Was Andrew Bailey’s early success with the Red Sox pitching staff just an eclipse?

Last year’s briefly successful gambit has left behind a void the 2025 Red Sox are struggling to fill.

Every once in a while, you experience something so rare, so amazing, and so downright mesmerizing, that words won’t do it justice. On April 8th, 2024, I experienced such an event in the hills of Arkansas on the eastern edge of Mt. Nebo where I witnessed a total solar eclipse with my family.

For those that managed to get a view of the partial eclipse on that day outside of the main swath, I can assure you the difference between that and totality is quite literally night and day. Even for those who may have seen 98 or 99 percent coverage, the difference between that and 100% is the difference between flying to Florida and stopping at the Disney World parking lot vs. actually going into Disney World. They are not comparable! (If you want to see one without leaving the U.S., your next best chance will be in 2045)

As totality approaches, strange and beautiful things begin to happen. The lighting starts to change, the temperature drops significantly, animals get confused, and you almost feel like you’re in an alien world. The light source of the sun is still where it’s supposed to be, up high in the sky, but it’s far dimmer than you’ve grown accustomed to seeing every day of your life, and when something that constant just isn’t doing what you’re accustomed to seeing it do, it’s borderline startling.

Then, as you approach the moment of truth, the pace of the action accelerates until finally everything happens all at once! The last slivers of the sun’s waning crescent disappears from view, and the entire sky enters bizarro world. A mysterious and enthralling hue dashes across the sky and then washes over you like a high speed jet just as the moon covers the last speck of sunlight — And just like that, ECLIPSE!!!

Only the very edge of the horizon is left orange – Like a 360 degree sunset. Inside of that, you have a ring of twilight, and then inside of that you have a ring where you can see a couple of stars and maybe a planet, and then inside of that you have this gorgeous spectacle where the sun’s corona is surrounding this big black hole that is the dark side of the moon. The milky white ring here is nothing short of breathtaking. Nothing else in nature even remotely compares to this feature. No words will do it justice. No video will do it justice. On a scale of one to ten, it’s an eleven — you just have to see it for yourself!

Despite the darkness, you’re keenly aware this is nothing like the normal night sky. At night, you’re looking out into deep space and into the far reaches of the universe. With an eclipse, you’re looking right into the center of the solar system, and all of the nearby features you know so well (the sun, the moon, Venus) are right in front of you. You’re home!

There’s a connection to everything both on and off the planet, which is made more exclusive by the fact you’re experiencing it from a perspective most humans will never see in their lifetime. And yet, this unique perspective is created by something so simple and recognizable: Familiar objects arranging themselves in unfamiliar ways.

Photo by: HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Then, just as you’re starting the grasp the magnitude the moment, it’s over. The sun begins to pop out, the magic fades, and things return to normal. However, the residue of the spectacular sights and senses remain, including one in the picture above I’d like to expand on here.

That gorgeous diamond ring feature on the lower left part of the eclipse’s circle is known as Baily’s Beads, and it occurs when the moon’s uneven topography allows a few last bits of light to sneak through the valleys.

They are named for British astronomer Francis Baily, who noticed the phenomenon and described it as “the moon appearing to break up into a series of bright points” during an annular eclipse in May of 1836.

For me, the splendid imagery of the beads crosses my mind every once in a while. It’s something that stays with you. So it was only a matter of time before I happened to think about Francis Baily’s Beads in close proximity to a time where I was digging into some research on Andrew Bailey and the Sox pitching staff. Their last names, pronounced the same but spelled differently, then got me to thinking about other connections.

Photo by SSPL/Getty Images

The day following the real eclipse was April 9, 2024, and that’s when a second eclipse of sorts began at Fenway Park. It was the home opener, and it featured our first look at baseball’s version of Bailey’s Beads.

Once again, familiar objects arranged in unfamiliar ways would be the catalyst for the creativity. This time, it would be off-speed pitches steeling the limelight over the traditional fastball we’ve become accustomed to seeing front and center in a pitching sequence.

For a while, the results were spectacular. Hitters reacted the way ancient, astronomically illiterate cultures likely did in a real eclipse — they were confused, caught off guard, and probably horrified by what was happening.

But baseball scouting, much like objects that cause an eclipse, is a moving target. Eventually, people figure out the magic trick, the sun comes back out, and the magnificent moment gets locked in the past. Bailey’s Beads, while spectacular, are also fleeting.

Photo by Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images

Now obviously, Andrew Bailey wasn’t the only member of the Red Sox who pushed the idea to throw mostly off-speed pitches early in 2024, and I’m sure he and the rest of the staff have other ideas they’re working on besides “keep throwing the off-speed stuff until hitters figure it out,” but that brief window where the strategy was working almost better than anybody had a right to think it would is worth revisiting. Not just because we get to talk about eclipses, but because it’s also warped our worldview of the 2024 Red Sox.

They ended up 81-81 and the most .500 team you could ever imagine. Furthermore, they did it in the midst of a string of seasons where they seem on a quest to go 500-500. However, their true talent level was probably less than .500 — a lot less! — and this is proving problematic for the 2025 Red Sox.

Before we jump too far ahead though, let’s go back a year around this time (May 7, 2024) when David Schoenfield wrote the following:

“The Red Sox are throwing the fewest fastballs of any team in MLB in 2024. Just 31.8% of their pitches have been fastballs (either four-seamers or sinkers), well below the MLB average of 47%. Just one other team is under 40%, and no team was below that last season.”

