Posts Tagged ‘Mike Lowell’
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Red Sox Roadkill: Inefficient Offense Away From The Friendly Confines of Fenway (Part 2 of 3)July 27th, 2008
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Just as life tastes better with KFC—well, according to the the ad jingle, at least—the Red Sox offense undoubtedly performs better at Fenway Park.
Hitting .297 with a .376 on-base and .475 slugging percentage at Fenway as a team, the Boston lineup scores an average of 5.8 runs per home game.
But, then, take that same crew away from Fenway: the team average drops; the accumulative OBP dips; and a power sap follows suit. As a result, the offense—prior to the club’s three-game series against the Seattle Mariners at Safeco Field—has produced 4.3 runs per road game, ranking them towards the middle of the pack in the AL in terms of road run production.
Now, it’s no strange occurrence that an offense produces more at home than they do on the road. Various reasons, ranging from ballpark factors to simple creature comforts, play a role in the splits. Yet, despite the seemingly stark contrast between Boston’s home and road offensive splits, the Sox—with a .762 OPS away from Fenway—lead the AL in road average (.266), road on-base (.336), and road slugging (.425) through July 20.
This begs the question: based on the above, just how many runs should the Sox be averaging on the road?
It’s such a pity that there isn’t a way to calculate such things. Oh, wait. There is! Read more
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Halfway Point Revisited: Making The GradeJuly 20th, 2008
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The mid-season report card, better known as the beat writer’s great crutch, remains one of the more pointless routines in baseball journalism. After all, a baboon could regurgiate what a player has already done and fling arbitrary grades around.
So, since we all know that assigning high and low marks to individual players is nothing but a sham, I decided to take a stab at it as well, though with, hopefully, some predictive acumen in certain cases. Read more
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Sox Head West, Offense Goes SouthMay 30th, 2008
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Superman has his Kryptonite. Spider-Man has his forever-conflicting sense of responsibility. And the oh-so-close-to-being-immortal Achilles had that pesky heel thing.
But the fatal weakness for the Red Sox thus far this season has been quite simple—with no intergalactic travel required. Because just outside the friendly nooks and crannies of Fenway Park, the mighty Boston lineup tends to morph from a run-producing powerhouse into the motley crew that made up the anemic offense of the painfully awful ‘62 Mets.
OK, a bit of an exaggeration, for sure. After all, the Sox, despite a recent run-scoring outage, still maintain the second best road OPS in the American League. But with Boston dropping 10 of their last 12 away from the Fens—and averaging only 3.5 runs in the process—the team needs to take the nearest exit ramp off this road to perdition.
After the first six contests of a ten game trip—a West Coast swing through Oakland and Seattle before heading back east to square off against Baltimore this weekend—the Sox find themselves with only a single etch in the win column. Read more
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Sickly Sox Regress To The MeanApril 28th, 2008
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Five days. That’s all it takes. From a six-game winning streak filled with memorable late-inning heroics to a five game nose-dive the Red Sox would like to soon forget as the team heads into its first off-day since April 7, a span covering 20 straight games played in between.
But with a run differential that didn’t match their spiffy 15-7 record heading into Wednesday’s contest against the Angels, the Sox were due for a little regression towards the mean—though, ideally, not in the span of 120 hours. Of course, a team-wide bout with the influenza epidemic of 2008 hasn’t helped matters.
Ravaged by a nefarious flu bug, the Sox were forced to dip into the depths of their system when ace Josh Beckett and the so-far-undefeated Daisuke Matsuzaka fell victim to the pervasive virus last week during a three game set with the Angels.
As a result of the unexpected scratches, Boston called up two starters from the minors—Triple-A Pawtucket right-hander David Pauley, a middling young arm who had previously made his debut in 2006, and fellow righty Justin Masterson, a top five prospect in the Sox system making the jump from Double-A Portland. In addition, Jon Lester took to the hill on three days rest in the middle game of the series.
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Deficit, Smeficit: Sox Proving No Lead’s Too LargeApril 24th, 2008
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Just call them “The Comeback Kids.”
No, I’m not talking about John McCain and Hillary Clinton, though their individual runs for the presidency have also prevailed over seemingly insurmountable odds. But rather, I’m talking about the American League’s best team, record-wise and, perhaps, otherwise, through the first four weeks of the still very young season.
Or maybe “The Cardiac Kids” would suit them better. Not sure, but considering some of the key igniters behind the Red Sox recent barrage of late-inning magic, the noun ‘kids’ seems more than apropos.
Off to a start filled with more last-minute drama than an episode of Lost, the team from the Back Bay has quashed, in convincing fashion, any worries of a slow start due to the aftereffects of an opening-morning excursion through Japan and an April schedule chocked full of playoff contenders.
But despite the 15-8 record, you can hardly call the Red Sox play on the field dominant. More like opportunistic and absurdly resilient, bordering on miraculous.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s not to say they’ve been lucky—ever since going the way of Snake Plissken and escaping from Toronto after a weekend nightmare in early April, the Boston Nine-plus have been rolling through the competition … just not in a—let’s say—Arizona Diamondbacks-like manner.
Breaking Out The Calculators: Run Differential Meets Pythagoras
The D-Backs (through Wednesday) have scored 128 runs and yielded only 79 tallies to their opposition—good for a run differential of 49—whereas the Red Sox (through Wednesday) have plated an AL-leading 123 runs but allowed 112 runs to score—a run differential of just 11.
So, what? Both teams top their respective leagues with 15 wins apiece. It doesn’t matter.
Well, in the land of sabermetrics, where the VORP-petals fall and the Win Share trees tower, it does matter. Yes, the wins are in the proverbial bank, but a team’s run differential can tell us a different story.
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The $20 Million Man-nyApril 20th, 2008
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While one slumps, the other thrives—a perfect summation so far on the young season for the dynamic one-two punch of David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez.
It’s the type of luxury few teams can afford. It’s a combo that serves as a constant between the Red Sox two World Series championship runs over the past four years. And it’s partly why the Boston lineup, despite Ortiz’ early season bat-swinging malaise, has remained near the top in all the important offensive categories after three weeks of April baseball.
But it’s also, quite possibly, the last year we’ll see the Dominican duo stacked side-by-side in the same lineup—midsummer classics and fantasy baseball leagues excluded.
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Red Sox Win Series, Lose LowellApril 11th, 2008
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The Red Sox may have won the home opening series against the Tigers, but they did so at a cost.
That’s because before Boston doubled up Detroit in a 12-6 slugfest Thursday night, the team found out it would be minus the services of third baseman and five-hole hitter Mike Lowell until at least April 25 as a result of a sprained left thumb suffered on a diving stop in the top of the first inning of Wednesday’s contest.
With Lowell, last year’s World Series’ MVP, landing on the 15-day disabled list, the team purchased the contract of 23-year-old Jed Lowrie from Triple-A Pawtucket. The switch-hitting Lowrie, rated by Baseball America as the organization’s fifth best prospect, has so far been groomed as Boston’s shortstop of the future or even trade bait in the right deal. Yet he does have experience all over the infield from the minors.
Although off to a cold start with zero runs batted in over nine games, the loss of Lowell will present the Red Sox with their first real challenge on the young season while also testing the team’s depth as they head into a weekend series against the Yankees.
