Martinez also leads the MLB in BABIP (batting average on balls in play), the infamous harbinger of regression, with a .402 mark. A BABIP in the .400s almost always signifies oncoming regression, but Martinez may avoid that because he’s hitting the ball hard more often than any other player and he’s been spraying the ball across fields.

Let’s also recognize that while .402 is a crazy high BABIP, it’s down from .427 just a week ago. The dip didn’t affect his counting numbers at all. In that week, Martinez racked up nine hits, five homers and eight RBI.

Martinez’s standard numbers aren’t dipping with his BABIP in part because he hits the ball very hard, very often. According to MLB.com Statcast data, Martinez hits the ball 95 mph or higher 59.1 percent of the time, the top mark in the MLB. He also hits the ball with an average exit velocity of 95.8 miles per hour, good for fourth in baseball behind Joey Gallo, Aaron Judge and Miguel Cabrera.

Additionally, Martinez barrels the ball up in 14.9 percent of his plate appearances, second in baseball only to teammate Mookie Betts (15.6). His line drive percentage is 23.6, on pace for his career-high for a full season.

In short, he hits the ball really hard. But also, he doesn’t hit the ball soft. This might seem redundant at first, but seriously, his soft-contact rate is glaringly low compared to the rest of the league. I included Betts in the chart to show some perspective.

Courtesy: Baseball Info Solutions

This means that Martinez is hitting the ball at a medium- or hard-contact rate over 95 percent of the time he makes contact.

Not only is the 30-year-old outfielder hitting the ball hard, he’s hitting them to the opposite field, too. Now, I won’t say all fields, because he’s not hitting it into centerfield as much, but his opposite-field percentage (36.2) is second in baseball to Cincinnati’s Scooter Gennett (37.7). Over the last couple of years, Martinez has steadily leveled out his field distribution.

Martinez’s opposite-field percentage took a five percent leap in his career year last season, when he batted .303 with 45 home runs and 104 RBI. The percentage has seen yet a larger increase in 2018, where he’s on pace to eclipse all three of those figures.

And while Martinez’s BABIP is high, that figure can be neutralized with sky-high hard contact numbers and effective field distribution: two figures that display much more skill than luck. If Martinez continues to hit the ball hard and spray his hits, he’ll likely be able to avoid regression and surpass his outstanding 2017 campaign.

102.2 miles per hour. That’s squarely in Aroldis Chapman territory. And as eye-popping as that is, there are a few key things you should notice. Firstly, had Aaron Judge not fouled it off, it would’ve been a ball. There’s no debating that. It wasn’t going to be in the zone for any umpire, even C.B. Bucknor’s. But before you tell me it was supposed to be there, let me bring up my second point: it’s way off target. Christian Vazquez sets up on the inside corner, and Kelly launches his firecracker up around Judge’s collarbone. Frankly, I’m surprised Vazquez had his glove up there in time, given the velocity and where he originally wanted it to go. Lastly, observe Judge actually fouling that off. If you’re throwing 102 that high and it’s still getting fouled off or hit into play, you’ve screwed up. They’re either counting on it or it’s predictable — maybe both! It’s not as bad as throwing 103 in the zone and watching your lead disappear, but still, it’s pretty bad.

That’s Joe Kelly in a nutshell. His velocity is there, the Stuff is Great, but the results you’d expect never materialized, due to either bad control or, like last year, a frustrating inability to strike guys out. Nearly a year ago to this day, Chris Teeter wrote about Kelly’s lack of strikeouts in these same webpages, and noted that Kelly was just one strike away from really becoming a reliable contributor in the bullpen. The ineffectiveness with two strikes really did show last year, as Kelly routinely could not turn those advantageous counts into outs. He was fine on 0-2, with a .171 opposing OBP on batters through that count. But anything more than that, and you’d be hard-pressed to find good numbers. Through 1-2 counts, over 30 percent of batters reached base. When it went to 2-2, that number jumped to 35. In full counts, Kelly allowed 25 of 51 total batters faced to reach base. He had 21 walks and seven strikeouts. That’s downright repulsive.

