It's not just that the Red Sox are losing. They look lost
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But rather than submit a game-by-game, inning-by-inning breakdown of the recently completed West Coast road trip, during which the Sox went 3-6, I'm going to put just two plays on the blackboard for analysis and discussion. One of the plays, which I'll call Happier Times, is from when the Red Sox swept a three-game series from the Yankees at Fenway Park to inch ever closer to first place in the American League East. The other, which I'll call The Aftermath, is from the bow-wow West Coast trip.
Happier Times: In the middle game of Boston's three-game sweep of the Yankees — Saturday, June 14 — the Yankees scored two seventh-inning runs to cut Boston's lead from 4-0 to 4-2 and now had the tying runs on base, two down. Trent Grisham was up. He swung and missed at a Justin Wilson offering for strike two. That's when Sox catcher Carlos Narváez, the former Yankees farmhand, observed that the Yankees' Jasson Domínguez, apparently thinking it was strike three, was wandering off second base. Narváez pounced. Domínguez, dead. End of Yankee rally. The Sox held on for a 4-3 victory.
Carlos Narváez picks the runner off of SECOND BASE to end the inning! 😳 pic.twitter.com/FCzurlEpGB
— MLB (@MLB) June 15, 2025
The aftermath: In the finale of Boston's three-game series against the San Francisco Giants last Sunday at Oracle Park, eighth inning, Sox trailing 8-5, Jarren Duran led off and hit a hard single to right. He tried to stretch it into a double. But the right fielder was Mike Yastrzemski, and, as Yazzes will do, he fired a strong throw to second to nail Duran.
I highlight the two plays because they're fine examples of how much has gone wrong with the Red Sox in just one week. In the Duran case, we have a base runner trying to take second with nobody out, down by three, eighth inning. While it's true that replays seem to indicate Duran managed to get a finger back on the base ahead of the tag after initially overrunning the bag, the ensuing ejections of Duran and Sox manager Alex Cora served only to focus greater attention on Duran's blunder. The manager later explained that part of his rant was over an earlier play in which Abraham Toro was ruled out of the baseline on a play at the plate, but Cora added that, 'I hate to get thrown out. I hate it. But obviously, I have to defend my player,' meaning Duran.
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That's some nice, old-timey baseball there, I guess, the manager 'protecting' Duran. It doesn't work here, though. It's not Cora's job, or shouldn't be, to play hockey dad after one of his players screws up. Yes, it's vitally important for the offense-challenged Red Sox to be looking to scratch out every run — hey, they have no choice now that Devers is gone and they're averaging 3.1 runs per game — but there's 'aggressive base running' and there's 'bad base running.' This was bad base running, which is a facet of bad baseball, which has become the Red Sox Way. While it's commendable on one level that Duran's mindset is to 'make something happen,' base running like this is happening too often.
The aforementioned Narváez play was indicative of how the Red Sox conducted their affairs in the three-game sweep of the Yankees. The Sox were suddenly playing clean, crisp baseball, making the big plays and being attentive to little details, such as the catcher keeping a sharp eye on what baserunners are up to.
In that same game, rookie third baseman Marcelo Mayer had Fenway Park roaring with back-to-back outstanding defensive plays. In Boston's 2-0 close-out victory on Sunday, the Bombers' Aaron Judge hit into an inning-ending 5-4-3 double play that was all the more impressive considering it was Toro to Kristian Campbell to Romy Gonzalez. That's not how the Red Sox envisioned their infield coming into the season.
But it worked. Back then, everything was working. The fans took notice. And Cora took notice that the fans were taking notice.
'This weekend here, compared to last year against (the Yankees), it was loud, it was fun, people showed up early and they were into every pitch,' Cora said after the three-game sweep. 'They stood up with two strikes. I haven't seen that in a lot of years.'
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You know what else was working? Devers as designated hitter. For all the early concerns about Devers making the transition from third baseman to DH, he had figured it out to the tune of 15 home runs, 58 RBIs and a .272/.401/.504 slash line. And yet, Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow and president/CEO Sam Kennedy, post-trade, dropped little breadcrumbs about Devers being some kind of bad influence on the kids in the clubhouse.
That was then. This is … wow. And wow in a bad way. As in yikes.
It's not just that the Red Sox are losing. They look lost.
(Photo of Willy Adames gesturing to the Giants dugout after tagging out Jarren Duran: D. Ross Cameron / Imagn Images)
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