What Happened To The Hitting?

On a tough week for Red Sox bats, can they improve, will they, and who, and what, and why, and oh my god does anyone have 20 cookies I can't do this anymore

Not fun. Not fun to write about, not fun to think about, not fun to watch. That’s pretty much the last week of Red Sox baseball all summed up. I keep telling myself it’s only a week, just one week, so as it turns out, there was no need to overreact by kicking the stove so hard I broke my toe. Which is good because I didn’t do that and my toe is not broken so you can’t prove anything.

Fortunately the fact that it’s only one week in a long baseball season is true. It can be difficult to remember how unimportant individual games are in a baseball season, and with the expanded playoffs, they’re even less important than they were last season and in seasons before that.

None of that makes me feel any better though, and I’m guessing if you’re reading this, you’re probably similarly unhappy about the way things have gone for the Red Sox over the past six days.

Last week on Tuesday I wrote a Red Sox Week In Review piece. In it I discussed how the season was, in essence, going just fine. I was due to write another one of those today, but the truth is I think this is more timely. Perhaps I should move it to a monthly review. I don’t know. Or scrap it entirely. I think it has value but I don’t want to detract from more important and timely topics. Your thoughts are, as always, welcome and encouraged both in my in-box (matthew.kory@gmail.com) or in the comments section below. Or, heck, both. Knock yourself off. But regardless, the point is last week things were fine and this week they’re not, which means, yeah, it’s been a really lousy week, but it’s only been one really lousy week.

So let’s get into it, right after I say hi.

Hi! Welcome to Sox Outsider, my free Red Sox newsletter. I’m Matt Kory and I do the writing around here. You might know me from my writing at FanGraphs, The Athletic, Sports on Earth, or other spots on the web. I’m here now, covering the team I love and I hope you’ll join me by subscribing. Just hit the button below this paragraph and drop your email into the box. It’s super easy, you’ll get everything I write delivered to your in-box, and did I mention free? It’s free. Thanks.

Since I wrote the Week In Review last Tuesday, the Red Sox have lost two series two games to one. The first was to Toronto and the second was to Tampa. The Red Sox scored 13 runs in those six division games. That, in case you’re new to baseball or, like me, have difficultly with multi-digit numbers, is bad. Quite bad. You’re not going to win many games averaging a hair over two runs a game. And, I know you’ll be shocked to read this if you’re a goldfish and don’t remember two sentences ago, but the Red Sox did, in fact, score that number of runs and they did not, in fact, win many games. So it worked out just as I post-predicted it would.

The great Alex Speier did some summing up over Twitter and yikes it is not good.

Alex Speier @alexspeier

The Red Sox are averaging 3.5 runs per game, their second-lowest scoring average through 16 games this century. League context is that offense is down everywhere for multiple reasons, but … their offense is absent for huge swaths of most games.

Alex Speier @alexspeier

Red Sox’ first 5 PAs of the game: 4-for-5 Red Sox’ next 29 PAs: 2-for-28, BB They lost to the Rays, 5-2.

It is important to note, as Speier does, that offense is down across the league, something that can be seen pretty clearly by looking at the 2018 Cubs. Weird, I know, but go with me here. The Red Sox have a 3.66 team ERA right now, which means, in essence, that they’re giving up 3.7 (earned) runs a game. That seems pretty good, but as is always true with these stats, context is key. Back in 2018, the Astros led baseball with a team ERA of 3.11. The Cubs were third in all of baseball that season with a 3.65 mark. That’s essentially the same ERA the Red Sox have right now. But the Red Sox don’t have the third ranked pitching staff in baseball by ERA (or any other stat). No, the Red Sox team ERA ranks 18th. The mark that was third best in baseball four years ago is now below average. That’s how far offense has fallen this season.

So that’s the context. But even within that context, as Alex Speier points out, the Red Sox batters have been AWOL. It’s not difficult to look at what they’ve been doing and pick out some general themes.

No Homers, No Walks

The Red Sox are a power-hitting team, yet they have 11 homers on the season, tied for 23rd most in baseball, and half the number hit by the first-ranked Blue Jays. Part of that is luck, as the Red Sox are 25th in home runs per fly ball with just 7.6 percent of their fly balls going over the wall (Toronto is at 15 percent). No, that doesn’t have to be luck, but this is roughly the same roster as last season and last season 13.7 percent of Boston’s fly balls went for homers. Still, it’s not all luck, but some of it is.

Also, we’re still firmly in small sample size territory, so it doesn’t have to be luck. It can just be lousy play for a short period of time. That happens too. Regardless, Xander Bogaerts (9.1 percent home runs on fly balls), JD Martinez (8.3 percent), Bobby Dalbec (5.9 percent), and Enrique Hernandez (4.5 percent) all seem like candidates to hit closer to their career averages in this area.

We know the Red Sox aren’t necessarily a big walking team. Last year they finished in the bottom third of the league with a walk in every 8.4 percent of their plate appearances. This year that number has dropped to 6.5 percent, which is almost last in baseball, just 0.3 percent ahead of Kansas City and 0.4 percent ahead of the White Sox.

If we look a bit closer, we find a lot of guys well below their career averages. Bogaerts, Devers, Christian Vazquez, Bobby Dalbec, Travis Shaw, Christian Arroyo, and Trevor Story are all walking less than they have over their careers. For some of them I didn’t have to look up their career walk rates because, well, you can’t walk less than zero percent of the time.

