A number of Red Sox players were hot in the World Baseball Classic. A number did well in Spring Training. But it hasn’t really carried over into the first week of the season. The Boston Red Sox are 1-4 after a full turn of the rotation and are once again looking for Garrett Crochet to play the part of the stopper.
This is the same team that made upgrades over the winter — even if those upgrades didn’t come off the wish list of players we would have come up with. This is the rotation projected by analysts
around the industry to be the best in baseball. But Garrett Crochet was good. Connelly Early looked really good for his sophomore season debut and only a handful of starts last season. Sonny Gray wasn’t impressive. Ranger Suárez looked like he was still trying to catch up after missing time pitching this spring due to WBC rotation issues. And Brayan Bello had good and bad innings.
Mathematically, the first five games count as much as the last five but the impact seems even larger because there are no other games on the season record to hide a run of four poor performances. Everything at the start of the season is magnified.
But let’s step back.
Willson Contreras is a veteran. He’s a career .257/.352/.458 hitter over his 11 years in MLB. How many times over a five-game span has he gone gotten two hits or fewer? 172. That’s obviously distributing them across the season but that’s the point. And there have been variations in his playing time over the samples. As many as 22 at bats and as few as 10. At the start of 2025 he was 0-19 over the first five games. In 2018 and 2022 he had 7 hits in 25 and 18 at bats, respectively.
He’s a year older, granted, but still likely to have his typical Willson Contreras season.
Trevor Story? He’s not piling up big starts in five games all the time either. In 2016 he had six home runs in the first five games of the season. But he also had totals of 2, 1, 1, and 1 with the other six seasons being zero home runs.
Roman Anthony doesn’t have a long career to draw on and he is putting up some bad numbers for his short career. On Tuesday he struck out three times on a total of nine pitches. That’s not great. He struck out four times in a game for the first time this season and first time since July 2025. As you may recall, he turned things on quite a bit for a while as July turned into August.
And while the hitters have looked bad there’s also some amount of the struggle that isn’t in their control. Maybe they’re facing really tough pitchers?
This is likely not the only reason. The bats have been slow to warm up even as spring is in the air in Boston, a month removed from seven-foot piles of snow occupying the city.
And while the Red Sox also have, at least on paper, a good pitching staff that could be dominating opposing lineups, sometimes these things happen. Remember Bello and Lucas Giolito heading into last June? Disaster. And then both of those guys started throwing well.
No one wants to wait until June — the Sox squandered a lot of April and May wins in 2025 that might have been nice to have come September — the calendar is only just turning to April. We’re not at the Marathon game yet. Opening Day at Fenway Park hasn’t even happened. For a moment, perhaps, let’s give these guys a chance to turn things around.
