Optimism Behind A Tough Start: Red Sox Lose First To Detroit But It's Not All Bad
I sliced my thumb too so a good day all around
When you woke up from a dream a few weeks ago, perhaps just after the lockout ended, with a burning image of the 2022 Boston Red Sox in your mind’s eye, how did they look? Yes, sexy, absolutely, but I meant in a baseball way. Since writing is a one way medium, I’m going to guess they could slug the heck out of the ball, but they might struggle to pitch and field. How those last two aspects panned out probably had a lot to do with how successful the season ended up being.
If that’s correct, you might not recognize the team on the field at this point. The Red Sox have struggled to hit, but pitched and fielded the ball pretty well. Strange, right? Actually, no. So let’s get into it. Right after I say hi.
Hi! I’m Matt Kory and welcome to Sox Outsider, my Red Sox newsletter. You might know me from my work at The Athletic, or FanGraphs, or Baseball Prospectus, or a number of other fine internet-based writing establishments. Now, as I’m clearly no longer writing at any of those fine places, I’m doing this. And I love it! I hope you will too. So please subscribe and follow along with me as we experience this 2022 Red Sox season together. Thanks for reading.
Four games into the 2022 season, the Red Sox find themselves in last place in their division at 1-3. In the immortal words of Joe Girardi, words that will likely follow him to immortality, “it’s not what you want.” Heck, go ahead and put that on my tombstone. There are reasons to feel optimistic about this group despite the slow start, however.
The Red Sox, as a team, are hitting .173/.243/.308. That’s like Oprah told the Red Sox to look under their seat and suddenly everyone is a backup catcher. You’re a backup catcher, you’re a backup catcher, and you’re a backup catcher! Last year’s Orioles hit .239/.304/.402. Compare that to the Red Sox collective line. That’s how badly the Red Sox have hit so far. Last year’s Orioles are WAY better.
But it gets worse (and then it gets better)! Put runners in scoring position and somehow, some way, they’re even worse than sub-Orioles bad. With runners in scoring position the 2022 Red Sox are hitting .107/.182/.143. I mean, that’s just hard to do, right there. Like, if you tried, you’d probably get some accidental hits that would drive your batting line higher. A bloop, a bleeder, a mistaken hit of some type that just gets over a fielder’s glove. But no. Not here.
So that’s bad. And that’s why they’ve been losing. It doesn’t take any kind of genius to go, oh, this team has scored 12 runs in four games and that’s not very good and it’s not going to win you many games. But sometimes you don’t have to be a genius to figure something out.
So here’s the good news: they’re not this bad! How do I know? Because no team is this bad! No collection of baseball players known as a baseball team has hit this badly over a full season since World War II. It simply hasn’t happened. The worst is the 1963 New York Mets, who were effectively a minor league team, and they hit .219/.285/.315. The next team on the list, presumably not a minor league team, just a bucket of garbage baseball-wise, was the 1952 Pittsburgh Pirates. They hit .231/.300/.331.
Right now the Red Sox, through four games, are offensively somewhere in between the 1963 Mets and the 1952 Pirates, the two worst hitting teams of the modern baseball era. That’s to say of the 2,200 or so different baseball teams since 1945, if the Red Sox played like this for the rest of the year, they’d be behind 2,199 teams.
As I was saying, this team certainly isn’t this bad. This should be and will be, a solidly above average hitting team. It’s not yet because they’re kinda cold and a bit slumpy, but also because, and this is a very important point, they’ve only played FOUR GAMES.
There is nothing predictive in four games. Nothing. But Matt, you say, what about NOPE. Nothing. Nothing predictive. These four games tell us nothing about how good a hitting team this is.
Except Rafael Devers is awesome. But we already knew that.
So, okay, ready for more good news? I knew you would be.
The Red Sox have actually pitched quite well! I know, not predictive, and I’ll stick to that here. But predictive or not, it’s nice to see the part of the team we all thought was as likely as any to be the baseball equivalent of a trashcan on fire actually look good.
