Pablo Sandoval Hit A Dramatic Go-Ahead Home Run In The 8th Inning, But The Bullpen Fucked It All Up
If there’s one thing that you need to know about baseball fans, it’s that we’re all creatures of habit.
Like clockwork, every April is the month of overreactions. It’s a 162-game season, but if a guy makes a couple errors, the fans want the next guy in line. If a new player starts out 0-for-12 with a few strikeouts, he sucks. If a reliever can’t get the job done in game three of the season, send ‘em back to Pawtucket. Imagine if baseball rosters and lineups were managed the way that fans’ knee jerk reactions demanded them to be? Christ almighty. Give these guys a chance to, like, maybe adapt to a new season?
I’m referring to a few guys, obviously. Pablo Sandoval made two errors in his first two games, which I honestly chalked up to the home crowd at Fenway being in his head and his need to be liked and his hatred of getting booed. That’s another issue, but you’re not going to pull Sandoval after two games and put somebody like Brock Holt in there immediately. The leash needs to be much longer than that.
Second guy? Mitch Moreland. He started off the season 0-for-12 with 6 strikeouts, and I’m already seeing tweets about how he sucks and asking where Sam Travis is. I think you’ll see Travis regardless this year, but how about maybe giving Moreland, the guy that’s hit north of 20 bombs over his last three full seasons, more than 12 at-bats before we pull the plug on him, especially when two of the outs that he made at Fenway were balls that he scorched to the fence and would’ve been homers on a warmer night. He ended up hitting a single and a double in the eighth and ninth innings yesterday, too, by the way.
I guess we can loop a few bullpen guys together here on this one, but Joe Kelly took the brunt of the fan backlash for yesterday’s loss. While he wasn’t great, it was a collective failure. Kelly just happened to be the guy that allowed the winning run to score, but the go-ahead and winning runs were charged to Heath Hembree, who started this mess. It sucks, because the Red Sox were actually in a situation where there were two outs with nobody on with a one-run lead in the eighth after Hembree struck out the first two batters that he faced, but then he walked the next two before getting the hook.
In comes Robby Scott, who I was excited to see earn a roster spot this spring, who then allowed a game-tying double to Mikie Mahtook, so now he’s done. Then, we get Kelly. By the way, this is why baseball games take forever. Three consecutive Tigers hitters saw three different relievers from the Red Sox. Anyway, Kelly kept the shit show rolling by walking the first batter he faced to reload the bases, and then walked a second consecutive batter to hand the Tigers the lead on a silver platter. Just a pitiful performance by the Red Sox bullpen when it looked like this inning was gonna be a breeze for Hembree.
The first thing that sticks out is obviously the collective failure here, but after you get past that, I look at the order in which these pitchers were used. Matt Barnes is away from the team on the bereavement list, so you have to wonder if John Farrell would’ve even gone to Kelly had Barnes been there. He went to Hembree in the eighth inning of a one-run game before he went to Kelly, the guy that we were told was going to be the 8th inning guy in the absence of Tyler Thornburg and Carson Smith.
He also went to Barnes over Kelly on Opening Day, so Farrell’s lack of faith in Kelly is definitely something to keep an eye on here, and obviously Kelly isn’t doing himself any favors with his most recent outing. Kelly looked good on Wednesday, though, pitching two scoreless innings in extras against Pittsburgh. Also, I saw fans were asking for a four-out save from Craig Kimbrel there at the end. I think Farrell was just trying to see what he has in these non-Kimbrel relievers and testing them out in certain high leverage situations, and I’ve honestly got no problem with that for now. Not trying to run my closer into the ground before June.
Saving the best for last here — we wouldn’t have had situation on our hands where the Red Sox bullpen even had a lead to protect if it weren’t for Sandoval’s 8th inning, three-run blast off of Francisco Rodriguez. That dude’s been giving up epic home runs against the Red Sox for like forty years now. Incredible! Best part about this home run — and I didn’t catch this until somebody pointed it out to me on Twitter — but it looks like Sandoval made reference to the belt exploding incident when he crossed home plate.
I fucking LOVE this move from Pablo. Get mad. Use it as motivation. Nobody has shit on this guy more than I have since he’s been in Boston, and we ALL laughed at him when his belt exploded. We all did. He deserved all of the criticism that he brought on himself prior to this year, and just because you were hard on him in 2015 and 2016 doesn’t mean that you’re a fraud for rooting for him in 2017 now that he actually gives a shit. The Pablo that we’re watching now is the Pablo that Red Sox fans thought that they were getting two years ago, but that obviously wasn’t the case.
The fact of the matter is that David Ortiz is not walking through that door, and they’re gonna need Sandoval to pull his weight (no pun intended), and do shit like what he did in Detroit yesterday to win this division. He’s put in the work, he’s said all the right things that he wasn’t saying a year ago, and it’s paying off here in the early going. I’m all in on the Pablo Redemption Tour.
Final score: Tigers 6, Red Sox 5