This, along with the homer per fly balls, should regress over time towards something more approaching the team’s true talent, I’d expect. I’d hope. Unless they’re having a team-wide plate discipline epidemic, or their hitting coach is playing a belated April Fools practical joke by teaching them to swing at everything. Actually, hold that thought.

I’m kidding of course. They’re not getting taught to swing at everything, but that is kinda what they’re doing. Going into Sunday’s games, the Red Sox were tied with the White Sox for the highest percentage of pitches in the strike zone swung at. But that’s not all! They lead baseball in percentage of pitches swung at outside the strike zone too. Put that together and you won’t be surprised to hear the Red Sox have swung at more pitches than any other team in baseball this season. It’s not innately bad to swing at a lot of pitches, but there is likely a breaking point where it becomes bad, and it seems clear this team has passed that point.

I studied Boston’s team batted ball profile and there’s nothing that really stands out that makes me think this isn’t just a small sample size concoction of bad luck and team-wide slumping. They’re not hitting the ball extremely hard, but you probably expected that. They’re around the middle of the league on most things, relatively average. It’s not indicative of a team that can’t score runs. The only thing that stood out to me was there were a lot of infield pop-ups, which are bad, but also not necessarily an indicator of anything except a few too many bad at-bats.

Naming Names

While this is a team-wide issue, there are three guys who stand out to me as shouldering a sizable portion of this under-performing offense. So let’s name names and talk about them individually.

Trevor Story

Story isn’t doing much of anything at the plate. He’s not walking, he’s not hitting for power, and worse, he’s not really helping out in the field. He was playing very good defense at second base for a while but that horrendous error to set up the loss in Tampa on Saturday was extremely costly and pretty much ruined any value he’d accrued there.

So the first month of his time in Boston has been a wash. I still think there’s a lot to recommend Story in his extremely strong track record. There’s nothing that you’d look at that he’s done in Boston and think, oh, this guy is gonna be an All Star, but then of course not because he’s been bad. But he’s not bad, if that makes any sense. He’s had a rough start but I don’t see anything that tells me his skills have completely eroded. It’s just a bad start. If he’s still hitting like this in another month, we’ll take a longer look.

Enrique Hernandez

Hernandez is a bit more frightening as his track record of being an above average hitter, at least the hitter he was last year, is, well, just last year. He was a fine hitter in LA, but never to the level he was last year in Boston (with maybe one exception, but it’s not worth discussing here; mostly last season was the outlier in his career).

This season Hernandez’s problem seems to be weak contact. He has simply not hit the ball very hard, as half his batted balls have been classified as “Soft” by FanGraphs. He’s popping up in the infield a lot, too which is a bad indicator, and one that likely goes a long way towards explaining his extremely poor Home Runs Per Fly Ball (HR/FB) stat as well as his Batting Average On Balls In Play (BABIP).

That all said, it took him a few months to get going last season as well, so I imagine the Red Sox will continue to give him lots of time to sort things out at the plate. It’s not like Jarren Duran is lighting it up at Triple-A and pushing for more playing time. That may come, but that isn’t now.

Bobby Dalbec

If I were to rank these three players, I’d go with Not Concerned for Story, Mildly Concerned for Hernandez, and Extremely Concerned for Dalbec. The thing about Dalbec is he’s an extremely streaky hitter, and that’s fine when he’s on a hot streak, but the level of production he’s giving the Red Sox right now would barely be acceptable from a backup catcher. There have been a ton of infield pop-ups amid just general soft contact from Dalbec’s bat, and for a power hitter at a run-generating position like first base, this is simply not good enough.

Will he get better? I mean, yes. He’s been so bad that he can’t help but get better. But he has to get a lot better to be an above average hitter. That can happen. We saw it last season. But with the team struggling to score runs the way they have been, it’s a lot tougher to hide a slumping first baseman.

The other disadvantage Dalbec has is the presence of Triston Casas at Triple-A. Casas has a .900 OPS to go with four homers and a ton of hard hit balls. Sox Prospects has him ranked as the best Red Sox prospect in the farm system. Could he step in and hit like he has in Triple-A? No, probably not. But the way Dalbec is hitting is setting the bar extremely low for what Casas would have to do to be an upgrade.

And then there’s Dalbec’s defense. I talked above about Story’s error that gave the Rays a chance to walk the Red Sox off on Saturday. It was a brutal error, one he shouldn’t have made. But here’s the thing: it kinda wasn’t his fault. The throw was quite bad, don’t get me wrong, but a major league first baseman should pick that throw. As we know, Dalbec didn’t. I’m not sure what was going on but he was out of position when the throw came and even though it wasn’t far off from first base, Dalbec couldn’t reach it.

Casas is reportedly a far better fielder. I don’t expect he’ll get called up soon, but if this continues for another few weeks into May, the Red Sox front office might not have much of a choice but to make a change.

To Sum Up

This team is better than what they’ve shown. I don’t think that’s going out on a limb. They will hit much better than they have. Rafael Devers will hit much better (he’s going to be the MVP so he’d better hit better, right?), Story will hit much better, and Dalbec is going to get replaced if he doesn’t hit better.

I do think there is a bit of a soft underbelly in the Red Sox offense though, one that worked out for them last season but you could see that not repeating itself. Christian Vazquez, Dalbec, Hernandez, and whomever is playing right field (right now Jackie Bradley Jr) are almost half the lineup. You can get away with a few not hitting, especially if they’re contributing defensively, but this can’t go on for a whole lot longer.

The Red Sox need to get more production from everyone in the batters box. They simply don’t have the pitching staff to survive with this level of offensive output without falling way down in the standings.

Thanks for reading.