Some Red Sox managerial savvy, a thought on All-Star snubs, and what’s wrong with the Yankees

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Some Red Sox managerial savvy, a thought on All-Star snubs, and what’s wrong with the Yankees

Posted By: jasabacklink June 28, 2024

Red Sox

Jarren Duran still has plenty of time to find himself with the honor he richly deserves for his play to begin the season.

Brayan Bello’s dreadful run of starts featured a battering by George Springer (rear) and the struggling Blue Jays at Fenway. Matthew J Lee/Globe Staff

COMMENTARY

The Red Sox, having failed to do so thanks to the weather on Wednesday, will play their 81st game of the season on Friday against San Diego. I will resist the urge to go full-on half season review, and instead offer a few thoughts on a team still firmly in the mix.

The Bello bump

Brayan Bello’s June couldn’t have been much worse. He’ll finish it with an 8.25 ERA in five starts, with 14 walks in 24 innings and a .347/.437/.515 line against him.

He failed to complete the fifth inning in three outings, and though he did win at Rogers Centre last week, he followed with another meltdown, charged with seven runs in the third inning of a return engagement with the Blue Jays on Tuesday.

“My mindset is good. Mechanics are good. I don’t really know what’s going on right now,” Bello told reporters.

The Red Sox were 7-2 in Bello starts through May, winning at the Rays and Orioles to end that run when the ace-in-training battled through one bad inning each. In June, he couldn’t battle out of an ugly frame against the league-worst White Sox — seven straight reached against him before he was pulled — and Toronto, which had lost seven in a row.

Manager Alex Cora expressed confidence that Bello (and pitching coach Andrew Bailey) will get to the root of the problem, but also pushed Bello’s next start from Sunday against the Padres to Wednesday against the Marlins in Miami.

“Whether it’s mechanical or mental, just give him a breather. I think that’s the most important thing,” Cora told reporters Wednesday. “There’s a few things that we have recognized that we have to be better at: throwing strikes and staying ahead.”

As smartly pointed out on Over the Monster, that breather is a significant one, and a show of managerial savvy by the Red Sox brain trust. Bello starting Wednesday keeps him out of that weekend’s Yankees series, instead lining him up the following week against Oakland.

Starting in that Oakland series means he can be held out past the All-Star break, after which the Red Sox head west for three-game sets at Dodger Stadium and Colorado’s Coors Field.

The latter’s no picnic to pitch in, but facing a lineup that’s 27-53 at press time beats one with a modern-day Murderers’ Row in it. Especially when Bello just made every hitter look like Marcell Ozuna (.954 OPS) for a month.

It’s clear the line between October and not, and perhaps the line between additions or abstinence at the trade deadline, is going to be very thin this year. Giving Bello a squishy schedule of games when there’s no obvious rotation replacement for him is the sort of small detail that could make a big difference.

Jarren Duran’s Star snub

Last season, 40 players ended up getting to call themselves American League All-Stars. Suffice to say, Jarren Duran still has plenty of time to find himself with the honor he richly deserves for his play to begin the season.

That said, him finishing 16th among AL outfielders in the voting when he’s arguably been top five across both leagues is a pretty big yikes. Duran and his 3.3 fWAR — via the AL lead in doubles and MLB lead in triples, while he’s also third in hits, fourth in steals, and sixth in runs — landed amid Toronto’s voting bloc, just ahead of worst-season-of-his-career George Springer, with Sox teammates Wilyer Abreu (19th) and Tyler O’Neill (20th) not far behind.

It’s literally a popularity contest, and these Sox are far more plucky than popular. The teams having the best years did the best job getting out the vote, as well they should have. No Orioles player finished lower than seventh at their position, with three (Adley Rutschman, Ryan Mountcastle, Gunnar Henderson) leading their positions and another three in the final vote for starting spots.

No Yankee was worse than eighth, with Aaron Judge and Juan Soto the top two vote-getters. No Cleveland Guardian was below 12th. More power to ’em all.

It got me thinking about snubs, though. Namely, what have been the best Red Sox seasons not to be honored in the Midsummer Classic? Going back to 2000, one name stands out far above the rest.

Kevin Youkilis.

At the 80-game mark in 2010, Youkilis was neck and neck with Adrian Beltre for the best hitter on a contending Red Sox team. His .992 OPS came with 18 home runs and 42 extra-base hits, but it was third among AL third baseman.

The two men ahead of him, starter Justin Morneau and Miguel Cabrera, earned their spots. But after Youkilis lost narrowly to New York’s Nick Swisher in the fan vote for the final roster spot, Yankees manager Joe Girardi chose Chicago’s Paul Konerko and his .939 OPS as an injury replacement for Morneau.

Girardi cited numbers, too: Konerko was hitting .299 to Youkilis’s .293, with 20 homers to Youk’s 18 and 63 RBI to Youk’s 57. Defensible enough, I suppose.

Youkilis had made the previous two All-Star teams, and would make it again in 2011. He’d eventually finish his career playing for Girardi, during a 28-game stint with the 2013 Yankees that I’d suspect you’d long since forgotten about.

The reeling Yankees

Remember those struggling Blue Jays we mentioned above? They followed beating Bello on Wednesday with a 9-2 thrashing of the visiting Yankees, holding New York to three hits.

It included a rough moment for rookie Ben Rice, the Dartmouth product from Cohasset, Mass., who made a mental error when he let this first-inning grounder clang off the first-base bag — hoping it would go foul — rather than collecting it for an easy out.

Baltimore thus moved percentage points past the Yankees atop the AL East when it pounded on Texas. New York, since becoming baseball’s first 50-game winner this season by beating the Red Sox on June 14 at Fenway, has lost 9 of 11 and has been outscored, 87-43. No team has been worse in either category.

Judge has been hot, knocking in 14 of those 43 runs as he reached 30 home runs, but Soto is hitting .152 (with 16 walks in 49 plate appearances). Giancarlo Stanton’s annual injury arrived, and the pitching has cratered. New York’s lost all five of Carlos Rodón and Luis Gil’s starts, the two averaging fewer than four innings per outing while allowing seven home runs and 40 hits.

Gerrit Cole’s return figures to help long-term, but the crosstown Mets tagged him for four homers in four innings on Tuesday.

Of course, as positive runs like the Red Sox are on are more common than you probably think, so are negative ones. New York is the 14th team to lose at least nine across an 11-game stretch this season, and last year, four of the six wild-card teams (including World Series combatants Texas and Arizona) struggled through such a run.

Swells and swales, even for the great teams. A nice thing to keep reminding yourself when the local nine is hardly great, but hanging around in a sport keen to reward exactly that.