The Red Sox lineup is off to an impressive start to the 2021 season
It would be premature to compare this Boston Red Sox offense to the best lineups in franchise history considering we aren’t even three weeks into the season but we have to be impressed by their early-season pace.
Boston blasted the Chicago White Sox for 11 runs on Patriots’ Day, highlighted by a monster first-inning. An outburst of that magnitude will sway statistics in a small sample size but this was hardly an outlier from the team leading the majors in several offensive categories.
Monday’s game marked the third time this season that the Red Sox have scored 11+ runs on 16+ hits. The other 29 major league teams have combined to do so four times this season. No other team has multiple games with 10+ runs and 15+ hits.
The Red Sox lead the majors with 96 runs scored through 17 games. That’s a 915-run pace over the course of a full season, which would be the fifth-most in franchise history.
As poorly as the Red Sox played during the dismal 2020 season, the one thing they could do was hit, leading the league in hits and batting average. This year’s lineup is clearly an upgrade. Boston leads the majors with a .288 average while the Los Angeles Angels rank a distant second with a .265 average.
Boston leads the American League with a .351 OBP and .468 SLG, narrowly trailing the Los Angeles Dodgers (.352 OBP) and Cincinnati Reds (.470 SLG) for the major league-lead in both categories.
wRC+ takes the Runs Created statistic and accounts for external factors such as ballpark and era while adjusting an a scale that makes 100 represent league average. The Red Sox lead the majors by a comfortable margin with 128 wRC+, meaning their offense has been 28 percent better than league average this season.
If they manage to sustain that figure for the full season it would break the MLB record shared by the 1927 New York Yankees and 2019 Houston Astros (126 wRC+). The Red Sox franchise record was set in 2003 with 120 wRC+ so this year’s club could still challenge that mark even with some modest regression.
Several hitters in this lineup stand out for their impressive performances so far this season. Xander Bogaerts (.386) and J.D. Martinez (.383) rank fourth and fifth respectively in batting average in the AL. Martinez leads the majors with 20 RBI and he’s tied for second with six home runs. The veteran DH also leads the league and is third in the majors with a 1.239 OPS.
Both hitters are on pace for career-highs in OPS and a trio of other bats in this lineup are as well: Alex Verdugo (.882), Christian Vazquez (.826), and Christian Arroyo (.824).
Rafael Devers has seen his batting average fluctuate during a streaky start but he’s third in the AL with five home runs and 15 RBI.
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A few great weeks does’t mean this level of production is sustainable over a full 162-game schedule. Hitters go through slumps that inevitably will sidetrack this early-season pace.
On the other hand, there are some areas where positive regression should be in store. Bobby Dalbec was expected to contend for the Rookie of the Year based on his massive power potential but he’s yet to collect his first home run. Bogaerts has a .927 OPS despite that he hasn’t gone deep yet either.
The Red Sox haven’t gotten much from offseason acquisition Hunter Renfroe. If he doesn’t pick up the pace soon, outfield prospect Jarren Duran is lighting it up at the team’s alternate site in Worcester and inching closer to his big league debut.
Regression is a natural part of a baseball season but it works both ways, acting as a balancing act. The top hitters will cool off a bit but others will eventually heat up or be replaced.
We should pump the breaks on the historical comparisons until this team proves itself over a larger sample but the early-season numbers are still impressive to look at. Even if they regress from this scorching start, we’ve seen enough to know that the Red Sox will be among the league’s top lineups this season.