What's Wrong With The Red Sox
(Shh! It's their hitting!)
April! How badly do you want to relive this month, Red Sox fans? I’ll be honest and say I wasn’t jumping up and down to write about it. The plan was to do a straight monthly review, but that doesn’t seem pertinent right now. So consider this your Red Sox Month In Review. Take a brick. Now drop it on your toe. There. Consider the month reviewed.
Instead of focusing on the month as a whole, I want to zoom in on the hitting, or what little of it there has been. We’ll look at what has happened, prospects for improvement (of which, surprise, I think there are a few!), and what can be done to achieve that improvement.
Before we get to that though, hello, thanks for reading Sox Outsider. I’m Matt Kory. I’ve written at Baseball Prospectus, The Athletic, FanGraphs, and other spots. Sox Outsider is my Red Sox newsletter. I think you’ll enjoy it, so please subscribe if you haven’t already. It’s free to do. Just click this red button. Thanks.
The Red Sox are off today (mercifully). It’s a good time to decompress, having just lost two of three to the Orioles, who Boston is a half game up on in the standings. Nobody cares about the standings on May 2nd, but a 9-14 record is never a good thing.
There are numerous items worthy of discussion, but any discussion of the 2022 Red Sox has to center on one issue, which is Boston’s hitting. If you look back at recent games, the Red Sox scores read like binary code, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0. OK, it wasn’t that bad, but it was bad. The Red Sox have averaged 3.5 runs a game this season, which normally would qualify as horrendous. It doesn’t quite reach that level though because hitting across MLB is way down this season. It’s still not good.
So what’s the problem?
We’ll start at the 30,000 foot level and say they’re not hitting for power and they’re not getting on base. When they do get hits, they’re usually singles, and there usually aren’t runners on base ahead of them because they’re not hitting and they don’t take walks.
On a more micro level, the Red Sox as a team are just swinging out of their shoes. No team in baseball has swung at more pitches than the Boston Red Sox. The Sox have swung at 52 percent of the pitches they’ve seen this season, far and away the highest percentage in the league. Only the Red Sox and White Sox are over 50 percent. The Padres are at 43 percent which is lowest in baseball, to give you some context.
This is not a selective team, but this is a new level of.. whatever the opposite of selectivity is. I’m not sure whether the team is gripping their bats too tightly, needs to be reigned in by the coaching staff, or what, but this is essentially the same collection of talent the team put on the field last season, and last season they swung at 48.8 percent. Still a lot, but not enough to tilt the meter. Maybe this is just an early season blip, or maybe you take Kyle Schwarber out of the lineup and this is the result.
In addition to swinging a ton, they’re not hitting for much power. As a team they’re slugging .336, 23rd in baseball. They’re 27th in home runs with 12 on the season, and they have one triple. Surprisingly, they’re first in doubles with 44. Still, the end result isn’t good, and it’s certainly not good enough.
Part of the issue is they’re not pulling the ball. The pull side is where most of the power is, and while there are some hitters who hit the ball the other way for power, like JD Martinez, that’s not how it is for most hitters.
For example, look at Enrique Hernandez. When he’s hitting well, he’s hitting line drives to center field, and pulling the ball to left field for doubles and homers. Here’s his spray chart for last season.
You can see, other than a few mis-hit doubles that fell along the right field line, just about all his hits for power are to left field. He managed one Pesky Pole squeaker last season, but other than that, every homer he hit at Fenway was over the Monster.
Now, let’s look at his 2022 season to date.
A lot less data here, both because it’s only a month and because he doesn’t have many hits, but again you can see the doubles and homers are almost exclusively pulled. That’s the importance of pulling the ball, which the Red Sox aren’t doing.
It’s strange to use Enrique as an example though because he’s actually pulling the ball more than he did last season. His problem is he’s hitting far fewer fly balls (25 percent this season to 33 percent last season) and he’s wasting far more at-bats with weak pop-ups. A ridiculous 22 percent of his balls in play have resulted in what Baseball Savant calls Pop Ups. Those are effectively batted ball strikeouts, in that they’re almost always outs. Those at-bats have killed his quality of contact, and I suspect it’s not just those ABs either. He’s simply hitting the ball a lot less hard than he did last season.
Perhaps that will change. It did last season. He had a rough March in 2021 with an OPS of .671, and he ended the season with an OPS of .786. And that brings me to this.
There is no way this team is this bad. They’re just not. Now, don’t misunderstand me. They might not be good. But they’re not this bad. There are a bunch of things going on here. So let’s address each of them.
League Context
I discussed this a bit above and in the post from last Friday (read that here) but suffice it to say the league batting line in 2021 was .244/.317/.411. That’s an OPS of .728. So far this season the league has hit .231/.306/.369. That’s an OPS of 675. So, at least by OPS, the league average has dropped by about 50 points. Oddly, you can see that actually both seasons have similar batting averages and on-base percentages. Down a bit, but not ridiculously. What’s way down is slugging. Forty of those 50 points of OPS is slugging percentage.
The Red Sox sure fall into that boat as well. They slugged .449 in 2021, and that’s dropped to .336 this season. That’s more than a .50 point drop, but it’s the same thing, if a bit more so.
