Red Sox Sweep Yankees!

Plus notes on Whitlock, the Odor call, JD Martinez, the lead-off spot, and the Yankees

It’s tempting to title this “How Sweep It Is!” or “War And Sweep” or “The Great Gatsweep” but I wouldn’t do that to you and also I just kinda did that to you. I am both great and awful.

The Red Sox swept the Yankees in Yankee Stadium! That’s it. Send tweet.

Where to start? It’s always easier to write about a loss because by definition something didn’t go right and that’s your topic. While it wasn’t perfect, the Red Sox did sweep the Yankees (in Yankee Stadium!). But it was baseball and by definition, it can’t be perfect. That’s a crazy thing about baseball: it’s a perfect game about imperfection. So let’s talk about the big imperfection.

The Big Imperfection

So if we’re going to start with imperfection, let’s start with this:

Look at Christian Vazquez’s glove. That’s about where he caught the ball. Those white boxes aren’t perfect, but they’re certainly close enough. There is a considerable distance between the glove and the box. That’s Yankee great Rougned Odor at the plate, by the way. It’s the ninth inning of a tie game with two runners on, the count is full, and Matt Barnes has just thrown ball four to load the bases. Except it wasn’t ball four because the home plate umpire called it strike three. Whoops!

Here it is (pitch 7) according to MLB’s pitch tracker:

Each of those lines represents a thousand miles or a billion angry tweets. It was, to be charitable, an awful call. Forgive me a bit of a digression here, but I coach a little league team and recently had to talk with them about umpires making bad calls. That happens in little league and nobody likes it. It really sucks to have the bat taken out of your hands or to walk someone you think you earned a strikeout on, but no baseball game is ever really truly decided by one pitch or one at-bat. There can be a final decisive play, but there are 100 other plays before that which can impact the game as well (and do, in various ways).

Now this wasn’t Little League. Winning matters in Major League Baseball, far more than in Little League, and perhaps even more than that if the Red Sox are facing the Yankees on national TV. The game has evolved past this kind of umpiring, which used to exist on the regular (watch old Greg Maddux clips if you don’t believe me), to where we, the audience, know immediately if a call, any call, has been missed, let alone a pivotal call that was missed badly. But until we get an automated strike zone, which can’t come soon enough, these kind of calls will be made occasionally and they will impact the outcome of baseball games. As roboump detractors will tell us, this is the beauty of The Human Element. That there are mistakes, bad mistakes, truly egregious mistakes that change things, is somehow supposed to be a good thing. No, I don’t get it either.

But the Yankees didn’t lose last night because an umpire blew a strike call. If Gabe Morales gets that call right, the Yankees have the bases loaded and Clint Frazier, a .185 hitter with a .683 OPS, at the plate. That’s far from a sure thing. Also, if your winning game plan involves the phrase, “get Rougned Odor to walk” then you need to come up with a different game plan.

JD Martinez

JD Martinez missed the last two games of the series with a wrist injury. The Red Sox are saying it’s not serious and he should be able to avoid the injured list, but for a team so heavily dependent on the bats of about four guys, Martinez being one of them, even missing him for 10 days would be a tough blow. It’s to the Red Sox credit that they won the last two games in Yankee Stadium without Martinez.

Xander Bogaerts

What can you say about Bogaerts at this point? His defense probably isn’t great, and I’m not a huge believer in “clutch” but oh my gosh, the man is just so darn good! He has a .912 OPS, he gets on base, he hits for power, he gets clutch hits… [shakes head] I know I’m not saying anything anyone else hasn’t said a thousand times but it’s impossible to not watch a few games and come away impressed. His two-RBI single in the 10th inning was the hugest huge hit to ever huge.

The lead-off spot

I talked about this on the latest Sox Outsider Podcast (check it out!) but this lineup construction is frustrating. I love Alex Cora as a manager, but his insistence on batting one of the team’s worst hitters first and in front of the team’s best run producers is straight up hurting the team. Danny Santana hit first in every game in the Yankees series and went 1-for-12, which isn’t that different from his .125 batting average on the season. So it’s not like you couldn’t see it coming. It sure would have been nice to have someone (anyone!) on base in front of the the Verdugo/X/JDM/Devers group, too, especially when it’s not like this team has a massive margin for error.

But it’s not just Santana. Cora has placed a series of the Red Sox worst hitters at leadoff this season. Here’s a list of every player who has batted lead-off for the Red Sox in 2021:

1. Danny Santana

2. Marwin Gonzalez

3. Michael Chavis

4. Franchy Cordero

5. Enrique Hernandez

6. Christian Arroyo

It’s almost as if he’s trying desperately to avoid putting good hitters at the very top of the lineup and it’s, quite frankly, bizarre. What’s wrong with putting Bogaerts or Verdugo at lead-off? Then you wouldn’t run into times when you have to pinch-hit for your lead-off hitter, like Cora did leading off the eighth inning. If your argument is something about lengthening the lineup, ask yourself if batting a .125 hitter first really does lengthen the lineup, or does it just put someone who should be batting ninth (or not batting at all) in front of your best guys?

Clearly Cora isn’t going to budge on this, but it’s hurting the team. I don’t know if bringing up Jarren Duran will do it - Duran is fast so he looks like a prototypical lead-off type of dude, but hopefully at some point either GM Chaim Bloom will have a talk with Cora or maybe the Red Sox will trade for Rickey Henderson.

Garrett Whitlock

Whitlock has been nothing short of a revelation this season out of the pen for the Red Sox. The fact that he’s a Rule 5 guy from the Yankees organization only makes it that much sweeter. That he got his first major league win against the Yankees in Yankee Stadium on Saturday is [blows out elbow making chef’s kiss sigh].

The Yankees

Man… even the 2018 Red Sox didn’t sweep the Yankees in Yankee Stadium. The last Red Sox team to do that according to MLB.com was the 2011 team… which is just weird. But whatever. The Yankees are scuffling badly. They’re in fourth place, 5.5 games behind the Red Sox and 6.5 games behind the Rays. They’re not hitting, they’re fielding looks awful, and… well, does there need to be anything after that? It’s not hard to look at this roster in light of their 2021 performance and wonder what happened? DJ LeMahieu has been bad. Same for Gleyber Torres. Same for Gary Sanchez. In addition to those, they’re running Brett Gardner, Clint Frazier, and Rougned Odor out there. Their rotation is fine but after the admittedly ultra-human Gerrit Cole, it gets pedestrian in a hurry. This isn’t a very strong roster unless they get super-human performances from their star players (where have you heard that before?) and so far the only guys holding up their part of the bargain are Cole and Aaron Judge.

It’s possible LeMahieu, Stanton, and Torres turn their seasons around. Entirely possible. But this isn’t a week-long slump they’re in. We’re approaching two and a half months of full-on mediocrity. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens because it feels like something is going to happen, one way or the other.