In which the Red Sox set a record that is at least over 125 years old but probably extends back through the Civil War era

Thursday 6/11/26

During yesterday's ballgame, the 2026 Boston Red Sox achieved something that hasn't been done in the history of baseball going back to 1901, and probably before that, save that we don't technically know for sure because of the prior state of record keeping: the first three batters in their line-up each struck out three times in their first three at-bats.

It was 5-0 Rays in the eighth inning, when the hapless Caleb Durbin--a denizen of the bottom portion of the Sox' line-up--came to the plate and socked a homer. This made the score 5-1. Durbin then returned to the Red Sox' dugout and put on a Wally the Green Monster head and celebrated with his teammates, which was beyond embarrassing, because here you were, presently eleven games under .500 on June 10, and getting blasted again. Maybe...I don't know...act like a professional? But no! We can't have that in 2026! Can't be serious humans. Hell no. Gotta be clowns!

Then, another man got on, and Jarren Duran singled, bringing up two-hole hitter Ceddanne Rafaela who for some reason--okay, let's just call it the general state of stupidity of almost everyone in the world--Red Sox fans think is Roberto Clemente (despite these baseball experts barely, if that, having heard of Clemente, but you get my meaning). Ceddanne then did the improbable thing (which becomes more possible during a fake comeback like this) of planting one in the outfield seats, making the score 5-4.

Another amazing stat about these Red Sox: they lead all of baseball in ninth-inning runs scored, and yet were 0-35 coming into this game when trailing after eight innings.

This team is interesting for all the wrong reasons.

So now they have a chance, right? It's paramount to hold the Rays scoreless in the bottom of the eighth, then see what you can do in your last promised chance to hit. Red Sox manager Chad Tracy brings in Justin Slaten, who sports a 7.30 ERA this morning, and he gives up 2 runs in two-thirds of an inning to make it 7-4.

And wouldn't you know it: the Sox pick up the run they would have needed to tie to the ballgame in the ninth courtesy of, of all things, another home run by Caleb Durbin who will probably never home in back to back innings again in his big league career, and lose 7-5.

That's awesome. Interestingly inept and embarrassing.

This is the best you're going to get these days from this team.

There was a story that came out with these quotes from front office personnel from other teams basically laughing at the Red Sox' roster construction, saying they can't believe they went with all these Triple A guys at the bottom of their line-up, which is ironic given the whole thing I just said about the record-setting top of the Sox' line-up.

And while I'm loath to defend the Sox, anyone who thinks that Triple A players at the bottom of big league line-ups isn't the norm now either doesn't know what they're talking about or have an agenda. The truth is that you don't have enough capable big leaguers to make this league go 'round as a wholly big league baseball player endeavor. Guys on the whole are worse at playing the game of baseball than ever before. Instruction at the minor league level is worse than ever.

Baseball is in thrall to analytics, and swinging to spreadsheets, as we've seen time and again and explored repeatedly in these pages, won't make you a capable ballplayer. They'll make you Marcelo Mayer. And then you'll have a team littered with Mayers.

The big leagues right now are a mix of big leaguers and minor leaguers pressed into being big leaguers. You know what the San Diego Padres are hitting as a team? .216. .216! And right now, they'd be a playoff team.

Bad baseball. This is a league of bad baseball. The result of analytics and how we relegate ourselves to living now. We don't have to do live this way--we chose to. Even baseball is ruined.

Anyway, make it 0-36 for the 2026 Boston Red Sox when trailing coming into the ninth inning. They're also 0-28 when trailing by 3 or more runs at any point in a game. Not coming back from a 4-1 deficit in a single instance on the season at this juncture is worse than not having overcome a ninth-inning deficit. We're more than a third of the way through the year. That 0-28 is a number of historical proportion. It's mesmerizingly bad. Like you keep staring at it blinking in disbelief.

And yet, I still see comments like, "If Roman Anthony comes back and hits like he did last year..."

I always want to say to these people, "How do you think he hit last year?" The general opinion is that Anthony was great in his portion of a season in 2025. He wasn't. He had 8 home runs in 257 at-bats. That's like half a season, right? A bit less. We'll call it an 18 home run pace. He struck out 84 times. We'll call that a 170 strikeout pace. 170 strikeouts...and limited power.

Why are people so ignorant? These things aren't hard to understand. This isn't like creating great art and it requires all this talent and thinking. This is like mental shoe-tying, but the sports version. I'll tell you what people do: they want to look at one number. And everything they think and say, all the associations they make, the projections, all of their ignorance, will stem from their usage of that one number. What do we keep saying? It's a dashboard culture. As in, the Instagram dashboard concept. Transpose that to the rest of culture. Dashboard culture.

In baseball, the dashboard number is WAR or OPS. Anthony's OPS in 2025 was .859, so people think he was great. You can have the OPS--and it's not like that's an amazing one--and have little actual production to show for it and a ton of strikeouts, so you're not even making fielders have to do anything, or producing productive outs to move runs along or drive in runs. Speaking of the latter: Anthony had 32 RBI in 2025, which we'll call a 70 RBI pace. This is piddling stuff. He was a piddling offensive player during his glorified half season. And I'm expecting to learn any day now that Garrett Crochet has been shut down for 2026. Current baseball philosophy and practices also produce more brittle pitchers than ever.

Roman Anthony's per-162-games average for strikeouts in his career thus far: 188. That's a fact. Anyone is free to see and understand that fact. But that doesn't mean anyone will. Or even can.

Here at 12 games below .500 on June 11, the Red Sox are pacing for 66 wins on the season. U-G-L-Y. They'd have to go 54-42 the rest of the way to finish 81-81. They've yet to win four straight games. A 62-34 record would be required to reach last year's win total of 89, which was treated by Red Sox fans as this notable achievement, but was the exact same number of wins as the 1973 and 1982 Red Sox teams, squads that were thought of at the time as also-rans, which speaks to the distorting lens that is the ridiculous current Wild Card set-up.