For the fourth day in a row, the Red Sox managed to play their new worst game yet of the young season. And while there’s still 157 more of these after tonight, that’s suddenly starting to sound more like a threat than a reason to get comfortable. Only two good things happened in this one: It ended quickly (two hours and 30 minutes), and nobody got injured.
On the mound, Brayan Bello got clobbered, allowing 11 baserunners and six runs in just 4.2 innings of work. (It was really five innings, but we’ll get to that more in a moment.) In the meantime, here’s three other irritating details from this outing that stood out to me the most:
- There were two, two-out walks that helped jumpstart unnecessary Houston rallies.
- Bello showed a familiar inability a finish off hitters, and this was despite generating some encouraging swings and misses on his cutter. It’s that familiar “the stuff is there, but he can’t seem to put it all together in a package” trope we’ve seen from him.
- Cookies were repeatedly handed out to one of the best hitters on the planet in Yordan Alvarez. I mean, get a load of this pitch:
At the plate, the Red Sox struck out 13 times (that’s 27 over the last two games) and recorded just four hits, with most of them coming late in the proceedings when the house was already on fire. Speaking of four, that’s how many times Roman Anthony struck out, and the first three of them came on a grand total of just nine pitches. For the lineup as a whole, it took until the bottom of the fifth inning for the team to record its firs hit.
But you know what didn’t take until the bottom of the fifth to happen for this Red Sox offense? Dumb baseball! Here’s Ceddanne Rafaela burning an ABS challenge on an 0-0 count with one out and nobody on base in the top of the third inning.
Not only was the pitch not close to being a ball (the Red Sox have been really bad at identifying pitches to challenge out of the gate), but a bases empty, 0-0 count situation screams low leverage. You can’t be burning resources like this in early inning spots!
Now granted, this game stinking worse than a cesspool by the middle innings rendered this mistake irrelevant, but we’re a mere five games into the season and this Red Sox team is already developing a pattern of not knowing how to to use the ABS challenge system properly. There’s a strong argument to be made that burning both challenges early on Saturday cost them that game, and it will probably cost them more wins soon if they keep piling up foolish situational challenges like this one from Rafaela tonight on anything other than blatant missed calls in low leverage situations.
Speaking of dumb things and missed calls in less than high leverage situations, check out the 1:11 mark on this video posted on Twitter from Tyler Milliken:
That’s everybody on the field falling asleep and not realizing a strikeout just happened, and in some ways, this is the worst sign of all from a game filled with nothing but bad omens. How disengaged does the team as a whole have to be to not realize that’s strike three? Cora missed it, the entire defense missed it, and even Bello missed it. You would think that if you were a pitcher desperately struggling to work your way out of a two out jam, you’d notice when you had strike three to end the frame. It’s a really, really terrible look for everybody involved here, and par for the course in what was a really, really terrible game for the Red Sox.
None: Nobody is getting a stud next to their name after this hideous performance! It was a complete and total failure of the group project across the board, and garbage time hits against low leverage relievers does nothing to change that.
The entire lineup, but specifically Roman Anthony: He had twice as many strike outs as any Red Sox pitcher recorded tonight. He set the tone early and often for this complete stinker of a game.
Everybody who pitched, but specifically Brayan Bello: Walks, home runs, not finishing guys off, not knowing when you struck a guy out to get out of your last inning. There’s a reason he was demoted to the No. 5 slot out of the gate this year after flirting with being the No. 2 guy for much of last summer. It’s Show & Tell time for him to take that next step, and he didn’t do himself any favors tonight.
The baseball IQ of the entire team: If it gets any lower, we’re going to have water it twice a day.
If you want one messy highlight play to sum up the embarrassment that was this game, it’s this clown show from the team that’s picking up right where it left off in leading the American League in errors last year.
If you’re looking for some good news, Garrett Crochet starts the series finale tomorrow, so they still might salvage a 2-4 start before the home opener on Friday.
