Opening Day: Pooptastic!
The Orioles and John Means shut down the Red Sox to start the 2021 season
No joy in Mudville. The Red Sox got take apart by Orioles starter John Means, who was masterful, as the Orioles beat Boston 3-0 to start the season. The Red Sox got only two hits, the first a Kike Hernandez single to lead off the game, after which he was promptly picked off, and the second, a J.D. Martinez double with two outs in the ninth. In between those two at-bats, Boston had exactly zero base runners. Also I got old and died. I’m sorry, but I’m dead now. It was that kind of game. It was like waking up on Christmas morning to find out there is no Santa Claus and also the Red Sox lost to the Orioles on Opening Day.
Let’s start with a few positives though. Why? Because that’s the kind of guy I am. Also there are fewer of them.
Nathan Eovaldi
As good as Means was, Eovaldi was just as good. He pitched into the sixth inning, and looked strong for his first start of the season. He struck out four and walked only one. As good as Eovaldi’s pitching line was, he was probably even a bit better than that. If memory serves, his lone walk should’ve been a strikeout, but Joe West was behind the plate, and was probably mentally composing country music songs in that particular moment (“Now, hmmm… what rhymes with “truck?”) and missed the pitch. Eovaldi was further and noticeably let down by his defense a few times, but we’ll get to that. Still, he kept the ball in the yard, limited hard contact to a few reasonable hard hits, and overall he looked strong.
If I had to quibble, he threw maybe a few too many balls but the truth of it is if he pitches this way every time out, he’ll be fine. It was a good start that deserved a better result. The rotation is going to need Eovaldi to put together a good season and this was absolutely a step in that direction.Bobby Dalbec’s Defense
Dalbec was Super Scoops at first base, on duty throughout the game. He personally bailed out Rafael Devers on a number of occasions but it wasn’t just Devers. It seemed every throw from a Red Sox infielder was at his feet, in the dirt, or a tough short hop, but Dalbec dealt with them all. He looked good over there.Hirokazu Sawamura
The Japanese reliever looked strong in his first inning of relief work for the Red Sox. He buzzed the bottom of the zone repeatedly, got a number of weak and odd looking swings and misses from Orioles batters, and was undoubtedly the best and most promising Red Sox reliever of the day.Actually, I can’t think of any more positives. Nobody got hurt. There. That’s all.
Now the negatives.
On-Base Ability
The first thing that jumps out at me is this lineup. It’s not going to be an on-base oriented lineup. There should be a lot of power, they have a number of guys who can jack one over the fence, but there is a ton of swing and miss in the lineup as a whole, and there really isn’t much in the way of selectivity at the plate. They just don’t take a lot of pitches, and the result is they’re down in the count immediately and repeatedly.
Credit John Means who pitched a great game, but sometimes that happens. Sometimes you’re facing a starter who has command and control of all his pitches on that day. It’s tough luck, but there is a way to deal with it, and that is to take pitches, to not expand the zone, to take walks if you can, to work counts, to make the pitcher throw as many pitches as possible. At least that way, even if you can’t score on him, you can force him out of the game by the fifth or sixth inning. Means pitched seven and I’m guessing if it hadn’t been Opening Day he might’ve come out to pitch the eighth as well, and all because the Red Sox took no walks and generally refused to work the count.
This is going to be a theme, I’m afraid. Guys like Xander Bogaerts, JD Martinez, Alex Verdugo, and even Devers are going to have to take pitches because nobody else is going to do it. There could be a number of nights like this in the Red Sox’ future because once a guy gets rolling on them there’s not going to be many Red Sox hitters who will force him to work for outs.Infield Defense
I was worried about team defense and wrote about it here at Sox Outsider a while back, and Boston’s performance on Opening Day did nothing to dissuade me from that thesis. Devers did not look strong a third. He made a number of bad decisions and a number of bad throws, and was lucky Dalbec was at first to bail him out. On one, he cut in front of Xander to field a grounder when he shouldn’t have. On another, he tried to barehand a ball he had more than enough time to field with his glove and still get the out. The ball went off his hand and the runner was safe.
I’ve been a defender of Devers’ defense at third, but this was a pretty tough evening at the hot corner, and fuel for those who think he should be moved off the position. Devers has to do better.
It wasn’t just Devers though. Xander and Enrique Hernandez had miscues as well. It wasn’t a promising beginning for a team with a lot of defensive questions, especially considering the fact that while this team is all about roster flexibility and positional flexibility, the two spots on their roster where the are inflexible with Xander and Bogaerts, were two of the bigger problem spots defensively yesterday.The Bullpen
It’s hard to get too worked up about a mediocre bullpen performance when the offense managed two hits all night. Once the Orioles scored their second run the game was effectively over. But it’s worth noting that when Eovaldi left the game there was one out in the sixth inning with an Orioles runner at first base in a scoreless tie, and by the time the Red Sox made it out of that inning the Orioles had those two crucial runs courtesy of a very erratic performance from Matt Andriese. Josh Taylor struggled as well, and Austin Brice came to bail him out.
There’s going to be some bullpen sorting as this season goes on, and I don’t expect the guys who are there now to compose the bullpen in July or August. That implies a level of bad performance is coming, and for some guys I won’t be surprised to see it. But that’s where we are.
I could go on, but really it was only one game. That’s always a tough concept for me to get through my head at the start of the baseball season. We’re always coming off the NFL season, the NCAA tournament, the NBA and NHL playoffs have typically begun, and the value of a single game in all of those sports can be life or death to the teams in question. But then baseball shows up and la-dee-dah, every game is 1/162 of a season, not meaningless exactly, but about as close to meaningless as you can get this side of Spring Training. It induces such mental whiplash, but it’s true.
You never like to lose Opening Day, but then again, if you could choose, if there was ever a game you’d prefer to lose, this would be it. There are 161 more games left to make up for it. As Earl Weaver said, “This ain’t football. We do this every day.”
A short programming note: it isn’t my intent to write game recaps every day. There are game stories from better writers with much better access than I have. But as this is/was Opening Day, it was notable. There will be times I cover games individually, but generally I’m going to try to take more of a 10,000 foot view of things. We’ll see if I can stick to that.
One more short programming note: Check out the Sox Outsider Podcast! It’s good. All the peeps are saying so.