Any day now, I expect that NESN will issue this disclaimer prior to the start of their Red Sox telecast:
Any resemblance between this Red Sox team and the one you watched for the month of the season is purely coincidental.
The names and faces are the same, of course, give or take a callup or two. But the results are night and day when it comes to offensive performance.
Four the first 30 or so games, the Red Sox were a woeful offensive bunch. They didn't take walks, they chased pitches out of the strike zone more often than any team in the game, and too often, they ended up scoring one, two or three runs per game.
Was it any surprise that they occupied the basement of their division and sat nine games under .500?
Since then, it's as though a switch has been flipped, a light has gone on. This is what everyone expected from the Red Sox when the season began, but somehow, didn't get for the first month.
Nothing illustrated the complete turnaround more than this: in their first 29 games, the Red Sox scored 95 runs, for an average of a little more than three runs per game; they've now scored 95 runs in their last 13 games, an average of 7.3 runs per game.
In other words, in the last two weeks, the Red Sox have been more than twice as prolific scoring runs as they had been for the first four weeks of the schedule.
On Tuesday night, the start of a brief three-game road trip, all the elements came together, and they came together against a quality starting pitcher, Dylan Cease. Kike Hernandez set the tone by driving the first pitch of the game into the left-field seats, with an exist velocity of 112 mph. The Sox were off and running.
By the time the night ended, they had established season highs in hits (19), runs (16), homers (four) and extra-base hits (nine). Every member of the starting lineup had at least one hit and every member but one (Xander Bogaerts) knocked in at least one run in a balanced attack. They got homers from the first, second, sixth and eighth spots in the lineup.
"It was relentless,'' agreed Alex Cora, "from top bottom. Usually in these games, somebody doesn't get a hit or has a bad night. Today, everybody had a great night. Obviously, coming into the season, we knew we were going to hit and you look at the numbers today and we're probably a Top 3 offense in the league. We were horrible for three weeks, but it evens out. I think we're controlling the zone and now we're doing damage in the zone, which is the fun part.''
Since he was hired, Cora has preached the importance of his hitters doing damage by hunting fastballs and being aggressive within the strike zone. But until a few weeks ago, too many hitters in the lineup forgot the "...within the strike zone'' part of the equation. They flailed at pitches high and low, in and out, in a desperate -- and ultimately futile -- attempt to square balls up.
Now they've reined in their approach and the results are plain to see.
For the first month of the season, the most common refrain heard about the offense was: "They'll hit, because they always have.'' And indeed, that seemed like common sense. Nobody had aged out since last October, and the addition of free agent Trevor Story only deepened their attack.
But when the season began, the Red Sox engine wouldn't turn over. The Big Three of J.D. Martinez, Rafael Devers and Xander Bogaerts, for the most part, did their job, but few others did. They had no one getting on base at the top of the order, and no one to offer protection in the bottom half of the lineup.
The result? Strong pitching performances were wasted and the Sox ended up on the wrong end of a lot of low-scoring, one- and two-run games.
The change came in Atlanta, two weeks ago, when suddenly, the hitters became more discerning and focused on pitches they could drive. A breakout series in Texas was greeted with some suspicion because of the quality of the opponent. But when the Sox took two-of-three from a white-hot Houston Astros team, the offensive reawakening seemed a little more real, and a four-game sweep of Seattle -- not a powerhouse team in the standings, but possessors of a quality pitching staff -- only reinforced the notion.
Each game now seems to feature the unveiling of another hot hitter. Last weekend, it was Story, who heated up and hasn't yet cooled, with six homers in his last five games. Now, it would seem, it's Hernandez and Christian Vazquez -- at the top and bottom of the order respectively -- who are joining the hit parade.
From top to bottom, they continue take their walks. Of the five they worked Tuesday night, three came around to score.
Some perspective is in order. Despite their torrid stretch at the plate, the Red Sox remain a losing team (20-22) and are lodged in fourth place in the division.
But with nearly three-quarters of the season still to play, there at least is the sense that the Red Sox have begun to hit as everyone expected. And that's a start, however late it may be.