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You know things are going good when it’s news that you lose two games in a row.
Such as it is for the scorching Boston Red Sox, a team that shook off a bafflingly bad first half to, just maybe, establish itself as the team to beat in the American League.
The Red Sox had won 27 of 30 before running into the ice wall that is the Athletics over the weekend. Boston opened the series as baseball’s hottest team facing its coldest team. Because baseball is the magical thing that it is, after the Red Sox drubbed the A’s on Friday, the West Sacramento nine rebounded to take the last two games of the series. Boston had not dropped consecutive games in five weeks.
A tough 2-1 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays on Monday extended the sudden skid to three. We still can’t say that the hot streak is over, but it does feel like a good time to take stock. Just what have we been watching from the Red Sox? Why did it happen and, perhaps more importantly, what was going on at Fenway before? How rare is it to get that hot? And what does all of this portend for the coming postseason?
Let’s try to answer those questions.
Years ago, Bill James developed a “team temperature” metric for tracking how hot (or not) clubs were at any given time. I’ll spare you the math, but the concept is very simple: You start at room temperature — 72 degrees — and every win adds to that number, while every loss takes away from it.
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I have always loved team temperatures, and since James’ site went into retirement a few years ago, I’ve assiduously tracked them in my system. Because of that I can tell you empirically that no team has been hotter, longer, this season than the Red Sox have been over the past couple of months.
During the apex of its run, Boston reached 130 degrees, the highest temperature of any team this season. Even after losing the back-to-back games to the A’s, the Red Sox remained over 100 degrees for a 28th straight day. That’s the most days over 100 degrees of any team this season in total, not just consecutively. The loss to Toronto finally dropped the Red Sox back to double digits, a still-warm 92 degrees.
But here’s the part that is truly wild: Boston’s nadir this season, reached just before the Red Sox began to heat up, was 14 games under .500, 32-46. Overall, the Red Sox have spent considerably more days in the cool category (71 days at under 72 degrees) than warm (47 days at 72 degrees or warmer). Boston has been cool 60% of the time this season, the eighth-highest figure in the majors.
And yet these Red Sox got as hot as any team we’ve seen in years.
Boston became just the seventh team in the past 100 years to go 27-3 over a stretch of 30 games, according to ESPN Research. Here is a list of those teams, how they ended up, what their record was when things started to heat up, and the maximum number of games each was under .500 during that season. See if you can spot the one that is different:
Teams that have gone 27-3 during a season over the past 100 years:
TeamRecord before streakLowest pointResult1936 Giants49-441 under .500Lost World Series1941 Yankees33-241 under .500Won World Series1947 Yankees27-232 under .500Won World Series1953 Yankees17-91 under .500Won World Series1977 Royals64-514 under .500Lost ALCS2017 Indians69-562 under .500Lost ALDS2026 Red Sox37-4814 under .500TBDIf you add up the total number of maximum games under .500 that the first six teams compiled, you get 11. The Red Sox were 14 games under by themselves at one point this season.Was this run totally unexpected?It was pretty unexpected. Red Sox GM Craig Breslow had started to make noises about offloading the movable contracts on his roster at the trade deadline, right about the time that his team began to stir.You can’t blame Breslow, who didn’t unfurl the white flag so much as he suggested he’d started to rummage around the closet to find it. The thing about that 32-46 low point is that it’s 78 games — nearly half the season. At that point, you kind of figure a team is what it is.State of WARWhy wins above replacement rules MLB, frustrates fans … and what’s next. Bradford Doolittle »
Let’s consider where the Red Sox were at their nadir, which came after losing 4-3 to Toronto on June 18, completing a three-game Toronto sweep at Fenway, Boston’s fourth loss in a row. That’s when the Red Sox went 14 games under .500 and were, at that point, a chilly 42 degrees on the team temperature gauge. After that game, Boston flew across the country to Seattle and won the very next night, a win that we can now pinpoint as the start of this amazing run.
