April's now in the books and the Sox are coming off a pretty rough stretch offensively. This is despite torrid performances from Vazquez (in limited plate appearances) and Benintendi. A few players are struggling out the gate (Bradley, Pedroia, Leon) but the team's run production (93 runs scored, 25th in the league) is lagging even its bats (WRC of 104, 16th in the league).
Team power has obviously been a contributor in their early underperformance, but there's something else that's been jumping out while watching the games: shoddy baserunning. Despite being one of the best baserunning teams in the league last year (in terms of Fangraphs' BSR metric), they are one of the worst so far this year. And they are really quite terrible (-6 as of May 1st, ahead of only the Astros). Watching the games (e.g. the almost blown chance to score Hernandez last night) seems to bear this out, too. So what the hell is going on? It seems like Farrell doesn't even like sending guys anymore. Are players like Betts et al. hiding injuries or is it just a fluke of small sample size?
Team power has obviously been a contributor in their early underperformance, but there's something else that's been jumping out while watching the games: shoddy baserunning. Despite being one of the best baserunning teams in the league last year (in terms of Fangraphs' BSR metric), they are one of the worst so far this year. And they are really quite terrible (-6 as of May 1st, ahead of only the Astros). Watching the games (e.g. the almost blown chance to score Hernandez last night) seems to bear this out, too. So what the hell is going on? It seems like Farrell doesn't even like sending guys anymore. Are players like Betts et al. hiding injuries or is it just a fluke of small sample size?