With 44 games to go, it is not quite crunch time for the Red Sox. That will come sometime after Labor Day, when the schedule has just weeks remaining and the playoff push becomes even more critical.
But given that the Red Sox are fighting uphill to get back into wild card contention, there is some undeniable urgency to their current plight. If the Sox don't win the majority of their games remaining in August, what they do in September will be inconsequential.
Ordinarily, they might be turning to Xander Bogaerts, J.D. Martinez or Rafael Devers to carry them through this important stretch. But each one of the Big Three is mired in a month-long slump. Martinez hasn't homered in over a month. Bogaerts hasn't been the same run producer he's been in seasons past, still shy of 50 RBI for the season. And even Devers, the most feared slugger of the three, has run hot-and-cold in recent weeks.
Instead, the Red Sox biggest offensive weapon of late has been their unlikely cleanup hitter, Alex Verdugo. A week or so ago, Verdugo, who had fretted that he might be dropped in the lineup after the trade deadline saw the Sox acquire Tommy Pham and Eric Hosmer, instead found himself hitting fourth, sandwiched between Bogaerts and Martinez.
Wherever he's hitting, however, Verdugo is contributing in a big way. He reached base five times in the Sox' 8-3 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates. He singled and scored their first run of the game in the second inning. He walked in the third, doubled home a run in the fifth, singled and scored in the eighth and and drew another walk and scored again in the ninth.
Three hits, two walks, three runs, one RBI.
Not a bad night, but then again, not terribly surprising given how Verdugo has performed for the last two weeks. In his last 11 games, he's hitting .447 with eight doubles and 11 runs scored. His offensive turnaround hasn't been limited to just that recent stretch, either -- after falling to .205 on May 16, he's hit .310 with a .360 on-base percentage.
He has 30 doubles on the season -- positioning him to reach 40 doubles for the season, one of his goals before the start of the year -- and 20 of those have come since June 1.
For the first two months, it was well-documented that Verdugo was one of the unluckiest hitters in the league, with a hard-hit rate greatly at odds with his actual production. Simply put, Verdugo was barreling the ball often, but failing to get rewarded.
Now, in the second half, it seems his fortune has turned.
"I'm locked in,'' Verdugo told NESN after the game. "I'm staying within myself, not trying to do too much. I'm being on time with the pitcher and trying to use the big part of the field. For me, every time I try to go oppo (and hit to) left-center, I can't try and push it that way. It's just like, my sight goes that way, so it's just letting me see the ball a little deeper and I'm able to keep the off-speed pitches out in front.
"When I hit them out front, I'm able to keep them fair instead of hooking them foul. Pitch recognition, swinging at better pitches..just feel locked in, man. That's it, locked in.''
"He's hitting in between some good hitters, too,'' Cora pointed out. "He recognizes situations. Today, he recognized some patterns -- slider away, fastball in -- and put up some good swings. He was patient enough in certain at-bats.''
Verdugo hardly profiles as the protoypical cleanup hitter. He lacks the home run power generally associated with that role -- he has just seven homers in 111 games and has never hit more than 13 in a season. But Verdugo is fully capable of spraying line drives all over the ballpark, and his career on-base percentage of .340 speaks to his plate discipline.
Importantly, he also puts the ball in play more than anyone else in the Red Sox lineup. His 7.4 percent strikeout rate was good enough for seventh best among qualified American League hitters heading into Wednesday night. This allows the Sox to at least occasionally start runners with Verdugo at the plate, confident that it's highly likely he's going to make contact.
Early in the season, too often, that contact proved futile, as it was regularly directed at somebody, resulting in an out. Now that things have evened out, it's the Red Sox who are lucky to have Verdugo producing in the middle of their lineup at a time when the hitters they would normally be dependent on are not.