The Boston Red Sox essentially pulled a Dennis Green.
The Kansas City Royals have been a hot topic across Major League Baseball. They’re the defending American League champions, they’re the best team in the AL this season and they’re positioned to have eight players start in this year’s All-Star Game in Cincinnati. Surely, the Red Sox should have been no match for Ned Yost’s bunch. And they weren’t in Saturday’s collapse at Kauffman Stadium.
But as Green, a former head coach of the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals, famously said in 2006 after his team blew a 20-point lead to the Chicago Bears, “If you want to crown them, then crown their ass.” And the Red Sox, a team meandering its way through 2015, didn’t look ready to “crown their ass” this weekend.
Instead, the Red Sox themselves looked like a team capable of making a whole bunch of noise over its final 90-plus games, even if that noise still doesn’t equate to playoff baseball in Boston.
The Red Sox clobbered 16 hits, including 13 extra-base hits, in a 13-2 beatdown in Sunday’s series finale. Boston received contributions from up and down the lineup — much like it did in Friday night’s series opener — and it’s an encouraging trend that’s starting to emerge after a two-month malaise.
“I think the extra-base ability up and down the lineup is starting to come through a little bit more regularly,” Red Sox manager John Farrell said after Sunday’s emphatic win. “You look over this full month so far, we’re swinging the bat with more authority and certainly like the capability that this team has.”
Saturday’s loss — in which the Red Sox blew a three-run lead — suggests Boston’s issues still run deep. Inconsistency has been a problem — the problem, even — so it’d be silly to expect the Red Sox to suddenly morph into a juggernaut based on a good game, a couple of strong performances or an impressive week. Positive momentum often looks like a foreign concept to this team, so as the saying goes, fool me once, yada, yada, yada.
But Boston’s offense finally is clicking. And for a team supposedly built on offense, that’s about as encouraging a sign as you can get while still being nine games under .500 (31-40). It suggests that developing an identifiable strength — the one that was supposed to mask the club’s other deficiencies this season — isn’t outside the realm of possibility despite how disappointing the Red Sox’s first 70-plus games have been.
“More than anything, it’s just the relaxation in the batter’s box by every guy that walks to the plate,” Farrell said of the state of his offense. “That’s not to say it’s going to result in an extra-base hit, or even a hit, for that matter. But you see a lot of close pitches being taken. We’re not expanding the strike zone. … The ability to build the inning is becoming more evident.”
The Red Sox entered Sunday’s game leading the AL with 189 hits and 39 doubles in June. They trailed only the Toronto Blue Jays (.289) with a .288 average this month after hitting .245 in April and .237 in May. Boston’s three-homer, eight-double, two-triple performance in K.C. simply added to the narrative.
“I think we’re right there,” said Mookie Betts, who is hitting .556 (20-for-36) over the course of a nine-game hitting streak. “I think we can go on a run here and take this momentum into the next couple of games.”
Betts, David Ortiz and Hanley Ramirez each homered Sunday. Betts fell a single shy of the cycle, Xander Bogaerts produced three doubles, and Dustin Pedroia and Brock Holt each had two doubles.
No one is saying we should “crown their ass” with regard to the 2015 Red Sox, just like Boston didn’t look ready to anoint Kansas City as this year’s World Series representative from the AL.
But if there’s any reason not to write off the AL East’s cellar dwellers in June, it’s the offensive potency the Red Sox are beginning to show in their quest to rebound from a dismal start to 2015.
Maybe the Red Sox are who we thought they were coming out of spring training.
Thumbnail photo via Peter Aiken/USA TODAY Sports Images
