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.

Sox Get Plenty of Help

            Baseball is a game of numbers. There are hundreds of statistical categories in the game, and any one of those data points can define a team. Normally the stats that are cited to make a point about how well, or poorly, a given team is doing are home runs, runs batted in and earned run averages. However, this year, the statistical category that best accounts for the success of the Red Sox thus far is unearned runs.

            An unearned run is a run that is not charged to the pitcher. It happens when a player scores or reaches base on an error or a passed ball. The Red Sox have won several games thanks to errors in the field. The Sox, who many said would have the best offense in baseball going into Spring Training, have scored 95 runs so far this season. That’s the fifth most runs scored by an offense so far this year—not bad at all. But consider this: opposing teams have committed 26 errors while playing the Sox, which has led to 23 unearned runs scored by the Boston offense.

            That’s the most unearned runs of any team in the MLB. By far. And it accounts for more than 25% of the runs the Red Sox have put on the board this year. The inability of the Red Sox to score runs on their own has been especially prominent of late. In fact, the winning run in each of the last three Red Sox wins has been unearned. And if all of that isn’t enough to convince you that the Red Sox offense hasn’t lived up to what it should be, I’ll also point out that they lead the league in walks, with 81.

            I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t capitalize on other team’s blunders, because you absolutely should. Forcing errors is part of the game. However, scoring a quarter of your runs because of errors by the opposing team is something that any team should worry about. It’s not a winning strategy in any sport to count on others to fail, giving you the opportunity to succeed. Right now the team is on pace to cash in on more than 200 unearned runs, which would be the most by a Major League team since 1955. This is Major League Baseball that we’re talking about, and the Red Sox shouldn’t expect to continue getting the uncanny amount of breaks that they’ve gotten from opposing defenses so far this year. The Red Sox season has been filled with unpredictability, and in my opinion, this team’s record should be nowhere near .500 like it currently is.

            While the unearned runs have padded the offense’s struggles, there hasn’t been any sort of a cushion to hide how atrocious the pitching is. Right now I look up and down the roster and I see a bunch of pitchers who are unpredictable. This staff features guys who are capable of putting together quality outings, but are also in danger of getting rocked on any given day. Take Wade Miley for example. Two starts ago the lefty tossed 5.2 scoreless innings, but on Sunday in Baltimore he got rocked as hard as any pitcher in the MLB this year. When he came off in the third inning, he was probably hoping that most Bostonians were tuned into the Celtics playoff game against the Cavaliers, and not to the Red Sox game, because he looked like a Little League pitcher going up against the Orioles that day. Over the 2.1 innings that he pitched, he allowed six earned runs on five hits and two walks. Six runs over two innings? That’s just embarrassing.

            When the Sox turned to their bullpen, it didn’t get much better. In fact it got even worse. Heath Hembree allowed six earned runs over his just 1.1 innings of work. No reliever went more than two innings, leading to an 18-7 Red Sox loss at Camden Yards in Baltimore.

            There were also some other controversies surrounding the Red Sox trip to Baltimore over the weekend. It all started back in Boston last Sunday when Red Sox DH David Ortiz was ejected for arguing balls and strikes in his team’s rain-shortened 7-1 win over the Birds. It seemed pretty harmless to most of Red Sox nation, and it’s not like we’ve never seen Ortiz get hot with an umpire before. However, for some reason, Orioles broadcaster and Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer took exception, and even though he didn’t make the trip to Boston, went to Twitter to criticize the beloved slugger.  “FINALLY Ortiz gets tossed #disrespectful,” he tweeted out.

            Palmer later expanded on his criticism of Big Papi, telling ESPN.com’s Gordon Edes in an email that “(Ortiz is) entitled to do it any way he wants, but when he throws his whole team under the bus, all the fans who came out to Fenway Park, it’s kind of like a puppy -– unconditional love -– but at the end of the day, if the puppy doesn’t do the right things, you need to housebreak him.”

            Palmer also said that Ortiz should apologize for his actions. While he has every right to criticize Ortiz, he is dead wrong in what he said, and, it is hypocritical of him to go after Ortiz so harshly. Based on what he said, it seems as though Palmer wants all baseball players to act like perfect angels. However, I don’t see him putting up fits when Orioles players act excessively. Manny Machado acted out several times by throwing equipment around in Baltimore’s series against the Red Sox this weekend, and though Palmer denounced the Oriole third baseman’s actions, he didn’t put up any big stink about them like he did with Ortiz. And as Hall of Famer and NESN Red Sox analyst Jim Rice pointed out on the Red Sox postgame show, Palmer was no role model as a player. “Who cried more than Jim Palmer?” Rice asked. “I mean, come on. Lets be honest…You cry just as good as anyone else, so quit complaining, and let the guys go out and play.”

           

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