Just who are these Red Sox? Their deadline decisions hang on Craig Breslow’s read.
We know what the Red Sox need: Bullpen, bats against lefties, starting pitcher. It's becoming clear what it's going to cost: A lot.
COMMENTARY
Big seasons can turn on little moments.
If Tyler O’Neill catches Trent Grisham’s game-tying, two-strike, two-out double in the ninth inning of Saturday’s game, the Red Sox win their series against the Yankees instead of losing it. New York does not get to claim a “statement weekend,” as the New York Post called it Monday morning, and still has just one series win since their Fenway visit in mid-June.
Could O’Neill have caught it? Sure. Should he have?
“It hit high off the wall,” the slugger told reporters on Saturday night. “Unfortunately just out of my reach.”
“It was pushing away from him. I haven’t seen the video or whatever but it’s not easy,” manager Alex Cora added. “That’s an out in any other place. We play here. That’s it.”
I’ll stick with the could. O’Neill’s run toward the ball is awkward, appearing he was having trouble judging it and looking toward Jarren Duran in center field. His last move, backing Cora’s assertion, is going perpendicular to the wall while the ball continues to drift toward center.
O’Neill had to go somewhere in the vicinity of 60 feet after it was hit, but he’d largely done it when the ball struck the Monster not all that much higher than his head. Defensively, he’s been a bottom-quarter player this year. Three outs below average across the three outfield positions, three years after those metrics called him excellent during his career year.
Put Ceddanne Rafaela or Duran in left and they make that play. Of course, you don’t put a quality defender in tiny left field at Fenway Park . . . you put an O’Neill, or worse.
It’s forgivable, given his two homers Saturday were a big part of the reason the Red Sox still had a chance in that rollercoaster. Another litany of squandered leads: 5-4, 6-5, and 8-6, after blowing it in the seventh of Friday’s win.
We could similarly parse Rafaela getting caught absent-minded off third base in the second inning Saturday, which cost Boston a run. The Sox hitting back-to-back homers off Carlos Rodón in the fourth Sunday, getting a Rafael Devers none-out triple . . . and leaving him there. Three more errors Sunday, and two more unearned runs.
“A win’s a win,” Aaron Judge told reporters on Saturday night, amid another monster (6 for 11, 2 HR, 7 RBI) weekend, “just like a loss is a loss.”
The Red Sox, baseball’s best team for a month before the All-Star break, are 2-7 since it. A year after they were 56-48 in the shadow of the trade deadline, they are 55-49. Last year’s team didn’t have a 21-9 run, but had win streaks of eight, six, five, and five by this time a year ago.
“I don’t think a nine-game stretch defines who we are,” Cora told reporters Sunday night.
Maybe 30 didn’t either. They’re both just snapshots, and a six-month regular season is loaded with those. Just this weekend:
— The AL-best Guardians took two of three at the MLB-best Phillies, a potential World Series preview where the actual best teams got to play for the thing.
— The East-leading Orioles lost two of three to the charging Padres in a battle of deadline buyers.
— The Blue Jays are sellers, yet swept the Rangers, who are trying to decide where they fit.
— The Mariners got right via the White Sox as they head into Boston.
— The Giants, mulling a selloff after a big-spending winter, swept four from the Rockies. Still below .500, but within 3.5 games of the National League wild cards. Where do they go? What do they do?
The easy answer, frankly, is to sell. As we talked about on Friday, six wild cards between the two leagues basically means a perennial sellers’ market. The proof is on the transaction wire: Two significant low-level Phillies prospects for Miami closer Carlos Estévez, because they are going for it. (Hi, Dave Dombrowski!) Three players, including San Diego’s former top pitching prospect, for Tampa reliever Jason Adam.
We know what the Red Sox need: Bullpen, bats against lefties, starting pitcher. It’s becoming clear what it’s going to cost: A lot.
So now what happens?
The Red Sox have made this difficult by winning a litany of games like the two they just lost. Saturday’s, against a Yankees team that has found ways to lose repeatedly the last six weeks, and Sunday’s, with a series on the line and ace Tanner Houck on the hill.
The Red Sox were 10-3 entering Sunday in rubber games — the third in a three-game series tied, 1-1. They’d won six straight beginning with that declaratory Phillies/Yankees homestand, using those rubber games to win each of those final three series before the break.
Then came the sweep at the Dodgers — competitive games, but losses. The Rockies series, with an extra-innings squander in the opener and a rout in the decider. And now, what could’ve been a third victorious set against the Yankees in six weeks, right through their fingers.
The problem here, of course, is the thing that defines teams is itself just a snapshot. A month of baseball, the seventh in a season, for which the barrier of entry isn’t near as high as it used to be.
James Paxton is a buy-low pickup, peripherals worse than they were last year, but maybe spottable against the right teams. Danny Jansen is similar at catcher, a pending free agent and well-liked teammate whose once-powerful pull bat might play at Fenway — and will free up Connor Wong more than Reese McGuire did.
It’s something. It’s not close to enough.
“Odds are, one day, we’ll look back and say, ‘This was a trade that happened,’ ” quipped The Athletic’s Zack Meisel about the Jansen deal.
Sox-Yankees felt like Sox-Yankees again, which is always a treat. There is life in this bunch, life that was lacking a year ago even if the record is similar. There are things to like.
But there are also things that suggest, “Maybe not this group. Maybe not yet.” Maybe, if recent history hadn’t been so bleak around here, baseball operations would have already made the choice to think about next year.
I don’t think this one will. And what happens between now and Tuesday? Feels a little like that ball off Trent Grisham’s bat, hanging in the air, with Tyler O’Neill lumbering in its general direction.
Felt like we knew what we were in for. Felt like the ending was going to be happy.
Maybe not so much. It’s not easy, as they say.