Which was true. In two years on the JV team I never had smoke blown up my ass, not once. I never saw smoke machine, a lit cigarette, a pair of rubber gloves, or anything else that might be necessary to get the unsavory job done either  during or after practice. The origin and history of such a line has always escaped me, perhaps because I’ve studiously avoided googling “blow smoke up ass” but, assuming you’re not a practicing proctologist, perhaps it’s best we move on, except to say this. Red Sox fans: I’m not here to blow smoke up your asses.

This has been an awful month for the Red Sox. In addition to a lousy record, they’ve lost repeatedly in painful fashion, showed a complete inability to pitch, hit in the clutch, field at crucial moments, and, adding injury to injury, endured injuries to key players. So it’s not been good. And because of all that, and because of the resulting anger, sadness, and general negativity surrounding the Red Sox, I thought it might be time to focus on happier things. Because while we’ve been so busy being angry, throwing things, swearing, and writing really mean things on Twitter about the team before reconsidering how silly it would look at the last second and deleting it, there are actually a lot of very good things going on with this team. Right now even! It’s true. Let’s look.

The Youth

Of the nine players who have comprised the most common lineup, five of them are 26 years old or younger. They include the starting shortstop, center fielder, right fielder, third baseman, and catcher, who collectively average 24.6 years. That’s incredible. And the amazing thing is there looks to be three long-term All Stars in that bunch too. This isn’t a group of random young players assembled because there weren’t other better choices, this is the group you’ve been waiting for as long as you’ve been a Red Sox fan. Xander Bogaerts, Mookie Betts, and Jackie Bradley are the core of a multi-pennant winning franchise. This could be the start of something great.

Remember those incredibly annoying Yankees teams from the late 90s and early 2000s? The ones winning division title after division title and racking up World Series trophies? They were built on a foundation of youth, and even more so, of a group of very good players of similar age spending their careers together. When the Yankees won their first World Series of that era in 1996, Derek Jeter was 22 years old. Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada were 24, Mariano Rivera was 26, and Bernie Williams was 27. When that group had won their final World Series in 2009, Jeter was 35, Pettitte and Posada were 37, Rivera was 39 and Williams had retired.

There were many other players along the way worth mention, but the point is, when you have a core group that good, you can fill in around the edges. You bring in veterans, bring up competent youngsters, and try to supplement the core as much as possible, but when you’re starting with that kind of quality at the beginning, you don’t have to do an amazing job to reach the final goal. The Yankees, with that group, gave themselves a huge advantage and over the years, and they managed to take advantage of it a lot. The Red Sox are setting themselves up to be in a similar spot.

The System

With Betts, Bogaerts, Bradley, the catching tandem of Swihart and Vazquez, and Shaw, who may not be a star but looks to be at least a starting-quality third baseman, the Red Sox are already doing well on the youth front. But then there’s Andrew Benintendi, another center fielder (after Bradley and Betts) who is burning through the system. Yoan Moncada looks like he could be the third baseman, left fielder, or first baseman of the future. There’s Rafael Devers, who at 19 has more power in his bat than anyone in the system, which, considering the system, is saying something. There’s also Anderson Espinoza, Michael Kopech, and maybe, hopefully, Jason Groome. Some of those guys won’t pan out, and some will be dealt, but there is a tremendous amount of talent coming. We often say as a fan base that we want to be competitive, which is partly why this past month has been so dispiriting, but this level of talent on the way virtually guarantees competitiveness. And hopefully it should do a lot more than that.

The Ownership 

We love to knock the owners here in Red Sox Nation. I’m guilty of it as well on occasion, but the truth is it’s hard to ask for better owners than the Red Sox have had in John Henry and Tom Werner. They’ve made missteps for sure (losing Theo Epstein is a Grade A sin in my book) but think about what they’ve accomplished. They renovated Fenway Park, the jewel of baseball, and made it fit for another generation. I’m bringing my kids there next week for their first trip and they can’t wait. Would we care as much about the Red Sox if they played in a dome in Southie? We’d still care, but the connection to the past, and the environment the games exist in, these things matter. And Henry and company are a huge reason why the team still has Fenway.

