Red Sox at the break

If someone were to tell you back in April that the Boston Red Sox would cruise into the All-Star break with the best record in the American League, you probably wouldn't believe them.  You may need to pinch yourself just to make sure you aren't dreaming.  Yet here we are in mid-July with the Sox having banked an AL best 58 wins before the break.

Of course many Sox fans will take this early season success with a grain of salt, with haunting memories of recent failures still stirring fresh in their minds.  There was the gut wrenching end to the 2011 season, when the Sox 7-20 record in September was responsible for blowing a 9 game lead in the standings that cost them a playoff spot on the final day of the season.  It was the worst late season collapse in league history and one of the worst records the team had produced in any month in franchise history.  "The Collapse" was followed up by the forgettable Bobby V season, when a toxic clubhouse sunk the team to the basement of the AL East.  Boston ended up waiving the white flag at the trade deadline, shipping out a quarter of a billion dollars worth of long term salary in a blockbuster trade with the Dodgers.  Their 69-93 record was the third worst record in the AL, leaving little hope for a quick turnaround.

The worst to first turnaround caught most of us by surprise, but maybe it shouldn't have.  Ok, so nobody would have thought they would be this good, considering 58 wins at the break is a franchise record.  There is still a lot of talent on this roster though.  When you upgrade the manager to John Farrell, remove a few bad apples (looking at you, Josh Beckett) and get a little luckier in the health department, improvement should be expected.  A repeat of last season just wasn't going to happen.

Great, so maybe we should have given this roster a bit more credit and raised expectations a little to put them on the list of potential playoff contenders.  But first place?  How did they get there?  That record is no fluke.  The Sox not only have the best record in the AL, they also have the best run differential (+91).  As is often the case for this team, they are fueled by their bats.  Boston leads the majors in runs scored (498), OBP (.350) and OPS (.793).  While they didn't exactly come scorching into the break on the heels of a 5-5 west coast trip, they still have the league's best road record (27-23).  We can forgive them for their recent mediocrity - those long trips out west can be brutal.

While this Red Sox lineup can hardly be considered a modern day Murderer's Row, it's still stacked with productive players.  It starts at the top with Jacoby Ellsbury.  The power he displayed in his near-MVP campaign in 2011 may never return, but his speed makes him a spark plug at the top of the lineup that sets the tone for the rest of the team.  After a slow start to the season, he's rebounded to post a .305/.368/.422 slash line to go along with his league leading 36 steals.  Dustin Pedroia is having another fantastic all-around season, batting .310/.396/.436 and providing the best glove at second base in the league.  Put it all together and his 4.6 WAR is 4th best in the AL.  Then there is Big Papi.  Remember when we were mourning the end of the slugger's career, when he looked like he was washed up?  David Ortiz has slimmed down, gotten healthier and is now mashing the ball as well as he ever has.  An Achilles injury cost him a large chunk of last season, but since the beginning of 2012, only reigning MVP Miguel Cabrera has a higher slugging percentage than the .609 mark posted by Ortiz.  This season, he's 4th in the league in batting average (.317), 11th in home runs (19) and 7th in RBIs (65), all despite missing the first three weeks of the season.  On a per at-bat basis, the only AL hitters that have been more valuable than Ortiz so far are Cabrera and Chris Davis.

The pitching has had it's ups and downs, but being middle of the pack has been good enough considering the offense they have supporting them.  Their staff ERA of 3.91 is 7th in the AL.  Not great, but above average and a far cry from the miserable 4.70 ERA they put up last season.  The pitching this season would look even better if they had gotten more starts out of Clay Buchholz, who remains on the DL after being limited to only 84.1 innings so far.  His sparkling 1.71 ERA would easily lead the majors if he didn't fall just short of qualifying.  If he returns soon after the break and finishes with a strong second half that comes even close to what he has done so far, he may find himself in the Cy Young race by the time the season ends.  The surprise of the staff has been John Lackey, a pitcher who I once debated about being one of the worst in franchise history two years ago and is now coming off a season missed due to Tommy John surgery.  His 2.78 ERA is the 4th best in the AL among starters.  He has regained some of his velocity and his K/9 of 8.34 is the best it's been since 2005.  It remains to be seen if his career revival is sustainable, but he's shown enough to prove that he's gone from an afterthought anchored by a massive contract to a key part of the rotation.

While much improved from last year's disastrous season, the pitching staff still has some causes for concerns. Jon Lester started the season pitching like an ace the first couple months of the season, before crashing back down to Earth.  While we had hoped that last season was an aberration that would be rectified by the return of his former pitching coach as the new manager, this season is turning out to be nearly as bad.  His 4.58 ERA, 1.37 WHIP and 7.38 K/9 are all approaching or exceeding last year's career worst marks.  The former ace is trending in the wrong direction, with nearly two seasons worth of data (dating back to September 2011) showing that he's become a below average pitcher.  The declining strikeouts is a big part of his struggles, but the increase in walks may be a bigger concern.  Walks have been a problem for most of the pitching staff, as Lester, Ryan Dempster and Felix Doubront all rank near the bottom of the AL in walks allowed.

Then there is the bullpen, which has been adequate, but still a weakness.  Joel Hanrahan was brought in to be the new closer, but never really got started before landing on the DL with a season ending injury.  Andrew Bailey hasn't been able to stay healthy (to the shock of no one) and when he has pitched, his ineffectiveness ended up costing him the closer role.  The job now belongs to Koji Uehara, who has been outstanding, but the 38 year old reliever has already made more appearances and tossed more innings than he did all of last season and is now on pace for a career high in innings pitched.  A bullpen riddled with injuries could ill afford for Uehara to breakdown, which will require the Sox to carefully monitor how he's used down the stretch.

The post All-Star schedule will provide a difficult test for the Red Sox, as they'll open the second half of the season against division rivals - Yankees, Rays and Orioles.  This will give them the chance to add a comfortable cushion to their division lead or allow those teams to gain ground on them if the Sox stumble out of the break.  Pessimists would argue that recent history has shown a "comfortable" lead at the end of July hardly assures anyone of a playoff spot.  The Sox have proven that even a 99.6% chance of making the postseason in early September can still be fumbled away.  Then again, the odds are highly against the chance of the Sox suffering through another historic collapse, plus the addition of a second Wild Card for each league makes those odds even more unlikely to happen this time (seriously, if that rule was introduced one season earlier, would any of this mess ever have happened?).

Making the playoffs for the first time since 2009 is beginning to look likely, but to succeed in the postseason, Boston needs their offense to keep humming like a well oiled machine.  They need Buchholz to return at close to the level he was at prior to getting injured.  They need Lester to regain his old form and they need to keep the bullpen from falling apart.  That's a lot of question marks heading down the stretch, but find me a team in the AL that isn't flawed.  That team doesn't exist.

We may not all agree that the Red Sox are the team to beat in the AL as we head into the unofficial second half of the season, but I think we can all agree that thus far the team has surpassed our wildest expectations.  After hitting rock bottom last year, things are finally looking up again for Red Sox Nation.