The anatomy of a Red Sox hitting slump
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This story was excerpted from Ian Browne’s Red Sox Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
For the Red Sox, this is the question that bears asking as they open a new week: Where have the crooked numbers gone?
The offensive slump started on May 22 in Anaheim and hasn’t ended, except for some brief moments.
In the last five games of a road trip that ended with a hard-fought 3-2 victory at Yankee Stadium, where the Sox didn’t have a multirun inning. Over their last nine games, in which the Sox are 3-6, they’ve scored 22 runs. In its first 12 games of June, Boston has scored a mere 41 runs.
Now, they come home for a six-game homestand that begins tonight against the Rockies in hopes that friendly Fenway will help the bats catch fire again.
That didn’t work in the last homestand, when manager Alex Cora’s team went 2-5 against the Reds and Rays.
But it is likely just a matter of time before the Sox start hitting with ferocity again. This might be just the right time to face the Rockies, who are 28th in the Majors with a 5.19 ERA.
With a 33-33 record, the Sox are in last place in the loaded American League East but still within striking distance in the hunt for the Wild Card, four games back in the standings.
In the first few weeks of the season, the offense was the overwhelming strength of the Sox. A positive development over the weekend was Rafael Devers showing signs of life by belting two homers in the Bronx.
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Predictably, Adam Duvall struggled to find his timing in his return from a broken left wrist, going 0-for-6 in his first two games back. Once Duvall regains his stroke, that should make a difference.
Alex Verdugo, one of the team’s most consistent hitters the first two months of the season, has gone cold in June with four extra-base hits and a .685 OPS in 47 plate appearances.
Masataka Yoshida, who hit .365 with a .999 OPS over a 156 at-bat stretch from April 20-June 6, has two hits in his last 20 at-bats.
All hitters go through slumps over the course of a long season. The problem for the Red Sox is that most of their hitters have slumped at the same time. But that can change quickly, as the Sox will try to demonstrate this week.