They’ve hired smart people and let those people do their jobs unencumbered. Again, there have been missteps along the way (Bobby Valentine comes quickly to mind and hopefully leaves as quickly) but Theo Epstein, GM of two World Series winners, was allowed, before he could call himself that, to trade the face of the franchise in Nomar Garciaparra for a decent starting shortstop and a backup glove-first first baseman. Later Ben Cherington was allowed to ship the team’s stars, virtually all of them, to LA for essentially nothing at all. There are more examples, but those stand out to me as among the most egregious and still, the men in charge were allowed to do their jobs, and in doing so, they followed an unlikely route to a championship.

David Ortiz

Finally, be thankful for David Ortiz. We’ve covered him here extensively and I imagine we’ll be doing so more as the season winds down, but please, be mindful of what we’re watching. Remember what Ortiz has accomplished in his career, the amazing hits, the hundreds of homers, and the shockingly clutch performances. Then look at what he’s doing right now. He’s authoring maybe the greatest age-40 season of any player ever. But whether he succeeds in finishing that and scrawling his name into the record books once again or not, this is a season that we should be thankful for because, ultimately we’re watching one of the greats both at the end of his career and in his prime.

The Future

For all those reasons, the team’s youth and expectations for improvement, their impressive stable of minor league prospects, their ownership, and the great Big Papi, rejoice, Red Sox fans! Maybe, like at the end of Ghostbusters 2, the team just needs to feel some positivity, some love, to push it in the right direction. But even if the 2016 season doesn’t end in a championship, know that the future is promising, friends. And that ain’t nothing. Indeed at the end of a month like June, remembering that can pull you back from the brink and remind you that things can and will get better.

Winning some damn games now and again wouldn’t be a bad start, though.

Photo by Greg M. Cooper/USA Today Sports Images

Maybe it wasn’t.

I’m not saying he was secretly good out there—that would be one hell of a secret. And I’m not saying it’s up in the air, because 747.2 innings is such a small sample—it is, but not so small that defensive metrics this extreme aren’t meaningful. What I am saying is that even after adjustments, defensive metrics may have been unfair to Red Sox left fielders, making a very bad season look so bad that it’s hard to believe.

Take out both Ramirezes, and Red Sox left fielders have a -7.3 UZR/150 that would still rank dead last in all of baseball over the last 14 years.

Maybe we need to leave this at the feet of a different Ramirez, to some extent: Manny Ramirez was installed in left field when advanced defensive statistics were first publicly reported, and in 6,478.2 career innings in left for the Red Sox, he managed a -21.0 UZR/150 and looked like a bad fielder. Manny’s stats passed the smell test. And for every other left fielder to have logged 1,000 or more innings in left for the Red Sox, there seemed to be some other way to explain the negative defensive statistics away. Jason Bay and Jonny Gomes were never that great defensively anyway. Carl Crawford was getting older, and had trouble adjusting. Daniel Nava got bounced around too much.

But maybe it’s more than that. Take out both Ramirezes, and Red Sox left fielders have a -7.3 UZR/150 that would still rank dead last in all of baseball over the last 14 years.* Has the team been more comfortable putting bad fielders there than other teams? Maybe. But with all due respect to the ghost of Brian Daubach’s career, it seems unlikely that after taking out two of the team’s worst fielders, the remaining left fielders were still worse than everyone else.

*Note: I got this number after applying some high school algebra to numbers that were already rounded, so it may not be exact—but there’s a lot of room between -7.3 UZR/150 over 13,052.2 innings and the -6.1 UZR/150 Phillies.

