Injuries add to Boston's struggles

            Injuries has now joined poor managing, lack of focus, and underperformance on the list of things that have made the 2015 Red Sox season the painful-to-watch disaster that it is.

            Third baseman Pablo Sandoval and catcher Blake Swihart both went down with injuries over the weekend, digging the Red Sox’s hole to be even deeper, and adding two more complicated problems to the already plagued 2015 Red Sox campaign.

            Yes, the Red Sox had a good weekend, taking two out of three from the defending AL Champion Royals. But let’s face it, this team has had good weekends before, and time and time again, they have continued to disappoint any fans who had any sort of expectations at all for them. This season has turned into an embarrassment for the Red Sox and their fans. They currently sit in last place in the AL East, and are nine games out of first place.

            It’s not so much how bad they are, but more the way that they have handled how bad they are. Whether it’s David Ortiz getting ejected for no reason, Wade Miley throwing a hissy fit on his manager, or Pablo Sandoval going on Instagram in the middle of a game, this team just doesn’t have the mental commitment to win right now.

            Off the field, there are more than a handful of problems as well. In the dugout, we have John Farrell, who has no clue how to manage a baseball game in a National League ballpark. Upstairs in the front office, there is Ben Cherington, who has epically failed three out of the four years that he has been General Manager of the Red Sox at his job, which is to put together a winning baseball club, and is currently driving this team even further into the ground. And sitting in the luxurious owner’s box, being fanned by $100 bills, there is John Henry, who is watching all of this happen, and yet still says, “The general manager (of the Red Sox) is going to be the general manager of this club for a very long time.”

            Let’s start with the on-field problems. The Red Sox just aren’t scoring enough runs. It’s a given that the pitching staff isn’t going to be fantastic, and that is entirely the fault of the front office, but this team still should be winning games with scores like 6-5, and scoring enough runs to make up for a mediocre rotation. Their team batting average is .256, and they just aren’t getting the production out of the middle of the order from the guys who they need to, notably Mike Napoli, who is hitting just .203.

            Mentally, they are even more of a train-wreck. Things got to a boiling point for them in Saturday’s loss to Kansas City.  Two starters had to leave that game due to injuries, and DH David Ortiz was ejected for arguing balls and strikes. Ortiz’s ejection stood more for his overwhelming frustration with his team’s performance, and for that matter his own performance, than it did for his anger towards the umpire. I understand how frustrating baseball can be, but at the same time, Ortiz let his team down by getting thrown out of that game. At the point where he was tossed, it was a close game, and for all he knew, having his bat could have been essential later on in that game.

            At the helm of this team is John Farrell. I don’t blame him for all that has happened, but at this point, he has proven himself to be a poor in-game manager. In the fourth inning of last Wednesday’s game in Atlanta, which is a National League ballpark, Farrell proved that he can’t execute basic strategy, and blew the Sox’s 1-0 lead. There was a runner on second with two outs in the inning, and the number eight hitter, Pedro Ciriaco, was coming to the plate, with the pitcher on deck. Any manager should know that with first base open you walk the number eight hitter to face the pitcher and get the third out in the inning. Instead, Farrell chose to pitch to Ciriaco, who made him pay by singling home the run.

            Over the weekend Farrell again proved his incompetence as an in-game manager after Blake Swihart doubled with nobody out. Mookie Betts, who has been the Sox’s hottest hitter as of late, came to the plate and was told to bunt Swihart over to third.  He did so successfully, but it gave away an out that shouldn’t have been given away after a leadoff double, especially with Mookie Betts up.

            I also blame Farrell for Wednesday night’s incident when Sox third baseman Pablo Sandoval was caught ‘liking’ an attractive young woman’s photos on Instagram in the middle of a game. Farrell needs to have control over his team, and if he wants to win, which right now it doesn’t really seem like he does, he can’t have his starting third-baseman working on his post-game social life in the middle of a game. It’s an embarrassment.

            Going forward, if they have to blow up the team, this will be the third time in the last four years that they will have done so. The blame for that lies on Ben Cherington, who doesn’t really seem to have a plan for this club. Yes, they won the World Series in 2013, but I’m starting to have questions about whether or not Cherington really has a plan, or if he is just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what will stick.

            This week will be the Sox’s last shot. I can’t see them turning this season around, but they have three straight series against AL East teams, and if they can’t start winning now, the season is as good as over.

Contact Jasper Goodman at jgoodman@radiovermont.com. Follow Jasper on Twitter @Jasper_Goodman.

Mixed Results From Sox

            After last Friday’s 12-5 loss to the Angels, it looked as though the Red Sox had hit rock bottom. Nothing was working for the club. In the three games prior to that loss, the pitching staff had limited opposing offenses to just 8 total runs, but the so-called “lethal” Red Sox offense was only able deliver a win in one of those games. However, in the typical fashion of a Boston sports team, just when their backs were up against the wall, the Sox clicked a switch, and came through with two excellent wins over the Angels.