Before that win over Seattle, the Red Sox were on pace to win 65 games. Their expected wins pace — based on run differential — was 78, a remarkable 13-game discrepancy that suggested they had been more than a little unlucky. Still, even a 78-win club isn’t one you’d expect to then win 35 of 43, which is what the Red Sox did prior to cooling off against the A’s.
However, if you want to argue that much better play should have been seen as a possibility, you can simply go back to the preseason. In the numbers that went with our season preview, I had the Red Sox at 87-75 with a 60% shot at the playoffs and a 4.9% chance to win it all.
Not bad. Boston’s baseline win total (the rating of its roster before simulations of the schedule) was 88.6, strong enough to put it in the middle of what figured to be a crowded AL East race. I had the Red Sox’s neutral-venue run profile as ranking 12th in scoring and fifth in prevention. I also had Garrett Crochet as Boston’s most likely award winner, with the AL Cy Young Award in mind, which I bring up as an admission that there’s only so much we know when a new season is at hand.
Based on where the Red Sox were before they got hot, we would not have anticipated them going on the kind of spree that they went on. However, based on preseason expectation, they look very much like an underachieving team that should have been doing much better.
First of all, we should point out that Boston’s improvement did not correlate with Breslow’s early-season decision to fire manager Alex Cora and much of his coaching staff. Boston was 10-17 when that happened — seven games under .500. When the Chad Tracy-led BoSox sank to 32-46, the new manager was off to a 22-29 start — seven games under .500.
That’s not to say that Tracy hasn’t had an impact, and the slow beginning could eventually come to be viewed as merely a period of transition and acclimation. Still, while the lineup and rotation have evolved, there isn’t one slam-bang move that flipped Boston’s switch.
Here are some things that have happened with its roster, though none of them is a clear-cut catalyst for what has happened:
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• In the wake of Crochet’s injury, among the responses was to install the implacable Jake Bennett in the rotation. Talk about an even-keel kind of player. If leaping New York Mets reliever Jefry Yan is on one end of the on-field emotional scale, Bennett is on the other. He has been consistently outstanding, and his emergence, in part, paved the way for Breslow to deal Connelly Early to the Washington Nationals for Curtis Mead in an effort to boost the offense. (Alas, Mead broke his hand in his first game for Boston, a misfortune that so far hasn’t slowed the Red Sox at all.)
• The infield mix changed. The early-season shortstop combo was a lot of Trevor Story and a good bit of Marcelo Mayer. Story went down with a sports hernia. Mayer’s last start at shortstop was June 25. Tsung-Che Cheng and Andruw Monasterio took over the spot, and the past couple of weeks, it has been just Monasterio. According to changes in my AXE ratings, Monasterio has been the 24th-hottest player in baseball since the Red Sox’s run began.
• At second base, Anthony Seigler became the most frequent starter. He has played well and become an emotional presence on the field and in the dugout. Nick Sogard has pitched in at the position, hitting better than league average, since Mead went down.
• At third base, faith paid off. Caleb Durbin has been the hot corner regular all season. At Boston’s nadir, he was hitting .192/.251/.322. Since then, he’s at .321/.413/.506. According to changes in AXE, Durbin has been baseball’s second-hottest player during the spree, behind only the Chicago Cubs’ Pete Crow-Armstrong.
• Incidentally, the early-season perception was that Breslow got fleeced in the offseason deal that sent Kyle Harrison, Shane Drohan and David Hamilton to the Milwaukee Brewers for Monasterio, Seigler and Durbin. That deal is looking a whole lot more even now.
• After struggling badly, Brayan Bello, viewed as a rotation mainstay before the season, was shipped off to Triple-A. In addition to Bennett joining the rotation, Patrick Sandoval returned from injury on July 9. These moves stabilized the post-Crochet/Bello rotation, which now includes Bennett, Sandoval, the outstanding Sonny Gray, Ranger Suarez and Payton Tolle.
• Bello returned to the majors on July 12 and since rejoining the Red Sox has been outstanding as a jack-of-all-trades combo pitcher. In six games, he has averaged 3⅔ innings while picking up two wins and a save with a 0.79 ERA while displaying infinitely better command.
