Regression, Thy Name Is Steven Wright
I was naive. I didn’t think that Steven Wright would regress like this.
Actually, check that. I knew that Steven Wright would eventually regress, but I didn’t think it would happen this abruptly, or this drastically. I knew that he wouldn’t be spinning complete game shutouts all year, and leading the American League in ERA from wire to wire. But based on his past performance at the major league level, I at least thought he’d finish the season with an ERA under 4. And don’t get me wrong — he still could, and likely will, finish the season with an ERA under 4. But part of me was hoping that he was about to haul off a “from out of nowhere” type season, similar to what RA Dickey did in 2012.
You could argue that, despite a bad month, he’s still having a “from out of nowhere” type season. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, expected Wright to do what he’s been doing this year. Anyone who says that they thought, back in February, that Wright would crack the rotation out of spring training and become the ace by default is full of shit. Wright was more than deserving of his All Star selection, and he most certainly deserved to pitch in that game. At the time of the All Star Game, Wright was the American League leader in ERA. However, he’s hit a bit of a bump in the road, as he’s now accumulated an ERA of 6.47 in the month of July, allowing 21 earned runs in 29.2 innings.
It’s disappointing that Wright has regressed a bit this month, but his performance of late is not disappointing in the way that David Price has been disappointing this year. We expected greatness from Price, and we’ve yet to see it. Nobody expected greatness from Wright, and we got it anyway. And now that it’s gone, we miss it because we foolishly have grown to expect it. But I don’t think we’d miss it as much if we were getting that expected greatness from Price in the first place.
This team shouldn’t have to lean on Wright when times get tough, as they are now. He was their sixth starter in spring, not their projected number one. So, while fans might be disappointed in the fact that Wright allowed eight earned runs in a game that the Red Sox lost 9-8, let’s keep our perspective in check here. Wright is not a lead the league in ERA kind of guy, and he’s not an eight earned run per start kind of guy, either. He’s somewhere in between, presumably closer to the league lead in ERA end of the spectrum. And if that’s what he ends up being, that’s okay. At the very least, it’s good to know that he’s capable of greatness, and that’s more than most pitchers on this staff can say for themselves in 2016.
The Red Sox battled back from being down 4-0 in the bottom of the third, 8-5 in the fifth, and after battling back yet again to tie the game 8-8 in the bottom of the sixth, go figure that it was a bases loaded walk in the seventh that did them in. That’s been the story of this team lately. On Friday, when the Red Sox scored one run, the Twins scored two. Last night, when the Red Sox scored eight runs, the Tigers scored nine. It’s incredibly frustrating, as a fan, to watch games like these. You can even loop in Saturday’s game when the Red Sox score nine runs, and the Twins scored eleven. When the offense is on, the pitching is off. When the pitching is on, the offense is off.
This isn’t a recent development, either. I remember bitching about this earlier in the season, and I theorized that there’s no way that this trend could continue, because that’s just plain bad luck. But I guess the trend actually has continued, and there’s really no logical explanation for it. It’s just shit luck that their pitching and their offense can’t sync up when they need them to. That’s why the Red Sox are now in third place, yet they have a better run differential than the two teams that are currently ahead of them. Shit luck. They’re not a third place team; they’re a wildly inconsistent team, who can’t win low-scoring ballgames — they’re 8-30 when they score fewer than five runs — and they’re also a team who loses way too many fucking games when they score 8+ runs. You should never lose a game that you score at least eight runs, never mind having that happen twice in a four-day span.
If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that the Orioles lost, but I think that just makes it worse. All I see there is a missed opportunity to gain ground in the standings. Both the Red Sox and the Orioles are 5-5 in their last 10 games. When the Red Sox had a golden opportunity to put a nice gap between them and the Orioles, they did the exact opposite, gave the division lead back to Baltimore, and pissed away several opportunities to build a lead on the O’s.
Final score: Tigers 9, Red Sox 8
Radio plug: I’ll be talking Red Sox with Zolak and Bertrand today at 10:50am on 985 The Sports Hub. LISTEN LIVE HERE.