The Red Sox Are Going To Light Shohei Ohtani Up Tonight
This is a statement that I will either regret saying, or I’ll look like a genius. I’m throwing money on this game and it is by far going to be for the Sox to blow Ohtani out of the water.
The Red Sox offense is scolding hot right now. It’s spicy and at least seven of their hitters are on a tear and that doesn’t even include Tzu Wei-Lin who’s been called up following Xander big stick’s injury.
Ohtani hasn’t faced a real lineup in baseball yet. In both of his starts he’s played the Oakland A’s and, I mean this with all of the disrespect that I could muster, they don’t supply anything close offensively that the Red Sox do.
Everybody in the Red Sox lineup is starting to heat up at the same time and that includes J.D. Martinez. Martinez has been pushing the ball to the opposite field since the beginning of the season and if it weren’t for the cold, he’d probably have about eight home runs so far.
He’s been crushing the ball and the cold climate’s been keeping it in the ballpark. Sending him out to LA to take on the Angels in warm weather, my God we should see some balls flying this series.
There’s also one of the top two leadoff men in baseball who goes by the name of Mookie Betts. Betts made a remark last season that he would never be as good as he was in 2016… Well, I don’t want to be the guy to tell him this but as of right now, he’s headed for that 2016 mark and has become one of the most feared hitters in the game. Betts’ OPS is over 1.000 and I don’t see him cooling off.
This entire offense has been hot and just like Betts, I don’t see them stopping. One thing that I don’t think a majority of people anticipated is this team’s depth. They’ve lost one of their most pivotal pieces to their production of their offense in Xander and they haven’t skipped a beat. When he went down ahead of the Yankees series, I’ll be honest and say that I was rattled. I didn’t expect this lineup to maintain the ability to put together the kind of offensive production that they have been and man, did they prove me wrong and stuff me into a shoe box.
The Red Sox offense tonight from Hanley to Eduardo Nunez, to Betts and Benintendi, is going to introduce Ohtani to pitching in the majors… And we’ll see how he’s going to handle it.
Let’s be honest, he could cool the Sox’s bats off tonight and take this entire blog and make me want to remove it from the site… But this team hasn’t shown me any reason to believe that they’ll be slowing down and again, that was all in cold weather. So until they prove to me otherwise, let’s go Sox and let’s put up some numbers in Cali.
Nick Quaglia (@NickQuag)