There’s a certain string of emotions when watching sports that everyone has experienced. It’s the general “sinking stone” feeling. Your team gets out to a lead, and sure, it’s a bit shaky. You convince yourself that it’ll be okay, that the feeling is just fleeting. As if some deity heard you, everything goes bad the moment you do that. Your heart drops into your foot. It’s pure, unadulterated carnage, but you can’t stop watching. You’ve already accepted defeat and the game’s not even halfway over. Your eyes glaze over and you wish for it to end. (Eat at Arby’s.)

The Red Sox used newly-acquired Roenis Elias as a starter for one game. Go back to that last paragraph, start from “Your heart drops…”, and re-read it from there. You have now encapsulated that one start. Congratulations!

What Went Right In 2016

Literally nothing. He is a cautionary tale in what happens when you need your tenth-best starter to pitch.

Okay, maybe not nothing, but if I’m looking for a silver lining here, he at least resembled a starting pitcher in Pawtucket. Compared to the next segment, that’s pretty okay.

What Went Wrong In 2016

From the start, it was bad.

He started three games in Spring Training and turned in one decent start. He was optioned to Triple-A at the end of March, as he had no shot to make the rotation at that point. The Red Sox called him up for some bullpen help on April 22nd. The next day, the Houston Astros scored three runs off of him over 1.2 innings. Elias was sent down the day afterwards to make room for Henry Owens. Yeah. That was a thing.

Elias was then called up on June 17th to make that one fateful start against his former team, the Seattle Mariners. Here’s how Franklin Gutierrez greeted him:

Park attendants are still looking for that second home run ball. As you can expect, he was sent back down again soon after.

Third time wasn’t really the charm for Elias, as the next time he was called up, he allowed a run over two innings while facing the Arizona Diamondbacks. Not as bad as his last two outings, but still ineffective. Nine batters faced, four hits, no strikeouts, no walks. Sigh.

The Red Sox opted to go with Owens and even Sean O’Sullivan as their spot starter over Elias several times in 2016. Combine that with Carson Smith needing Tommy John surgery, and you’ve got a Wade Miley trade that did very little for either team in 2016. Not great, Bob!

What To Expect in 2017

He’s not this bad. Probably. Elias has done better in the majors before and he’s flashed limited strikeout potential. His ceiling isn’t high, but the most you can expect from him is a spot-start or two and some long relief appearances when the bullpen’s gassed. He’ll first have to be a better pitcher than Owens or even O’Sullivan if he wants to get a decent amount of innings, and if we’re being fair here, that bar isn’t set particularly high. If he can’t, he’s only a passable LOOGY that’s stuck behind Robby Scott. It’s a hard-knock life for starting pitcher depth.

Photo by Bob DeChiara/USA Today Sports Images

Last season went as well for Henry Owens as “Our American Cousin” did for Mary-Todd Lincoln; take out Owens’s effectively one walk per inning in his limited big-league run (or a similarly bad rate in AAA) and you might feel some fondness for the performance, much as Mrs. Lincoln may have enjoyed the show at Ford’s Theater, spousal murder notwithstanding. That, of course — as the line from a far more famous play goes — is the rub, and in neither case can we get past it.

But Owens’ Red Sox career, and his long-term future in Major League Baseball, is still alive. There is not a lot of hope, but there are examples of players with durable arms figuring their stuff out later in their careers, or at least after the age of 25, and a tall lefty is gonna get every chance to prove himself over the long term. If Owens fails himself out of Dave Dombrowski’s good graces, there’s almost no question that another organization will try to salvage him; one man’s trash, etc. At the very least, Boston’s current glut of potential starting pitchers (so many of them lefties) eases the burden on Owens to perform well right away, at least in theory. In practice, no number of starting pitchers is too many, and as long as he’s around, Owens might be called on for some garbage time innings in 2017. In the rare event they’re not garbage when he starts, they probably will be when he finishes. He’s got a long way to go.