Just like Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating is mostly a function of its range component, RngR. Among the other components, the effect of an outfielder’s arm (ARM) and the effect of boneheaded or inspired plays (ErrR) are next-most important. You should care, because in RngR, the chasm between the Red Sox and the next-worst team is mind numbing: -157.9 RngR to the Phillies’ -112.4 RngR. And just as Fenway taketh away, it also giveth. The Red Sox rank a little differently in ARM than they do in UZR/150 overall, as I’ve once again shown elegantly with a red arrow drawn on a touchpad:

Caveat time: I’m not able to find home/road splits for UZR (or DRS), so if what we’re getting after here really is about Fenway, the effect might be twice the size of what it looks like. Also, how UZR treated left at Fenway was tweaked when the park factors used were made more sophisticated before the 2010 season. It’s probably no accident that among the left fielders with at least 200 innings for the Red Sox, many of  the positive marks came from the last few seasons: Jackie Bradley Jr., Rusney Castillo, Yoenis Cespedes, Alejandro De Aza and Brock Holt. Some of this information is still useful, though, for estimating the size of the grain of salt we should take with Hanley Ramirez’s stats last year.

This graph doesn’t tell you how many innings each of these left fielders actually had (see for yourself, if you like), but you get the picture. Some usual suspects, but a few surprises, as well.

Hanley rated worse than Manny did over his career in left, but the -31.9 UZR/150 was hardly unprecedented: Manny’s -33.8 UZR/150 in 2006 was worse. The main difference between them was the extent to which they affected the game with their throwing arms. We don’t have UZR for Manny’s first season in 2001, but in 2002, he didn’t do so hot in ARM: -4.1, almost as bad as Yoenis Cespedes was good in his limited time. After 2002, though, Manny put up a 13.5 ARM, putting a serious dent in his shortcomings with range.

Manny didn’t do dramatically better in left for the Dodgers than he did for the Red Sox, but he did do better, and that was despite seeing his ARM marks go negative once he got there. Looking only at RngR, Manny got worse as he got older: -2.5 ARM in 2002, when he was still DHing, then -9.6, -13.0, and a whopping -30.1 in 2005 when he set his career-high for innings. In Manny’s No Good, Terrible, Very Bad Year in 2006 his RngR was -27.7 (which was actually worse, given a 200 inning drop), and the -13.8 he ended up with in 2007 could have been a real improvement, luck, or both. In the year he split with the Dodgers, though, he improved to -9.5, about where he was in his first full UZR year in left in 2002 in a handful fewer innings. His -4.6 RngR in 2009 is astonishing, even if it was in just 812 innings—and his -3.2 in 2010 in 359.2 innings is almost as surprising. Basically, Manny left Fenway, and then his range was only about one third as bad as it was with the Red Sox. In 2009, the man turned 37 years old.

Manny left Fenway, and then his range was only about one third as bad as it was with the Red Sox. In 2009, the man turned 37 years old.

But wait—there’s more. Carl Crawford was a great left fielder for Tampa Bay; for all of his full seasons, he had a RngR of between 11.7 and 16.5, except for one season. Preceding his Red Sox tenur, Crawford had that 16.5 RngR and then a 14.9 … and then seemed to flush himself down the toilet with a -1.5 RngR in his only full season with Boston (his partial 2012 was also essentially a zero). Back playing left for the Dodgers in 2013, he had a 9.1 RngR in a not-quite-full season’s worth of playing time, essentially picking right back up where he left off for the Rays.

Not sold yet? Then take the left fielder with the second-most innings out there in the UZR era. Daniel Nava’s -7.7 UZR/150 in left was nothing to write home about either way and his 1,702.2 innings were about a thousand short of the sample size we generally consider meaningful. Still, Nava buoyed that number with a 5.1 ARM, and his -14.4 RngR was… not good. But Nava didn’t just play left—he also played 1117 innings of right field, where he had a positive 4.5 RngR and 9.9 UZR/150. Better than J.D. Drew in right, and yet almost as far below average in left as he was above average in right.

