Baseball is a cruel game. Last night (well, probably two nights ago by the time you’re reading this), Ceddanne Rafaela played hero with a grand slam that drove in all the Red Sox runs.
Tonight, he swung at a pitch that might have been outside state lines with the tying runs on base to cap off an extremely lamentable eighth inning.
Three batters earlier, Romy Gonzalez grounded into this double play, which while not quite as infuriating, proved every bit as costly.
Outside of those two at bats, four of the first five Red Sox batters reached base in the inning. It was exactly the frame where a team like the A’s, who had lost 24 of 30 entering tonight, should’ve blown the game, and it was exactly the frame where the Red Sox, winners of 23 of 27 entering tonight, should’ve won the game.
Instead, the offense reverted to pumpkin form, and the group that couldn’t buy a big hit to save their life over the first two and a half months of the season resurfaced. They went just 1-9 with runners in scoring position, wasted six walks (not a single one of them scored), hit into three double plays, and only had one run on the board going into the ninth inning in a park that wants to be minor league Coors Field.
Adding to the frustration, it also kind of felt like a game the Sox might have won if Curtis Mead was in there batting second instead of sidelined with a broken wrist. That spot in the lineup ended up having an average leverage index of 1.54, and Romy Gonzalez went hitless from it. There’s no way to know exactly how this game would’ve panned out if Mead was in there, but I would’ve liked to have seen it.
There’s also a second guess to be had from Chad Tracy tonight, who let Jake Bennett go out for the seventh inning. Ultimately, this resulted in Brain Serven hitting his first major league home run in four years, which turned a manageable 1-0 deficit into a 3-0 hole, and set the stage for the irritating squandering that ensued in the top of the eighth.
The argument against Tracy would go like this: Bennett’s had a tendency to hit a wall when he gets beyond 75 pitches all year, and his velocity went from a very impressive 96 mph early to several ticks off that later in the game.
At the same time though, I get where Tracy’s coming from. He used the high leverage part of the pen yesterday and didn’t want to use them again in a game the Sox were trailing, and he also doesn’t really have any other great options. All this underscores why the Sox need to have more bullpen depth on their shopping at the trade deadline. There’s such a drop off between the Chapman / Whitlock / Slaten / Guerrero part of the pen and everything else. They need something to bridge the gap.
Three Studs
Let’s give all of these to the right buttons Tracy pushed. Specifically, all three pinch hitters / defensive subs who nearly dragged the Red Sox back into the game.
Masataka Yoshida: Pinch-hit to lead off the eighth with a single.
Anthony Seigler: Followed up Yoshida’s pinch-hit single with a pinch-hit walk. He also put this charge into the ball to end the game, nearly tying things up.
Connor Wong: Hit a two-run bomb in the ninth to get the Red Sox within one after coming into the game defensively.
Three Duds
Ceddanne Rafaela: See the at bat in the eighth inning.
Romy Gonzalez: Went hitless, including the costly double play in the eighth.
Ryan Watson: Another guy who is here because of something that happened in the eighth inning. In his case, he coughed up a run that turned out to be the game winner after Wong’s shot in the ninth.
Looking Ahead:
The Red Sox will send Patrick Sandoval to the mound for the third game of this series tomorrow against Jacob Lopez, and it feels like a pretty important one given how cold the bats have looked at times in recent days. With the Dodgers lurking on the schedule this weekend, you’d like to grab enough wins on the front part of this road trip to prevent any potential damage there from exploding into an ugly overall trip to California.
