AT THE MOMENT : Underfunded, Unlucky, Underperforming Red Sox Backbone Threatens to ……..

When you combine a neglectful owner, an inconsistent front office, and some rotten luck, you get the 2024 Red Sox defense.

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” – Warren Buffet

Well, as the tide continues to recede in Boston Harbor, it’s very apparent that everybody who put this roster together wasn’t wearing any clothes. Through a dreadful combination of neglect, stupidity, aloof ownership, inconsistency in implementing ideas, and some plain old rotten luck, you end up with the complete underfunded disaster that is the backbone of the Boston Red Sox.

Now, when I say backbone, I’m specifically talking about the positions up the middle of the diamond. So defensively, we’re looking at shortstop, second base, centerfield, and catcher. This is the group of everyday players you mainly use to prevent your opponent from scoring runs, and not surprisingly, most great baseball teams are built up the middle.

When it comes to the 2024 Red Sox, they’re already below average defensively at all of these positions except centerfield, which should be no surprise to anybody who’s watched these games. Going into the season, second base always looked like a big problem here, and with catcher, the hope was to tread water. Not great, but perhaps manageable with above average play elsewhere. Then, the Trevor Story injury completely destroyed any chance of this happening! In one night, the Red Sox went from arguably the best team in the league defensively at shortstop, to arguably the worst. They got completely exposed the moment he went down. Now, the only answer they seem to have to stop the flood of errors suddenly emanating from this position is to take the guy who has been good at the only other defensive position up the middle (Ceddanne Rafaela in centerfield) and move him to shortstop. Yikes!

Then you also have the ultimate weapon in preventing runs up the middle of the diamond: The pitching. And so far, this element of the 2024 Red Sox has actually been a pleasant delight. But unfortunately, it can’t last. In an almost perfect encapsulation of how things have gone so far, the Red Sox have both allowed the fewest earned runs of any team in baseball (46), and the most unearned runs of any team in baseball (20).

In this case, both stats and the eye test tell the same story: The pitching has been good enough to get the Red Sox off to a scalding hot start (something like 12-5 should’ve very much been on the table), but the defense has just been so putrid in so many critical moments, they’re only 9-8.

It’s such a shame too, because the internal improvement we’ve seen from the arms in the rotation was one of the big ingredients needed going into the season for the Red Sox to surprise and punch above their weight. Unfortunately, this ray of sunshine has little chance of fueling a run of prosperity in 2024 the way everything else has blown up in their face. Virtually every other factor remaining on the board is coming into focus, and all of it is set to break this pitching staff under the crushing weight of inevitability.

Between the injuries, the lack of depth across multiple key spaces on this roster (thanks ownership!), the extra outs the defense forces the arms to get on a nightly basis, the amount of season left for the arms to endure, the lack of help they’re getting from a depressingly underwhelming bottom of the lineup, and the amount of innings the rotation is forcing the bullpen to clean up night after night, that regression from literally being the best pitching staff in baseball out of the gate is going to hit like a hangover after a half dozen whiskeys.

And yes, the arms will crack. Not because they stink, but because water flows downhill and the sun rises in the east. No young, unproven, undermanned (lack of depth behind them), overtaxed rotation forced to get extra outs on a nightly basis can survive the grueling grind of a 162 game season without hitting a sour note. It’s basically one of the laws of the baseball universe.

The story might be different if their defense was better, or if they had capitalized on the chance to get several games over .500 out of the gate here, or if ownership had actually invested in some depth anywhere up the middle. But instead, these guys pitching their butts off have been left hung out to dry by the rest of the organization; including everybody from ownership, to the front office, to their own teammates who just can’t make the plays for them in critical spots.