Rock Bottom?
Well.
That sucked.
The Red Sox swung themselves right into 3rd place in the AL East. The out of zone chasing has just gotten ridiculous.
I keep wanting to believe the Sox have just been incredibly and unbelievably unlucky. Which they have been! But as Eck said two days ago, “you make your own luck”. and the Red Sox are absolutely not making their own luck at all.
At the end of the day the Red Sox had an expected batting average 20 points higher than the Yankees, not to mention these are both atrocious xBA. Both teams were horrible!
The game turned on its head on this play
Devers made an amazing diving stop to save a couple runs, but then Bobby couldn’t come up with a tough bounding grounder down the line.
Here’s the thing though. Both Sanchez and Rizzo’s hits came on 0-2 counts. A part of the story, definitely not the whole story for this team lately, has been its inability to
put hitters away. The bottom of the 2nd went like this.
Stanton - started 0-2 then singled on a curveball right down the middle
Odor - Full count walk (he did start with a 3-1 count to him but let this bad .225 hitter get away from him)
Sanchez - 0-2 after getting a swing at a pitch in the eyes. Now this pitch was not a horrible pitch, it was also not where he wanted it, but still not a horrible pitch, but with runners on first and second with no outs and a big swing and miss candidate at the plate, you gotta bury this pitch or get it up higher than the second strike. Granted, this play in right is probably made by most right fielders. The Sox defensive alignment is so strange right now and JD just didn’t get a great read, going back first, then just coming up short on the slide.
Gardner - 0-1 sac fly. Gardner is putting the ball in play here so this isn’t a horrible result. Tie game runners at first and second. Okay.
Velasquez - 0-1 horrible hanging slider right down the middle for an RBI single. And after Velasquez easily steals second, runners on second and third for the top of the lineup with only one out.
DJLM - 2-2 - a long at bat that could have ended up much worse ends in an amazing but later made irrelevant play by Devers. Diving to his left and holding the runners and getting an out. 1 out away from escaping only down 1.
Rizzo - 0-2 again! Rizzo falls behind on two out of the zone swings. So then Pivetta hangs a nice little spinner down the middle. Bobby should have probably made that play, but honestly it should never have been close enough for Rizzo to put wood on.
That was not a great inning!
Put guys away! Pivetta clearly did not have his best stuff last night, which was unfortunate because Andrew Heaney did have his best stuff. Heaney’s best stuff is still really really really not great, but it was good enough for the Sox bats to look horrible yet again.
The Sox really only had 2 chances to maybe score. In the Top 6, when Heaney was at the end of a lucky day, he walked Kikè to start the inning. I think the entirety of the Yankee fanbase wanted to scream to take Heaney out after what felt like 5 innings of miraculous pitching. Boone left him in, and Renfroe rewarded him by swinging at a full-count pitch no less than 5 inches off the plate outside to scuttle the rally.
The other chance came against our favorite closer Aroldis Chapman. Man, what a horrible guy. Anyway Kikè bailed out Chapman on a would be ball 4, on a slider that never was and never had a chance of being a strike. Then Renfroe hit an absolute tank as far as I’ve seen a ball hit at Yankee stadium there. Xander walked, and Raffy swung at 3 balls. In Raffy’s defense, those first two sliders are great great pitches and you tip your cap. You don’t have to swing at nasty sliders, but it’s a tough pitch to lay off. Now right after a walk, I might not be swinging at the first pitch, but that’s just me.
JD followed with a single to make things a bit more interesting. Boone ended Aroldis’ misery and brought in Lutege. Plawecki has been hitting great, and had a good at bat. He hit a ball deep in the hole that somehow Velazquez, who honestly was a big pain this entire series, made a sliding play and threw out Plawecki, who may have been safe anyway, but not enough to overturn to end the game. I am almost impressed that Plawekci could even run that slow to make that a close play. Just wow. That was slow. That’s just how it goes sometimes.
Running out of words for the state of the team. I do think that they will turn it around and we can be feeling better after playing some bad teams, but hey maybe we will feel worse.
As for me, I choose to get my hopes up.