Month: June 2015

Happy Brock Holt Hits for the Cycle!

Posted on June 17, 2015 in Game Recap

The bullpen may have had a great day, but Brock Holt had a better one. Happy Brock Holt! (Boston Herald/Matt Stone)

So the Sox won today. Everyone’s making a big deal about Brock Holt hitting for the cycle. They should, too, it was cool. First one for the Red Sox since John Valentin!

Glorious mustache.

Glorious mustache.

I just can’t muster up any enthusiasm about it. It’s not you, Brock, it’s me. I’m still too bummed out for one win to turn my spirits around. But hey, this isn’t about me, it’s about our hundreds, nay, thousands of readers! So I’ll soldier on just for you.

There’s really nothing for me to complain about here. Every player on the team collected a hit, and six of Boston’s nine batters had a multi-hit game. There were nine total extra-base hits, including three triples. Mookie Betts was a home run away from the cycle himself. It was an offensive explosion. It just feels too good to be true.

I’m gonna be pessimistic real quick here for you: the 1st inning started out with a flurry of success – back-to-back doubles (Holt and Betts), a walk (Ortiz), a single (Bogaerts), only to be followed by perhaps the worst possible result: Sandoval grounded into a double play, scoring a run, and Napoli inevitably struck out.

By the time the Braves tied it up during Wade Miley’s only shaking inning of his outing, I was ready to call off the season again. I’m so sorry that I’m the way I am.

But in the sixth, the Sox shut me up by capitalizing on Mookie Betts’ leadoff triple with a pair of singles and a pair of doubles, driving in three runs and making the score 5-2, Boston.

My boy Junichi Tazawa came in when Miley got into one last spot of trouble in the 6th and ended the inning without incident. At that point, Holt hit his solo home run to come within one hit (a triple, obviously) of a cycle and extend the lead by a run.

In the eighth inning, against some guy called Sugar Ray Marimon (is the name Sugar Ray always cool? Probably), the rest of the Sox order got to work in order to get Brock Holt one last at-bat, succeeding and plating two more runs along the way. Holt capitalized on the opportunity, sending a ball deep to the triangle to carve out a little slice of the Red Sox history book for himself.

Koji came in and gave up a couple runs, which is pretty standard for him in non-save situations. I don’t know. It was a very impressive performance, but I’m not impressed. Maybe if they keep showing this amount of life. Maybe if this is the statistical regression back to the mean, or maybe if they just start playing like it means something. VERY DRAMATIC ANALYSIS.

But for now, I guess, Happy Brock Holt!

P.S. Don’t think I forgot that you also got caught stealing in this one, Brock.

Sad Brock Holt

Oh come on, I didn’t mean it.

Cycle Brock Holt

Phew, much better.

 

 

 

Sox Lose 7th In a Row

Posted on June 16, 2015 in Players
Hebeh. (Photo by Jim Rogash/Getty Images)

Hebeh. (Photo by Jim Rogash/Getty Images)

After the Red Sox’ first sweep of the season just over a week ago, and a glimmer of hope that perhaps the ship was righting, the Sox have dropped seven in a row.

Porcello took the bump in this one and again was on the wrong side of of the W-L column and has not won a start since May 16. Yikes. This one wasn’t terrible but it still looks like he’s leaving a lot of balls up in the zone, which you would think is a relatively easy thing for a major league pitcher to fix. Maybe just aim lower? I tell my little league catchers to give the pitcher a lower target if he’s leaving balls up in the zone. Anyone know how I can get a hold of Blake and Sandy?

It seems like this team can’t get everything going at the same time. During that stretch a few weeks ago when the starting pitching was great they couldn’t hit. Now that the offense has come around somewhat the pitching has been mediocre at best and the bullpen has been shaky.

Bogaerts, Pedroia, and Holt have been rock solid and Ortiz was hitting .333 over his last five coming into last night’s game, including three homers. But Ramirez is hitting .200 in his last six, and Napoli has dipped back below the Mendoza line. The offense did bang out 10 hits (three by Mookie Betts in his return to the lineup) but they once again Plaxico Burress’d themselves, grounding in the three double plays and going 1-7 with runners in scoring position.

The silver lining here – aside from Mookie looking no worse for the wear after his scary crash – was Xander, who homered, but I unfortunately don’t have any proof of that because for some reason neither the Red Sox nor MLB have it up on their sites. I guess you’ll just have to trust me. He turned around a center-cut 89 MPH fastball and hit it out to dead center. He also made a nice play in the field and continues to improve at short. Earlier in the year I touched on his advanced defensive statistics; how some had improved and some had declined, and I wasn’t quite comfortable enough with advanced defensive stats to use them to back up what I was seeing – he’s gotten a lot better. I’m now happy to report that they’re up across the board so I still don’t have to learn exactly what they mean.

Lefty pretty much covered the doom and gloom thing yesterday, but the Red Sox now sit 11 games under .500 and it’s getting harder to stay optimistic seeing as we are now halfway through June. It’s a little early for this talk, but it’ll be interesting to see if the Sox are buying or selling come July. That’s not a question you should be asking in June of the team with the 4th highest payroll in the league.

