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

As good a place to start as any is the Red Sox Batting Power/Finesse split from Baseball Reference (through Sunday’s game):

Power pitchers are defined as those in the top third of the league in strikeouts plus walks, while Finesse pitchers are in the bottom third. As you can see, the Red Sox have been better against Finesse pitchers than against Power pitchers by 94 points of OPS. That on its own is not all that interesting, as almost everybody knocks around the Finesse pitchers and takes their licks against the Power guys. The interesting part is that the Red Sox’s 94-point difference is smaller than the league average of 115 points, ranking them 11^th in baseball. What’s more is the last column, which shows that the Red Sox have been only 2 percent better than the rest of the league against Finesse pitchers but 8 percent better than the rest of the league against Power pitchers.

Let’s see what that looks like at the player level. Here is how Red Sox players have fared on this split (70 season plate appearances minimum):

As I said, it is typical for players to beat up on Finesse pitchers and have difficulty against the Power guys, but four of the everyday Red Sox players (five if Pablo Sandoval is counted) have done more damage against the Power guys, and Mookie Betts’, while not better against Power pitchers, has an OPS difference that is better than league average. And even Xander Bogaerts, who has fared considerably worse against Power pitchers, has a solid OPS against them. Interestingly, Benintendi, Pedroia, Betts, and Bogaerts have the four lowest strikeout rates among the players in the table. Their contact-making ways are providing some immunity against the hard-throwing strikeout machines.

Much of the ground in the high-contact-offense v. high-velocity-strikeout-pitching was covered a few years ago when the Kansas City Royals made their back-to-back World Series appearances (winning once) with an offense that was relentless in its ability to string hits together. Trying to explain the Royals success, Ben Lindbergh, with the help of Mitchel Lichtman, found that from 2010-2015 contact hitters did fare better against power pitchers than did non-contact-focused batters. For 2017, at the team level, this relation is present but not strong. For example, the Red Sox lead the way in not striking out, but their 108 sOPS+ mark against Power pitchers, while good, only ranks 12^th in baseball, and is a far-cry from the power-pitching-destruction-units of the Dodgers, Astros and Nationals (128, 127, 120 sOPS+, respectively). All told, the correlation between team strikeout rate and OPS difference for the Power/Finesse split was small (r = 0.15), and only slightly better when related with their sOPS+ against Power pitchers (r = -0.26). Being able to avoid striking out helps combat power pitchers’ attacks, but there is clearly more to the story.

After the Royals’ World Series win in 2015, the discussion of how they had changed baseball forever with their blueprint for roster construction was rampant, but in the end it was mostly just a hyperbolic reaction to something that was remarkable in the moment. The Royals have continued to strikeout less than most, and they have actually performed better against Power pitchers than Finesse pitchers in 2017; their problem is that they have not really hit any type of pitcher very well since those magical postseason runs. Alas, the sweeping revolution of contact-focused lineups has not happened – at least is hasn’t yet – but these 2017 Red Sox certainly do bear a resemblance to those championship Royals’ offenses: they make contact and string hits together to score runs. Their ability to stay away from the strikeout, which comes from their continued success hitting with two strikes, makes them a tough offense for Power and Finesse pitchers alike. Ideally, the Red Sox get the postseason glory of those Royals teams, but carry the success beyond two seasons.

Photo by Mike DiNovo – USA TODAY Sports

Having a successful two-strike hitting approach is an often talked about area of focus for players and teams, and seems to come with advice in every direction. Shrink the zone. Expand the zone to protect the plate. Shorten up your swing. Widen your stance. Stay inside the ball. Be a two-strike brawler. I don’t really know about the specific merits of any of these things. It seems to me that having a fairly consistent approach regardless of count would reduce the likelihood of getting exploited by a pitcher’s tactics. But my advice can just as easily be added to the list in the previous sentence. In any case, whatever Red Sox hitters were doing last year when the count had two strikes, it was working. As a team they found themselves in two-strike counts around half the time, but in those situations hit .209/.277/.324, which by OPS was 30 percent better than the major league average.

This probably does not come as a huge surprise. As noted above, the Red Sox had a great offense last season, so it would be really odd if they just wilted in the face of two strikes. And if they did then we wouldn’t be talking about them as having a great offense. These two things, hitting and hitting with two strikes, are related. In four of the last five seasons the team with the highest OPS has also had the highest OPS in two-strike counts. The connection was not just at the top of the charts: for the 2011 through 2016 seasons, team hitting performance with two strikes was strongly correlated with their hitting in general (as measured by OPS; r = 0.816). Basically, good hitting teams tend to hit well (relatively) even when they are faced with two strikes.