Rough Starts From Good Hitters
The Red Sox are operating with three good hitters in their lineup right now. Rafael Devers, Xander Bogaerts, and JD Martinez have all hit well, if not quite as well as we might like, so far this season. So far only Bogaerts has exceeded expectations. Devers has been fine, though not spectacular (he’s still going to win the MVP though) and Martinez has been good, not great, but has been in and out of the lineup. This concludes the happy portion of this breakdown.
Rough Starts From The Back Of The Lineup
Beyond those three guys, there’s really not much to speak of in terms of production. Enrique Hernandez was a spark plug at the top of the lineup last season and he’s been terrible. Trevor Story was supposed to be another middle of the order monster and while I do think he will be that, he hasn’t yet. Alex Verdugo had a hot start but has since tailed off significantly. Bobby Dalbec has been straight up bad. So has Christian Vazquez. So has Jackie Bradley.
After Bogaerts, Devers, and Martinez, the Red Sox just don’t generate any offense. It’s hard to score runs with six guaranteed outs in a nine man lineup.
Can they get better?
I think they can get better. There are a few obvious places to look for improvement. Trevor Story is first. He’s much better than he’s showed. I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: Story signed late, missing most of Spring Training, then just after he got to Fort Myers, his wife gave birth and he had to leave the team to be with her (as he should have done). He just never had a chance to get into any kind of shape at the plate, and instead he’s been forced to use April as his Spring Training with predictably tough results.
He will round into form soon enough.
Beyond Story, there is more to get from Rafael Devers. Devers is seemingly swinging at every pitch thrown to him, but he’s still making hard, loud contact a lot of the time.
He’s backslid in terms of plate patience and discipline but this is the time to remember it’s still early in the season. There is lots of time remaining for Devers to remember to take a darn pitch every now and then.
I’m expecting a lot more out of Rafael Devers this season.
The last guy who the team should be able to get more from is Alex Verdugo. I’m on record as not the biggest Verdugo fan, but there might not be a more unlucky player so far this season in baseball than he. According to StatCast, Alex Verdugo’s quality of contact should have generated a .594 slugging percentage, a number that would easily be tops on the team and have us all crowing about a breakout season. Instead, his slugging percentage is .375. Looking at his StatCast data you’d think he’d be crushing things, not looking like a backup outfielder on a team that can’t hit. If Verdugo keeps hitting like this the positive results will come.
Beyond Verdugo, Story and Devers though, finding sources of improvement is difficult. Still, that’s three guys the team should be able to get a lot more production out of, and three guys is a third of the lineup. Getting those guys going will do an awful lot to juice up the Red Sox offensive numbers.
That doesn’t fix everything though. There are some problem spots. The biggest problem spot is at catcher. But there’s probably not much the team can do about Christian Vazquez right now. There’s nobody to take his spot either on the roster or in the minors, so unless the team is more competitive close to the trade deadline, it’s pretty much just hope he hits better, but be prepared if he doesn’t.
That brings us to two guys who could be playing themselves off the team. Right now, Jackie Bradley’s 2022 looks almost exactly like his 2021 season, where he was the worst hitter in baseball. In fact, Bradley’s numbers are worse than last season, but because of the league context, he’s actually been one percent better in 2022. Whatever plan the Red Sox had to fix Bradley hasn’t worked yet. He might be cooked.
Bobby Dalbec is another serious problem. At least Bradley has been good in the field. Dalbec has been a total zero offensively and defensively. That said, his second half last season does give some hope that he will be able to turn it around.
The most obvious solutions to both the Bradley and Dalbec problems are in Triple-A Worcester. Outfielder Jarren Duran is hitting again, posting an OPS over 1.000 so far on the season. There are still the same questions about his abilities to hit velocity at the major league level and adequately field his position in the outfield, but it would be difficult (though not impossible!) to be worse than what the Red Sox have received from Bradley so far. Soon enough the Red Sox may have to call up Duran and give him another shot.
The answer at first base is Triston Casas. Casas is hitting well in Triple-A but not destroying the level. As the top prospect in the system, the Red Sox have a number of developmental requirements he’ll have to meet to graduate to the majors, and they’re unlikely to make changes to that even with a crying need at the major league level. That said, Casas is a quick learner and he’s likely to be major league ready sometime this season. It wouldn’t be surprising if the team gave Dalbec another month or so and then if he’s still not hitting, called Casas up.
It’s not a sexy solution, but much if not all of what must be done right now is to wait. Nobody wants to hear that the answer to fix a struggling team is to sit on your hands, but in this case that’s probably the most prudent answer. Once Casas is ready he’ll be up. Perhaps Duran pushes his way back up sooner. Then the trade deadline comes and they can evaluate where they are and what to do then.
The end result is that May really should be better than April. Unless the pitching, which I totally failed to mention until now, falls apart. But we’ll save that for another post.
Thanks for reading.
Agree with all of this, Matt.
But while we wait for Casas and possibly Duran to come up, there’s no reason not to give Franchy some of the ABs currently going to Dalbec and JBJ