How the Red Sox are reigniting their offense: ‘Beefed up' video room, individual meetings

New York Times

8 hours ago

BOSTON — When the Boston Red Sox returned to Fenway Park last week after a rough 3-6 West Coast trip, manager Alex Cora and hitting coach Pete Fatse started moving furniture around.
They dragged a couch from Cora's office across the hallway to the team's video room. Players were spending more time there, and Cora and Fatse wanted them to be comfortable.
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'We should have a pull-out bed and a pillow,' Fatse quipped.
It was one piece of what the Red Sox are hoping is an offensive reawakening in a post-Rafael Devers Red Sox world. The other: switching up their hitters' meetings from a bigger group setting to more individualized one-on-one sessions with the team's hitting coaches.
'I think it brings accountability,' Cora said of the meetings, which the club implemented for a time last season, too. 'When you sit down with the hitting coach and they ask you about the stuff of the pitcher, you better know, right? Sometimes when you sit as a group, you can hide it.'
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There have been a lot of changes to the Red Sox roster over the past several weeks, with rookies debuting and veterans like Alex Bregman on the injured list. The most notable change, though, came with the departure of Devers in a franchise-shaking trade 19 days ago.
In the nine games immediately following the Devers deal — all played on the West Coast — the Red Sox averaged 3.11 runs per game with a .188 average and .573 OPS. On the plane ride home, Cora and Fatse decided something had to change and that returning to individualized meetings was a good idea.
Baseball is cyclical, and teams rotate through ideas that work until they don't. Last season, when the Red Sox switched from group hitting sessions to more individualized meetings in late May, their offense took off, helping the club to a 29-19 record through the All-Star break.
The current Red Sox club still holds its larger group meetings at the start of each series and utilizes its expanded video room for group sessions, but then the three hitting coaches — Fatse and assistants Ben Rosenthal and Dillon Lawson — sit down with each hitter daily to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses.
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'I just think that when you're doing it individually, especially with young guys, it allows them to come to the table with their own thoughts,' Fatse said. 'It's more of a discussion as opposed to a presentation to the group, is probably the best way to put it.'
Since the Devers deal, the Red Sox have featured 14 different lineups, oftentimes including as many as three rookies and two second-year players.
For rookie Roman Anthony, the individual game plan (along with some guidance from Bregman) has been helpful in recent days. The 21-year-old is in the midst of his best stretch since debuting on June 9. Entering the second game of Wednesday's doubleheader against the Cincinnati Reds, Anthony had hit safely in five straight games and was 9-for-22 (.409) with four doubles.
'I spend a lot of time with Fatse, Dillon, Rosie. It's not one of them,' Anthony said. 'Every day it's somebody new, but we're all on the same page, so that's why we've got a good thing going.'
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The first game after the West Coast trip, the Red Sox offense certainly didn't look great in a 9-0 loss to Toronto. But the next day, the team clobbered the Blue Jays 15-1 and added a 13-6 win over Cincinnati two days later. They jumped out to an early lead on Tuesday against the Reds before the game was suspended and rescheduled for a doubleheader on Wednesday. After falling behind, the Red Sox rallied for a 5-3 win in the first game, helping them pick up their first series victory (despite an 8-4 loss in the nightcap) since a sweep of the Yankees the night Devers was traded.
There have been too many starts and stops for the Red Sox this season, and there were mistakes in Wednesday night's loss, but the lineup is moving better in recent days. Veteran Rob Refsnyder believes the one-on-one meetings make it easier for each hitter to play to his strengths.
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'Sometimes you can fall into the trap of game planning the same way as somebody else,' Refsnyder said. 'And in all honesty, one person might be feeling great. One person might not be feeling that great. What you can hit and what you can't hit can fluctuate day to day. We're meeting more one-on-one, and it's good, you don't go to the cage unprepared.'
Refsnyder noted the difficulty, especially for younger players, in retaining information from their 4 p.m. group meeting to 8 p.m. when a hitter might be facing a reliever they'd discussed earlier in the day.
The solo sessions help reinforce specific ideas for a player's strengths and weaknesses. At the same time, the group sessions at the start of each series are still important and not something Cora and Fatse want to eliminate, hence moving furniture into the video room.
'We've kind of beefed up our video room and created more accessibility for guys,' Fatse said. 'I'm a big believer that to have success at this level, you have to take ownership over your process.'
Over the offseason, the Red Sox expanded their video room at the expense of the coaches' locker room, which shrank, a symptom of Fenway's tight confines. The expanded video room allowed for double the computers equipped with TruMedia, an analytics platform the team has used for several years and a bigger space overall for players to dig into data. Players have had access to the team's internal technology on their phones and iPads, but Cora and Fatse wanted to instill a collaborative atmosphere with a computer lab set up to go along with more one-on-one instruction.
'Guys making themselves available to each other, talking shops, kind of giving different perspectives and not everybody's going to see it the exact same way,' Fatse said. 'It's something that AC and I have talked a lot about, like, how do we beef that up and, just, let's continue to make it part of a culture. It's always been part of our culture. But we have some new guys here. So, how do you reestablish that?'
The 2025 Red Sox could use a run like the 2024 team had entering the All-Star break, and Cora and Fatse are hoping the recent changes will help. They also realize the meetings are just one piece of the puzzle. But in an increasingly complex game, details matter.
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'As we think about where we want to get to, you want to play in October,' Fatse said. 'It's very individualized. So our mentality is, like, how do we get these guys prepared for what that's going to look like now? You think about some of the growing pains we went through last year. So, just making an adjustment off of that.'