While some players don’t care about what the stats say, Alex Verdugo is looking at his knowing they’re not where he wants them to be.
The Boston Red Sox outfielder has just three home runs on the season and is batting .236 with 26 RBIs. Verdugo has been making contact with the ball, it’s just not going his way at the moment.
“Yeah, 100 percent,” Verdugo told MassLive.com’s Christopher Smith on Friday when asked if he looks at his stats. “I see the .230 (batting average) up there. It’s very frustrating. Trust me. It is very frustrating. I feel I should be right in that .280 to .300 range. I should be right around there, which is normally where I’m at.
“I think for sure I’ve definitely hit some balls hard and driven some balls that I thought had a chance to go (out) or do a little bit more than what they did. That’s just baseball, right?”
Even though it’s on Verdugo’s mind, he’s ready to move forward and not have his stats take up too much space.
“But you try not to think about it. You kind of try to say, ‘Hey, we’re here right now. This is the park that we have. This is what we’re dealing with,'”. But for me, I think earlier it kind of made me mad and made me kind of try to do more,” Verdugo said. “That kind of put me into a two-week slump of rolling over too much, kind of expanding the zone and chasing a lot of things that I normally didn’t.
“I was kind of trying to reach back and produce a little bit more or hit something harder. But I think once I finally kind of relaxed and went back to just, ‘Hey, man. Get pitches in the zone. Control the zone the way I normally do. And just try to hit line drives.’ “
We’ll see if Verdugo, after getting on base three times in the Red Sox’s 7-2 win over the Oakland Athletics on Friday, can get into the zone Saturday afternoon. First pitch is set for 4:07 p.m. ET.
