A lot can happen in 40 games, but here’s one thing that baseball fans around New England should stop hoping for: a Red Sox playoff berth.
Sorry folks, it ain’t gonna happen.
The frustratingly-mediocre Red Sox entered Monday’s off-day six games back of four teams in the American League wild card race.
Or, if you’d rather be realistic about it, they entered Monday as the sixth-worst team in the AL.
And unlike last week at this time, there are no longer any reasons to think this team has a chance. Baseball-Reference gives them a 2.9% shot at making the playoffs, while FanGraphs offers a more palatable 6.6%.
Let’s change that number to 0% and move on with it.
This isn’t negativity for the sake of being negative. It’s reality for the sake of the future.
Here’s what we know: the Red Sox still have to play 40 games, 31 of them against teams ahead of them in the AL East or the wild card chase. If they don’t go something like 32-8, they’re cooked.
How is a team going to do that with a starting rotation that includes two rookies and a 42-year-old Rich Hill, a bullpen that has just two reliable pitchers who have been either injured or overworked, and an offense that is scoring just four runs per game since July 1?
Alex Cora has been an exemplary company man all season, but even the optimistic manager seems to be running low on morale these days.
“It’s been kind of hard with the rotation, if you look at the innings that we have pitched, with young kids,” Cora told reporters in Baltimore on Saturday. “There have been a lot.”
There are a lot of reasons the 2022 season went wrong, but one of the biggest is the team’s inability to keep runs off the board.
They’ve had 28 starts by rookie pitchers, easily the most in the division, while the rebuilding Orioles have only had 19, seven for the Rays, four for the Yankees and just two for the Blue Jays.
With an inexperienced staff and Hill making 18 starts with a 4.68 ERA, a thinly-stretched bullpen and one of the worst defensive outfields in the big leagues, the Red Sox have allowed 585 runs, more than every AL team except the Royals.
They’re on pace to allow 777 runs, and they’re going to get back into the playoff race?
Please. There hasn’t been a team to allow that many runs and win a playoff game since the 2007 Yankees, who had eight of their nine regular hitters with an OPS-plus over 100.
Know how many the Red Sox have? Four.
A team that can’t stop the bleeding has to at least score like crazy, and this Red Sox team hasn’t done that.
What’s remarkable — and will continue to be remarkable until the front office reveals its master plan or explains what the heck happened this year — is that the organization looked at their inability to prevent runs before the trade deadline on Aug. 2 and decided they didn’t need help.
It’s even crazier to think they imagined they might afford to trade their only good lefty, Jake Diekman, to the White Sox, and still have a chance at a playoff spot.
Except for Christian Vazquez, the Sox held onto every pending free agent — and they have a lot of them — and will not have nothing to show for them (except perhaps fifth-round draft compensation for Xander Bogaerts) when they walk away this winter.
They also thought they’d be getting healthy.
Instead, over the last two weeks, the Red Sox realized they rushed Nathan Eovaldi back from the injured list to no avail. Chris Sale broke his wrist while allegedly riding his bicycle to lunch in Newton on a 100-degree day, and doing it with a broken pinky. Trevor Story hasn’t approached a rehab assignment. And James Paxton had his rehab put on pause due to a lat strain.
They aren’t getting healthy. They’re finished.
At this point, they might as well look ahead.
All of their eligible free agents could afford to lose playing time to guys who are actually part of the future (if there is one). Why not call up first base prospect Triston Casas to start getting familiar? Let Jarren Duran try to figure it out with continued playing time in the outfield, or better, move him back to second base in preparation of Story’s eventual move to shortstop next season.
Let John Schreiber and Garrett Whitlock get some rest. Name Matt Barnes the closer.
It doesn’t really matter how they do it, but one thing is almost certain: sticking with the status quo seems futile.
It’s time to look ahead to the future that the Red Sox have been so focused on these last three years. The present has faded.
