First Week Recap: The Red Sox
Through the first week of the season, the Red Sox are 3-4. They’ve outscored opponents 35-34, and as a team have a .810 OPS and a 4.65 ERA, while losing one game in extra innings and another by one run. They only won one of three at home against the Yankees, but then took two of three in Kansas City before losing the first game ever played in Target Field, which had all sorts of emotions on the Twins’ side. But read a few message boards, mailing lists, and columnists and you might think the Sox were ten games back and packing it in for the winter.
The main complaints are about three parts of the team: The bullpen, the defense, and Big Papi. While none of the three has lived up to expectations thus far, they’re not the huge problems that many are making them out to be. Here’s a look at each:
The Pen
The Sox bullpen hasn’t been great so far. Last year they had the second-best pen in the league by ERA, but they lost Billy Wagner and Takashi Saito to free agency and replaced them with journeymen Scott Atchison and Scott Schoenweis. This year Jonathan Papelbon has lost a game in extra innings, Ramon Ramirez has been dreadful, and everyone else in the pen has run into a bit of trouble. But it’s really not that big of a deal. I don’t have much confidence in Ramon Ramirez, but if he continues to be bad, he’ll be used in increasingly lower leverage situations, and then will be replaced by someone else. It’s not too hard for teams to acquire competent or even great relievers out of nowhere, and a team really only needs four good relievers to get the highest leverage innings, and then a group of guys who can be average to fill out the rest of the pen. For an example, one needs to look no further than last year’s Sox, who acquired the aforementioned Billy Wagner for a marginal prospect (and paid the remaining portion of Wagner’s salary).
The Defense
So far the defense has been solid, but not outstanding. Ellsbury looks like he is still learning the Monster, and he collided with his own fielders twice in the Sunday game with Kansas City (taking him out of Monday’s game with a rib contusion). Mike Cameron has misplayed a couple balls that seemed catchable, and Scutaro has been solid but not tremendous. But again, this defense only seems bad when you compare it to its expectations, which were of course exceedingly high. When the Sox decided to let Jason Bay go and not chase Matt Holliday in favor of fixing the poor defense they displayed last year, well, you knew you were going to see a million spring training articles about it. And that the defense would be under a microscope. But here’s the important number: through seven games, the Red Sox have a team defensive efficiency (simply the percentage of balls in play the defense turned into outs) of .711. Last year they were .687. So even though the defense is still gelling, they have already been significantly better than last year’s disaster at turning hits into outs.
Papi
David Ortiz hasn’t hit too well so far. He is just 3-22 with two walks, and he’s leading the league with 11 strikeouts. But he also hit very poorly last April and May, and from June on led the league in home runs. It’s apparent that he hasn’t lost it completely, and if he had had a 3-22 week in the middle of the season, very few people would notice. But because those are his only statistics for the calendar year, everyone thinks that his wrist is still bothering him (from two years ago), he needs to see the eye doctor again, or he is just done as a player. Any of those things could be true. But we don’t know yet, and it’s way too early to make rash decisions based on a week of games. And if they do decide to bench Papi, Jeremy Hermida seems to be a good replacement based on his play so far. He shows promise as a breakout candidate.
Every team has problems that are magnified by the small sample size. Mark Teixeira only has three hits this year. Mike Gonzalez has blown two games for the Orioles. The Astros have only scored 13 runs in seven games. Some of these teams and players who have started out bad will be bad all year, but they won’t be this bad, just as Vernon Wells won’t keep up his guise of being a good player (unless he has gotten back into the steroids*) and the Phillies won’t finish the year with an .857 winning percentage.
*Lazy joke.
