Sox get well at home
Find ways to score with long ball lacking
Call them the National League Red Sox.
They’re still stuck on three home runs for the season, lowest total in the majors, but with two sacrifice flies, a big inning fueled by their opponents’ sloppy defense and some better-than-expected starting pitching, who needs home runs?
“I mean, the guy who’s supposed to hit the homers is not here anymore, Papi,” Hanley Ramirez after the Red Sox’ 8-1 win against the Baltimore Orioles last night. “We just have to score one way or another, and we did it tonight.”
David Ortiz isn’t on this team, and it shows, but the new-look Red Sox have persevered, their latest win pushing them above .500 with a 4-3 record that should settle some nerves, especially considering they played four of those games without both Ramirez and Xander Bogaerts, who returned to the lineup last night.
Mookie Betts (flu) has played in only four games and is just starting to show signs of life with his 2-for-5 performance. Jackie Bradley Jr. is on the disabled list with a knee sprain, but Andrew Benintendi’s bat is beginning to awaken, his 3-for-5 night pushing his average to .250.
The flu has mostly passed now, and the Red Sox are revealing themselves to be the type of team that’s going to thrive only if they’re opportunistic, because the power still hasn’t shown up.
Somehow, they’re averaging 4.3 runs per game in the early going.
“We know there are guys who still have to work to get their timing, Hanley and Bogey particularly with the four games they each missed,” manager John Farrell said. “It looked like to me that Mookie was starting to get better timing with each successive at-bat. That will be key for the middle-of-the-order guys to get back into the flow of things.
“In the meantime while they’re getting going, Mitch (Moreland) continues to swing the bat very well.”
Moreland is hitting .321. And the Red Sox catchers are providing the rest of the offense.
The first two runs weren’t easy to come by against O’s righty Dylan Bundy, who had a wipeout breaking ball the Red Sox couldn’t do much with. But they manufactured a run in the second on a sacrifice fly from Pablo Sandoval, who had to reach under the strike zone to lift one into left field, and another run in the fifth on a sacrifice fly from Dustin Pedroia, who popped a similar pitch into center.
Christian Vazquez was the unexpected hero of the evening, providing four hits from the No. 9 spot in the order. His third hit unraveled the Orioles for good.
Sandoval walked and Chris Young reached on an error by shortstop J.J. Hardy, who botched what should have been a routine double play, before Vazquez lifted a blooper between short and center. The fielders collided and everybody was safe. Back-to-back singles by Pedroia and Benintendi produced a three-run seventh inning and some extra cushion for the bullpen.
Vazquez’ fourth hit, a triple down the right field line, drove in two of the three runs in the eighth inning. The Puerto Rico native has reached base in all seven of his plate appearances to start the season, the first Red Sox player to accomplish that since Ted Cox in 1977.
“I’m seeing the ball well,” he said. “I feel good.”
Vazquez even stole a base, another sign that this powerless Sox team is being forced to find new ways to score.
“Our catchers are doing an outstanding job offensively and defensively,” Farrell said. “We’re in a tight ballgame, and I thought we did a great job with the aggressiveness on the basepaths. We bunched a number of hits together late. We found some holes. We were given a gift out to extend an inning. But still the one thing that didn’t go away from us was the hustle down the line to get a couple base hits to extend an inning.”
Coming off a wildly inconsistent spring training in which he left one start with triceps tightness and finished on the disabled list because of a forearm strain, Drew Pomeranz gave the Red Sox few reasons to be optimistic. But he provided them more than they could have hoped for last night, shoving 95-mph heaters in and around the zone for the first few innings then settling in around 90-91 mph with a blurry curveball that the O’s barely could touch.
His final line in six-plus innings: one run, four hits, one walk and six strikeouts.
“That’s the best I’ve felt in a long time, put it that way,” he said.
It was Pomeranz’ best start since joining the Red Sox. That’s the way he pitched in the National League.
These first few April games at Fenway aren’t looking too different.