Brewers 5, Red Sox 1: Paralysis at the plate poisons another potent pitching performance

Richard Fitts now has a 2.21 ERA in eight career starts. The Red Sox are 0-8 in those games.

Picture if you will, a herd of fat, juicy, slow moving wildebeests. They’re approaching a river crossing, which leaves them extremely vulnerable to any predator in search of a snack. It’s a carnivore’s dream!

Now, take this setup for slaughter on the Serengeti, and imagine what the equivalent might be for a baseball lineup granted a similar opportunity. Perhaps its a parade of starting pitchers who look like this:

• Tylor Megill
• Cade Povich
• Zach Eflin
• Dean Kremer
• Trevor Rogers
• Chad Patrick
• Aaron Civale

These are the last seven starters the Red Sox have faced. They’re so random, spellcheck doesn’t even think four of them are real.

And yet, the Red Sox failed to score more than a single run off six of these seven guys. One by one they threw their unimpressive slop, and one by one they managed to bamboozle the Boston bats.

These are pitchers who routinely give up crooked numbers to minor league lineups, so I can’t stress enough how alarming it is that the Sox are struggling through this stretch of starters. If you go through all the game logs every MLB team, you’d be hard pressed to find a softer stretch of seven starters than this.

Most teams probably go at least 5-2 in a stretch like this – And if they get the pitching the Red Sox just did over the last week where they’ve held opponents to five or fewer runs in all seven games, they might even go 7-0 if they’re a serious contender. The Red Sox? They went 2-5 while the wildebeests passed them by.

Tonight, the starter they failed to hit was Aaron Civale, who has a fastball so ordinary it could stay in its own lane and get passed on the interstate in certain parts of this country. So of course, this putrid lineup only recorded three hits against him and didn’t score a run until the sixth inning. Naturally, that was the only run they scored all night, and fittingly it had more to do with a Milwaukee mistake that it did with genuine production.

If you’re counting, that’s five total runs in four games since Alex Bregman went on the IL.

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Yet somehow, even after all that futility, the Red Sox were actually still in line to win this game up 1-0 in the ninth. From there, Aroldis Chapman blew the save, and Liam Hendriks gave up a walk-off grand slam in the tenth.

Do you know how much you have to suck as an offense for a game to end like that and for the take away to be “there’s a huge problem with the offense.”

I mean, if this is what they look like against lousy starting pitching, what is it going to be when they actually start facing some good arms?

Oh, and if you want to get even more upset, have a look at what the manager had to say after this game:

Studs

The five guys who combined for eight shutout innings and nearly dragged this pathetic offense to victory. (Dick Fitts, Brennan Bernardino, Greg Weissert, Justin Wilson, and Justin Slaten.)

Five Duds (Because I really can’t limit this to three tonight)

Trevor Story: He came to the plate with at least one man on base in all four of his at bats tonight and went 0-4. Since April 22nd he’s has 41 strikeouts and just two extra base hits.

Jarren Duran: 0-5 with four strikeouts including an especially disastrous failure to get the ball in play with men on the corners and one out in the tenth inning. His -.307 WPA was the lowest of any player on the team tonight.

Rafael Devers: Unlike Duran, Devers actually got a base hit. Unfortunately, it was a single that came with two and nobody on, leaving him with a -.199 WPA thanks to his other four empty at bats.

Aroldis Chapman: He was bound to blow a save eventually, but boy did he pick a bad time to do it.

Liam Hendriks: If you want to pitch more, maybe try not giving up a walk-off grand slam.

Play of the game:

It’s not the story of the game, but a walk-off grand slam is certainly the play of the game: