At the end of every season, you can bet on seeing at least a handful of columnists writing about what teams can learn from the eventual World Series champion. If you only followed the game through sports writers, you’d be incredibly impressed by just how quickly the sport evolves year after year. This season, the Royals won the championship, and so teams around the league are supposed to start copying them. In this particular instance, that means building a strong and deep bullpen and a lineup that relies heavily on contact skills.
Of course, this is a silly concept in general. There are many ways to build a winning baseball team, and it typically takes a few years to build that team. Changing your course every year based on the most recent winner would be the worst “process” of all time. With that being said, these columns still interest me, because I’ve always been fascinated by the identities of different teams. Something about an overall narrative shaping a team is interesting to me, and it’s the reason a bad team with a story like the Astros of a few years ago was more interesting to follow than a mediocre team with no direction like the Rockies of the last five or ten years.
It’s not like the Red Sox are completely abandoning it to form a lineup made of undisciplined free-swingers, but it appears their priorities are changing.
Looking specifically at the Red Sox, they’ve undergone a lot of changes over the last 15 years, but the one thing that has stayed constant has been their lineup’s identity. If you were an opposing pitcher with a matchup against Boston coming up, chances are you were not happy about it. It certainly helped that guys like David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Victor Martinez, Mike Lowell and Kevin Youkilis were hitting in the middle of it, but it was the overall strategy that killed opponents. This is a team that has historically taken approximately a million pitches per game and drawn hundreds of walks per at bat. Every start against them was a grind, is what I’m saying.
Over the last couple of years, it seems that the franchise is sort of moving away from that strategy. It’s not that they are completely abandoning it to form a lineup made of undisciplined free-swingers, but it appears their priorities are changing.
Rather than leading the league in walk-rate like they did seemingly every year from 2003-2013, Boston has found themselves more toward the middle of the pack of late, finishing tied for 15th in that category among all major-league teams in 2015. It certainly wasn’t a perfect approach, as their discipline fell from its typically pristine level to merely average, with an O-Swing% finishing as the 14th highest mark in the league. However, they did emulate the Royals in a way, hardly ever swinging through a pitch. The 2015 Red Sox made more contact than all but three teams across the league.
Obviously, using one year’s worth of plate discipline numbers doesn’t paint a full picture of a changing identity, especially when it comes from a year in which basically everything went wrong. However, looking at some of the recent moves made by this team, it’s clear the times are a-changin’. Look at the last three big-name bats brought onto this team. Pablo Sandoval, Hanley Ramirez and Rusney Castillo all have one thing in common. It’s not that all three of them historically have bad plate discipline (though one could argue a couple of them did last year), but they don’t approach their plate appearances like traditional Red Sox hitters do. They’re more worried about swinging at a good pitch to hit than they are about getting deep into counts. If the first pitch is the best pitch, they’ll swing at it without hesitation.
All three of them figure to be everyday(ish) players in the 2016 lineup, as do Xander Bogaerts and Blake Swihart. Bogaerts, for his part, was known for being a relatively patient hitter through his minor-league career, but that has not translated to the major leagues. He has a six percent walk-rate in two full major-league seasons, including a 4.9 percent mark last season. Even if he sees some regression back to what was expected from him, it would take a huge change in his approach to get back to being a stereotypical Red Sox grinder. Swihart, meanwhile, has always leaned more towards aggressiveness at the plate, and it’s worked for him. So, that’s five of nine batters in the lineup who are likely to be more aggressive than patient at the plate next year.
Right now, Boston’s lineup is essentially split down the middle between patience and aggressiveness, with four guys clearly belonging to each group, and Bogaerts sitting somewhere in the middle.
What’s so fascinating to me about this lineup, though, is the fact that they aren’t going full-Royals with their hitters. They still have David Ortiz and Dustin Pedroia, who have always been grinders at the plate and don’t figure to stop now. They still have Jackie Bradley, who is still an unknown quantity at the plate but is a good bet the exhibit strong patience. They still have Mookie Betts, who had a surprisingly low walk-rate of seven percent in 2015, but one can still see him getting that up to nine percent or higher without squinting too hard.
This is an offense that has tremendous of balance between approaches, which kind of goes against my idea from the beginning of the post saying that interesting teams need identities. Right now, their lineup is essentially split down the middle between patience and aggressiveness, with four guys clearly belonging to each group, and Bogaerts sitting somewhere in the middle.
In and of itself, though, the lack of identity is somewhat interesting. There’s no easy way to approach this lineup with a simple game plan. Pitchers can’t head into their outing known they can either pound the zone to take advantage of patient hitters. They also can’t extend their zone a little bit in hopes of getting an aggressive hitter to chase. There’s no one-size fits all strategy against this lineup.
Does any of this ensure that the lineup will perform better than it did last year, especially in the first half? Of course not. Hitters still need to hit, regardless of their strategy at the plate. With that being said, it’s an interesting change from their past ways, and the move toward aggressiveness is one that makes sense. Last decade, starting pitchers were meaningfully superior to their bullpen counterparts. In today’s game, there are more competent relievers, so knocking a starter out of a game early doesn’t have the same effect as it did in 2004, for example. The Royals just won a World Series taking this to an extreme, and while it’s certainly not the only way to win, the Red Sox are putting their own spin on it.
In the end, the offense needs to improve in Boston right along with the pitching. The Red Sox are going to try to do it by mixing aggressive hitters with patience hitters, constantly keeping opponents on their toes. Only time will tell if it will work, but it’s a change from what we’re used to, and it’s a change to their long-successful identity from earlier in the millennium.
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