Red Sox Do The Thing!
You didn't think they'd do the thing, did you? But they did it! They did the thing!
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It took four games, but finally, thankfully, mercifully, the Red Sox have won a baseball game. Boston beat Tampa 11-2 yesterday. They are 1-3 on the young season.
Baseball is such a weird game. The Red Sox look overmatched against the pitiful Orioles for three straight games, they can’t properly field a ground ball or, it seems, put one foot in front of the other without getting their foot caught in a bear trap, or falling through a door and over a railing into the harbor. Then the defending AL champions show up at Fenway and the Red Sox look like their 2018 selves. I half expected “Franchy Cordero” to peal back his face and find it was just Mookie Betts on stilts this whole time.
Part of yesterday’s success had to do with Tampa starter Michael Wacha, who is simultaneously 29 and 42 years old. Do you remember Wacha pitching against the Red Sox in the World Series? He did, for the Cardinals, back in 2013. Or was that 1946? No, it was 2013. I looked it up. He started what turned out to be the clinching Game Six and gave up the bases-clearing double to Shane Victorino, scoring David Ortiz, Jacoby Ellsbury, and Jonny Gomes. Time flies.
Anyway, Wacha isn’t good anymore. He was pretty bad in 2019 and really bad in 2020, but that just meant he was available to the Rays, which is scary because a few years back Wacha used to be quite good. So you’d think uh oh, the Red Sox are about to be the first to get beat by the New & Improved Michael Wacha. But it seems the magic beans haven’t had time to fully take hold yet, so Wacha gave up five runs in five innings, like you’d have expected had he signed with any other team. Every once in a while the universe smiles upon us, is what I’m saying.
More pertinently to this newsletter, Red Sox starter Nick Pivetta looked… well, Pivettaish. Pivetish? I don’t know. He looked like a good version of himself is what I’m saying. His stuff is seriously good. He dropped a slider that made my feet buckle and I was watching on my computer. His fastball can reach the upper 90s and live in the mid-90s through the middle innings. He’s got a particularly strong changeup when it is particularly strong, which it occasionally was.
It’s an impressive package overall, and you wonder why he hasn’t had more success than the zero success that he’s had so far in his career. But he’s one of those guys who is seemingly less than the sum of his parts. That’s been the case in his career to date, but wasn’t particularly the case on Monday. He wasn’t outstanding against Tampa but he was good enough. He fell behind a lot of guys, threw a ton of balls, and ended up walking four, but he also struck four guys out. He kept the ball in the yard, and he kept the Red Sox in the game.
Ultimately five scoreless innings will work every time. That said, if he pitches like that against the Yankees I don’t expect those innings to be scoreless. There’s more work to do for him, and you can see he has a lot to work on, just as he has a lot to work with. The command and control are lacking, and maybe they always will be. It changes from at-bat to at-bat. He’ll strike a guy out on four pitches, three of which the batter never had a chance against and one nobody outside of Little League would ever offer at. Then he’ll walk the next guy on four straight. And he did that yesterday as well, but he managed to keep the bad to a relative minimum. Right now that’s what’s standing in between him and being a number two starter. It’s a lot, don’t get me wrong. But you can, with the proper binoculars, see the other side on Pivetta. That stuff is tantalizing. There’s lots more work to be done, but he’s got my attention.
Speaking of tantalizing, J.D. Martinez is on fire in a good way. He smacked one off the Pesky Poll yesterday which was his second hit of the day to go along with two walks. He and Christian Vazquez are the only Red Sox hitters to show up through four games, though Xander Bogaerts did try to make up for lost time yesterday with four hits.
It wasn’t just Bogaerts, Vazquez, and Martinez though. The Red Sox posted 11 of the top 14 exit velocities yesterday against Tampa, including two of the top three by Vazquez. What I’m saying is the offense is coming around, or at least the pillars of the offense are. This team isn’t going anywhere without Martinez, Bogaerts, and Vazquez. Maybe they’re not going anywhere anyway, but they’re dead in the water last Thursday if those guys don’t hit. Fortunately, they are all hitting, or at least they did yesterday.
Want to hear something strange? Before Monday’s win, the Red Sox starting staff had an ERA of 5.33, sixth worst in baseball. Now guess what their FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) is. It’s 2.25, best in baseball! That’s through Sunday’s games, so it doesn’t include Pivetta’s five shutout innings. It’s ridiculous to look at FIP from three games, but then it’s also ridiculous to look at ERA through three games. Either way this is a classic example of Small Sample Size Theatre, though there is some truth to it. The Red Sox starters weren’t *that* bad against Baltimore. The O’s had a megaton of small hits fall in on them and they were let down by a leaky Red Sox defense, particularly the infield, which turned batted balls into outs the way my kids used to turn Play-Doh into ice cream when they were infants, which is to say, far more with their imagination than in real life.
Team defense is part of baseball, so I’m not saying the Orioles didn’t deserve their hits, or that the whole series can be chalked up to a run of bad lucky. What I am saying is the Red Sox starters pitched okay, pretty good, even. For a starting staff under such suspicion, because let’s face it, this team needs to get some decent starting pitching to make this season palatable let alone interesting, that’s at least a good start.
There’s more to be done, but yesterday was a good beginning. This team is flawed. They aren’t going to make anyone forget the 2018 team anytime soon, but there is a path forward here. Yesterday may have been the team starting to find their way.
Baseball!