Red Sox's Offense Is Collapsing In Clutch Situations At The Worst Possible Time

The Boston Red Sox's offense is going through one of its worst collective slumps of the entire season in terms of run production, the worst news just a few series remain before the regular season ends. It is almost certain that they will face the New York Yankees again in the Wild Card Series, as happened last year, in a series where two of the most dominant pitching staffs in the league will face each other. To determine who earns the pass to the Division Series, the offense will be a key point, especially in a best-of-three clash.

In nine of their first 15 games of September, the Red Sox have gone hitless or with just one hit with runners in scoring position. They have a 3-9 record in those games and have combined for just 5-for-57 with RISP, with 18 strikeouts and 10 walks. This stretch of inconsistencies is not new; Between March and June, when the team played to a 37-47 record with a minus-10 run differential, the average number of runs scored per game was 4.0. So far in September, they have recorded 3.6.

What makes the lack of timely hitting even more concerning is that the Red Sox’s success has been based precisely on taking advantage of key moments and making the most of them. This season, they have accumulated 25 wins while scoring four or fewer runs, and in only four of those games have they gone hitless with runners in scoring position. It is clear that this team can win games in many ways, but Boston’s chances of success are reduced to a minimum when they cannot get hits in RISP situations. The statistic is devastating: they have lost 24 of the 28 games in which they have been unable to get hits in that situation.

To continue going deeper into this situation, I divided two key stretches of Boston’s season: a first period, when they played to a 34-8 record and the team completed the great comeback before the end of the first half of the season, between June 19 and August 7, and a second stretch from August 8 until now. I chose the offensive statistics only in high-leverage situations, and it turns out that, since August 7, the Red Sox have posted the worst BABIP in the league (.184), and have fallen to 29th in batting average with just .180, line drive percentage (12.0%) and hard-hit rate (25.0%).

On the other hand, while the team was on its winning streak in the first period, the Red Sox led the league in slugging (.606), ISO (.269), placed second in OPS (1.001) and wRC+ (167), and third with the highest contact rate against pitches in the strike zone (91.5%).

Here, we can reach more interesting conclusions by comparing both periods for the Red Sox in high-leverage situations. In this second stretch, the loss of impact and production has been evident. Strikeouts have gone up by 4.4 percentage points, which has been joined by a higher amount in soft-contact percentage (8.4% difference), along with the 15-point drop in hard-hit rate. Yes, the rate of contacts outside the strike zone has risen by 18.9%, but it has not been able to result in hard contact that generates production.

Although the offensive samples are smaller when we analyze the hitters individually, the chaos is perfectly illustrated.

What I like most about these samples is that the number of at-bats adjusts to a similar sample of at-bats in any short postseason series. The collapse has been so significant that only Jarren Duran has a slight improvement with 143 points of OPS and 43 points of wRC+, although the mark of 65 since August 8 remains mediocre.

At the same time, the numbers during the winning streak provide a little encouragement, and they marked a moment when the Red Sox seemed unstoppable. It is clear that they can do it again. But this is not about some hitters getting hot; the offense as a whole needs to function as it did in its best version of the season, building runs, running the bases intelligently, and connecting the key hits in clutch situations.

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