The Southpaw Struggles

On Tuesday night, the Red Sox offense knocked Oakland Athletics’ starter Sean Manaea all over the park. The offense breaking out for a big run total was a welcome sight and particularly noteworthy for one simple reason: Sean Manaea throws with his left hand, a characteristic among certain pitchers that has presented frustration for Red Sox batters this year. Despite having a lineup full of strong right-handed hitters and getting to play half of their games in Fenway Park, the Red Sox’s production against lefty starters (.711 OPS) has been underwhelming. They are not bruising righties to any great extent (.756 OPS), but the weak performance against southpaw starters has raised an eyebrow or two.

The struggles against left-handed starters are present for the majority of the guys who makeup the regular lineups:

With the caveat that we are playing with small samples of plate appearances and recognizing that OPS is not the best measure of offensive production, Chris Young, Hanley Ramirez and Xander Bogaerts’ inability to do damage against lefty starters this year is alarming. They are all down at least 300 points from last year and 190 points from their career marks. Xander has been playing hurt and it is killing him at the plate. Likewise, Hanley’s shoulder injury affected him and likely had a knock-on effect on Young’s opportunities. Despite Young’s struggles, the Red Sox seem to be happy to move forward with him as the fourth-outfielder-primary-righty-bench-bat for the playoffs. They could have promoted Bryce Brentz, who has crushed lefties for Triple-A Pawtucket (.279/.380/.577), but elected not to. In Young we trust, I guess.

It is worth mentioning that in 2016 the Red Sox’s offense, which was largely made up of the same guys as this year, also performed considerably worse against left-handed starters than against right-handed starters (.758 v .824). However some of that was a function of rough luck in scheduling, as the lefties they lined up against last year included six top-50 starters (by BP’s WARP): Jose Quintana (twice), Chris Sale, James Paxton, Madison Bumgarner, Danny Duffy, and Dallas Keuchel. They knocked Quintana and Keuchel around, but the point stands. Given my mentioning this fact, you might think the 2017 difficulty against lefties has also been a function of who they have faced, but the difficult-opponent issue has not really been present this year. Only Paxton and Quintana currently qualify as top-50 starters among the lefties they have opposed in 2017. If you only saw bunt-hating C.C. Sabathia’s starts against the Red Sox (1.04 RA9 in 26.0 innings) you might think he was the class of the league, but his 4.8 RA9 in his 105.0 not-against-the-Red-Sox innings shows he is not and makes me even more mad about how he has dominated them this year.

All of this might come across as another pessimistic article about another fatal flaw of this 2017 Red Sox team. While there is a clear difficulty against lefty-starters, the Red Sox have patched together enough of an offense to complement their strong pitching and defense, and be in control of the American League East with strong odds of making the postseason. What’s more is that other than the Yankees, who could throw three left-handed starters in a playoff series (Sabathia, Jamie Garcia, and Jordan Montgomery), none of the other likely playoff teams in the AL feature left-handed heavy rotations. The Cleveland “21 Straight” Windians have an entirely right-handed rotation, and Keuchel is the lone lefty in the Astros’ starting corps. Don’t get me wrong, the Red Sox will be in really tough against either of those rotations in a Division Series, but considering the offense’s performance to date, the lack of lefties could make the task a little easier. And of course, given the track records of the guys on this team, the offense can be much better.

Photo by Bob DeChiara – USA TODAY Sports