McAdam: Mitch Moreland needs to play over Jackie Bradley Jr.

ARLINGTON, Texas -- Jackie Bradley Jr. went hitless in Sunday's 6-1 win over the Texas Rangers, and now has a slash line of .178/.264/.271.

Mitch Moreland, meanwhile, had a double and single in four at-bats, giving him a line of .347/.407/.653.

Seemingly unrelated, these two opposite trajectories are, instead, connected.

It's rare to have them in the lineup at the same time, as they were Sunday. Usually, when Moreland is in, he's playing first, which means Hanley Ramirez is the DH, which means J.D. Martinez is in left, which (usually) means Andrew Benintendi is in center and Bradley is on the bench.

Usually. Sunday was the exception, since Alex Cora saw fit to give Ramirez a day off. But again, usually, the two are mutually exclusive.

Through the first 35 games, Bradley has been given the benefit of the doubt from Cora, as the manager waits for the mercurial Bradley to get hot at the plate. As the numbers illustrate, that not only hasn't happened, it hasn't come close to happening. Bradley is third in the team in strikeouts and isn't generating good at-bats.

His defense, of course, remains nonpareil, and when the Red Sox deploy their outfield rotation -- with Benintendi in center and Martinez in left -- they weaken themselves at not one, but two outfield spots. Benintendi is a considerably a better left fielder than Martinez, and Bradley is superior to Benintendi in center.

But as valuable as Bradley is as a defender, he's become a true liability in the lineup. With the Sox getting little production out of the catching spot -- Sandy Leon's three-run homer Sunday notwithstanding -- the bottom two spots in the order have become a black hole.

The Sox can't afford to have two nearly automatic outs at the base of their lineup, especially when there's an easy solution. And that solution involves playing Moreland most -- if not every -- day.

Moreland has earned the playing time and, as he demonstrated both last season and this one, he's fully capable of hitting lefties, so the Sox needn't worry about his splits.

Having him at first represents an upgrade there over Ramirez, whose play there has been perfectly acceptable, all things considered, but still, not the equal of Moreland's.

In the outfield, Martinez has been as advertised, which is to say ''adequate'' with the ability to occasionally make a surprising play. It happened last week in Toronto, when he ran down a ball in the right-center gap, and it happened again in this series when Martinez tracked a ball down on the warning track in left-center, running a long way to get there.

In short, Martinez has been far from a disaster -- both to the eye test, and in terms of advanced fielding metrics which have him at neutral in DRS (defensive runs saved), meaning he's neither helping nor hurting them.

With Moreland's bat to be gained, that's a tradeoff the Sox should be more than willing to make.

"He's a good hitter,'' said Alex Cora. "You take a look at what he's doing right now ... he's putting pressure on the manager to play more and I like that.''

This doesn't have to be a season-long commitment for Cora. Moreland is known to be streaky, too, and in time, it may be that he drops off enough that his presence in the lineup on a daily basis can't be justified. At that point, he can go back to being a role player, alternating games at first and providing a strong lefty bat off the bench.

Perhaps by then, too, Bradley will use his downtime to figure out some things at the plate. As inept as he's been with the bat in the first six weeks, it's a given that a hot stretch is coming, just as surely as it has in recent seasons. There will be a three-week stretch this summer when he'll look like he'll never make another out and everything off his bat will be hit hard.

But that time isn't now, and the Red Sox ready for a huge series in the Bronx, it only makes sense to field their best lineup. For now, that includes Moreland and not Bradley.