Roman Anthony shouldn't have to clean up a Red Sox mess Craig Breslow created

Roman Anthony is two years younger than me. I am not old. 

Yet the Boston Red Sox’s budding superstar finds himself having to answer questions about why his team is so utterly terrible nine games into a season when some saw the Red Sox as a sleeper contender in the American League. That is not fair for a 21-year-old in a sport where the average age of a Major League debut is 25. He is playing in his first full season; that was his first opening day. Yet here we are, asking.

Roman Anthony can't pitch, but the Red Sox need rotation help

The Red Sox are asking a lot of Anthony, who was visibly frustrated after the team's most recent defeat. But he is far from the reason they are in this predicament.

The Red Sox look like the worst version of themselves. The starting pitching, the major strength of this roster, has been a mess through two rough weeks that have seen the Red Sox in a gloriously undisputed last place in the entire American League. That is, as Roman Anthony says, unacceptable. It has been a nightmare, but it is not his problem to solve.

I am not going to sit here and tell you a 2-7 start was predictable. None of us in Red Soxlandia predicted it would be this bad, so shockingly quickly. But of the things we did worry about, here are the two major ones: infield defense and power hitting. Both have not exactly been great, but Boston has spawned in a new, never-before-seen issue out of the rafters like a WWE tag team coming to mess you up and oh no they’re playing the intro music: starting pitching.

Garrett Crochet dominated his first start (they won) and got dominated in his second (they lost). Sonny Gray was terrible in his first start (they lost) and good in his second (they won). Ranger Suarez, the big-money free agent that Craig Breslow spent Boston’s (apparently limited) war chest on, was terrible in his first start (they lost) and terrible in his second start (they lost). Are we starting to identify a pattern?

The Red Sox have made a couple of dangerous assumptions with their starting pitching that could cost them many wins and many, many “sell the team” chants in the near future: first, Garrett Crochet was an unhittable pitching god last year, and the rest of the staff operates around him being an unhittable pitching god. If he is just … good, the offense is not explosive enough to keep up with consistently high usage of the bullpen. Second, Boston invested serious money in Suarez, a pitcher with a relatively low strikeout rate who favors soft contact. If ABS affects his ability to paint the corners and get ground balls, that’s a major uh oh situation. 

Compound all of that with a bullpen that simply cannot stop giving up home runs, and we have ourselves a completely untenable defensive situation. Again, I am not saying the Red Sox pitching staff is bad. On paper, it is good. On the baseball diamond, it has been bad. 

Boston's hitting has been the problem, and Roman Anthony can't fix it by himself

But I have majorly buried the lead: the Red Sox offense has been galactically awful. Weirdly, they have been hitting home runs themselves at a slightly above-average rate, and power was the main concern coming into the season, but they are 27th in runs per game. That’s just … that just won’t work. It will not. Scoring that few runs alone is enough to sink any pitching staff, let alone one with so many points of failure like this one. 

Roman Anthony, conversely, has been fine — but he is being asked to be the face of the team, which he is, no matter what I or anyone else says. He’s going to be a star (it would almost be a statistical anomaly if he is not), but it’s understandable if he takes a few years to get from the red carpet to his Best Actor speech. The Red Sox, conversely, cannot wait that long.

Chief Baseball Officer Craig Breslow has constructed a baseball team that simply does not work if Roman Anthony is average. He is their main pressure hitter with both high on-base splits and (theoretically) tons of power. He and Alex Bregman in the 2-3 holes were the straws that stirred every single Red Sox drink last year. The second straw just … left for nothing, and now one single straw is required to stir way more drinks and, man, there are too many drinks. Roman Anthony is barely old enough to drink. 

None of the other everyday players can be counted on. Cedanne Rafaela strikes out too much, Caleb Durbin started the season 0-19, Wilson Contreras is batting .161, and Trevor Story has been bad at the plate and at shortstop. Roman Anthony is the single non-negotiable on this baseball team — he will be the centerpiece for the foreseeable future, but they also need him to be the centerpiece right now to achieve anything.

Craig Breslow's team lacks flexibility when they are unwilling to spend

The lack of offensive spending this offseason by the Red Sox front office was reprehensible. Bregman was paid a lot for a 30-something infielder, sure, but the Red Sox have continuously refused to pay their hitters in favor of shuffling platoons that are cheap and replaceable. Rafael Devers was not the player they were paying, sure, but they traded him for nothing when he was still the only real power hitter on the lineup. Meanwhile, Breslow’s repeated stabs at starting pitchers — Walker Buelher, Dustin May, now Ranger Suarez and Sonny Gray — are boom or bust. If you find a second ace, great. If you don’t, well, now we’re left with a lineup that can’t hit and a league-average pitching staff. That’s not coming out of the AL East.

There has been something fundamentally flawed with this baseball team for the first nine games. They seem to know it; Roman Anthony seems to know it. I can’t imagine the clubhouse is much of a party right now. But if they’re going to emerge from this quagmire rather than go 2-160, the everydayers other than Anthony need to start hitting. It’s … that simple. You have to … hit the baseball. There are no minor leaguers waiting in the wings, and short of a major trade (that won’t happen under the current ownership) this is the team. They need to flip a switch ASAP.

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