Just a few more stats to illustrate how great the offense has been of late: in May, the Sox are 2nd in average, 5th in OBP, 3rd in SLG, 4th in OPS, 4th in wOBA, and 4th in wRC+.
No worries, I definitely wasn't referring to you. An intelligent discussion of what a deadline selloff might look like is absolutely warranted, and imo even an interesting thought experiment in seasons where the Sox are unlikely to be sellers. Getting to first place would require some serious star-aligning, and like you I'm cautiously optimistic about the possibility of a WC berth, but it's far from guaranteed.
I didn’t call for mass firings, but this team is still not great. It’s incredibly too heavy and is being carried offensively by four players.
So if the "Fire Bloom and Cora!" contingent was wrong to overreact to April's small sample size, aren't those who are proclaiming "problem solved!" about the offense in the last couple of weeks making the same mistake? We're still routinely running out several noodle bats like Dalbec, Vazquez and JBJ. Verdugo is still in a terrible funk.
Vazquez and JBJ have both been close to league average offensive players in May, and Cordero is probably over league average after today. Dalbec and Hernandez have also hit much better over the last 1-2 weeks. They aren't being carried by four guys anymore, almost everyone is starting to contribute. The lone exception among the regulars really is Verdugo who hasn't shown any signs of life with the bat after a nice start.
Anyone proclaiming all the problems are solved would be wrong, but expecting Story, Devers, Martinez, and Bogaerts to hit well and carry the offense is much more realistic than the view held by those who seemed to think Story would continue to be a zero offensively. The Sox won’t play at an .800 clip the rest of the season, but expecting regression to career averages is a reasonable position to hold. Those thinking the Sox were actually an 11-20 team were disregarding the severe underproduction of players with proven track records of being very good
Has anyone made that claim? I'm still of the mind that this team is better/more capable than what they had represented through the first 30 games and there are still needs at 1B, C, OF, bench and pen. It's nice to see JBJ contributing with the bat, but I think we all pretty much think him to be the guy that we've seen in the past. Franchy's plate approach seems to have changed for the better and we have shifted from relying on the same three guys to produce two runs per game to most everyone chipping in, resulting in 4, 5 even 8 or 9 runs per game. It's a streak for sure and not likely to be sustainable, but IMO what we see now is closer to what most expected from this team than what we saw 30 games in.
I'm reading a FanGraphs article about the Blue Jays infield (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-blue-jays-infield-has-yet-to-soar/), and there's a chart showing the 20 hitters with the "Largest Slugging Percentage Shortfalls on Flyballs." That is, whose actual results are the worst relative to their expected results. Three Red Sox hitters are on that list: Verdugo at #2 (Trey Mancini is #1) with a -.589 SLG/xSLG difference, Bobby D at #9 (-.461), and Kiké at #18 (-.378).
The weird thing is that Verdugo's statcast numbers continue to suggest that he should be getting much better results. His BB% is down, but so is his K%. His hard hit % is down slightly, but his barrel rate is up. He is vastly underperforming his xSLG and his xwOBA. His xwOBA is actually above his career average by .016 while his actual wOBA is .079 below his career average.
How is that indicative of hyperbole? It is still not a given they are going to be in contention at the trade deadline, and if they are not then Evoldi and Bogey, barring health concerns, are the most logical trade chips.
You had the season over 11 days ago. Now, with well over 100 games still left they're very much in the playoff race. How was your ridiculous claim not hyperbole?
Those were jokes? He was being facetious? It was a thought experiment?
Dalbec has hit .194/.324/.258 over his last 15 games. I suppose it is a measure of his futility at the plate this season that someone sees this as "much better" recent performance.
This is what is known as false equivalence. Calling for the firing of two widely respected baseball minds 16 games into the season because of a bad start is a far, far, FAR different thing--is not at all the same mistake, in other words—than looking at improved results over a small sample size and drawing conclusions about whether a problem has been solved.
Good point, these are really different. You can’t rehire those guys after you axed them, but you can reconsider your conclusions when things change.
I think a lot of this just comes down to your definition of contending. There were a lot of discussions on the board heading into the season with many of us feeling that the Sox would contend for a wild card in a very tough division with an outside shot at the division. There was a definite sense that Bloom was setting things up for the all-in push to start in 2023. Story, Hernandez, and Verdugo all starting the season in a black hole certainly made the road tougher, but a quarter of the season in, the Sox seem to be within striking distance of where we’d expected…unless the expectation was to compete for a title this year. If that’s the case, then this season is certainly shaping up as a disappointment. But there is nothing about Bloom’s approach over the offseason that indicates HE was gearing up for that kind of run. The Sox seem to me to have been built to be good this year, not great. That means there are going to be weak spots on the roster, and the cushion is going to be thinner at times than we’d like.
I’m open to the idea that it’s too early to say anything good about Barnes, but I’d read that the Sox believe he’s been throwing much better lately and just not getting the results. And they put him in a high-leverage situation on Saturday and he closed the game out with a perfect ninth. Generally speaking, though, you’re right that it’s probably too early to read too much into that.