So far in 2018, Kelly’s been much better. Ever since the Opening Day implosion, Kelly’s faced 49 batters, allowed six hits with one(!!) walk, and struck out 15 of them while allowing zero runs, earned or otherwise. That’s good for a 30.6 percent strikeout rate, a two percent walk rate, and a 1.45 FIP over that span. And he’s doing all that while still throwing as hard as he ever was. It’s seemingly the same old Joe Kelly, but what’s really going on here?

Pitch selection is key, so let’s start there. Go back to that video of the 102 mph bullet Kelly threw. The ending clip of that is a good slider that Judge simply has no chance on. The slider wasn’t Kelly’s go-to secondary pitch for the vast majority of 2017 — he liked using a curveball that didn’t really do much of anything. It was fairly middling in terms of results. The slider, however, raked in the whiffs.

Other than August, his curveball was really bad at getting swinging strikes. Last June, he threw it 35 times and got zero whiffs, then last October he threw it 10 times with zero whiffs, and so far this month, he’s thrown it four times and gotten (surprise!) zero whiffs. At this point, you’re clamoring for him to use something, anything else. And so, Joe Kelly adjusted.

His slider became his best friend. Couple that with changeup that getting a swing and a miss 33 percent of the time and he’s actually got a pair of useful, potentially wipeout pitches. The changeup is an especially good development, since it seems like common sense to pair a fastball that sits 98 with a changeup — a pitch designed to look like a fastball until the last 15 feet — that averages an 11 mph difference between it and his fastball. With that kind of velocity, you could get whiffs on those two pitches alone. Add a slider in there that isn’t too shabby either, and that’s a potentially great pitch repertoire. At the very least, it’s shown to be quite effective so far in 2018, as his 11.8 percent whiff rate is the highest of his career, while his 72 percent contact rate is the lowest of his career.

It might just be a case of Kelly being more emotive, but he seems to be pitching smarter as well, since trying to beat batters on stuff alone isn’t always a good idea. Back during the Anaheim series, the Red Sox had a plan to exploit Shohei Ohtani at the plate, and Kelly followed suit, blasting a 98 mph fastball down and in for a swinging strikeout. Kelly tapped his head to acknowledge a smart plan of attack — maybe a plan by Vazquez, and then executed by Kelly. That same gesture made an appearance once more in Texas, during a nerve-wracking Joey Gallo plate appearance. He blew past Gallo with a — you guessed it! — 98 mph heater high, and did the same thing afterwards. Stuff alone won’t make you a good pitcher, but stuff in the right spot? That’ll get you places.

This isn’t going to be all optimism, obviously. Kelly has only thrown 14.1 innings so far this year, so we’re stuck dealing with a small sample size until, well, August. Then we’ve got to deal with a .212 BABIP, a 33 percent line drive rate, and a 42 percent hard-hit rate — a rise of eight percentage points from last year. The groundballs disappearing and him throwing first-pitch strikes less than 50 percent of the time are both something we need to keep eyes on. Everything here is more than a little foreboding.

But right now, he’s striking out and walking batters at career-best rates, and finally seems to be rounding into a really good and potentially reliable late-inning arm during a point in time where the Red Sox desperately need one. It’s about time Joe Kelly started, for lack of a better term, punching people out.

Header photo by Kelley L Cox — USA TODAY Sports

1. This is about as obvious as a retaliation pitch as you’ll see. Joe Kelly legitimately steps towards Austin on the pitch. People who subscribe to the notion that there’s a certain way of doing this type of thing all seemed to think Kelly did it the “right” way, and I hate myself a tiny bit more for even writing that sentence. And then leaving it in here.

2. This is a STRONG reaction from Austin. He wastes absolutely no time letting everyone know exactly what’s about to happen. The most memorable baseball fights all have immediate mound-charging, and Austin slamming the bat is gravy. And then we get Joe Kelly beckoning too? Top-notch theatrics. Baseball fights are dumb, but if you’re going to do it, do it big.

3. Shout out to Christian Vazquez for taking his mask off, seeing Austin charge the mound, and immediately putting his mask back on.

