CB Bucknor bad<\/a>, that\u2019s how bad. They\u2019ve already allowed 11 home runs. They\u2019ve committed six errors. They\u2019re hitting .171 with runners in scoring position. They struck out a whopping 38 times in the three losses to the Astros. The series ended with a 6-4 getaway day loss in which Crochet gave up five runs (four earned), three of those runs coming across on a 402-foot home run by Carlos Correa. Houston\u2019s unearned run was made possible by a badly flubbed grounder by shortstop Trevor Story.<\/p>\nRed Sox manager Alex Cora summed it up this way: \u201cNot good \u2026 not good.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cora also made a last-second decision to pull catcher Carlos Narv\u00e1ez from the starting lineup. The manager spoke cryptically about why he made the move, but was up front about why Anthony wasn\u2019t in the lineup. Cora called it a \u201creset,\u201d which made sense considering Anthony was 1-for-17 with 10 strikeouts in the four games since Opening Day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The news wasn\u2019t all bad. Remember how in spring training it was being said right fielder Wilyer Abreu might hit 30 home runs this season? Anyone want to make it 40? Abreu hit another home run Wednesday, his third. He\u2019s hitting .417. As for Anthony, he was sent up as a pinch hitter in the ninth inning and jumped on Bryan Abreu\u2019s breaking pitch on the outside corner and lofted it to left field for a home run. The Sox have similarly lofty expectations for Anthony \u2014 as in signing him to an eight-year, $130 million contract extension last summer \u2014 and this will be his first home opener. Better to have fans buzzing about the home run he hit Wednesday than the 1-for-17 that preceded it.<\/p>\n
Everybody overreacts when baseball teams get off to bad starts. But it\u2019s been eight years since the Red Sox won the World Series \u2014 a laughable lament in just about every other big-league market but a big deal in Boston now that \u201c1918\u201d has been retired as a Yankee Stadium catcall. It doesn\u2019t help that Red Sox principal owner John Henry rarely appears in public anymore, though he did show up on screen for a few seconds from a suite in Cincinnati. People want to know if ownership is still interested in the big prize, and a sluggish start ratchets up such talk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anthony is the wild card in all this. The Sox no longer have a David Ortiz or Mookie Betts \u2014 or even an Alex Bregman, whose leadership was so important to this youngish bunch last season. But anyone with even a casual interest in the Red Sox has talked up Anthony as the next face of the franchise. (Keeping in mind we\u2019ll need to revisit this notion if Abreu keeps hitting home runs.) There\u2019s even talk that Anthony could be, yikes, MVP. And that got me to thinking about Fred Lynn, who as a 23-year-old in 1975 was American League MVP and Rookie of the Year.<\/p>\n
Lynn makes an excellent point: While he and Jim Rice arrived in the big leagues in late 1974 as top prospects, not a lot of fans were screaming for them to take over the team. That\u2019s partly because fans didn\u2019t do deep dives into baseball prospects in those quaint, pre-internet days, but also because the mid-1970s Red Sox had Carl Yastrzemski. Now Red Sox fans are looking for the next Yaz, or Lynn, or Rice, or Dwight Evans, or Ortiz, or Betts. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cRoman Anthony, geez, when he came up last year, man, that\u2019s a lot of pressure,\u201d Lynn told me. \u201cThat\u2019s a big difference between his career starting and my career. I snuck up on people.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis kid, the trumpets were blaring as soon as he came,\u201d Lynn said. \u201cHis whole family was there. I watched it. Totally different scenario from me and Jim. And to his credit, he did pretty well. It took him a few at-bats to figure it out \u2026 and when he got on the road and away from all that, that\u2019s when he started to take off.\u201d (Lynn pointed out that while he\u2019s seen Anthony play, he hasn\u2019t met him yet. He said he\u2019s looking forward to that.)<\/p>\n
Now, second-year big-leaguer Roman Anthony and the 2026 Red Sox are returning home. For the Sox, the 1-5 start doesn\u2019t matter. Not on Friday. For Anthony, the 1-for-17 doesn\u2019t matter because in his first plate appearance Friday, he\u2019ll be looking for his second straight home run.<\/p>\n
But then comes the day after the home opener, and it\u2019ll be all about first place, not first pitches.<\/p>\n
Read the fine print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People can\u2019t seem to agree on anything these days, be it sports, politics or your all-time favorite movie.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":658585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2375],"tags":[5,141,48,2542,4,5386,89,2543],"class_list":{"0":"post-658584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boston-red-sox","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-boston","10":"tag-boston-red-sox","11":"tag-bostonredsox","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-opinion","14":"tag-red-sox","15":"tag-redsox"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}