Weekend Sox Notes: The Lineup, The Schedule, And Did I Mention The Lineup?
Also I discuss the lineup!
Apologies for my absence recently. I coach a little league team and a big weekend tournament absorbed all my thoughts and efforts. Did I pitch a tiny fit in the dugout when I saw Matt Barnes had given up a homer to Shohei Ohtani in the ninth yesterday? Maybe. But beyond the occasional score-checking I’m afraid I didn’t lay eyes on much Red Sox baseball.
Sometimes though not watching is actually a bit of a balm. Not knowing the intricate details of the loss makes it hurt a lot less and lets you look at things with a clearer eye. Which isn’t to say that loss did not SUCK. It did SUCK. But the fact that the Red Sox took two of three in a series at Fenway Park is really and truly the main point here and that’s almost always good enough, regardless of the specifics.
May
Before May began, I noted its opportunity. The Red Sox faced a daunting gauntlet of mediocrity, a series of middling and downright dreadful teams, with the occasional competitive group tossed in, presumably for spice. The end result of any schedule is, of course, not wholly about competition level, nor is it about individual performance, instead it’s a combination of the two. That’s where the Red Sox have found themselves in May, posting a 9-8 record against a slate of competition that you’d hope they would, frankly, do far better against.
Sadly the easy part of the month is over. The Red Sox have faced the Tigers, Orioles, Rangers, and Angels, and while they have a winning record to show for it, it’s not by much. Toss that all in with a 1-2 series loss to the A’s and you have an almost .500 record against perhaps the easiest run the Red Sox will face this season. Doesn’t mean they won’t do better later. Indeed I expect them to, but these past few weeks were and will continue to be a missed opportunity that I fear the team will lament come September.
Situation
The Red Sox recent malaise has dropped them from the top spot in the league. They no longer have the best record in baseball, sadly. The San Francisco Giants have passed them, and the Chicago White Sox have passed both. The A’s are tied with Boston. More pertinently the Red Sox remain in first place in the AL East, which, when you really boil down, is where we all butter our toast.
The takeaway here is that there isn’t one single runaway team in either league regardless of what we all thought two months ago. The Red Sox are not heads and tails above every other team like they were in 2018, but they can complete with every other team. It’s not the dominance an organization works towards, but it’s competitiveness and competence and overall quality, none of which we, the Red Sox rooters who experienced 2020, should be sneezing at. In fact, I urge you to stifle any urge to sneeze that comes up because this season is pregnant with more promise at the moment than any of the oddsmakers or mathematicians predicted, prognosticated, or projected before the season began.
The Lineup
The argument for batting Kike Hernandez first was that Kike Hernandez is about to take a step forward and just needs Alex Cora to give him that extra special push that only Cora can provide. The argument for keeping Hernandez in the leadoff spot despite a sub-.300 on-base percentage over a month’s worth of baseball was that, hey, the Red Sox are winning and you don’t mess with success, even if what you’re messing with is actually not success but an active part pushing against that very success you’re attempting to continue fostering. The argument for putting Marwin Gonzalez, Michael Chavis, or, presumably, Wally The Green Monster, in the leadoff spot is that the lineup is working now the way it is and why monkey with success?
Those are all backwards arguments. I’m not advocating for making changes for changes sake, and I’m not saying a month and a week of baseball is destiny when it comes to Hernandez’s (or Gonzalez’s or Chavis’s) ability to get on base, but I think we can kinda get the point by now, which is essentially that the lineup according to Alex Cora starts at the number two spot.
And look, Alex Cora is a World Series-winning major league manager and I’m a doofus who writes a newsletter, and I get that. But after over one hundred years of people studying baseball lineups, here’s a distillation of what they’ve figured out: it’s a vehicle for handing out at-bats. That’s it. There’s no special significance to where a player hits in the batting order, there’s no magic to it, in fact, at all. The Red Sox are passing out the most at-bats to some of their worst hitters. That’s a fact. Alex Cora has been hitting some of his least effective hitters the most.
Take yesterday’s game. Please! [hold for laughter] The Red Sox ninth inning, after going down a run at home, went like this: walk, strikeout, walk, strikeout. That was the end of the batting order. So the end result was runners on first and second with two outs but the top of the order was coming up! Oh happy day! One of the Red Sox best hitters was about to come to the plate in a vital spot! Surely they’d be able to get a hit to tie the game or walk it off and the Red Sox would have a wait what?
Yes, Michael Chavis, a player the Red Sox had recently deemed so important, so integral to their success, that they sent him to the minor leagues, strode to the plate. Not, Xander Bogaerts, not Alex Verdugo, not any of the other potential players who could have walked up to the plate in that most critical of moments. Nope. None of ‘em. Michael Chavis. And you know what? He struck out on a high fastball to end the game and I know you’re as shocked by that as you were by the sun coming up this morning or water coming out of your faucet when you turned the handle.
Lineups aren’t destiny. Chavis could’ve gotten a hit. Heck, he could’ve homered. But it doesn’t matter. There is no way he should’ve been up in that situation. Regardless of what you think of Chavis as a player, he’s indisputably not one of the Red Sox best hitters, and as such he has no business batting at the top of the lineup. None. It’s time for this silliness to stop. It’s time for Alex Cora to put a decent lineup into action. It’s not going to solve any of the Red Sox issues, but it can make a small difference on the margins. Mostly though it’s a self-inflicted paper-cut of a wound that need no longer exist.
Podcast
That’s more than enough on the lineup. Thanks for reading Sox Outsider. While you’re waiting with held breath for the next edition of this newsletter, I urge you to check out the Sox Outsider Podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and just about every other podcast provider on the planet. The podcast is where I interview some of the best baseball writers on the planet, who know the Red Sox and Red Sox opponents the best. In my most recent episode I spoke to Chad Finn of the Boston Globe about the Red Sox hot start to the season and what believing in the Red Sox really means at this point. We also discussed Boston’s rotation, the back of the lineup, and a bunch of other Red Sox-related stuff, so please check it out!
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