A big part of the Green Monster tradeoff is the ability to help control baserunners, but it’s possible that learning to throw from Fenway’s left field requires some kind of adjustment (especially if one is learning the outfield for the first time). Even in the context of Red Sox left fielders, Hanley Ramirez’s -10.5 RngR in just over a half-season of work was flat-out bad. His ridiculously awful -7.3 ARM in the same span is what made his UZR/150 that next level of awfulness, though, and the similar marks for DRS told a similar story (-10 rPM, -5 rARM). It’s possible that learning to throw from the outfield was especially challenging for Ramirez, but ARM is mostly inferential—it is affected by what baserunners try as much as what they try unsuccessfully. A few well-publicized gaffes in the outfield early in the season very well could encouraged runners to try to take extra bases much more often, and then the problem may have snowballed, with the “right” throwing decisions changed for Ramirez.

Balls that hit the wall and aren’t catchable by BIS’s estimation aren’t included in UZR’s RngR calculations. So what gives? I don’t have an explanation, and as I’m not half as smart as Mitchel Lichtman, I wouldn’t deign to suggest there’s an obvious problem in the metrics. It does seem like something is here, though, and it might be as simple as what happens to Coors Field hitters, with home/road adjustments making for a harder row to hoe overall. For now, though, I feel like we don’t necessarily need to heap so much abuse on our man Hanley. And it may be wise to temper our defensive stats expectations for Rusney Castillo and Chris Young this year as well.

Photo by Mark L. Baer/USA Today Sports Images

But to some extent, the Red Sox’s BABIP may always be a bit lower than their batting average would lead us to expect. After all, they play half their games in a park where this can happen:

That bit of thunder from Allen Craig’s boomstick had an estimated “true distance” of 326 feet. In only six parks would that have even hit the wall, and I’m going to go ahead and guess that at PNC Park and Progressive Field (both 325 feet), 326 feet still means “in play.” I know what you’re thinking, so I’m going to save you the time: 325 feet at McCoy Stadium.

The point is that ballparks provide some inconsistencies that you don’t have in other sports, including, say, football. Game conditions can change in football, just as in baseball, but I wonder if even that doesn’t make as much of a difference; hitters don’t have quite as much control over a ball’s trajectory in the first place as a quarterback would have. Especially if footballs were especially easy to throw for some reason.

In last week’s edition of Read Sox, Nick Canelas addressed the close connection between Deflategate and MLB’s new ball “security and storage” policy. Apparently, MLB sent a memo to teams before the season with a “nine-step procedure on ball handling” according to this AP report. From the AP report:

“Obviously, there’s not as much that you can do to baseballs,” Los Angeles Angels pitcher C.J. Wilson said. “I mean, you can’t change the density of the baseball at any point — unless you dunk them in water. Then they’re going to be 9 ounces, and everyone’s going to blow their arms out.”

As right as he’s been on hair products, I have to disagree with Wilson here. Water isn’t always a liquid, and although water vapor can’t get shampoo out of your hair, it can affect the baseball. The results are not trivial.

And weight is only part of it. In a guest piece about humidors at Baseball Prospectus four years ago, Dr. Alan Nathan explained how absorption of water can affect batted ball velocity. Published lab experiments tell us that in terms of balls hit hard enough to become home runs, baseballs stored at 50% humidity lose about 0.6 mph in batted ball velocity as opposed to balls stored at 30% humidity (used as an approximation for Denver). But humidity also affects baseballs in another, more meaningful way: it’s also about how a “mushier” ball has a lower coefficient of restitution (like a Chicago-style softball). The decrease in bounciness for the same ball would mean about a 2.2 mph difference in batted ball velocity.

