Red Sox are looking like inevitable champions
BOSTON — The Boston Red Sox earned 108 victories in Major League Baseball’s regular season, and it turns out they hadn’t even played their best ball.
Now they have, and as the World Series shifts to Dodger Stadium for Game 3 on Friday a sense of inevitability moves with it.
The Red Sox have beaten the Los Angeles Dodgers twice this week, convincingly. If you book a return flight to Boston for Games 6 and 7, make sure it is fully refundable. This World Series could easily end before then.
“We knew we were going to have a good team — good lineup, good chemistry, good energy — but not that good,” said third baseman Eduardo Nunez, the only Red Sox hitter with a homer. “We can beat you with homers, defence, pitching, base hits, stolen bases. I think we have it all.”
They do, and they have played nearly flawless baseball all month, winning nine of 11 games. So far in the Series, Boston’s biggest mistake is a bounced first pitch by their grand old man,
Carl Yastrzemski, before the opener — and even that turned out fine. The 79-year-old Yaz demanded the ball back from his catcher, the injured Dustin Pedroia, and tossed in a strike.
By the time the Red Sox return to Boston, they should have their fourth commissioner’s trophy in the last 15 seasons. They have won all five of their road games this post-season, and seem poised to clinch the title on Vin Scully Avenue. The Dodgers, who fell in seven games to the Houston Astros last fall, would be the first team to lose consecutive World Series on its home field since the New York Giants in 1936-37, both to the Yankees.
Scully, the future voice of the Dodgers, rooted for those Giants teams as a boy in New York. He fell for them out of pity, he has said, when he saw the score of Game 2 of the ’36 Series, an 18-4 shellacking.
The second game of this World Series only felt that lopsided. The score was actually 4-2, but it was more like a Boston blowout. The Dodgers went hitless in eight of nine innings, clustering their three hits in the fourth. Their last 16 batters went down in order.
“Coming in here, I thought we played these guys pretty straight up,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who soon conceded what everyone knew. “We’re not swinging the bats well right now. That’s obvious.”
Roberts seems to operate more from a predetermined game plan than Red Sox manager Alex Cora does. Both organizations rely heavily on data, but the Dodgers have taken position-swapping, rigid bullpen decisions and matchup-based lineups to extremes.
They used four second basemen in their last five defensive innings of Game 2. They called for the veteran reliever Ryan Madson in the fifth inning of both games, and each time Madson walked his first hitter, Steve Pearce, and allowed every inherited runner, five in all, to score.
The four hitters with the most home runs for the Dodgers this season — Max Muncy, Joe Pederson, Yasmani Grandal and Clay Bellinger — were all benched for Games 1 and 2 because the Red Sox started left-handed pitchers. (Grandal, a switch-hitting catcher, has struggled on defence this season and the others bat only left-handed.)
“We’re going to shuffle it up for Game 3, but it’s not because of necessarily performance,” Roberts said. “It’s kind of who the starting pitcher for those guys is. But these are the guys that got us here, and we’re going to ride them out.”
The right-hander Rick Porcello will start Friday for the Red Sox, after starting Game 4 in the first two rounds against the Yankees and the Astros. Nathan Eovaldi started and won Game 3 of those series, but Cora used him for the eighth inning both nights at Fenway, the final plank in a sturdy bridge to closer Craig Kimbrel.
“It’s been a lot of fun, both starting and coming out of the bullpen,” Eovaldi said. “I’m just ready to take the ball whenever they need it.”
Cora is having a blast, too, not only because of the outcomes, but because of his freedom to manoeuvre on the fly. As the Astros’ bench coach last season, Cora saw how manager A.J. Hinch effectively used starters in the bullpen. He delights in going for the knockout punch.
“Nate might come in in the eighth again,” Cora said. “If we have a chance to be up 3-0 with him on the mound and Craig, we’ll do it, and then we’ll figure out Game 4.
“That’s the beauty of the playoffs. It’s actually fun, because you map out everything over
162 games and you give guys rest and take care of guys; but now it’s pedal to the metal, and whatever happens that day, we’ll take it.”
In both confrontations with the right-handed Madson, Cora stuck with the right-handed Pearce instead of inserting the left-handed Mitch Moreland. Both times, no move was the right move.
“He’s reading the game,” Moreland said of Cora. “He’s one of the best I’ve ever seen at being able to just know what’s going to happen.”
The Red Sox have struck out more than usual in the World Series — 20 times, the same total as the more whiff-prone Dodgers. But the Red Sox ranked 26th out of 30 teams in strikeouts during the regular season, while leading the majors in slugging. The Astros had the same kind of lineup last fall, and the Dodgers are succumbing to it again.
In the big moments, the Red Sox have made contact and seen where it takes them. Xander Bogaerts beat out a double-play grounder in Game 1, bringing home the go-ahead run. Ten of Boston’s 12 runs have come with two outs, and their hitters detest strikeouts.
“That’s not our baseball,” Pearce said. “It’s OK for other teams, how they’re built. But we’re a team that grinds out atbats, and we just keep passing it to the next guy. Everybody feeds off of it; we ride the momentum and have somebody deliver the big hit.”
In Game 2 it was J.D. Martinez, who broke a 2-2 tie with a two-run single to right after Pearce’s walk. He said he had been too passive — hitters hate the word passive — against Madson in Game 1, striking out on three pitches after the walk. This time, Martinez said, he swung at the second pitch and dumped it to right — functional, not fancy.
“The pitch dictates what we’re going to do,” said Martinez, who hit .330 with 43 home runs this season. “We’re not up there forcing balls in the air. I feel like it’s the common mistake with hitters these days, and I think it’s something we all talk about and we have a really good understanding of it. We kind of think we’re hitters before sluggers.”
Commissioner Rob Manfred would love to see the strategy catch on. The Red Sox tend to play long games, but their style is exciting, which makes for a more compelling product. While some teams use a plodding, deliberate approach to offence, the Red Sox slash, dash and bash. The Astros do it, too. “The most interesting development in the post-season is that there’s a lot of chatter about the fact that Boston and Houston are teams, particularly with two strikes, that put the ball in play,” Manfred said on Wednesday. “Usually in baseball, when you see a lot of success associated with something that’s a little different than what a lot of people are doing, it begins an organic movement back in that direction, and we’re hopeful that we see some of that.”