Red Sox's rotation off to historic start in 2024

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.

BOSTON -- Tanner Houck going all Greg Maddux on the Guardians on Wednesday night at Fenway Park with a complete-game three-hitter that required just 94 pitches brought attention to an early-season story that probably deserves more traction than it has received.

The Red Sox’s starting rotation is the best in MLB through the first three weeks of the season.

That’s not a misprint. The rotation that finished 22nd in the Majors last season with a 4.68 ERA while finishing 27th in innings (774 1/3) is currently setting the pace for starting pitching.

Boston starters have a 1.85 ERA, the best in MLB by more than a half run per game (the Royals are second at 2.39). In 102 innings, they have 105 strikeouts and 24 walks. This is the lowest rotation ERA the Red Sox have had through the first 19 games in the Live Ball Era (since 1920).

And this is from a team that made one offseason acquisition to the rotation in Lucas Giolito, who won’t throw a pitch this season after undergoing UCL surgery on his right elbow.

So how has this happened exactly?

Let’s piece it together. Hiring a pitching-minded chief baseball officer in Craig Breslow led to sweeping changes from an infrastructure standpoint, the biggest being the hiring of Andrew Bailey as the club’s pitching coach.

And the team’s core of homegrown pitchers (Houck, Kutter Crawford and Brayan Bello) -- plus 2021 Rule 5 Draft pickup Garrett Whitlock -- is just at that stage where they’re taking lessons learned from the past few seasons and maturing in real time.

And Nick Pivetta, the veteran of the staff at 31 years old, carried the momentum he gained in the second half of last season before going on the injured list on April 9 with a mild right flexor strain that shouldn’t cause him to miss much more time.

“Some guys took steps at the end of last year,” said Red Sox catcher Connor Wong. “Obviously, Bails comes in and we started leveraging guys’ pitches and doing things in kind of a different way, and I think it’s helped accelerate some of the progress the guys are having.”

If you could use one word to describe the mantra of Boston’s rotation, it is attack. As in, attack the strike zone.

Bailey has preached it since the day he arrived, and the pitchers are following his lead.

“We’re just attacking guys, and guys have completely bought in and are doing their work,” Wong said. “And I think the results are starting to show.”

Boston’s 10-9 record is nothing to write home about, and the club has looked shaky on defense since Trevor Story suffered a season-ending left shoulder injury in the eighth game. But if the defense can find some more stable footing, the Red Sox have the chance to leverage their improved pitching staff and become surprise contenders for a postseason berth.

“We've been talking about them for a while,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said of his starting pitchers. “Tanner got called up in 2020; he was supposed to be a guy. Kutter and Bello came up a couple of years after that, and if we were somewhere else, we’d be talking about the young guns. But they’re not young anymore.

“They got some innings under their belt. Last year wasn't great for them. And this year, they made some adjustments in the offseason. I think the most important thing for them was being healthy, especially Whit and Tanner. Kutter, obviously, made adjustments physically -- just like Bello -- and they bought into the concept of throwing their best stuff over the plate. They have different stuff now. It's been fun to watch.”

Crawford, a pitcher few people outside of Boston know much about, leads MLB with a 0.42 ERA. He has a buffet of pitches he uses regularly.

“I think the big emphasis for me was to attack the zone consistently,” Crawford said. “Obviously, try to limit the walks, so I think that kind of made the difference. In 2022, I had a big learning year. I’ve kind of taken what I’ve learned from then to now, and throwing strikes is huge and trusting your stuff and having conviction in your pitches.”

It has become a rotation-wide mantra, led by Bailey, but also emphasized by game planning coordinator Jason Varitek and the catching tandem of Wong and Reese McGuire.

“I think our relationship with Reese and Wong is fantastic,” Houck said. “I think it’s a combination of having great conversations with them, having great conversations with ‘Tek and Bailey. We’re one unit and we all work together as one unit.”