I use the evidence of how they were playing and how deep the hole was to form a conclusion. That conclusion may still come to pass. Though I am cautiously optimistic about the wild card spot, it would not be surprising if the Sox offense proved inconsistent and they go back to having trouble scoring runs. In other words their offense went back to being like it was last year. Another cold streak combined with the bullpen shitting the bed and talks of the wild card could be fantasy by the time the trade deadline rolls around. More to the point, the examples Bringbackmo cited, as I showed in my response, are not examples of hyperbole.
IMO, There are few stats more unreliable than "blown saves". In the Sox case, it tracks, only because we watch them every day and we see the bullpen is spotty at best. But giving up a 1 run lead in the 6th inning with the bases loaded and none out is not the same as blowing a 3run ninth-inning lead and losing. And, as we saw yesterday, a blown save isn't even a team loss every time.
We still have no idea about the overall quality of the team expect that the results so far have been exceptionally poor. If you play .330 ball and the reason is "they were good teams" then you by definition are a bad team. Beating up on a slumping Seattle team is great but that's what they should be doing.
I'd agree (and do agree with the rest of your post generally.)
In terms of all games counting, I completely agree. The thing is, in order not to tumble into mathematical quasi-oblivion, they had to reel off a string of wins while showing signs of better play (especially competitive at-bats.) They've done that. So, IMO, they're alive.
Well yeah, most teams that play .330 ball for six weeks suck. Like you said upthread, we really don't know how good or bad this team is yet. Chance are they are right around where their record / run differential are now, somewhere around a .500 team. If they're a similar overall team in quality to last year, we'd expect them to win ~4 out of 7 the rest of the way and finish with ~87 wins.
That A's team won 20 in a row, didn't they? That's the outlier of all outliers and probably should be discarded as a data point in figuring out this year's Sox.
Right of course it's an outlier. Like I said, teams that start 11-20 usually do so for a reason: they suck. I don't think the Sox suck like most 11-20 teams usually do. I'm not sure what data points we should be using, because it's obviously an unusual circumstance for good / great teams to play quite this poorly for 30 games.
The lowest point for the team was 10-19, which is .345 ball, not .330. Lots of good teams have a 10-19 streak hidden in the middle of their season. You just don't notice it because it didn't happen at the start. And with the 3rd wild card, you don't even have to be a particularly good team to make the playoffs.
I don't really think that is true, I think we notice the few that do because they're so unusual and stand out so much. I strongly suspect that playing 30 games of .345 or .333 baseball isn't as common for good teams as we think.
The Braves never had a stretch as bad as 10-19 or whatever... but they didn't even reach .500 for the first time all season until they were 44-44. They ended up winning 88 games.
There's also the 2019 Nationals, who were 24-33 by the end of May. It's not quite as bad as .345 ball, but point being there enough recent samples of teams that started off looking quite bad that went on to be title contenders (and winners).
The Braves last year have already been brought up. The Yankees last year started the season 6-11, a .353 winning percentage. They finished the season at 92-70, a .568 winning percentage. Also last season, the Sox went 6-14 from Aug. 1 to Aug. 18 (a couple of double headers in there), a .300 winning percentage. They went on to finish 92-70 and make the ALCS. Those were all just last season. Good teams go through bad stretches. It is magnified when they coincide with the start of the season.
I totally agree with everything said here, except for the Whitlock being pulled as a starter. I think Cora has been gentle on him and has been easing up on the breaks slowly. I also don't think that Whitlock's presence in the bullpen is going to make all that much difference at this point.
87 wins may, or may not, result in a WC berth. So they may have already tanked the season. We just won't know until we see how the top 6 favorites shape up.
Whitlock's stuff is losing its sharpness in the rotation and his last start was brutal. I really think they're going to Bard this kid (without the thoracic outlet syndrome complication) if they keep him on this path. He was dominant in the pen and they've weakened the pen in order to get a starter who is not all that effective.
I'd say it's impactful - meaning a team that starts poorly must finish excellently to make the post-season. They have no margin to go through a bad mid-summer slump, because they've already racked up a certain number of losses. Teams that start bad and slump midway - those are just bad teams.
I thought I saw that 87 wins would get you into the playoffs a much higher % of the time than 50% in the new team era, but I can't seem to find the data.
I don't really follow this line of thinking. It's a little like saying that if heads comes up 65 percent of the time in the first 300 flips, tails are going to have to get extremely lucky/hot in the next 700 flips to get to 50 percent. A team's potential is its potential, and that potential usually comes with peaks and valleys over the course of a season. When the season starts out as valleys, the peaks should be just as likely to occur over the course of the season. And, as we saw last year with the Sox, vice versa. Obviously injuries, unexpected poor performance, trades, and clubhouse morale/chemistry can all affect these outcomes, but when the various hot and cold streaks occur over the course of a season should be largely immaterial.
Whitlock was ill on Saturday. There's a strong case to be made that he shouldn't have been out there to begin with. He arguably shouldn't have even been in the ballpark if he was sick. Weird how there are still COVID protocols that rule otherwise healthy players out for close contacts (like Vazquez missing a game because Plawecki tested positive) yet presumably Whitlock had a non-COVID illness (maybe the same one that has felled Verdugo?) and was at the park every day and then pitching while still under the weather. And complimented endlessly for his "guttiness" for being out there. Such an outdated point of view after the last couple years.
It doesn't have to be that way. This is a choice the team is making.