Notes:

-Jonny Gomes, nice to see ya.

Some Pessimistic Red Sox Thoughts

Posted on June 15, 2015 in Random Stuff

I’ve been avoiding writing this all day, because this must be rock bottom. And if it’s not rock bottom, I don’t want to see how far down this team can go. The Sox are now the fourth-worst team in baseball by run differential, and the worst in the AL East by 74 runs. The only positive way to spin that is to note that we’re not as far back in the race as you’d think, knowing that stat.

When I was a kid, I’m not sure what I thought about baseball, and how you win. I can guarantee that I think about it differently now. Now, i think of the entire season as an aggregate, based on percentages and averages and consistent performance – if you have [insert player here], he’s going to give you this many doubles, or this many strikeouts, or this many stolen bases. And if you throw enough of those parts together, you’ll have a team that wins more than it loses. Every team tries to do that, unless you’re rebuilding. And the Sox have the luxury of a lot of money to spend in order to go find the right players. But it’s not working.

I don’t know what’s going on with this team. I don’t know if they should wait for things to turn around, because statistically they must (even though I’m pretty sure that’s a logical fallacy). I don’t know if they should start cutting some people loose to shake things up. I was fully on board for waiting for the tide to shift for two and a half months and now I’m starting to reconsider. If you have six guys who have the pedigree to bat .300 and only one of them’s doing it, is that a sign of a deeper problem?

There’s a part of my mind where baseball is still just about execution, about going out and being better than the other team. This is easier to grasp in a game like basketball, where you can physically exert your will on the opponent. But baseball is so random, so luck-based that the only way to beat luck entirely is to hit the ball 400 feet in the air. It is all about the stats, isn’t it? Players are about as good as they’re expected to be, trending up, and then down, and then they lose it completely at the end. And maybe that’s good for this team. Maybe these guys still have gas in the tank, so they can’t possibly be this bad over an entire season.

But as much as this is an aggregate sport, about numbers accrued over time, it’s also a game with tests that take place moment-to-moment. And right now, there are a lot of guys on this team who don’t show up for every moment. That could change. And I hope it does, and I hope the Sox find some luck. But at this moment, it seems like the Sox are shit out of it.

Red Sox Drop 5th Straight

Posted on June 14, 2015 in Game Recap

Fenway

A lot of good things happened in this game, but as has been the case for most of 2015 the desired result wasn’t there. Every starter had a hit except for Sandy Leon and Rusney Castillo, but Rusney was squaring the ball up and had a homer taken away by Joey Bats (who now, by the way, follows @AndRighty).

But this team found another way to come up a play or two short of victory. It’s hard for me to be as upset about yesterday as Lefty was about Friday night’s game because I was at the second half of this game, sitting about 8 rows from the field between home plate and the Red Sox dugout with my sister, my brother-in-law, and my baby niece. It was a great day to be at the ballpark.

She loves the Red Sox! #firstsoxgame

A photo posted by Bennett Collen (@stackinpeans) on

That being said, losing another winnable game is frustrating as hell.

Clay Buchholz got the start and put the Red Sox in an early hole, giving up a 3 spot in the top of the second. But the offense would get the Sox back in the game – they went into the 4th inning down 4-0 and came out of it down 4-3, thanks to RBI singles by Xander and Panda, and some Dickey knuckleballs that got past Russell Martin.

Buchholz settled down and turned in a decent outing.

Pitchers IP  H  R ER BB SO HR ERA
Buchholz 6.0 8 4 4 1 7 0 4.22

Papi led off the bottom of the sixth with a solo blast to tie the game at four.

With one out in the bottom of the seventh Pedey, Holt, and Ramirez would hit back-to-back-to-back singles, bringing up Ortiz with the bases loaded. After taking ball one he took a vicious hack at a hittable fastball, trying to give the Red Sox a four run lead with one swing. He missed, and eventually would strike out. Xander would follow and strike out on three pitches. You’d think with one out and needing only one run to take the lead Ortiz would have a different approach, trying only to hit a fly ball or even a single with the first hittable pitch he saw.

That would be the last threat the offense mounted on the day. The Red Sox bullpen pitched well (a day too late), so the game would remain tied up until the 11th inning when Matt Barnes surrendered a solo homerun to Russell Martin. This came a day after Matt Barnes gave up 3 runs without recording an out, opening up the floodgates and letting the Blue Jays back in a game that appeared to be well in hand. To be fair, Barnes had been very good this season up until Friday night, and pitched a scoreless tenth yesterday, but you’d like to see Farrell stay away from him if at all possible the day after such a forgettable performance.

Notes:

-Sandoval left the game with a quad injury and is day-to-day.

–Mookie will miss time after crashing face-first into the wall on Friday night.

-If this isn’t the low point of 2015, we’re in for a long summer.

-I’m still blogging one-handed/with Siri. It’s harder to be interesting, funny, or witty (all three trademarks of Righty’s writing, obviously) with this setup. I’ll try and pick it up for the good of the team. And to impress Joey Bats.