Where Have the Red Sox Position Players Gone Wrong?
With numbers like these, one would expect the team to compete toward the top of the AL East, but for as good as the pitching has been, the position players have struggled offensively and defensively.
After a year wrought with brutal infield defense a season ago, the injury to Trevor Story placed the Red Sox back in a similar position. The team is tied for last in all of baseball in fielding percentage and has committed the most errors in baseball, averaging .8 errors per game.
Opponents have taken advantage of this, and unsurprisingly, the Red Sox have allowed the most unearned runs in baseball.
It’s not just errors that have hurt the team defensively; they also lack range. Outside of Jarren Duran and Wilyer Abreu, no one on the Red Sox has a positive Fielding Run Value, and the team sits at -6 outs above average.
According to Fangraphs, the team sits at a -11.6 against the league average in terms of fielding and positional adjustments. Even Ceddanne Rafaela, who has admittedly been asked to do a lot in his rookie season moving from center field to shortstop, has produced a -3 fielding run value not because of errors but because of a lack of range at shortstop.
Defense has been a problem for this team in years past, and there is nothing to suggest it will improve throughout this season.
Additionally, the offense has continued to struggle to put up runs. The team has the third-worst K% in all of baseball at over 25%. With Rafaela and Vaughn Grissom chasing pitches out of the zone at a 40% and 35% clip, respectively, the strikeouts are sure to continue unless substantive change is made.
Even Tyler O’Neill, who was a breakout star to start the season, strikes out over 31% of the time and has a whiff rate of 32%. This lack of plate discipline has put the Red Sox 26th in baseball in BB/K ratio at just .32.
The team's biggest struggle has been hitting with runners on base. Their .225 average with runners in scoring position is 24th in baseball, and their 79 WRC+ in the same situation is 27th in the league.
For context, 19 of the 30 teams have WRC+ over 100 with runners in scoring position, with league leaders sitting in the 140s. The Red Sox have only driven in 130 runs with runners in scoring position, which is 21st in the league, and the team strikes out at a 24.4% clip in the situation.
They are in the league's bottom half in terms of WRC+ and are not in the top ten of any significant offensive category. Additionally, the underlying numbers suggest that the team has been lucky offensively, with a .308 BABIP, the fourth-highest in the league.
This indicates that the Red Sox have a higher percentage of balls put in play, resulting in hits, which over the course of 162 games will likely regress; the bloops and dribblers who have been finding holes thus far will likely not continue to do so.
