A most interesting ballgame at Fenway

Sunday 7/27/25

Fascinating game yesterday between the Dodgers and Red Sox at Fenway, especially when we go inside the numbers.

The Dodgers struck out 16 times, the Red Sox five times. Normally it's the Red Sox striking out at far more than their opposition. Then again, this was a Garrett Crochet game.

He came out and surrendered two homers to three of the first Dodgers' batters, including a lead-off blast from Shohei Ohtani. After that, nothing else. Gave you six innings.

When Crochett isn't what I'll call Crochet-good, he's still very good, and that impresses me as much as anything about this first season of his with Boston.

He allowed eight hits and two walks in those six innings yesterday. There was some traffic. He threw 100 pitches, 66 for strikes. In the words, he wasn't at his best. Didn't matter. Crochet finds a way. Struck out ten.

This guy is the Cy Young award winner to me. He's the most valuable starting pitcher in the AL, in my view. I know, that's not the basis for the Cy Young. But I don't think there there's a better pitcher right now either.

Mookie Betts pinch hit and struck out to end the game. Betts is a Teflon player. He receives no criticism. He's now hitting .237, with a .677 OPS.

How is no one discussing how much this player has fallen off here in his early thirties? Is it a blip? The beginning of the end? I honestly don't know. I think the latter is more likely.

And no, this isn't someone in Boston saying the Red Sox were wise to move on from him. That was obviously stupid. What I am saying, though, is the truly great players--the all-timer guys--don't lose it in their early thirties, and that's how most people have been portraying Betts for a long time now, whereas I have never thought he was as good as modern analytics would lead you to believe, which is all that many people look at.

Best game of the season from Jarren Duran? 3-4, no strikeouts, double, triple, 2 RBI, outfield assist.

Kershaw got hit around a bit, which I never mind seeing, no matter who he is facing, because I think he's soft, whines a lot, and is one of the most overrated players in the sport's history.

Three hits from Bregman.

You see production from various Sox players, and you wonder how they only scored 4 runs. Simple: 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position.

Shohei Ohtani is also hugely overrated. People don't know the game anymore, and they certainly don't know its history. They parrot what the echo chambers impel them to. It's all about narrative, group think--which is more like group chanting--and the associative; that is, something becomes associated with a qualitative quantity (i.e., this thing is the best/gold standard of its kind), and then it becomes all but unbudgeable as the benchmark representative of that qualitative quantity, whether it's best band, best magazine, best newspaper, best women's basketball player.

I'm told this guy is better than Babe Ruth. He's nowhere near Ruth.

Ohtani in his prime, and he's hitting .273, with that OPS now being under 1.000. If you're Ruth-level in 2025, that OPS better be up around 1.200 and the average at .340 as you stand at 40 homers right about now.

.273. Spare me this Ruth comparison nonsense. And spare me the "batting average doesn't matter" foolishness, too, while we're at it.

Guy runs into pitches. That's not the same as being an all-time great hitter.

An all-time great hitter does it all well. A Williams, a Musial, a Gehrig, a Hornsby. Judge is closer to those guys than Ohtani, and he isn't just a DH.

Rafaela also had an outfield assist and Narvaez threw out a man attempting to steal. Thus, you had the Dodgers making three of their twenty-seven outs on the base paths, which is the same as giving up an inning's worth of outs. Can't be doing that.

The Red Sox can salvage something, at least, if they win this game today and take the series. I think it's a big game for them. These were three hard series coming out of the break, and 4-5 looks better than 3-6, especially with a capping series win.

Of course, it's one thing to win a Garrett Crochet game and another to win a non-Garrett Crochet game.

Something to keep an eye on, by the way: Crochet has a real shot at winning the pitching triple crown. He's having one of the great pitching seasons in Red Sox history, through late July anyway. If he keeps this up for another two months, he goes into that group with Smoky Joe Wood, Mel Parnell, Jim Lonborg, Luis Tiant, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez, Curt Schilling.