Defibrillator Needed
It’s been a demoralizing three weeks for the Red Sox here. Since the start of the trip to San Francisco, the team has gone 8-11, dropping from 1.5 back in the wild card to 3.5 back, with Seattle having also surged past them. Fangraphs’ playoffs odds have crumbled from 35% to 10% heading into this weekend’s series against the Yankees.
During this stretch of games, the team's offense produced a .263/.313/.408 batting line when the bases are empty, and crater to .195/.251/.390 with runners on base. The starting pitchers posted a commendable 3.77 ERA, but the bullpen struggled significantly — save Jansen and Martin — registering a 6.11 ERA and having 15 meltdown-level performances.
Even through this offensive downturn, Casas has continued his breakout, batting .270/.343/.540, and Reyes has excelled, slashing .341/.383/.545. However, the rest of the position players have generally performed slightly below the league average. Yoshida, with a .210/.231/.274 line, and Wong, at .182/.217/.295, are fighting through horrible slumps.
When Houck is activated in the coming days, the team will be at full capacity, and it’s on the players to wake up and go on a run. They are responsible for the current position in the standings, playing down to their competition repeatedly throughout the year, so we will find out if they have enough fight in them to go on any kind of streak against a tough schedule. If not, we’re going to be tracking draft standings shortly.
Casas became the first player this season with multiple opposite field home runs longer than 430’. Casas has two, Ohtani has one, and then there were two in Colorado and one in Mexico City. Casas’ blasts came in a span of 66 plate appearances.
Below is a graph of all players since 1950 that have more than 450 plate appearances in their age-23 season and earlier. Even though Casas is on the low end of qualifying plate appearances, his power and walk rate have been exemplary. He is going to pass 500 plate appearances for his career in the next game or two.
Tweetdeck finally met its demise, bringing an end to how I’ve followed live sports, news, and messages sent to me for over a decade. I have no interest in becoming a subscriber and trying to push through as-is. We’ll see what happens, but the regular website and app just don’t hit the same for me, and I’m feeling like this is the start of a dramatic downturn in tweet consumption and back-and-forth interactions, which is too bad because I always enjoyed the ease of that while watching a game.
I haven’t logged into Threads since the night it launched, and I think Bluesky shows the most promise, but it feels like it’s missing its chance to open to the masses, and it desperately needs news breakers to migrate there.
Maybe this will be the impetus that leads to more posts here, a couple of times per week, a couple of topics each post type of thing. We’ll see.