4/5-4/7 Red Sox @ Angels Series Thread

With the fastball rate posted in the A's thread no pets need be harmed. The bats are about to awaken!

MaYbE iF tHeY'd SiGnEd aN aCe.

Shocked would be much too strong of a word, but yes I would be at least surprised if all three of them turned out to be better than Pivetta and Bello.

incandenza, I've been thinking the same thing. The ideal time to go out west is at the beginning of the season and right after the AS break, when most of the team will be fresh and travel can be scheduled to be convenient and allow the team to get adjusted to the time difference.

what happened in Oakland was a lot of luck and especially the first game. the Fatse bats were dead for the most part and it won't work against the Angels. I don't think i saw 2 barreled up balls in that entire series. They have to start to hit and make solid contact in this next series or my optomism will wane. Fatse should have gone the way that Dave Bush did. I was unpleasntly surprised they retained him. He didn't deserve another year.

Kevin Kennedy was great. not so much as a manager, but really loved him the maybe half a season he did "color" commentary on Rays home games, before being told his services were no longer needed. Reason? Job prerequesite for Rays broadcasters is Tampa never does anything wrong. Kennedy, being a legit baseball guy would call out mistakes and call ou the biggest homer announcer since Phil Rhizzuto.. One DeWayne Staats.

Stoked to see Whitlock in-person on Saturday! Not so stoked to be going to the glorified Toyota dealership of a ballpark that’s Angel Stadium (and the 30 mile 2 hour drive). But hey — SOX!

Also for those on the east coast, prepare for a possible rain delay tomorrow — looks like there should be some rain around game time but nothing that should persist and result in a postponement.

Growing up, my drive to Fenway was 2 hours. Now I live in Boston and it still takes me 45 min to get home from the game usually, lol.

I am not comfortable knowing he was 5-11 in 3 games vs the Sox last year, and has had some big games vs them in the past, although I think those are mostly at Fenway. 

So it’s just a normal commuter train? Seems like if they want help traffic, they could run one more at 10:30 pm on game nights.

Jen McCaffrey reporting on the team's goal of 800 runs and the "hitting process" counterpart to the much-covered run prevention framework. It turns out that, what's been missing these last couple years was . . . sleeveless hoodies.

“The leaderboard itself is kind of like visual accountability, you can’t run from it,” Fatse said. “We post it every day, it gets updated and basically is a quality-at-bats chart.” The chart showed how each batter ranked on three metrics: walks, strikeouts and barrels (a stat that measures exit velocity and launch angle, i.e., solid contact). “Those are the things we value from a process perspective and we’re going to post it every day,” Fatse said.

“It’s just how do we create a better structure for communicating with the players and then ultimately tracking what we’re trying to achieve,” Fatse said. “It’s something that we did a lot in our meetings last year, but Alex and the group, we felt like it was important to put it out there, especially in the name of competition,” Fatse added. “The idea being, the quality of the at-bat feeds the nine-on-one mentality.”

While within each at-bat it is technically a one-on-one battle between the pitcher and hitter, the nine-on-one mentality Red Sox hitting coaches are preaching reminds players they’re one unit facing the opposing pitcher. “The nine-on-one is a group mentality, all pulling from the same rope,” assistant hitting coach Ben Rosenthal said. “If I’m up and don’t get the pitch, I know someone else is behind me and he’ll have that opportunity, and if he doesn’t, the next guy. Not trying to make something happen that’s not there.

Fatse knows his players and he knows they like swag. Over the winter, he had black and white sweatshirts made for his hitters with “9-on-1” across the front with signature Red Sox lettering. The sleeveless hoodies — “We’ve got some pretty physical guys and a lot of them wanted to have sleeveless, like TO and Jarren,” Story explained about teammates Tyler O’Neill and Jarren Duran — were a hit among the offensive group. Players have worn them around the clubhouse and in pregame drills as a subtle but noticeable reminder of the goal at the plate each day.

theathletic.com/5392295/2024/04/05/red-sox-offense-9-on-1-approach/