Back-To-Back Homers By Mookie Betts And Hanley Ramirez Help Salvage The Series In Baltimore
If you’re looking for the blog on Matt Barnes throwing at Manny Machado’s head, you can check that out here, but that wasn’t the only thing that happened yesterday. Believe it or not, the Red Sox and Orioles actually played a baseball game, too.
The storylines of a baseball team change almost by the day over the course of a baseball season, and one of the big storylines heading into Sunday’s series finale that didn’t have to do with people attempting to hurt each other was that the Red Sox offense, albeit still leading the league in batting and hits, had been struggling. In the big picture, they’re the worst home run hitting team in the majors, but on a smaller scale, they couldn’t hit for shit over their previous four games.
Boston came into Sunday hitting .189 with a .484 OPS as a team, second worst in the majors over that four-game span. The Red Sox had mustered just three extra base hits over that clip, which obviously isn’t gonna cut it, and is very uncharacteristic for the names that they’ve got in their lineup. It appeared as though they busted out of that mini slump almost immediately against Kevin Gausman with Xander Bogaerts and Andrew Benintendi leading off the game with back-to-back singles, followed by back-to-back home runs from Mookie Betts and Hanley Ramirez.
Advertisement
Since the start of last season, Betts is hitting .438 with a 1.542 OPS at Camden Yards, both of which are the highest marks by any player that has played at least 10 games there since the start of last year. His 21 hits, 9 homers, 18 RBI, and 48 total bases are the most by a visiting player in that ballpark since the start of last season, as well.
It was the first long ball of the season for Hanley. About friggin’ time he starts hitting for power, although he started off pretty slow last year too, at least power-wise. He only had five home runs as late as June 21 last season, and still ended up with 30 because he hammered 25 bombs in his last 80 games. Mitch Moreland added his second homer of the season in the fifth inning, also off Gausman. Thanks in part to Benintendi’s first five-hit game of his career, the first five batters in the Red Sox order went 12-for-22 with three homers and all 6 RBI, while the bottom half of the order went 2-for-15 with a double and 4 strikeouts.
Oh well. It was enough. And it was enough because Eduardo Rodriguez had his best start of the season thus far. After missing a start in Toronto due to the birth of his son, Rodriguez made his first start since April 13 and gave the Red Sox 6 innings of one-hit, shutout ball. Rodriguez struck out seven batters and walked five. You hate to see a walk total that high, and you figure the way he was throwing the ball yesterday, he probably could’ve given the Red Sox maybe another inning if he hadn’t racked up his pitch count on walks. One more critique — Rodriguez still isn’t throwing his fucking slider, and it’s driving me insane. He threw 108 pitches, and only four of them were sliders (75 fastballs and 28 changeups). Need more variety as a starting pitcher in this division.
On a positive note, in his three starts in 2017, he’s struck out fewer than seven batters just once. Also, since being acquired by the Red Sox from the Orioles at the 2014 trade deadline, Rodriguez has a 3.46 ERA against the O’s, which is the lowest ERA against Baltimore by a Red Sox starter over that span. Note: Chris Sale has yet to face the Orioles as a member of the Red Sox, but he’s lined up to get the ball in the first game of that four-game set at Fenway Park a week from today, and he has a 1.89 ERA against the Orioles in that span that I’m referencing.
Final score: Red Sox 6, Orioles 2