I’m not going to argue the Red Sox will end up with a very good bullpen - they might but I’m not saying that now - but so far that’s what we’ve seen. The Red Sox, through only four games, have a 1.62 bullpen ERA, fourth best in baseball.
OK, so want to know how predictive that is? Instead of telling you directly I’ll just say this: The team that is currently leading MLB in bullpen ERA is the Colorado Rockies. They have a 0.98 bullpen ERA. So yeah. No. Not predictive. But fun! And promising, as much as these things go.
A few other thoughts before I stop literally bleeding on my keyboard (I was knife cleaning last night and sliced the tip of my pointer finger):
It’s only been two games but it’s really nice to have Trevor Story at second base. He’s going to hit and I believe he’s going to hit really well, but that aside, he’s Boston’s best fielding second baseman since Dustin Pedroia. Twice he’s ranged over to the other side of second base and cut in front of Xander Bogaerts to field a ball. That’s some range! Having someone who can contribute that much defensively on top of what he can do with the bat, something Red Sox fans haven’t seen yet, but will, is going to be fun to watch.
Rafael Devers is winning the AL MVP. On this I will hear no dissent. What’s odd is it doesn’t feel like Devers is hot yet. In fact, he doesn’t looked very locked in at all. So I looked up his stat line and he’s hitting .313/.353/.625. My gosh. Wait until he gets going!
Michael Wacha looked pretty strong yesterday. Yes, it was against the Tigers, so caveat noted, but still the results were there and you can only face the team in front of you. After a tough start that saw Wacha lose the strike zone for two hitters, he was quite effective. He threw 63 percent strikes, struck out four, and after the third hitter of the game, he only walked one. Mostly though he kept Tiger hitters off balance with his changeup, the pitch the Red Sox liked so much that they signed him this off-season before they did really anything else. The numbers don’t look fantastic, but the Red Sox don’t need fantastic out of Wacha. Cromulent will suffice nicely. It was a promising start to the season for Wacha.
Ryan Brasier… the guy was uncanny in 2018, and probably doesn’t get the credit he deserves for his part in that World Series winning season. He gave up one run in 8.2 innings pitched over the 2018 ALDS, ALCS, and World Series. That’s nuts and he should be remembered fondly by Red Sox fans for it. Now though… he’s not the same guy. His fastball isn’t upper 90s anymore, and the command just isn’t there. Yesterday he gave up the two run homer that ended up being the difference in the game to Javier Baez. Baez, who swings at just about everything, was sitting on a high fastball and got exactly that. It might’ve even been what Brasier was trying to throw, but it just wasn’t fast enough. Also, the previous two pitches had been located in about the same spot. To me, it was the perfect time, a 2-2 count, to try to get Baez to chase outside the zone, something he is very prone to doing. Instead, Brasier went back to the well again and Baez didn’t miss. It didn’t cost the Red Sox the game because the offense was M.I.A and you can’t expect to win when you score just one run. But still, yuck.
JD Martinez homered for the only Red Sox run of the day. Then, with two outs in the ninth, down two runs and with Rafael Devers (AL MVP) on second base after a double, Martinez got a two strike fastball out over the plate and drove it deep to right field. Off the bat I thought it had a chance to go out, but it died on the track and the Red Sox loss was official. Still, a promising sight to see JD put some good wood on the ball multiple times, especially against upper 90s heat when you consider the issues he’s had with that kind of pitch in the recent past.
Matt Barnes pitched. Not only did the Tigers not score, but Barnes didn’t walk a single batter. One strikeout and he threw eight of his 10 pitches for strikes. The Matt Barnes redemption tour is here!
I’ll try to have more on Garrett Whitlock and his contract extension later this week, but for now, the man is signed for four years after this one (through 2026) and there are team options for the 2027 and 2028 seasons as well. The contract guarantees Whitlock $18.75 million, and with escalators and options exercised, he could earn up to $44 million. For a guy who was a Rule 5 pick just a year ago this is quite a climb up the organizational ladder of importance.
Two more against Detroit including against old friend Eduardo Rodriguez, and then, finally, home to Boston for the opener against Minnesota this Friday.
Thanks for reading Sox Outsider, everyone.