4. Aaron Judge singularly moves entire piles of players. He just sort of picks up Joe Kelly and walks away.

5. Overall game strategy is probably the last thing on Joe Kelly’s mind at any given point, but Frequent Red Sox Tweeter @OverTheMonster has a point:

Always a good idea to waste a pitcher for petty bullshit in a game where you're already burning through your entire bullpen

— OverTheMonster (@OverTheMonster) April 12, 2018

6. What’s the rule about hitting guys? Do you have one pitch to do it? Kelly not only missed him with the first attempt, but hit Austin in his second at-bat after the aforementioned slide. People don’t forget:

The only thing I would had done different than Joe Kelly tonight, is I would’ve hit Tyler Austin at his previous at bat. Other than that, Kelly executed perfectly #YankeesvsRedSox

— Pedro Martinez (@45PedroMartinez) April 12, 2018

Sorry but it’s very Joe Kelly that he missed the first time he tried to drill Tyler Austin.

— Lindsey Adler (@lindseyadler) April 12, 2018

7. Joe Kelly won, right? It seems like Kelly definitely won.

Joe Kelly literally brough Austin to the ground but Yankees fans think he didn’t win the fight pic.twitter.com/SrBqJgpBRw

— . (@GetMeAnOffense) April 12, 2018

Joe Kelly just won an entire fanbase over again in one night. That’s impressive.

Header photo by Winslow Townson — USA TODAY Sports

That offseason, the Red Sox famously brought in future Hall of Fame pitcher and future Hall of Fame-level asshole Curt Schilling to, as it turned out, co-front the rotation. They also brought in Mark Bellhorn, Terry Francona, and maybe even more importantly, Keith Foulke. It was a murderer’s row of talent, from the front office on down. As it turned out, it was just barely enough to get past the Yankees in a second consecutive ALCS Game Seven. That was elation so high it lifted my ankles off the floor.

That two-year period where the Red Sox went from so close to winning to losing to so close to losing to winning represents certainly the most intense rivalry between two teams I’ve ever experienced or endured in my lifetime. And now, dear reader, 200 words into this, here is my point. The rivalry is back, my dudes! . It’s back! The Red Sox and the Yankees are the two best teams in the division, two of the three best in the AL and probably two of the best five or six in baseball. This season, this 2018, is going to be another huge brawl of a season. They got Severino, we got Sale. They got Judge, we got Betts. They got Stanton, we got JD. So I thought it might be instructive to look and see how these two teams stack up against each other, a tale-of-the-tape, if you will, or even if you won’t.

Let’s start here. PECOTA. The PECOTA projections are here and they are spectacular. Though maybe not if you’re the Red Sox. I’ve already detailed how the Sox individual projections maybe aren’t as positive as we’d wish they were, but in the end and as we all know, games are won on the field not inside spreadsheets. Which is good, because PECOTA has the Yankees finishing seven games up on the Sox after winning 96 games. By any measure, 89 wins for the Red Sox would be an unsuccessful season, but that’s where things stand as of now. FanGraphs does their own full season projections as well, and theirs are slightly more favorable to Boston (which makes them worth mentioning). They have the Sox at 93 wins, a game behind New York’s 94. Better, but not what we’re looking for.

So let’s go deeper. Let’s go position-by-position and see who has the advantage. I’ll give you the names and their projected WARP in parentheses.

Catcher

Gary Sanchez (4.4) vs. Christian Vazquez (1.7)

This is one of the Yankees’ biggest advantages. Sanchez is, bizarrely as it is to say, perhaps as good a hitter as Judge. Vazquez is a fantastic defensive catcher, but at this point in his career, that’s mostly all he is.

Picks

PECOTA: Yankees

Matt: Yankees

First Base

Greg Bird (1.5) vs. Moreland/Ramirez (combined 0.4)

We don’t really know what Greg Bird is as a player yet, but he was as highly touted as Judge was prior to the 2017 season, so there’s some nightmare fuel for Red Sox fans. He missed most of last season with an injury and didn’t hit well upon return, but he’s young and talented so much more is expected of him this season. Moreland is Moreland, and it’s still unclear to me why the Red Sox felt it necessary with a glut of talent available on the market, to give him a two year contract. Best case he and Hanley combine to form the two sides of a successful platoon, so that could happen. Or Hanley could remember that he’s actually a great hitter.

