After a last-place finish and being maligned all winter, the Red Sox needed only 36 games to reinvent themselves as a plucky team of overachievers. By putting the ball in play more than all but one team in MLB, Boston jumped to a 21–15 start.
What can we make of 36 games? Seventeen previous Red Sox teams won at least 20 of their first 36 games. All of them finished with winning records, and 13 of the 17 lineups reached the postseason. These Red Sox have only six All-Stars on their roster, but their approach at the plate is graduate-level wizardry. It is best exemplified by newcomers Masataka Yoshida, a contact-hitting machine, and Justin Turner, a grinder who essentially replaced J.D. Martinez as the primary designated hitter.
“There’s more contact,” manager Alex Cora says about his lineup. “And it’s sharing information. There was a narrative going on here that we had a bad clubhouse last year, and that’s not the case. It’s just different guys. The impact JT is having with this team is similar to the impact we had with J.D. in ’18, but in a different way. J.D. was more like the hitting guru ... J.D. is more mechanics. J.D. is more process-oriented. [Turner] is more just like, ‘Let’s find a way here. Just grind.’”
The Red Sox have grabbed 14 of their 21 wins by coming from behind. They seem to summon offense whenever it is needed and from any spot in the lineup even though Yoshida, first baseman Triston Casas, center fielder Jarren Duran, catcher Connor Wong and second baseman Enmanuel Valdez are getting their first regular runs in MLB.
Michael Dwyer/AP
Now, the bad news: The way Boston is winning is not sustainable.
Red Sox starters are 13–14 with a 5.89 ERA. Only the Royals, Reds and A’s have worse starting pitching than Boston. Only five teams have made the postseason with a rotation ERA that starts with a five, and all of them happened in the Wild West steroid era, between 1996 and 2001.
No team in today’s game can hit enough to cover poor starting pitching. Not the Red Sox, especially when their offense relies on so many players still establishing themselves. For now, they have a hot hand. Boston is hitting .286 with runners in scoring position, third best in MLB. The best clutch team last year, the Dodgers, hit .272 in those spots.
The rotation must improve by a large margin. James Paxton will join the club this week, but he’s 34 years old and has made six starts in the past four seasons. Tanner Houck, 26, shows signs of promise, but he’s not equipped to carry a heavy workload as a starter. He averaged 52 innings a year over eight pro seasons and never more than 119 in any one year. Brayan Bello, 23, is off to a slow start (5.71), and his slider is getting pounded (.583) after Boston increased his innings last season by 58. Corey Kluber, 37, is 19–20 with a 4.57 ERA over the past five years.
The one possible difference-maker is Chris Sale, who is 34 years old and has made only 11 starts over the past three years because of injuries but may have just turned a corner upon the advice of Cora. After Sale obtained just two swinging strikes on 83 pitches against Baltimore on April 24, Cora advised him to drop the robotic, David Price–like abbreviated delivery and return to a full turn-and-fire method, starting with his shoulders square to the plate rather than toward first base. Since then, Sale has put together back-to-back quality starts with swing-and-miss stuff (27 swings and misses) while hitting 99 mph for the first time in five years.
Boston needs at least decent pitching—only the Mets have an older staff—to be a postseason team. The third-highest scoring offense is bound to regress some, but its contact rate suggests its personality as a grind-it-out lineup will continue. Only the Nationals have a lower strikeout percentage.
Led by Turner, the Red Sox have jumped from 20th to third in contact rate and 20th to 14th in chase swings. They enjoy getting deep into the analytical weeds about which pitches to hunt. They study catcher framing metrics more than umpire tendencies to help them with swing decisions. When they played Milwaukee, for instance, they expanded their idea of the strike zone out of respect for how Brewers catchers steal strikes.
In this nerdy, battle-every-pitch environment, certain hitters are flourishing, including:
Alex Verdugo
He has cut his strikeout rate to a career low while giving Cora a prototypical leadoff hitter.
“It’s a different dude,” Cora says. “It’s a different at bat right now. He’s playing like the guy that everybody envisioned, coming up with the Dodgers—running the bases, playing the defense, showing the bat. He’s not trying to hit homers, and the ball is jumping off his bat.
“I think physically he tried to generate power the wrong way, getting bigger and kind of like [Andrew Benintendi] in ’19. Your moves get slower. It didn’t work out for him last year, and he was banged up, too.”
Cora likes to motivate Verdugo by pointing out his percentiles on Baseball Savant. One day, he mentioned to Verdugo his sprint speed was colored in blue—meaning it was below average. Two days later, Verdugo asked, “Where am I now?” Replied Cora, “You’re pink now.” Verdugo had raised his sprint speed to the 55th percentile.
“Awesome,” Verdugo said.
“It’s like an internal joke,” Cora says. “One thing about Doogie, he grinds. Honestly, man, that was something we talked about in the offseason. If he plays up to who everybody believed he was going to be, yeah, it was going to be fun for us.”
Masataka Yoshida
From watching the Super Bowl with Cora in spring training, to dining with players and staff in the North End, to swinging and missing only 30 times in the first 36 games, Yoshida has made a quick transition to MLB. He told Cora the biggest adjustment was facing MLB changeups, which have fading action as opposed to the straight drop from split changes thrown in Japan.
Yoshida is not a great base runner or a plus defender, but he has surprising pop, he hits .471 when he hits the ball the other way and he could rack up 40 doubles with Fenway as his home park.
Jarren Duran
A .212 hitter over his first 91 games and Triple A insurance when this season began, Duran replaced injured Adam Duvall and immediately looked like a different hitter. He added bulk, raised his hands in his setup and tweaked his stride to be neutral rather than closed. The result is Duran is getting his foot down with better timing and placement, so he gets fooled less often. A .165 hitter last season on non-fastballs, he was off to a .421 start this year on secondary stuff.
Connor Wong
Cora calls him the most powerful Red Sox hitter “pound for pound.” An outstanding athlete with a strong arm, Wong started at shortstop at Houston before converting to catcher. With Verdugo, Wong was acquired from the Dodgers in the Mookie Betts trade. Generously listed at 6'1" and 181 pounds and showing more pull power this year, Wong will split duties behind the plate with Reese McGuire.
Justin Turner
As an early adopter of the launch angle revolution, Turner never wanted to hit the ball on the ground. He still prefers to get the ball airborne, but with a decline in power—he hasn’t slugged .500 since 2019—Turner, with his below-average strikeout rate and above-average walk rate, has become renowned as a situational hitter. In a game last week against Toronto, with Verdugo on second base and no outs, Turner tried valiantly to push a ball to the right side. He eventually succeeded with a deep fly ball to right field. It was the first inning. The Red Sox’s dugout met him with a line of high fives.
“That was amazing,” Cora says. “He tried to hit the ball to right field the whole time. You know, people watch. When you have a bunch of kids playing—Duran, Casas, Valdez—all these guys are like, ‘This guy is giving himself up for the team.’”
The Red Sox are 8–2 in a 21-game run against 2022 playoff teams (Guardians, Blue Jays, Braves, Cardinals, Mariners and Padres). They’ve proved themselves to be much better than the preseason reviews, when “winning the winter” becomes highly overrated. Thirty-six games, as history tells us, is enough to consider Boston as a wild-card contender. Their offense, even with some inevitable regression, is a fun watch. But whether these plucky Red Sox have any staying power will be determined by their starting pitching.
