There are any number of reasons why the Red Sox have fallen out of contention -- and that's putting it politely -- in the second half of the 2022 season.
Too often, the team has turned to rookie pitchers, some of whom aren't major league caliber. There's the bullpen, which has been beset by injuries and absence, to say nothing of some aging journeymen (Hansel Robles, Jeurys Familia to name two) who shouldn't have been entrusted with high-leverage situations in the first place.
There's been a shocking falloff at times in smart, fundamental play, leading, no doubt, to too many one- and two-run losses.
But a case could be made that the team's central failing has been how little production it received from J.D. Martinez and Rafael Devers.
Martinez's power has almost completely disappeared. While he continues to rack up doubles, he's hit just two homers in his last 42 games. Such a dropoff is hard to believe. In the first half, Martinez's homer total was down, but he was still a formidable run-producer. Now, even that skill has disappeared. For the season, Martinez is batting just .227 with runners in scoring position. This, from a hitter who had collected 99 RBI or more in five of his previous six full-length seasons.
This year, Martinez isn't guaranteed to reach 60 RBI.
Then there's Devers, who has similarly struggled in the second half. Some of that could easily be attributed to a hamstring injury that nagged him for weeks and undoubtedly hampered him at the plate when it came to using his lower half in his swing. At the break, Devers was in the conversation for the American League MVP, with an OPS of .981 to go along with 22 homers.
Since the break? It's been a completely different story. Before Friday night, Devers had a paltry .624 OPS with only four homers. Not all of it can be attributed to the hamstring injury, since his downfall at the plate began well before that.
But for one night, Martinez and Devers were the big contributors in the Red Sox' comeback win.
In the eighth inning, with the Red Sox trailing 1-0, Devers worked a one-out walk to fill the bases, and while that may not sound like much, there have been far too many nights in the last six weeks or so that an impatient Devers would have swung at something out of the strike zone and perhaps hit into a rally-killing double play.
Not this night. Exhibiting discipline, Devers walked to load the bases.
"Sometimes,'' said Alex Cora, "when you don't feel good mechanically, it's hard to lay off pitches. It's very hard. Sometimes you don't feel right and you expand. When we're going good, we don't mind (hitters) swinging. But when we're struggling, we would love them to zone in on certain pitches in the zone. A walk is a hit, that's what they used to tell us in Little League.
"We did a good job today. There were a lot of four-pitch walks, a lot of (full counts). We won a lot of counts that mattered. That's the fun part of it. When you see that as part of the offense, regardless of whether you have (just) two or three hits, you feel like something good is going to happen.''
It would be soon after the walk to Devers.
After Xander Bogaerts flailed at a couple of breaking pitches well off the plate, Alex Verdugo walked, too, the fourth of the inning, forcing in their first run of the night.
That brought up Martinez, who wasted no time being aggressive against Kansas City reliever Scott Barlow, offering at the first pitch and slapping a single through the shortstop hole, scoring Abraham Almonte. It proved to be the winning run in the Red Sox' 2-1 victory.
The ground single may not have been what Martinez provided in his prime, when he was capable of regularly banging balls off the left field wall or stinting line drives to the right-center gap. But it got the job done, a rarity especially in the second half.
"We had a lot of baserunners throughout the season,'' noted Cora, "and their batting averages aren't what they used to be with men in scoring position. Obviously, there's more stuff offensively that we haven't done throughout the season. But they drive in runs; that's why people get paid, right? They hit in the middle of the lineup and it's been a struggle for them in those situations.
"It was good to see the big guy get a hit there. It was good to see Raffy take a walk in that situation. It picked everybody up. It was good to see.''
It's not going to change the season, since it's far too late for that now. But it was enough to produce a September win, and force the Red Sox to consider how things might have gone differently if the two had begun to produce earlier.