Red Sox Monthly Wrap-Up: May
This is the second monthly wrap-up I’ve written for Sox Outsider and the first I’ve actually published, so as they say in Hollywood, “Great job, stupid.” I’m often asked how many pieces I write for SO that go unpublished, and the answer is a shocking amount. Someday when I’m famous they’ll publish all my half posts and incomplete sentences in a massive volume called “Matt Kory: a compendium of incomplete and unpublishable garbage.” People will pay $35.95 for it. It’ll sit in bookshelves behind people on Zoom calls. Something to aspire to, right there.
Where They Stand
The Red Sox start the month of June at 32-20, a game behind Tampa for the division lead. Here’s a fun fact, and by “fun fact” I mean “something awful you won’t want to remember”: after 52 games last season, the Red Sox were -14-66! OK, no, it just felt that way at the time. They were actually 19-33, 15 games behind the Yankees. The starting pitching was the worst it’s been in a century, and Mookie Betts was on his way to winning a World Series for the Dodgers. So there really wasn’t any direction to go but up.
By FanGraphs measurements, the Red Sox are the fourth best pitching team in baseball and the fourth best hitting team in baseball. They have been, by this somewhat crude measurement, the best team in the division and one of the best teams in all of baseball through two months.
State of the Division
The Rays have been mind-bendingly hot in May, going 19-7 and out-scoring their opposition by 44 runs. Are they this good? Short answer: No. Longer answer: Noooooooooo. Even longer answer: I don’t think so. They’re a decent hitting team but their best hitter has been Joey Wendle, who is a fine multi-positional player, but isn’t peak Manny Ramirez. I believe in their pitching a lot more than their hitting. This is, I still think, a very good run prevention team, but not a whole lot more than a league average offensive team. They’ll come back to earth soon enough.
The Yankees are on the other side of the planet after getting swept by the Tigers in Detroit. If you catch New York on a day Gerrit Cole is not on the mound, they’re a shockingly beatable squad. Aaron Judge is having a great year, and Giancarlo Stanton has been his fine though occasionally injured self, but that’s it. That’s the entire offense. The rest of the team is, frankly, mediocre at the plate. There’s probably some more to get than the Yankees are currently getting out of their roster offensively, but, and I don’t say this gently, yikes. And they’re about to start a four game series against the Rays. This could go quite badly. My thoughts are as follows:
The Blue Jays are interesting. They have quite the good young team, Vlad Guerrero is tearing baseball covers off of baseballs on a nightly basis, and Hyun-Jin Ryu is having a Cy Young-contending season, and yet I’m not quite sure I see it. Yes, you could look at the Red Sox roster and say the same thing of Garrett Richards and Nick Pivetta and I get that, but there’s at least some track record of performance this year right now with those guys. The Jays rotation after Ryu involves a lot of hoping and dreaming. Now they just had prospect Alek Manoah absolutely shut down the Yankees over six innings, but - and yes this feels weird to write - it was the Yankees, not a team that, you know, hits. Also, contention is a lot to pin on any prospect. That said, if Manoah and even more heralded prospect Nate Pearson show up this year, that Jays team is probably a World Series contender. If not, I’m not sure they’re a playoff team.
So where does all that leave the Red Sox? Well, right here, right now, the AL East looks particularly winnable. The Rays are very good, the Jays might be very good, and the Yankees are supposed to be very good, but probably aren’t. The Red Sox slot in there somewhere, as a team that wasn’t supposed to be very good, but is. Where they finish who can say, but the news as of now is good. The Red Sox have a real shot at this, as in the division, not just a shot to hang around for hanging around’s sake.
*BANG* Here come the Astros
In all the COVID stuff and the rush to hate on them for cheating (which I totally get), this Astros team somehow, someway, got ignored by the preseason punditry. As it turns out, they’re actually really good. They’re not a complete team, as their pitching staff is mediocre, but they sure can hit. They don’t quite have the highs of J.D. Martinez, Rafael Devers, and Xander Bogaerts in their lineup, but their lineup goes way deeper than Boston’s. There are really only a few weak bats, and on any given evening as many as seven or eight well above average hitters in Houston’s lineup. That’ll be a real challenge for the Red Sox pitching staff. The Red Sox should be able to score some runs in this series.
Xander For MVP
Is it too early to talk about the MVP race?
Yes!
But we’re going to do it anyway. Right now, two months into the season, there’s a real case to be made that your AL MVP is Xander Bogaerts. The competition for the award is pretty stiff. Vlad Guerrero, Jr. and Marcus Semien of the Blue Jays, Aaron Judge of the Yankees, Yoan Moncada of the White Sox, and Bogaerts’ teammates J.D. Martinez and Rafael Devers are all reasonable candidates. Vlad is out-hitting Bogaerts by 50 points of on-base percentage and 90 points of slugging percentage and leads him in WAR, 3.2 to 2.5. That’s a hefty difference, but Xander plays shortstop, a far more valuable defensive position, while Vlad plays first base and, if the defensive numbers are to be believed, not all that well. It’s true that difference should be accounted for by WAR, but it’s undoubtedly true that voters take it into account again when weighing candidates.
It’s still quite early and there’s time for players to fall while others get hot and rise. Heck, if the Yankees end up making something out of their season, perhaps the MVP should go to Gerrit Cole.
See what I did there?
Thanks for reading.