Elliott Green’s excellent new EP came out today. It was a great soundtrack for my drive to work today through heavy fog and light rain. I plan on chatting with her about it soon.

Quick reminder that the point of writing is to write and if you use AI in your writing I am just not interested in reading it! Writing is thinking! Do you own thinking! A new study shows AI misrepresents news content 45% of the time so maybe don’t use it for news either.

I don’t know how much time I’ll actually have to write about baseball this season but I’m going to try!

The Boston Red Sox are 1-5 after trips to Cincinnati and Houston. It’s just six games, sure.

They look bad and the numbers are bad. Time to panic? No not yet. But when the “this could be an issue” is an issue right out of the gate it’s magnified. Their path to success is there but they need some things to go right, starting with their rotation. So far they’re still looking to get their feet on the ground.

Here’s a graph I made of the total WPA (win probability added) for each player. Not great that four everyday players are at the bottom of the list and only one everyday player (Wilyer Abreu) is actually helping you win.

(All stats, numbers, and ranks mentioned in this post are through April 2.)

Offense? What offense? The team is tied for last in runs per game: 2.83! 17 runs in 6 games. That’s the exact same as the Reds (who just beat them twice) and the A’s. Not the company you want to keep.

The normal slash line looks bleak:
Batting average: .208 (22nd of 30 in MLB)
On-base percentage: .295 (21st)
Slugging: .347 (22nd)
OPS: .642 (21st)

A team without a ton of power needs to put the ball in play, but they sure love to swing and miss! They have the 3rd worst whiff% (behind the White Sox and A’s) and the 4th worst K% (behind the White Sox, A’s, and Angels). Not the company you want to keep. 

There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind Roman Anthony will be just fine. He’s still never faced a pitcher younger than him and been consistently great at every level. Some (me) will tell you he’s a legit MVP candidate. But it’s also possible that counting on a 21 year old Superman to be the engine of your offense might not work every day.

Opening Day looked great for Roman: 3 hits and a walk. (He became the 25th player ever with 3 hits on Opening Day as a 21-year-old. 10 of those 24 are Hall of Famers. He became the 14th player ever to reach base four times on Opening Day at the age of 21. 9 of 13 are HOFers.) Since that day, he’s just 2 for 18 with 2 walks and 10 strikeouts. The good news is the homer was a pinch hit AB in the 9th inning of the last game in Houston. Maybe the day off reset him and he’s about to take off. The offense will go as he goes, as long as they can start to make some contact.

Also we don’t know the details but Carlos Narvaez, whose emergence was a great story last year, getting benched and Alex Cora not wanting to talk about it? Not a great way to start the season especially with the team playing like this.

Pitching? Hello? Sox starters have the 5th worst ERA. ERA doesn’t always tell the whole story but a look under the hood confirms the grim reality. They have the 6th worst FIP (fielding independent pitching, focusing on what a pitcher can control) and the worst xERA (expected ERA) by a mile: 6.83; the Tigers are second at 5.72. All of that after a nice outing in game 1 from Garrett Crochet where he went six scoreless!

They’ve also allowed the most barrels, the highest barrel%, and the highest EV90 (106.8mph) which means 10% of batted balls are hit at that speed or harder. Other teams launching balls really stuck out in the game Ranger Suarez started.

He should be fine, but he gave up way too much hard contact:

Then Johan Oviedo, who was always a borderline 5th starter for this team, piggybacked him and gave up even more hard contact:

Oviedo hit the IL today with a right elbow strain. His fastball velocity was down (95 in his career, 94.4 this spring, 93 in this start) and he got hit hard. This plus the fact that he had Tommy John surgery and missed all of 2024 and much of 2025 makes this IL stint feels extra precarious.

Maybe some good news on the pitching front: Sox starters have given up the 2nd highest BABIP (batting average on balls in play) which should regress to the mean.

Players/stories/etc from around the league I’m watching.

There are a bunch of rookies off to hot starts, and the Pirates just called up the #1 prospect in baseball, 19-year-old Konnor Griffin, who crushed 4 homers in spring training even though he spells his name in a khaotic fashion.

Chase DeLauter of the Guardians has 4 homers, all hit in his first 3 games.

Sal Stewart of the Reds had 7 hits in the Red Sox series and at least one hit in 5 of his first 6 games including 2 homers and 7 walks.

The White Sox made a splash signing Munetaka Murakami from Japan and he made a splash socking a dinger in each of his first three games while also walking four times.

Owen Caissie, former Cubs top prospect who was sent to the Marlins for Edward Cabrera, is tied for second in the league with 8 RBI. (Cabrera’s first Cubs start was excellent. Feels like a deal that both teams might be happy with.)

JJ Wetherholt of the Cardinals had a homer on Opening Day and followed it up with a walk-off hit in the 10th in game 2.

Kevin McGonigle (great name alert!) had 4 hits including a pair of doubles on Opening Day and through six games has a .985 OPS.

We’ll see how the league adjusts to them as we go.

Drake Baldwin of the Braves, NL Rookie of the Year last year, is on fire: 3 homers, 8 RBI, and an OPS of 1.018. Those numbers would be higher if not for this home run robbery.

Mike Trout is back! He has a pair of homers and 10 walks in his first six games and he’s playing center again. Hopefully he can stay healthy, but when he’s hot it always feels like he’s about to have some weird injury knock him out for the year.

Joey Wiemer, a career journeyman, was scorching out of the gates for the Nationals. After beating out an infield single in the first and lining a hit back up the middle on Monday, Wiemer became just the second player in AL/NL history since at least the start of the live ball era, dating back to 1920, to reach base in his first ten straight plate appearances of a season.

Luis Arraez, who I find fascinating as a guy who wins batting titles but is barely a replacement level player, rarely strikes out. He’s already done so 3 times this season.

The windy city: Ian Happ would have hit a homer out of Wrigley on Opening Day but the wind pushed it in 113 feet, which is the most distance the wind has ever taken off a would-be homer using the Weather Applied Metrics database which has been tracked for the entirety of the last three seasons.

My beloved Worcester Red Sox had a crazy game last week. They won 19-3 but that’s not the wild part. Every player in their lineup walked at least once, and six of them walked at least twice. 20 walks in all:

There are 780 players on Major League rosters. The only one to wear #69 is AJ Blubaugh of the Astros.