The idea of good hitting teams hitting well in (mostly) all situations makes sense, but things get a little more interesting when looking specifically at how the Red Sox hitters performed last year. Here are all the players who accumulated at least 200 PA with the Red Sox last season, and one guy who didn’t reach that threshold but warrants inclusion:

* : did not reach 200 PA. Only had 118.

This shows a couple of noteworthy items. First, all but two Red Sox players (Travis Shaw and Christian Vazquez) posted an OPS in two-strike counts that was better than the league-average OPS (.522) in such counts last year. That result comes from Baseball Reference.com’s play index, through which a player’s performance (OPS) in a certain split (e.g., two-strike counts) can be compared to the league-wide performance in that split. The measure for this is sOPS+ and is what is shown in the third column. So David Ortiz’s 0.845 OPS with two-strikes was 121% above the league’s mark. Have we mentioned that he was 40-years old last year? What a tremendous final season.

The second noteworthy aspect of the data shown in the table is that other than Dustin Pedroia and Hanley Ramirez, all of the players who performed above the league average also performed above their career marks – note that we don’t have a major league career mark for Andrew Benintendi because he debuted last season, so for now his career mark is his 2016 mark. That overall performance is remarkable. Almost every Red Sox batter who got a reasonable amount of playing time hit better in two-strike counts last year than their established track records would have had us expect. Shaw and Vazquez, again on the wrong side of this analysis, joined Pedroia and Hanley in underperforming relative to their career levels; those two, Shaw and Vazquez, were just terrible with two-strikes last year. I recognize that there are significant questions/doubts regarding what Pablo Sandoval will provide in 2017, but Travis Shaw did not exactly leave a high-bar for him to exceed.

Having the majority of your everyday lineup and bench perform in difficult counts better than the league and better than has been typical for them is a good recipe for a potent offense. Performing better than league-average can be chalked up to the fact that Red Sox hitters are (for the most part) better than league-average hitters. The fact that almost the entire group outperformed their individual levels is related to them having strong years, generally, but is somewhat interesting. Every team gets worse with two strikes, but the Red Sox managed to limit the reduction: the ratio of their OPS with two-strikes to their total OPS was third-best in baseball. What was going on here? Were hitting coaches Chili Davis and Victor Rodriguez preaching an effective two-strike approach that the players were receptive to and able to implement? Was it just a general approach that worked regardless of count? For example, not changing the approach much, as I suggested above. Importantly, will it carry-over to 2017?

To generate a rough idea of what we might expect these hitters to do in two-strike counts in 2017 given the excellent 2016 performance, I looked into the year-over-year correlation for OPS in two-strike counts. Excellent resources already exist for this sort of analysis for many hitting statistics, but not this specific split on which I am focused – perhaps that is for a reason. In any case, I examined data from non-pitcher batters who accumulated at least 150 two-strike plate appearances in a season between 2011 and 2016. Player data sets were then divided into even and odd season halves, with the requirement that a player had at least 250 PA total in each half. In all, 257 players met these criteria. With this sample of players I found the correlation between even- and odd-OPS to be 0.548, which is moderate. It is around the values reported for OBP and SLG in the linked article (using a much larger dataset). Again, hitting and hitting with two strikes are related. Essentially, the year-over-year correlation I found suggests that about a third of the performance in two-strike counts can be attributed to something about the player’s skill, with the rest best attributed to random (or unknown) variation. Things like BABIP, pitchers faced, weather, and health will all considerably influence the outcome.

All told, last year’s over-performance in two-strike counts was wonderful, but it reeks of looming regression. Good hitters, as the Red Sox have in their lineup, are likely to perform better than the league, but going into 2017 expecting them all to perform better than their career levels again is ill advised, and the only moderate year-to-year correlation in two-strike hitting I found suggests that the performance will change due to things that are (for the most part) out of the player’s control. This certainly doesn’t mean that the offense is going to fall to bits this year. I still expect them to be a top-five group. After all, this is just one performance split and is likely much ado about nothing. But all else being similar, which is a major assumption, this is an example of why I suspect the run-scoring side of the Red Sox will not be as outstanding as it was in 2016. Good thing they worked on shoring up the run prevention side of the team this offseason.

Photo by Brad Penner/USA Today Sports Images