Following the fortunes of the Red Sox
Two games in Tampa reveal the good, the ugly and the strikeout
So deep into this baseball season, I wasn’t expecting to be given a chance to actually watch The Olde Towne Team, the team I’ve been following, rooting for, yelling at, reading about all my life — the Boston Red Sox.
Thanks, NESN. For years and years, I’d been able to follow (and occasionally watch) the Red Sox thanks to a hookup with Direct TV and the New England Sports Network, some sort of sports package they’d been offering me for years and years.
While it wasn’t like I didn’t get to watch much baseball — we were fortunate to get to watch John’s games nightly — I was always able to keep up with the Red Sox because we got their games on NESN. In New England, the Red Sox are — or maybe were — a religion and if you grow up there, it’s in your blood. Even if you’ve lived in Florida for 30-odd (very odd) years.
After some last-place finishes, absolutely bone-headed, short-sighted front office work (Trading Mookie Betts for a bag of baseballs!) things have cooled for the Red Sox in Boston. And thanks to an inexplicable — and to me, indefensible — decision by NESN to no longer televise the actual games outside the New England area, I was shut out. Sure, I could see the pre — and postgame shows, just not the actual games themselves. STUPID! Why change now? “Sorry, sir. You’ll have to buy the MLB Package….” To watch THIS team, expected to finish dead last?
So when I spun the TV dial and heard the dulcet tones of Tampa’s Rays’ baseball announcer Dewayne Staats…hey! The Red Sox were ON! I got to watch an actual game. Let me check on the boys.
Appropriately enough considering the way this year’s gone for them, they lost one and won one. As I write this on Thursday morning, they are 76-76, .500. In watching these two games, it wasn’t hard to see why.
After Tampa’s Ryan Pepiot struck out the Sox on NINE PITCHES last night in the 5th — yes, friends, nine stinking pitches, an “Immaculate Inning” — Staats happily shared a devastating statistic.
“The Red Sox lineup 1 through 5 are 0-for-30 so far in the series,” he chirped. “With 13 strikeouts.” Well, make it 16. The reason these guys are hitting in those first five spots is to be productive, drive in runs, get hits. But 0-for-30? Who are they facing, Tom Seaver and Bob Gibson?
Not exactly. The two non-household names who so handily dismissed the Sox lineup these last two nights were Shane Baz, a former Pittsburgh Pirates’ No. 1 pick who was one of those “players to be named later” in a trade and who didn’t even pitch last season (Tommy John surgery) and somebody named Ryan Pepiot.
Baz was coming off two straight losses coming into Tuesday’s game, an 8-3 Tampa win. Pepiot, who was yanked after his last start after just two innings, came over from the Los Angeles Dodgers this season. He got no decision after his six-inning, 12-strikeout effort in Boston’s 2-1 win. Twelve whiffs, one run, no decision.
Welcome to 2024 Major League Baseball. Two pitchers you’ve never heard of, wheeling and dealing and getting more swings and misses than is imaginable or acceptable. This is the game now.
There are currently FOUR .300 hitters in the American League, just THREE in the National League with 798 strikeouts amongst them — Bobby Witt (103 whiffs), Aaron Judge (163 whiffs), Vladmir Guerrero (91 k’s), Brent Rooker (162 k’s) in the AL; In the NL, Marcell Ozuna has 159 whiffs, Yordan Alvarez 92.
The one exception to these big whiffers is NL batting leader Luis Arraez with just 28 whiffs, a two-time batting champion whose bat-to-ball skills are so valued he’s now on his third team at age 27. You’d think a batting champ would be valuable. Nope!
In the two games I saw, Tampa started three different players with batting averages UNDER .200! Neither team had a .300 hitter. Neither team had a .290 hitter!
In Tuesday’s 8-3 Tampa win, the Rays whacked four home runs, three with nobody on. The Red Sox hit two, one a pinch-hit job by somebody named Romy Gonzalez, also a solo shot. Solo home runs. Strikeouts galore. Guys hitting under .200 and STARTING in the major leagues! This is the game now.
Now this might not exactly be breaking news to anybody who’s watched MLB games over the past several seasons. One former major-league general manager I know, a former big-leaguer who’d been in the game since 1963 confessed he hadn’t watched a full game in four years. It is NOT THE SAME GAME WE KNEW.
Boston fell apart at the end of Tuesday’s game when two-time Gold Glove left fielder Tyler O’Neil — who has hit 31 bombs this year — couldn’t quite haul in a sinking liner in the late innings, letting the ball get past him for a bases-clearing double. Not quite the way you’d draw it up.
One juicy little tidbit I also gathered from Tuesday night’s game seemed to say a lot. Tampa went to the bullpen and brought in a chunky lefty reliever named Garrett Cleavinger. His average fastball, according to the stats they put up on the screen, was 96 MPH. Stunning from a left-hander. But that wasn’t the killer. The breakdown of his pitches went like this: Cutter 27%, Slider 23%, 4-Seam Fastball 23%. A left-hander out of the bullpen throwing 96 and he only throws it less than a quarter of the time?
Tampa seems to be able to find guys who can do that. While they generally end up trading away their carefully nurtured ace hurlers — Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell, David Price, etc. — nevertheless, they seem to be able to find another great arm and move on. While the Rays have had struggled this year (74-78), Staats talked about them having an impressive seven-man pitching rotation once they all get healthy. That puts them at least four arms up on most major-league teams.
In Wednesday’s game, another statistical gem popped. This year’s Red Sox pitching staff, commandeered by former pitcher Andrew Bailey, an 8-year vet with a 16-14 career mark, has decided to throw breaking balls of all descriptions until further notice. The most prevalent pitch in the majors, they said is the 4-seam fastball, which most teams throw on average 32% of the time. Bailey’s Red Sox hurlers throw it just 18% of the time. Radical, no?
And in keeping with the theme of how the game — and my old Red Sox — have turned things around, Boston ended up winning Wednesday’s game in most un-Red Sox-like fashion. Historically, the Sox have always been a slugging team, designed to take advantage of The Green Monster, Fenway’s 315-foot inviting left field wall. These Sox feature something else. Speed.
After the oft-injured, generally disappointing Trevor Story had homered to tie the game at 1, he reached on an infield hit in the 8th, bouncing one off pitcher Drew Rasmussen’s legs. Story then stole second, then third! He ended up scoring the game-winner on Jarren Duran’s ground ball single to right, just past a diving Jonathan Aranda.
Tampa did the same thing in the 9th, getting two on against reliever Kenley Jansen, stealing second and third. But on a full count just to make things dramatic, Jansen fanned No. 9 hitter Logan Driscoll (.208), who apparently was allowed to hit in that spot because Cash had already used his pinch hitters and catchers. He whiffed on a 3-2, 92 MPH fastball. Ugh!
The Red Sox win, as noted earlier, raised their record to 76-76, which in the old days of baseball would have meant a quiet October and a disgruntled fan base asking for trades and Hot Stove action. With ten games left, they are four games out of the third wild card spot.
Manager Alex Cora — the team’s best move all year was to sign him to a contract extension — has found a way to win at least half of the time with a collection of young players, as non-descript a pitching staff as has ever been assembled and a lineup that on any given night, might go 0-for-30 over a couple games.
You might not think taking a close look at just two games in a 162-game season would tell you a whole lot about the team and the state of the MLB package in 2024. But you’d be wrong.
Is Cleavinger related to Tex who pitched BITD?