for a playoff spot is, to pull a favorite from the Twitter machine, not what you want. The fact that he has COVID, an illness that has a tendency to linger in addition to causing other more serious consequences, means there’s no certainty to when he will return or what condition he will be in when/if he does.
A Red Sox team with Sale, Eovaldi, and then some combination of Eduardo Rodriguez, Tanner Houck, and Nick Pivetta sounds like a tough out, if not an actual contender. Take the top off that rotation though and it gets much more difficult to make an argument for the Red Sox.
COVID
And that brings us to this topic. Great. Fantastic. Wonderful. Love talking about it.
[longest sigh ever]
The Red Sox are still passing COVID around like it’s a cold in a kindergarten classroom. The latest list includes:
Jonathan Arauz
Christian Arroyo
Jarren Duran
Yairo Munoz
Danny Santana
Matt Barnes
Martin Perez
Hirokazu Sawamura
Phillips Valdez
Chris Sale
I just checked to be sure there aren’t any more and none have been announced today.
Yet.
That’s a tough list of names, not because they’re important to the team, although they are, but because they are people who are dealing with a murderous illness, people with families, friends, and kids. Latest research further indicates how much less damaging COVID is to those who are vaccinated, so here’s hoping all of those listed had the ability and inclination to do so. It’s hard to win a playoff spot with one hand tied behind your back, it’s even harder with two hands tied behind your back, and it’s probably even harder if you were the one who tied your hands behind your own back.
Connor Seabold
I sure as heck won’t call it a silver lining, but the Red Sox needed pitching help because [gestures everywhere], so they called up one of their top pitching prospects in Connor Seabold. Seabold isn’t necessarily a future ace - though it strikes me that pitcher stardom seem far more difficult to predict than that for hitters - but he does have more than a few things to recommend him.
Primarily he comes to the party with a fantastic changeup and above average command of his pitches. His fastball has been effective in the minors, but it’s not likely to be a plus pitch in the majors as it’s just not that fast. And in fact that’s what we saw from Seabold in his start. He gave up some hard contact on his fastball and changeup. His location wasn’t great either. It looked like he was quite nervous, something I have a hard time holding against a kid making his major league debut.
The end result (two runs in three innings) was acceptable, but the process (two walks, a homer, no strikeouts) didn’t look good. There’s clearly something there, though it looked like the nerves were getting in the way of whatever that thing was. Still, it’s always nice to see someone get a chance in the big leagues. Aside from the pennant race and the intensity of competition in the moment, to see a person realize his life’s dream right in front of your eyes is really something special.
Marcelo Mayer
While I’m talking about good things, I’d be remise not to note that Red Sox first rounder and number four overall draft pick Marcelo Mayer has been playing well in the Florida Complex League (the old Gulf Coast League) for the FCL Red Sox. He’s got an .808 OPS with six extra base hits and four stolen bases in 21 games at shortstop. The FCL, for Mayer at least, is more about getting acclimated to pro ball than anything else. Good stats are nice, but as has been drilled into my brain by the smart folks at Sox Prospects (perpetual hat tip to them), you can’t scout the stat line in the lower minors. Still, Mayer is drafted, signed, and playing well. In a world full of bad things, this is a good one.
Garrett Whitlock
I was all ready to come in here and talk more about how Whitlock might be tired. And he might be tired! But man, he looked so good against the White Sox in the ninth inning yesterday! I know that’s a weird thing to say about a guy who gave up a walk off homer, but I thought he looked better than he’s looked in a while. He struck out both Eloy Jimenez and Yasmani Grandal to open the inning, blowing both away with upper 90s fastballs. His changeup had movement and great speed differential. He was throwing pitches where he wanted to, or at least where the catcher was set up. Then he got up 0-2 on Leury Garcia, a severely mediocre hitter with (now) 31 homers in his career (587 games).
Whitlock didn’t mess around with Garcia, pumping 97 mph fastballs in the middle of the zone. The first pitch was 96 at the lower inside corner for strike one. The second pitch was 97 over the middle of the plate that Garcia fouled off for strike two. The third pitch was another fastball, 98 mph, over the middle again. This time, well, you know what happened. Garcia got on top of it and it went out over the center field wall to end the game. It looked like Vazquez wanted the pitch up more, maybe at the top of the zone, but Whitlock threw it right over the middle. A mistake, but not a big one. The kind of garden variety mistake that good pitchers make all the time, and mostly don’t pay for it.
Maybe you could say Whitlock should’ve gone to a different pitch, but he’d just put Garcia in an 0-2 hole with the fastball, and as noted, Garcia isn’t a very good hitter. Not much to do with that other than note the positive and move on. Just a disappointing result more than anything else.
Team Defense
I’m going to write more about this, but it remains a huge concern going forward. Expect more from Sox Outsider on this soon.
17 Games to Go
That’s all that’s left in the Red Sox regular season. As it stands today, Boston is tied with Toronto for the first Wild Card spot. The Yankees are a game back and about to start a day game against the wretched Twins as I type this. Oakland and Seattle are both three back. Don’t ask who would be the home team if the season ended today. The season doesn’t end today.
Today marks the start of three in Seattle for the Red Sox. Eduardo Rodriguez, Nate Eovaldi, and the ever popular TBD will get the starts for Boston. I’m going to buy a road Sox jersey with TBD on the back.
No I’m not.
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TBD could also stand for
Too Bloody Daft ......