I thought for today’s article I would employ the assistance of the greatest band to come out of Boston to try to explain what happened.
Walk This Way
The Red Sox pitching staff endured a very strange game on Friday night to help secure the 84th win of the season. Together, they gave up only five hits and two earned runs while striking out nine Rays, but the issue came with the free passes.
Ranger Suárez walked five in his 5.2 innings, while Wyatt Olds walked two despite recording only one out. Greg Weissert, of all people, somehow managed to avoid the epidemic, but Erik Miller decided to double down on it with two walks of his own in the ninth.
Despite all of the free baserunners, the Red Sox withstood the challenge from the top team in the AL East and came away victorious. However, this is absolutely not a strategy that is going to fly in the playoffs, and if the Sox don’t get their control under control, it will certainly lead to a “Crash.”
Nine walks. Twelve Rays left on base. Still, Boston walked its way right out of Tropicana Field with a win and a magic number of one, thanks to the Texas Rangers’ victory over the Jays.
I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing
Connor Wong should certainly think about making this his motto moving forward if he wants to remain behind the plate in big games.
In the late innings of Friday night’s game, with Boston hanging on to a 4-1 and then 4-2 lead, Connor Wong kind of made a mess out of multiple pitches from Wyatt Olds and Erik Miller. More so Miller than “The Marshal,” but there were four wild pitches over the final four innings, with three of them coming in the ninth from Miller.
Granted, neither pitcher had great control, but Wong’s technique was sorely lacking behind the dish, including a crucial missed block on a slider in the dirt that would have been the final out of the game if he had managed to get some part of his body on it and keep it from going to the backstop.
All four pitches were correctly scored as wild pitches, but on a number of them, Wong simply did not move his body very much to try to block or receive the ball correctly. Miller’s slider can be nasty when it is on, and yesterday it and his fastball were moving all over the place, but Wong approached them like he had never caught Miller before.
Granted, I don’t know just how much Wong is going to be catching in the playoffs. To be honest, I don’t really care how much or how little Adley Rutschman hits. I have been very impressed with how well he has adapted to catching the Red Sox staff so quickly and the clear connection and confidence he has helped instill in them. I want him catching every inning of every game.
That being said, Rutschman is dealing with injuries, and there is a very real chance that Wong is going to have to strap on the tools of ignorance during the playoffs.
If and when that time comes for Wong to catch, I don’t want to have to close my eyes!
Back in the Saddle
A career-long 438-foot bomb to right-center field to lead off the game, followed by a two-out, two-run line-drive single with the bases loaded in the second, provided a little glimpse of what we saw before Roman Anthony was injured last fall, as well as during his WBC performance this spring.
The man is a gifted hitter, and as long as he can remain healthy, he is the one offensive player on this team who could single-handedly dominate a game like he did on Friday.
Three of the four runs Boston scored came because of Roman Anthony’s swings, and for a team that is devoid of a lot of impact players, they better hope that he is ready to start riding high.
Same Old Song and Dance
For the rest of the Red Sox offense, this game was more of the same. Four total runs on nine hits and two walks, yet they struck out eleven times.
Now take into account that three of the four runs came from the bat of Roman Anthony, and then mix in the fact that all four runs and seven of the nine hits came off the soft-tossing lefty starter, Ian Seymour, and we get more of the same from Boston’s bats.
They really cannot hit hard-throwing pitching.
Once Kevin Cash removed Seymour after five innings and turned to his bullpen, the Sox managed only two hits while striking out six times over four innings. And those weren’t even Tampa’s top bullpen arms. Those were the guys marked for mop-up innings and “let’s just try and keep the game close” jobs.
All year long, the team has relied on its pitching to pull it through, like it did again on Friday night. But if the bats don’t start knockin’ on pitches coming in a little faster than 92 MPH, it won’t really matter what the pitchers do because the Sox will be quickly locked out of the playoffs.
What It Takes
There were just a few glimpses of what it might actually take for the Red Sox to be successful in the coming Wild Card Series with the Yankees and, hopefully, beyond.
Twice Trevor Story reached base with fewer than two outs, and each time Caleb Durbin immediately followed with base hits through the wide-open right side of the Tampa infield. It was obvious from the moment Durbin stepped into the box that his approach was to go the other way, and he successfully executed it both times.
That was the strategy, along with aggressive baserunning and timely bunting, that worked so successfully during the summer hot stretch.
The main question is whether players like Roman Anthony, Trevor Story, and Adley Rutschman, who were not part of that summer stretch but will be in the Red Sox lineup in October, will be able to fit that mold, or whether their actual baseball talent will serve to complement the players remaining from that time, like Nick Sogard and Caleb Durbin.
If the Red Sox can mesh the aggressive small-ball style of July with some actual Major League talent and slugging potential, then October might be F-I-N-E, Fine!
If not, then Red Sox Nation will be hung out to dry for another offseason.
Image Courtesy of https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/suarez-shuts-down-bats-anthony-023234374.html