Red Sox - 020 000 000 - 2 7 2 Orioles - 310 220 30x - 11 14 0The Orioles began Friday with a 29-66 record. That's the worst record in the majors, but it's actually three games better than what the team had done last season after 95 games. (So things are looking up in Baltimore.) The Red Sox are nowhere near the best team in the American League (at 53-44, they are 9th among 15 teams), but they managed to win their 29th game way back on May 27!
The Orioles are bad at everything. They cannot score runs (27th out of 30 teams) and they cannot prevent runs (29th in runs allowed). And yet the Birds had a grand old time on a sweltering evening at Camden Yards, battering David Price (4-8-6-1-4, 88), who backed up his recent idiotic comments about Dennis Eckersley with his second-worst outing of the season.
Price lasted only four innings and allowed at least two baserunners in every one of them. He gave up home runs to known-mashers Anthony Santander (whose last extra-base hit had come on July 1) and Keon Broxton (owner of a .264 slugging percentage).
Not than anyone else wearing a Boston uniform looked all that good tonight. The first five spots in the Red Sox lineup went 1-for-18. Sam Travis (hitting #6) did yank his first dong of the year, but Baltimore gained one of those runs back in a hurry when Richie Martin tripled to right and scored on J.D. Martinez's fielding error.
Martin, who would have to get hot with the bat for a fortnight to hit his weight (and he's not chubby), lined a pitch to deep right. Martinez drifted back, but he stopped at the warning track and watched the baseball hit off the wall about three feet up from the ground. (Martinez is 6-3, so he probably could have made a basket catch.) The carom eluded Martinez to his glove side and he proceeded to chase after the ball, heading back towards the infield. The ball had stopped and he tried to pick it up, but missed it. At this point, Jackie Bradley finally materialized maybe 10 feet away. JBJ arrived on the scene so late, I assume he had been in a shift, playing Martin on the left field foul line (literally). Martinez finally got rid of the ball, but Travis's relay to the plate was only for show.
After Broxton's homer made it 6-2 and Martin followed with a single, Price proceeded to strike out the next three batters (the top third of the Orioles' order). I guess it took 18 batters and 72 pitches for Price to get properly warmed up.
Colton Brewer began the fifth - and he did not believe in wasting any time digging himself a hole. After a called strike, Brewer's next three pitches were: single, single, HBP. Loading the bases in four pitches, that's some trick. After a sac fly and a walk to re-fill the sacks, Brewer left and Ryan Weber came in. He pitched the rest of the way (3.2-4-3-1-3, 59).
Bradley and Sandy León, down at the bottom of the Red Sox's lineup, each had two hits. In the seventh, they were on first and third with one out, but Mookie Betts flied to right and Rafael Devers struck out. (Of course, the game was out of reach at that point, anyway.) Two innings earlier, with Michael Chavis and León on base, the same hitters had failed, Betts fouling to the catcher and Devers popping to third.
AL East: MFY 8, Rockies 2. White Sox 9, Rays 2. ... MFY –, TBR 9.0, BOS 11.0.
Betts, DHIf Mookie Betts scores a run tonight, he will set a Red Sox franchise record by scoring in 14 consecutive games. He is currently tied with Ted Williams at 13 consecutive games in a single season.
Devers, 3B
Bogaerts, SS
Martinez, RF
Vázquez, 1B
Travis, LF
Chavis, 2B
Bradley, CF
León, C
Betts leads MLB with 86 runs scored (nine more than Cody Bellinger and 11 more than Mike Trout). He's on pace to score 144 runs. Only Ted Williams has scored 140+ runs in a season for the Red Sox (see below). The last player for any team to do it was Alex Rodriguez, who scored 143 runs for the 2007 Yankees.
Most Runs Scored, Season, Red Sox
10 of these 11 seasons came within a 15-year period (1936-1950). ... Betts scored 129 runs last year. ... Amazingly, Ted Williams's first five seasons are among the top eight spots on this list (1939-42, 1946 (he missed 1943-45 because of military service)).150 - 1949 - Ted Williams 142 - 1946 - Ted Williams 141 - 1942 - Ted Williams 139 - 1938 - Jimmie Foxx 136 - 1912 - Tris Speaker 135 - 1941 - Ted Williams 134 - 1940 - Ted Williams 131 - 1939 - Ted Williams 131 - 1950 - Dom DiMaggio 130 - 1936 - Jimmie Foxx 130 - 1939 - Jimmie Foxx
Baseball Reference has the probabilities of each team reaching the postseason. "To compute these odds, we simulate the rest of the season and the postseason 1,000 times each day. The methodology relies on Baseball-Reference's Simple Rating System (SRS), which provides a strength-of-schedule-adjusted rating of each team, expressed in runs per game better or worse than an average team."
The page also includes each team's best and worst season from those 1,000 simulations. Best Red Sox season: 93-69. Worst Yankees season: 94-68. ... We have to hope this year ends up like simulated season #1,001.
AL East: Rockies/MFY and White Sox/Rays, 7 PM. ... MFY –, TBR 8.0, BOS 10.0.
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