• Then there was the splashy trade deadline, but that has yet to make much of an impact because Adley Rutschman, who is expected to be activated Tuesday, was still working his way back from injury and Mead is hurt. The only contributing newcomer so far has been lefty reliever Erik Miller, acquired from the San Francisco Giants for Mayer in a surprising trade. Miller has made three scoreless appearances for Boston. (Under-the-radar outfield pickup Eli White has also gotten some run.)
Invariably, any time a team gets this hot, it’s not hitting or pitching but both. This has been the case for the Red Sox. At the same time, their pitching was pretty good to begin with. It’s the batsmen who have really leveled up for Boston of late.
At the start of the blazing streak, when things looked bleak, Boston was on pace to score 635 runs while allowing 664, for a minus-29 differential. The Red Sox are now on pace to score 719 runs and allow 605, for a plus-114 differential. They improved their on-pace projections by 84 runs on the offensive side and 59 on the defensive side, adding up to the incredible 143-run leap in differential pace.
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On the pitching side, the bullpen’s performance hasn’t changed much. The Aroldis Chapman-led group was third in relief ERA even before Boston got hot; it’s second since. The frequency of saves has ticked up, but of course there have been more opportunities. Boston was 5-11 in one-run games before the run and is 8-4 since.
The revamped rotation, just so-so earlier in the season, has been one of baseball’s best. Since the June 18 nadir, the starters rank second with a 3.05 ERA while leading MLB in quality starts.
One area of run prevention that appears to have faded a bit is the team defense. According to Baseball Savant, the Red Sox were at plus-16 fielding runs above average before getting hot; they are at zero since. Theory: In need of offense, Tracy has simply been making decisions based on the need for hitting in contrast to the earlier emphasis on comprehensive run prevention. The give-and-take has cost the Red Sox a little defense, but the red-hot offense has made the trade-off more than worth it.
And the offense has been blazing. Before the spree, Boston’s .694 OPS ranked 25th in baseball. Since June 18, that number is .764, the seventh-best. As a team, the Red Sox have hit for much more power. Boston hit 61 homers in its first 72 games (29th) but has clubbed 57 homers in 46 games since.
This doesn’t just appear to be happenstance. Boston, as an offense, has walked more, chased less and been more willing to absorb a few strikeouts. The collective exit velocity is exactly the same (88 mph) but the launch angle has increased by 2 degrees. The Red Sox have morphed into much more of a take-and-rake club — and it has worked.
What has changed? Lots of things. Everything. And in a sense nothing, because the Red Sox have more or less ended up where they were projected back in March. What we did not see coming was the path they took to get here. Indeed, no one could have seen it coming, because it’s just so darn rare.
Monday’s defeat against Toronto left Boston at 64-54, a pace of 88 wins and a plus-114 differential. The Red Sox are 14th in park-adjusted run production and first in run prevention. Thus, after all this, the hot streak has left them with a very similar profile to what we predicted in March.
During this run, Boston has improved its win projection in my daily simulations by 20 — from 70 to 90. Boston’s playoff probability went from 2% to 98%. The Red Sox are now in the AL’s big three when it comes to pennant probability. Boston is at 16%, just behind the New York Yankees at 17%, with the Tampa Bay Rays leading the way at 32%. The Red Sox have the AL’s second-best run differential behind, of all teams, the Detroit Tigers.
The Red Sox are still shy of their expected win pace, now at 94, so there is more room to regress in the right direction.
Not every Red Sox player has joined the spree. Crochet remains out but is now talking about working his way back as a reliever, which is a fearsome thought — Boston’s solid rotation backed by Bello and Crochet helping to bridge the way to Chapman during the playoffs. Jarren Duran remains ice cold, but even if he doesn’t heat up, Roman Anthony should be back at some point.
Is Boston the AL favorite? It’s impossible to say the Red Sox are the favorite, but they are clearly among the favorites. That’s not too bad for a team whose season appeared to be all but kaput less than two months ago. Maybe it took an ultrarare hot streak to put the Red Sox in this position, but here they are, in a position from which anything is now possible.
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