After years of cursing the configurations of Fenway Park, and years of saying that the Red Sox needed to do something besides hit home runs, we saw this year the drawbacks to that fallacy.
While the rest of Major League Baseball was knocking them out of the park in record numbers, our Old Towne Team had a severe outage. Every major player, with the exception of Andrew Benintendi and Mitch Moreland (and Benintendi really doesn’t count because he played only a couple of months last season) saw his power numbers decline.
Now, some of that was understandable. David Ortiz was gone, and that meant there was no real imposing presence in the lineup that forced pitchers to change their game plans. Still, in a year when any one of a number of players could have come up big to pick up the slack, none of them did.
But the fact is simple. The Red Sox lacked power, and that deficit affected the pitchers.
And the biggest victim was Rick Porcello, who was the beneficiary of all kinds of offensive support in 2016 when he won the Cy Young Award. This year, he came close to losing 20 games.
You could say that the 2016 Porcello may have been an aberration and that the 2017 Porcello was more in keeping with his track record. I’d meet you halfway.
It would appear, though, that while you can never have enough pitching, and that while the starting pitching let them down in the playoffs — against a team that can flat-out rake, don’t forget — the Red Sox need a bat, and it needs to be a big one.
Problem: these guys don’t grow on trees. And power hitters seem to age quicker than even pitchers when you think about it. Joey Bautista is seen as aging at 36 while a waddling Bartolo Colon can still get hitters out at 40-plus.
(That said, I’d be interested in hearing what everybody thinks of taking a flier on Joey Batts.)
That was the No. 1 problem with this year’s Red Sox. It wasn’t that David Price was a jerk, or that Dustin Pedroia threw the team under the bus in April, or that Chris Sale pitched too many innings.
These guys simply didn’t hit enough, and they were horrendous when it counted. And the reason is pretty simple. Over the course of 162 games, even the worst hitters will have good stretches (you know, like Jackie Bradley Jr.) But water seeks its own level. Eventually, unless it’s an abnormally bad year, you end up being what you are.
When you combine hitters like Christian Vazquez, Sandy Leon, and others “being what they are” with sub-par years from Hanley Ramirez, Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts (the latter two really could have done a better job carrying the ball), you’re going to have a lineup where every other hitter is an automatic out. In such cases, it becomes easier to pitch around the hot hitters and easier still to dispatch the AO’s every time a crucial out is needed.
There are a couple of players we have to exempt here. One is Benintendi. He had more-than-decent stats for a rookie. Aaron Judge is the obvious Rookie Of The Year, but in another year, perhaps Benintendi would be in the conversation. He finished up with a .271 average, 20 homers and 20 stolen bases.
The other is Moreland. His stats this year are remarkably in line with what he’s done over his career. He’s a good No. 6-No. 7 hitter on a team with any kind of power, which, of course, does not describe this year’s Red Sox.
This brings us to Dustin Pedroia. He had what was, for him, a down year. But I don’t see the hostility toward him. If he doesn’t want to be seen as a player who condones head-hunter, good for him. I’m all for it.
The guy was hurt, and chances are it was from Manny Machado’s slide in April. If you’re going to get on his case because his stats were down, well, knock yourself out.
He, and the Red Sox, have some decisions to make, not the least of which is whether it’s time the Sox move on from him. But for heaven’s sake, stop treating him like he’s A-Rod or something. Pedroia always gave it everything he had here.
There’s not much to dislike about the pitching. Whatever problems the staff had were magnified by the lack of power. It’s still a team game. Sometimes the hitters bail out the pitchers, and sometimes it’s the other way around. Ideally it’s a 50-50 split. That wasn’t the case this season.
There were no problems with the defense either, other than the periodic problem at third base. Very fixable.
The two areas of most concern, other than lack of power, were baserunning and inability to manufacture runs.
On the latter, if you know your team isn’t hitting homers, then you have to be a little creative. Bunt the ball. And if that means having the whole team in before a night game to do bunting drills, so be it. This team was horrible at moving runners up.
Base running? Forget it. The Red Sox could have made Gandhi violent with their base running this year.
Finally, there’s the John Farrell factor. To fire him or not to fire him. I go back and forth, but the final analysis is that it’s time for a change. He never should have allowed Price to attack Dennis Eckersley the way he did, and it gave you the impression that he’d totally lost control.
Some of his decisions are certainly head-scratchers, but we all make those kinds of decisions from time to time. But he just came off as ineffectual in the Price incident, and that doesn’t bode well for the future.
