Up 2-0, Red Sox have that inevitable look
Boston, like Astros a year ago, is proving a tough task for L.A.
BOSTON — The Boston Red Sox earned 108 victories in the regular season, and it turns out they hadn’t even played their best. 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, 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 home run so far. “We can beat you with homers, defense, 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 World Series, the Red Sox’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 the injured Dustin Pedroia, and tossed 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 postseason, and seem poised to clinch the title on Vin Scully Avenue. The Dodgers, who fell in seven games to the 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.
The second game of this World Series was 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 manager Dave Roberts. “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 matchupbased 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-handers. (Grandal, a switch-hitting catcher, has struggled on defense 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 on Friday for the Red Sox. 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 maneuver 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.
“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.
“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. Ten of the Red Sox’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.
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.
“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 slash, dash and bash. The Astros do it, too.
“The most interesting development in the postseason 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.”