This wasn’t a fluke either. If you slightly switch up the metric and look at the year end four seam fastball usage numbers on Fangraphs, you’ll find that the 2024 Red Sox not only threw fewer of them than any other team, but that they threw six percent fewer than the next closest team in baseball, and more than ten percent fewer than any team in the American League. This represents a little more than a full standard deviation off the rest of the data in the MLB number, and almost two standard deviations off the AL figure.

Within this data outlier lies even more contradictions. The 2024 Red Sox were 53-43 before the All-Star break, and then just 28-38 after it. The .424 post All-Star game win percentage would extrapolate out to a 93 loss season, and the scary part is this is the piece of the data that’s probably going to most accurately reflect the true state of Red Sox pitching after the league figured out what they were doing. Oddly, the better the Bailey’s Beads were, the more they were covering up, and therefore the more the Red Sox need to fix long-term

If you go beyond the team’s record and dive into the specific numbers surrounding the pitching staff as a whole, they are just as worrisome. The 2024 Red Sox had a 3.64 ERA before the All-Star break, and then a 4.65 ERA after it.

The batting numbers against the pitching staff? Opposing hitters had a .669 OPS against Red Sox pitching before the All-Star break last year, and then a .761 mark after it. This means that Red Sox pitching held opponents to the second lowest OPS in the American League in the first half last season (behind only the Seattle Mariners), and then allowed the third highest OPS of anybody in the AL the rest of the way (bettering only the Angels and White Sox).

As Dennis Eckersley might say, “Yuck!”

Photo by Jaiden Tripi/Getty Images

Looking at this from a 2025 perspective reveals more of the same problem. Below I’ve listed the top 13 performers of the 2025 Red Sox so far based on bWAR (Baseball Reference WAR):

1. Alex Bregman: 2.8
2. Garret Crochet: 2.2
3. Rafael Devers: 2.0
4. Carlos Narvaez: 1.8
5. Wilyer Abreu: 1.6
6. Ceddanne Rafaela: 1.6
7. Jarren Duan: 0.9
8. Aroldis Chapman: 0.9
9. Justin Wilson: 0.5
10. David Hamilton: 0.4
11. Romy Gonzalez: 0.4
12. Hunter Dobbins: 0.4
13. Rob Refsnyder: 0.4

Do you know what all 13 of those guys have in common? Exactly none of them pitched on the 2024 Red Sox. There are nine are position players (with two of the top three guys there also just being acquired last offseason), and the other four guys are all pitchers who made their Red Sox debut in 2025 (Crochet, Chapman, Wilson, and Dobbins). Oh, and this list doesn’t even include Walker Buehler yet, who sits at 0.3 WAR on the season and will probably be joining it very soon.

So if you’re wondering why the Red Sox are still languishing around .500 despite hitting on most all of their big offseason pickups, it’s because they weren’t building on a foundation of .500 baseball. They were building on a rotting rotation that overachieved during Bailey’s eclipse and then showed its true colors once they were exposed to the sun coming back out in the second half of the season. Last year’s squad was likely a 90-some loss team on paper, and while the Sox deserve some credit for keeping that ship afloat as long as they did, it’s created a huge problem going forward.

The front office added some really nice pieces to a team with a .500 record, but all its done so far is keep them right at .500 as pretty much all of the positive pitching contributors from 2024 have disappeared. Some literally, others figuratively.

Two arms in particular stand out, and for more on that I’d like to look at something Boston Sports Gordo noted earlier this week.

After Wednesday, Crochet has now done this in 10 out of 11 starts with the rest of the staff sitting at 13 for 40.

Gordo then continued and broke it down by starter (again, as of Monday):

The two guys on this list we should probably be most interested in are Tanner Houck and Brayan Bello, as they represent the most missing production from the 2024 squad.

Last year, Houck did this in 18 of his 30 starts (including in 13 of his first 19), and Bello did in 14 out of 30. Together, they combined to give the team one of these outings 32 times, compared to just five so far a third of the way through this season.

By the way, the team’s record was 13-5 in the 18 starts Houck did this and 12-2 in the 14 from Bello, which comes to a 25-7 record in the 32 games they got this production in 2024.

Also probably worth noting regarding the 2024 staff, here are the five Sox pitchers who posted the highest bWAR last year, and they also happen to be the only five arms who managed to crack the 1.0 bWAR mark last season:

Tanner Houck: 3.5

Kutter Crawford: 1.9

Nick Pivetta: 1.7

Brayan Bello: 1.4

Kenley Jansen: 1.3

That’s 9.8 Wins Above Replacement from a pitching staff that’s now either on the IL (Crawford), pitching in southern California (Pivetta and Jansen), or producing 0.3 and -1.6 WAR for the Red Sox in 2024 (Bello and Houck). In other words, their five most productive arms from last year are now giving them a combined -1.3 WAR so far in 2025.

At this point, the Sox desperately need one of two things to happen. They either need at least two guys to step up behind Garrett Crochet and become serviceable second and third starters (Walker Buehler seems like the most obvious candidate for one of them with maybe Dick Fitts a close second) or they need Andrew Bailey and the rest of the “Red Sox pitching lab” to prove they have something more up their sleeve than last year’s temporary trickery.

Otherwise, the 2025 Red Sox really are building a pitching staff from scratch, and the 2024 bunch was about as safe to look at on a daily basis as staring into the sun. And of course, we were able to do that because it was all just an eclipse.