Picks

PECOTA: Yankees

Matt: Push

Second Base

Gleyber Torres (0.1) vs. Dustin Pedroia (1.3)

Torres is yet another great Yankee prospect, but for now we don’t know what he is at the major league level. Pedroia is an aging middle infielder coming off of surgery. So who knows on either of these guys.

Picks

PECOTA: Red Sox

Matt: Red Sox

Shortstop

Didi Gregorius (1.7) vs. Xander Bogaerts (1.4)

Ever since he’s put on the pinstripes, Gregorius has continued to get better. Over a similar timeframe Bogaerts’ numbers are going in the opposite direction. I’m still a Xander Believer though, more so than Gregorius who hacks at everything and seems like exactly the kind of hitter the juiced ball turns into something he isn’t.

Picks

PECOTA: Yankees

Matt: Red Sox

Third Base

Brandon Drury (0.4) vs. Rafael Devers (1.8)

Drury is Gregorius with a more boring name. He’s got some pop but he doesn’t take walks and he’s not much beyond average defensively. That’s a fine profile for a team with Sanchez, Judge, and Stanton, but it doesn’t move the needle much either way. Devers might be the second best hitter on the Red Sox. He’s that good.

Picks

PECOTA: Red Sox

Matt: Red Sox

Outfield

Left Field: Giancarlo Stanton (3.9) vs. Andrew Benintendi (2.1)

Center Field: Aaron Hicks (1.2) vs. Jackie Bradley (1.0)

Right Field: Aaron Judge (4.0) vs. Mookie Betts (5.2)

We’re doing outfield together because this is getting long. The funny thing to me is that the Red Sox are a team built on the strength of their outfielders. Their best hitter and maybe their second best hitter are both outfielders. Their best fielders are outfielders. This is an outfield-heavy team. And yet, up against the Yankees, the strength of this Boston team falls back. The Yankees won’t be able to keep up with Boston defensively but they won’t be bad there, and what ground they lose there will more than be made up for with their bats. Good lord, those bats. The “ifs” here are health. The Red Sox players haven’t shown any predilection for missing games to injury, but Stanton and Hicks both have missed significant time over their careers.

Picks

PECOTA: Yankees

Matt: Yankees

Designated Hitter

Brett Gardner (1.8) vs. JD Martinez (2.9)

I don’t actually know who is going to DH for New York, so I picked the best Yankee projection not included in the above sections and put him here. That’s Gardner. But no leftover Yankee is going to hold a candle to J.D. Martinez in the hitting department.

Picks

PECOTA: Red Sox

Matt: Red Sox

I was going to do the pitching staffs as well, but this has already gone on too long. We’ll leave that for next time. For now, the results. Counting the outfield as three separate positions, PECOTA has Yankees 6, Red Sox 3. I have Red Sox 4, Yankees 4 with 1 push.

Any way you slice this, and I’m sure Yankee fans would disagree with my analysis, it’s close. That we know. PECOTA shows that. FanGraphs shows that. Our eyes show that. It’s going to be another fun season. Buckle the heck up.

You may recall that in my article last week I looked at three primary factors/indicators that bode well for a Red Sox offensive bounce back. The first was age. The Red Sox lineup is mostly young and aging towards their peak seasons or already in their peak seasons. That means improvement is in the offing, very generally speaking. The second was 2018 projections. We will return to this. The third was under/over performance last season. I took the members of the 2018 Sox lineup, looked at what they did last year, and then compared that to what they were projected to do in 2017. This was an attempt to look at how the 2017 team hit compared to what a reasonable expectation would have been at the time. I found that, unsurprisingly, the team under-performed what was expected of them almost across the board.

