But as was made perfectly clear on Monday night in the Bronx, a good, reliable outfielder is made from much, much more than a fielding percentage. Consider that while no errors were made by either team on Monday, there were at least two fly balls that should have been caught and quite possibly could have saved the Red Sox a win.
That's not to say that Daisuke Matsuzaka pitched brilliantly and deserved much better, but had some of those catchable balls been handled properly, the righty's final stat line would have been a bit more respectable.
The first came in the opening frame, when Jeremy Hermida (pictured above) mistimed a jump and misread his distance from the wall, allowing a would-be crucial first out to turn into an RBI hit. The next inning, Darnell McDonald tracked down a bomb off the bat of Mark Teixeira but allowed the ball to bounce off his glove. McDonald also looked to not be sure of where the wall was, and Brett Gardner easily waltzed home to score the sixth Yankees run. That miscue was especially crushing because it would have been the third out of the inning.
McDonald also caught some flak for diving and missing Gardner's leadoff double in the ninth, but with a two-run lead, trying to make the out was more important than anything else (especially considering Gardner likely would have just stolen second on Jonathan Papelbon's next pitch). Still, you couldn't help but think that Jacoby Ellsbury would have had it.
And with that, Ellsbury's absence, along with center fielder Mike Cameron's, is really starting to show. The reason that there's no reason for uproar over the unspectacular play of the Boston outfield is that the players that are out there every night are not the ones who were hired to do so this past winter. Hermida's now started 24 out of 39 games, 23 of which were spent in left field. McDonald — a career minor leaguer with just five starts in center field heading into the year — has started 18 games in center this season. Bill Hall has also started 14 games in the outfield.
To point out that these players have not been excellent in the outfield is not an indictment of the players or GM Theo Epstein, it's simply to say that the team really needs Ellsbury and Cameron patrolling the outfield as soon as possible. The good news is that both are inching their way back to full health; the bad news is that Monday night's loss is already in the books.