What went right in 2016

On April 29, Owens pitched six innings of two-run ball at Fenway against the Yankees in a game that the Red Sox would eventually win 4-2. He struck out three, walked three, allowed a homer to A-Rod (his 691st) and six hits total. He left facing a 2-0 deficit, but the Sox would score two in the bottom of the seventh and take the lead for good on a David Ortiz two-run homer in the eighth. He neither pitched particularly well nor got the win, but it was unequivocally and far and away his best performance of the year out of the grand total of five appearances he made.

What went wrong in 2016

He was beaten out by Sean O’Sullivan for an emergency rotation spot, which says most of what you need to know. Owens’s other four appearances were a disaster, and his time in the minor leagues was *slightly* better. He was so bad in the show you’d think that he’d been replaced by Daniel Day-Lewis… except in that case you’d expect DD-L to be, you know, good. Owens was awful. The next time he toed the rubber following the Yankees start, he lasted three innings on the South Side against the White Sox, walking six, striking out two and allowing two runs. He’d only appear in two games after that: a spot start in Detroit in August (5 IP, 8 ER) and another one in September after the Sox had clinched the east against the Yankees in the Bronx (4.2 IP, 2 ER). At no point did it seems like there was any “there” there with Owens, who threw 120+ IP at Pawtucket over the year and still couldn’t find the plate (5.3 BB/9). But hey, he had a 3.53 ERA! Which leads us to…

What to expect in 2017:

Can Owens find the mound at Fenway this year? Barring a miracle turnaround or a disastrous sequence for the Boston rotation, the answer is probably NONONONONO PLEASE NO. At the same time, I don’t see how the Sox could find much value in moving on from him now… which doesn’t mean they won’t, but Owens’s value is either at a historical low or never existed to begin with. That sounds harsh, but the former is still more likely than the latter. There’s not much incentive to give up on Owens now — in fact, there’s a disincentive. The only thing left is upside, but there’s no telling if Owens really has a second act, or we’re already at the end.

Photo by Kamil Krazynski/USA Today Sports Images

Top Play (WPA)

Nothing was bigger – or more game-changing – than Hanley Ramirez’s monster blast to left-center field in the first inning.

That ball came off the bat at 114 mph, went 468 feet, and became the second-longest homer in the majors, just behind a 474-foot colossus that Giancarlo Stanton hit. Hanley’s .144 WPA moonshot set the tone for what was to happen for the first few innings. The Red Sox went to town on Oakland’s Sean Manaea, and the poor rookie didn’t even make it out of the third inning before getting yanked.

Bottom Play (WPA)

The A’s unsurprisingly take the cake here. Trouble was brewing in the top of the third inning, when Chris Coghlan came up to bat. Coghlan hit a single to center, where Jackie Bradley Jr. was waiting, and Oakland’s third base coach, Ron Washington, decided to send Billy Butler. Yes, you read that right.

There’s been better sends, I reckon. That play was worth a -.038 WPA, and killed any hope of the A’s catching up to the Red Sox early. I’m not sure what the rationale was there, but Billy Butler is – as the scouts say it – not fast.

when the catcher forgets how gosh darn slow Billy Butler is pic.twitter.com/pHx1CldlEO

— Matthew Kory (@mattymatty2000) May 10, 2016

Key Moment

The entire bottom of the third inning. The Red Sox, fresh off nailing Butler by a parsec at the plate, poured it on. Sean Manaea didn’t know what hit him. The first five batters all reached base, and the Red Sox had scored three runs before the first out of that half of the inning. The sequence of that inning went as follows: 1B, 2B, 1B, 1B, 1B, F8, 2B, pitching change, K. Generally speaking, five-run innings tend to clinch games for you.

Trend to Watch

Here comes Hanley Ramirez. We’ve been waiting for the power to appear, and it’s arrived in a big way. Over the last two weeks, Ramirez is slashing a robust .364/.451/.591 with three dingers. He’s gotten a hit in 11 out of the 12 games in that same span of time. Everything he makes contact on seems to be an absolute rocket. His shoulder isn’t a crumpled mess. Who knew Hanley could be this much fun when he’s on?

Coming Next

The Red Sox go for the sweep on Wednesday, as they’ll send out newly anointed staff ace Rick Porcello to face Eric Surkamp. No Rich Hill in this series, sadly.

Photo by Bob DeChiara/USA Today Sports Images