            On Saturday, starting pitcher Stephen Wright delivered the Sox a gem, tossing just 75 pitches over 6.1 innings of work in his club’s 8-3 win. This was great to see for the Red Sox. Wright didn’t have a whole lot of experience pitching at Fenway prior to that game, and to pitch as well as he did on national TV in front of a big Saturday night crowd is an excellent sign of things to come for the young knuckleballer.

            The offense consisted mostly of one guy: Mike Napoli. Nap struggled mightily through the month of April, hitting .162 with just one homer, but broke out of his slump in a huge way this weekend, launching four homers, including the farthest hit ball at Fenway all season. It was painful to see Napoli struggle the way he did through the first month of the season, but I think it was worth the wait. When he’s hot the way he is right now, he is as dangerous as any power hitter in baseball.

            It’s been hard to predict exactly where the Red Sox struggles would be this year. Prior to the season, everyone, including myself, said that this year’s club was going to score a lot of runs, but the pitching staff would struggle. To start the season, that proved to be true, and the Sox pitching staff had their fair share of problems. However, in May, the pitching hasn’t been the problem. Sox starters have had eight quality starts in their last 10 games, and Boston’s pitchers have posted a 2.94 ERA since May 13^th, which is the seventh lowest mark in the MLB over that span of time. But just as the pitching staff started to click, it became the offense’s turn to struggle.  The Sox’s offense has averaged just 2.7 runs per game in May, and has been held to two or fewer runs in 13 of their 21 games in May. Those numbers are simply unacceptable for this team.

            It’s been quite clear that this team struggles against left handers, and it hasn’t helped them that they’ve faced lefty starters in eight out of their last 13 games. But that’s still no excuse for their struggles.

            Even left fielder Hanley Ramirez, who crushed the ball in April, has had a rough time as of late. He hasn’t recorded an RBI in any of his last 17 games. That’s a bat that the Sox need to have producing in the middle of the lineup.

            With all of that said, though, the Sox’s struggles still haven’t been enough to bury them deep down at the bottom of the division. The American League East, formerly known as the best division in baseball, is terrible this year. Basically, if you win eight out of ten, you are going to move up to one or two in the division. The Yankees, who lost six straight going into this week, sit in second place in the division.

            In the most recent Baseball Prospectus playoff odds, the AL East division winner is projected to win just 84 games. Prior to about two years ago, it was almost a given that the AL East winner was going to have at least 90 wins. This is extremely fortunate for the Red Sox, because if they can get hot late in the season, they are going to be able to make a very serious playoff push.

Contact Jasper Goodman at jgoodman@radiovermont.com. Follow him on Twitter @Jasper_Goodman

Diversity Key For The Future of Baseball

            When Rob Manfred took over as the commissioner of baseball at the beginning of this year, he made it clear that changes were on the horizon. It was a much-needed difference from his predecessor, Bud Selig, who was at the helm of the MLB for 17 years, and did virtually nothing to improve the game as it was played on the field.

            Manfred has made his priorities clear as commissioner, and thankfully one of them is pace of play. In an open letter to Manfred prior to the season, I laid out my plan to make baseball more appealing to the younger generation, and while he didn’t take me on many of my suggestions, he has made changes to speed up the game, and I think it’s worked. Now that batters are forced to keep at least one foot in the box at all times, and there is a clock in-between innings, games seem to be moving quicker. Though the average game time is down just eight minutes from last year in the first month of the season, it feels like the game is moving quicker.

            While I myself have pointed out long baseball games as a problem, it is now clear to me that the actual time of game doesn’t matter as much as the speed at which the game moves along. Most football games take upward of four hours, but you don’t hear very many people complaining and saying that football is boring, and that’s because the game moves quicker, and there is less wait-time between plays. If baseball can do the same, it will become more appealing to people of my generation. 

            While pace of play is the issue that I’ve put most of my attention towards, it has been made clear by comedian Chris Rock that baseball has another problem, and that is getting black people interested in the game. Rock was featured on HBO’s Real Sports with Byant Gumbel, and he pointed out the decline of blacks who are interested in America’s national pastime. “I’m an endangered species,” the popular comedian said. “A black baseball fan. Why don’t black people like baseball anymore?”

            Rock went on to point out that neither team competing in the World Series last year had a black player on their roster, and that crowds in St. Louis for the World Series were more than 90% white. Almost every ratio you can find supports Rock’s point. Blacks don’t like baseball. They make up just 8% of MLB rosters and that number is falling fast.

            For me, this boils down to one thing. The culture of Major League Baseball is southern and white. Country music, chewing tobacco, hunting, and fishing are all things that many, if not most, baseball players enjoy, but aren’t things that are found in many black households.

            A sport’s culture defines who plays it and who enjoys it. Basketball, which is incredibly popular with young people right now, is a sport that has a very black culture, and even promotes itself that way. Basketball replaces country music with rap, which resonates better with young people who don’t live in Southern America.

            Rock says that in order to succeed, baseball needs to be more black, because “black America decides what’s hot, and what people get excited about.”

            Undoubtedly baseball needs to attract more young people, and if getting black people interested will get young people more interested, then Chris Rock hit the nail on the head.

Contact Jasper Goodman at jgoodman@radiovermont.com. Follow him on Twitter @Jasper_Goodman.