There it is, that (angry) feeling again: Rays beat Red Sox, 1-0
Injuries are unfair. And yet they’re predictable, at least to a certain extent. Players who get hurt tend to get hurt again. That’s something else we know. And so the Red Sox find themselves at a spot that was, at least by the above standards, predictable. A player got hurt and it was a player who had gotten hurt before. And now that player, Adam Duvall, is going to miss a good amount of time, and the repercussions of that injury are perhaps more dire than you’d like, considering the season is about two weeks old.
The truth is that the problem existed before the injury. Expecting Adam Duvall to hit like a steroided-up Babe Ruth isn’t a sustainable plan for winning. Expecting older players to play out of position and not get hurt is also not a sustainable plan for winning.
And so the Red Sox didn’t win. They missed Duvall. They miss (still) Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts. The offense without those players is something less than championship caliber.
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I hate to phrase things that way. The season isn’t over, nothing is written in stone yet. Heck, as I detailed yesterday, Adam Duvall was nine games into setting a new record for WAR in a season. So you never know.
But when you remove the magic, and look at things in the harsh light of the day, the Red Sox lineup is, to put it gently, missing something. To put it more rudely, at least as far as yesterday was concerned, ouch. The Red Sox are getting mostly nothing from Justin Turner, Enrique Hernandez, Christian Arroyo, their catching tandem, Triston Casas, and now you can throw whomever takes over for Duvall on that pile as well.
Again, this isn’t to say none of the above players will ever hit again, but my gosh it felt that way on Monday evening watching them lightly ground out repeatedly in the face of the back end of Tampa’s bullpen.
I get it. Teams have bad games. That’s part of a long season. But this is why a top-heavy lineup makes winning so difficult, and conversely, it’s the genius behind lineups like Tampa’s that feature few if any weak spots, even if they might not have the best players. The Red Sox early season success rested on their rotation not immediately deep-sixing the game, the bullpen holding on, and at least one of Rafael Devers, Adam Duvall, or Alex Verdugo picking up the offense. Yesterday they got two of the three, and it just wasn’t enough.
Reports now say that Duvall will be gone, likely for multiple months, if not longer. That’s a lot of pressure to put on Verdugo and Devers, but here we are. Yesterday, frankly, Devers failed. He came up with the the bases loaded and two outs in the eighth inning of a 0-0 game and took a fastball over the plate for strike three. The second pitch of the at-bat was even more egregious, when Tampa pitcher Colin Poche threw a 92 mph fastball exactly where he didn’t want to.
Devers dreams of getting mediocre fastballs thrown to him right there. According to Baseball Prospectus, Devers has a slugging percentage of .972 over the past two seasons against fastballs in that location. This wasn’t on the corners. This wasn’t a pitchers pitch. This was a straight up mistake, one that Poche probably regretted immediately after the ball left his fingers.
That was Devers’ pitch to crush. And he missed it.
That’s going to happen. It’s just unfortunate that it happened during a one-run game against this opponent.
It’s funny, I forgot how upset this kind of thing makes me. Losing to the Rays is angering on its own, but losing a game like this, where there’s this one defined opportunity that presents itself and the team isn’t able to take advantage of it… It takes a few hours to let go of that, at least for me. But that’s part of the greatness of baseball, because we get to do this again the next day.
Or, maybe that’s the damning thing about baseball. It depends on how you look at it.
The offense might struggle a bit without Duvall around to hold things up. That puts all the more pressure on everything else to work better. Here’s two spots in the order where I think some of that ground can be made up.
Triston Casas
The Red Sox first baseman has shown some flashes, but mostly he’s struggled early in the 2023 season. He’s simply not hitting the ball hard enough. He’s not walking either, so unlike Turner and Yoshida, there isn’t much there there unless the ball goes down the line or over the wall. And right now it’s not. Right now he’s basically Bobby Dalbec. But Casas is better than that. It might take a few more weeks, but I think he’s going to come around.
Masataka Yoshida
I can’t imagine what it must be like to go to a new country where I don’t speak the language or know the customs and try to immediately be a star and justify a huge contract. The pressure must be enormous. Hopefully it doesn’t crush Yoshida, who is as advertised when it comes to walks and strikeouts. The fear was always that he might not hit enough, and so far he hasn’t. The underlying metics don’t look awful beyond the ground ball rate (71 percent!), and there’s still lots of time, it’s early, yada yada, but also, all of a sudden his team needs him.
So anyway, it might get rough. Or someone else will step up. We’ll see. Today we get Garrett Whitlock’s return to the mound and to the rotation. Should be worth watching.
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