From what we’re starting to see from newly-available batted ball data this year, this is probably not just about home runs — many of the grounders we see are hit just as hard as home runs (definitely a lot more than I had thought), and overall velocity seems to have a huge effect on how frequently a ball falls in for hit. It seems to really matter, although with fielding in the mix (unlike with home runs), it may be a while before we can confidently start to draw conclusions about the extent.

In the BP piece, Dr. Nathan suggested that the Coors Field humidor has likely reduced home runs there by 30±6 percent. The potential effect of a humidor at Chase Field could be even more significant; Phoenix is twice as dry as Denver. Boston, on the other hand, is in some months as different from a humidor as Denver is — just in the other direction. Although the Denver humidor suppresses offense by increasing the humidity of baseballs, 50% humidity storage in Boston would mean a decrease — and the ball would travel farther.

One good thing about calculating reductions in home run distance is that you already know which batted balls to use. The flip side isn’t exactly true; the point would be that some of the fly balls that died on the track might end up over the fence. But looking specifically at balls that were already home runs and assuming that Dr. Nathan’s distance calculations would be linear even if in the other direction, I took a look at the possible effect of humidors at all MLB parks in a piece at Beyond the Box Score last November.

Some of the results: -13.1 feet on home runs balls in Denver becomes +7.9 feet in Boston, as a humidor might reduce the humidity of baseballs from 59% (average in Boston from April to September) to 50%. I’m not sure exactly how fence height plays into this for fly balls that have almost come back to earth (I’m estimating with a 30 degree angle), but while that Allen Craig home run might only have been over the fence in two or three parks, it looks to me like another eight feet might have put it over in 15 of 30 parks. Like I said: not trivial.

Although the Denver humidor suppresses offense by increasing the humidity of baseballs, 50% humidity storage in Boston would mean a decrease — and the ball would travel farther.

According to the AP report, the MLB memo from before Opening Day specified 50 percent humidity for baseball storage. That makes complete sense: it’s the exact level that Rawlings itself uses for its baseball storage, and for that reason, it’s what the Coors humidor is set at. It’s also what I assumed in that Beyond the Box Score exercise. But if the Red Sox wanted baseball storage at that level, it wouldn’t require adding moisture as in Denver, but taking moisture out of the air.

I have no idea how the Red Sox store their baseballs right now, so take all this with that caveat. But even if the team does have a “de-humidor” that is inspected and used just before games, that doesn’t end the inquiry.

Last year, Dr. Nathan kindly confirmed that it is almost certainly more appropriate to use an average of average daily humidity levels, rather than an average afternoon humidity level — the humidity of the air can fluctuate enormously, and it gets lowest when things get hottest, making early afternoon generally the driest part of the day. Dr. Nathan noted that it took about three days for a ball to acclimate to the air in laboratory settings.

From the AP report, it seems like the balls are closely supervised — but only on the day of the game. Balls ticketed for the umpires’ room are in storage prior to that. So what happens then? And for that rate, what about the air going into the umpires’ room? Maybe there was a memo requiring them to be hermetically sealed after Jason Grimsley’s adventure in 1994, but I’m guessing there’s an air vent that, you know, air could get through.

Baseball’s version of Deflategate didn’t come in the playoffs, but in September 2010 when Tim Lincecum had some colorful things to say about the Rockies supposedly switching balls mid-game. MLB took the ball-fetching part of the procedure out of the Rockies’ hands, and with the memo this year did the same for everyone. Now, it’d be like letting the grass get long if you think you’re relying on ground ball pitchers, or watering the infield if you’re slower than the other team: if it might affect one team more than the other (fly ball pitcher coming to town?), it can still be an advantage.

Which is all to say: there’s still the potential for shenanigans here. Kudos to MLB for making a change in recognition that the Rockies aren’t the only team that could manipulate the humidity of baseballs to gain an advantage, but the Red Sox can still act the fox. Regardless of how the balls are stored, the balls turned over to the umpires’ room on Friday are stored in the henhouse for meaningful days beforehand.

Photo by Tommy Gilligan/USA Today Sports Images