Two of those three items — the players’ age and their under-performance relative to expectations last season — were true at the time and will remain so after this article. Now to the second item, the 2018 projections. Here’s what I wrote last week about what FanGraphs’ projections said about the Red Sox lineup:

Going by those same rough estimates, of the Red Sox starting nine, FanGraphs projects seven of the Red Sox to improve, five of which significantly. Only Pedroia and Mitch Moreland are projected to improve only slightly from their 2017 performances. Rafael Devers is projected to perform just as he did last season, only to play a full season’s worth of games, which would be a large upgrade over what the Red Sox have been getting from third basemen over the past half decade or more. Only Christian Vazquez is projected to put up a worse performance.

So that’s what FanGraphs has to say. PECOTA, however, sings a very different tune. Of the Red Sox starting nine, which at the moment includes Hanley Ramirez, only two are projected to improve on last year’s WARP total. Those two are Andrew Benintendi (projected to go from 1.8 WARP to 2.5) and the aforementioned Ramirez, who is projected to go from -0.1 WARP to 1.5. Other than that Rafael Devers and Christian Vazquez are both projected at about what they did last season (within 0.1 WARP either way). For Devers that’s problematic because he’s projected for most of a full season in 2018 where as last year he came up in late July. This means he’s projected for less value per plate appearance despite, well, everything about him. For Vazquez, it’s the same story, but in his case it makes more sense. His offense last season had the whiff of unsustainability about it, so should he come back to earth a bit, and thus he would need more playing time to achieve the same value.

The scary part of the projections comes when you look at the meat of the lineup. Mookie Betts is projected to drop a half win. Xander Bogaerts is projected to drop a win. Jackie Bradley is projected to drop 0.2 WARP but he was at 1.2 last season — a number I don’t agree with considering his defense. Mitch Moreland is projected to be worth 0.0 WARP. So that’s your 2018 Red Sox lineup. Only one guy over 2.5 WARP, and just two over 2.0.

This is probably a good time to point out a few things. Firstly, PECOTA doesn’t know Moreland and Xander played through injuries that very much impacted their performance. It only knows their performance, but presumably, with some health, there’s more performance in there for both those guys. It’s a similar story for Jackie Bradley’s knee injury at the start of the season.

Furthermore, these are only projections and conservative projections at that. To pull from another somewhat notable team, Aaron Judge is projected to drop three wins from last season’s total, and Giancarlo Stanton is projected to drop 4.5. So, you know, things could be worse.

On the whole, these will probably be solid projections, but no set of preseason projections is going to be wholly 100 percent correct. The Red Sox offense could be vastly improved over last season’s output, and if I had to guess, that would be where I would go. I still think last season was a dip in what was and is an overall good offensive team. I think more players are closer to their peak-age seasons, and with some more health, a more modern hitting approach implemented by the new hitting coach, and a bit more luck, the team should be better and far more productive in 2018.

That all said, PECOTA’s projections offer a different viewpoint, and indeed, a greater argument for signing someone like J.D. Martinez. Replacing or augmenting Ramirez’s production by adding Martinez could go a long way if indeed the offense falters in the way PECOTA is saying it will.

Then again…

Given the sheer number of free agents out there, all projections, depth charts, and fantasy predictions are kind of moot, aren't they? Either 100-plus guys' careers are over or they're going to sign and kick over all the dominoes. (Pardon my nihilistic mood.)

— Steven Goldman (@GoStevenGoldman) February 8, 2018

Photo by Bob DeChiara — USA TODAY Sports

Cameron picked Judge and Sanchez and he’s pretty clearly right. He’s right for a few reasons, but primarily because this question is a loaded one because the next five years include far more prime seasons from the Yankee duo than the Red Sox one. Judge is 25 now so his next five years include pretty much the exact seasons you’d want to have from a given player’s career. Sanchez is a year younger than Judge so he’s in almost exactly the same boat. Benintendi is 22 this season so his next five seasons barely reach his peak year of 27. Devers is 20 now so his next five don’t even get that far. All things being equal you take the guys in there prime years over the guys in their pre-prime years.

So you can see this question isn’t exactly fair. A better question might ask which set will be the most valuable over the course of their career or between the ages of 25 and 35. But that wasn’t the question asked and it wasn’t the one I ran by my editor. So let’s stick to the script and see what we can do with what we have.

