This Red Sox season has been an exercise in one-step-forward-two-steps-back. And that rubric doesn’t just apply to the game-to-game results, but to the injuries as well. How many times have we gone from “minor injury, hopes to avoid the IL,” to “recovery progressing, hopes to begin rehab assignment soon,” to “RIP, gone but not forgotten”? Roman Anthony has already gone through that cycle, but we may have gotten good news recently. Anthony underwent yet another MRI this week — but this one was apparently
one of the good MRIs, performed just to check in on how things are going. ““Everything looked good, healing properly,” Chad Tracy said. Of course we still don’t have any timeline on his return, but hey, we’ll take what we can get. (Christopher Smith, MassLive)
We also got some promising news on Garrett Crochet, which came with a bit more specifics. He’s been cleared to start some “light throwing of weighted plyometric balls, which, y’know, aren’t the kind of balls they use in MLB, but they’re better than no balls at all. (Peter Abraham, Boston Globe)
Unfortunately, we may have reached the point where it’s too late for Anthony and Crochet to save the season. And if that’s the case, we can blame the Sox’ performance against the rest of the AL East. “The Sox have a horrendous 6-15 mark against divisional opponents – the second-worst record by any AL team within its own division. (Only the Tigers, with a 6-16 mark against the AL Central, had an inferior mark.)” (Alex Speier, Boston Globe)
The primary reason why the season may already be over is, of course, the Sox’ terrible offense. With so many individual hitters struggling, we’re starting to see something interesting at Fenway Park: private hitting instructors who do not work for the team. While the optics of this aren’t great, it’s not necessarily something novel. “At this level, players have had a lot of coaches throughout their careers. When they get to this level, there’s a lot of people who have helped them have success,” says Sox interim hitting coach John Soteropulos. (Chris Cotillo, MassLive)
And with the season slipping away, it’s no surprise that the Red Sox are involved in so much trade speculation. ESPN ranked the top-25 trade candidates for the upcoming deadline and included 4 Sox players on the list, led by Aroldis Chapman at number 8. (Kiley McDaniel, Jeff Passan, ESPN)
But despite all the trade chatter — and the, uh, standings — CBO Craig Breslow isn’t yet prepared to surrender the ship. Yesterday he appeared on the NESN pregame show and said he was “absolutely not” giving up on the season yet. “Right now, given we’ve got six weeks or so before the deadline, our focus is on doing everything we can to give ourselves a chance to win the game each night.” (Jen McCaffrey, The Athletic)
But while Breslow is probably prudent to wait for as long as he can before going into sell-mode, the fact that the only noise at Fenway is being made by traveling Scottish fans in town for the Wold Cup tells you all you need to know about the direction of this season. (Justin Turpin, WEEI)
