The Loss The Red Sox Suffered That No One Is Talking About
The 2021 Red Sox look a lot different than the teams in the past three years. With losses to key players like Betts, Benintendi, Bradley Jr., Sale, and many others that I am definitely forgetting, this season and its success was and still is up in the air. While they currently lead the AL East by 2.5 games with a record of 18-12, it’s a long season; anything can happen. A few holes on this team still need some working on, which could be a problem pretty quickly if not addressed. One of those holes is in the bottom three spots in the batting order. But, this is a self-inflicted wound. One that very easily could have been avoided if nerds just got out of baseball for 3 seconds.
The “Hole”
The bottom 3 of this lineup is abysmal. Absolute garbage. Combined, the three spots have hit .186 with 19 walks and 95 strikeouts. The power output has been awful. They have combined again for only three home runs. This was part of the lineup where hitting should be more common. If only we had someone that could just hit, oh I don’t know, maybe like .260 and maybe have around 4 or 5 homers themself. Nothing crazy, but just respectable enough that it’s not a guarantee out every time those three batters come up. Now, suddenly it’s not so bleak. If that were the case, the current best offense in baseball would be even better.
They Had The Guy
By now, you should know exactly where I am going with this. Andrew Benintendi. Benny is now hitting .278 with three home runs and 10 RBI’s while striking out 10 times. Pretty respectable for a bottom 3 of the order guy. Well, not according to the Nerds that never played past tee-ball. They thought it was a great trade to trade him for Wily Mo Pena 2.0, a minor leaguer named Josh Winckowski, and three players to be named later. I’m not going to dive into this trade again because I already did in an article once the trade happened earlier this offseason, but frankly, I don’t care about the other pieces.
This Winckowski kid is 23 and hasn’t pitched above AA, counting this year, and Players to be named later are very rare to amount to something good. Don’t worry though, Franchy Cordero has tremendous power and looks like a physical specimen. He just has had bad injury luck; that’s why no one knows it. That’s why he is hitting .158 with 0 home runs, 26 strikeouts, and 9 hits in his 57 at-bats so far this year. I’m just going to leave that there—no need for further commentary on that.
Conclusion
Bloom, you blew this trade big time. The problem with trusting the nerds that probably have only seen Franchy take batting practice since he was never on the field and never watch him play in games is simple; they don’t watch the game. They don’t know the game. All they see are numbers. Those numbers tell them that Franchy is a big dude that hits the ball hard, and his exit Velo is tremendous and blah blah blah. They are missing a critical factor in all of those stats; he needs to make contact in order for any of those numbers to matter. The guy can’t hit water if he fell out of a boat. He stinks. That’s putting it nicely. Yes, it’s a long season, but just watching him swing the bat and attempt to play the field, there is little sign of hope.
Nice job Bloom, you screwed this one up all because Benny had one bad year. Keep in mind, that lousy year came in the same year that your current heart of the order stunk in. You traded a guy who puts the ball in play, has batted over .260 with 13 or more home runs three out of the four years he was here, and a fan favorite for a guy who strikes out 45% of the time because when he does make contact, it has a .002% chance of going over the fence. There are some numbers for you nerd ball people out there. The only hope now is to send Franchy down to Worcester for Duran. Once that happens, tune back into CouchGuySports for another article about how badly Bloom lost this trade.
-Kevin Perdios (@Perdios95)