To start with, this season Judge and Sanchez have combined for 12.3 WAR (FanGraphs version). That’s a baseball-leading 7.8 by Judge and the remainder, 4.5, from Sanchez. That’s FanGraphs WAR since this was a FanGraphs chat question. But for the record, by our WARP, Judge and Sanchez have totaled 12.5, so same difference. In comparison, Benintendi and Devers have totaled 3.1 by FanGraphs and 4.0 using our metrics. Devers has only been up for 50 games so he’s on pace for about a three win season, give or take. Still, you’re talking about the two Red Sox players totaling about half the value of the Yankees players. Also, we’re comparing a left fielder and a third baseman to a right fielder and a catcher. It’s much more difficult to find a good hitting catcher than a good hitting left fielder or third baseman, and the positional adjustment of WAR reflects that.

Given that Devers has been on a three-win pace as a 20 year old, you have to think he’s got some four or five win seasons coming in the near future. He may reach higher than that in his peak seasons.

Still though, the Red Sox have two very good young players on their hands. What would a good estimation of their value be over the next five seasons? Given that Devers has been on a three-win pace as a 20 year old, you have to think he’s got some four or five win seasons coming in the near future. He may reach higher than that in his peak seasons, but again, those aren’t covered under this question. Benintendi would have more value if he was in center field rather than left, so what the Red Sox do with Jackie Bradley over the next five seasons will have an impact here as well. Benintendi, like his pre-draft biography, is a high floor, lower ceiling player in that he’s not likely to fall off a cliff (he’ll get at least three wins a year reliably), but his lack of size likely limits his power output and thus ultimately his ceiling. Still, projecting four wins out of Benintendi annually seems fair. He could go higher, but let’s be conservative.

Putting all that together puts the two Sox over the next five seasons somewhere between 40 and 50 WAR. That, by the way, would be excellent production from two pre-prime players. As for the Yankees, Sanchez’s bat has fallen off this season in that he’s not hit at an Aaron Judge-ian pace all season long like he did for his abbreviated 2016 season. Aaron Judge, though, has. After all this, the big question seems to be how good is Aaron Judge? We have a pretty good idea that Sanchez should be worth four to five wins a year with maybe some fudging up or down depending on his health (he is a catcher after all) and peak seasons. Judge is a bit different. He’s a 25 year old with a .622 slugging percentage who slugged .345 in Triple-A last season. This is a guy who has made maybe the most dramatic of leaps one can imagine. That’s not to say he can’t continue to keep his production up. He’s clearly showed he has the ability to do it once so that’s a good indicator he can do it again. Will he though? Young players can struggle, as we’ve seen from Judge himself later this season before finding himself later in September. We’ve seen that from Mookie Betts as well and Xander Bogaerts before him. Eight wins a season is just really high and Judge basically put together an eight win season in about four months.

If Judge is an eight-win guy going forward, the two Red Sox are going to have trouble catching the two Yankees. Anyone would have trouble catching the two Yankees in that scenario as Judge and Sanchez would represent two of perhaps the most valuable players in baseball. Take the two best players on any team and you’ll have trouble topping Judge and Sanchez, and that includes Mike Trout and whomever else you take from the Angels.

So for the Red Sox to “win” this, Judge has to not be the MVP every damn season because that means one of Benintendi or Devers has to be a serious perennial MVP candidate. It’s possible, but that’s a tough thing to project unless a player has already shown the ability to play at that level. In other words, you’d be better off projecting Mookie Betts to win an MVP than Devers, not because Devers couldn’t win one, but because Mookie has played at that level.

So the answer, likely sadly, is that Judge and Sanchez are very likely to be more valuable. Now, alter that question a bit and the result could be different. For example, why did the questioner pick Benintendi and not Betts? Betts and Xander would be a more comparable group and you could maybe make a stronger argument for them. In fact, that would be pretty close. So in essence, this is the Yankees varsity group against the Red Sox JV. And likely the results are going to show that.

Now watch Devers win the MVP next season.

Photo by David Kohl – USA TODAY Sports