The Red Sox Are Bad, But Xander Bogaerts Is Good

The Red Sox season is over. Boston chose last weekend to remove all doubt as to their 2015 destiny by being outscored 22-4 in four straight losses. Why be competitive and muddle the point? Stand strong for what you believe in, give up more than five runs for every one you score, and be satisfied that you have made your message clear. Now all that remains of a once promising season are the embers, a few flickers of promise still visible under the charred rubble. Which is kind of a long way of saying “Xander Bogaerts is good, at least.”

Bogaerts has highlighted his team’s decrepit performance since the All-Star break by hitting .400; Bogaerts ending an inning on second base with his hands on his hips and wondering why everyone keeps popping out might be the defining image of this Sox season. Even as Boston’s season continues to clog the commode, the emergence of Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts at least gives fans something to watch, and some faint excuse to dream.

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Hitting at a young age isn’t anything new for Bogaerts, who hit well in Rookie ball, Single-A, Double-A, and Triple-A. He was always one of the youngest players at each level, and has always one of the best. In 2013, Bogaerts put up a .909 OPS in Double-A, was moved to Triple-A where he posted an .822 OPS, and ended the season as the starting third baseman on a World Series champion. He was 20 years old.

Not much has gone right for the Sox since then, and Bogaerts was initially part of those struggles. His first full season of 2014 began with great expectations, but somewhere between re-signing incumbent shortstop Stephen Drew—which necessitated Bogaerts move back to third base—losing some games, and then losing a lot more games, Bogaerts lost his way. Or opposing pitchers figured him out and it took him a while to adjust to their adjustments. Or the vernal equinox did something. In the undifferentiated suck-bog of the team’s 2014 season, it barely mattered.

Whatever the case, a player who had always hit for average and power and gotten on base, suddenly could do none of it. From mid-June through mid-August of last season Bogaerts batted .153/.189/.213—no average, no power, couldn’t get on base. He was, in short, terrible.

That is a well-struck single right there, young man. — Bob DeChiara-USA TODAY Sports

More concerning was the fact that he wasn’t hitting the ball hard. Players hit into bad luck all the time—weak grounders go for outs, but so do line drives and deep fly balls. Given a long enough time frame, this tends to even out. Baseball is predicated on that fact. Hit enough line drives and your numbers will eventually reflect it. Hit enough deep drives and the ball will eventually go over the wall. Bogaerts’ weak grounders went for outs—so many outs—but he wasn’t hitting anywhere near enough line drives or deep flies to even out the numbers. He was also striking out a lot on near-identical sliders on the outside corner.

This season has been a different story for Bogaerts, if not the Red Sox. He lays off that vicious outside slider, except when he’s whacking it the other way for singles and doubles. His strikeout rate is way down and his batting average is way up. So Bogaerts has solved the first riddle of facing Major League pitching, mostly by just getting better.

The next challenge is learning to hit for power. For a player touted for his extra base potential, Bogaerts has hit for extremely limited power this season. He has three home runs, which is fine for a shortstop—Bogaerts was moved back to the position at the trade deadline last season—but which also qualifies as a bit of a disappointment given the slugging he did in the minors.

Two things stand out about Bogaerts 2015 season. First is his BABIP, which sits at .352. That’s normally an unsustainably high number, except that Bogaerts owns a 51 percent ground ball rate, which is the 30th highest in baseball. Grounders go for hits more frequently than fly balls (but less frequently than line drives), and so players who hit the ball on the ground frequently have higher batting averages. The downside with grounders is that they never go over the fence and will rarely make it past any outfielders.

To be fair, there is nothing wrong with singles. A single is a Starbucks on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike, and after eight exits—or three innings of players in Red Sox uniforms striking out—it’s quite welcome. But once you’re off the turnpike, you can do so much better. Bogaerts should be turning fastballs down the pipe into doubles off the wall, not grounders up the middle. This is all a lot easier to type than it is to do, of course.

The good news is that Bogaerts has both the time and the talent to figure it out. For now, he’s 23, hitting .300, and playing good defense. This is good, and there’s every reason to believe that it will get better, and that Xander Bogaerts will hit for power; maybe tomorrow, maybe next month, maybe next season when the Red Sox will start anew. For now the Red Sox and their fans will have to settle for watching the relative growing pains of one of the best young shortstops in the game. It’s the best show in town right now, which was not what anyone was hoping for. But it could at least have a happy ending.