A really good article in the Providence Journal today outlining where the Sox offense may have a weakness:
In attacking the Red Sox with his slider, Darvish followed a script outlined by the Rangers’ previous starters in this series. Derek Holland is a pure sinker-slider starter; only 19 starters in baseball throw a slider more often. Nobody in baseball throws a slider more than Saturday’s starter, Alexi Ogando, who uses it 38 percent of the time.
Texas’ effective use of the slider exploited one of Boston’s flaws as an offense. The Red Sox pummel fastballs; according to Fangraphs, they’re the best fastball-hitting team in the majors through one month of the season.
Ortiz and Daniel Nava have feasted on fastballs. Almost all of Boston’s home runs this season have come on heaters, with Ross’ homer on a Darvish hanging slider in Sunday’s second inning a notable exception.
The Red Sox as a team haven’t done as well against most breaking pitches, especially the slider. Fangraphs ranks them significantly below-average against the pitch thus far this season, and the Rangers took advantage of that this weekend.
Here's a look at a subset of the FanGraphs data. You can look at the full data here.
The numbers for Ortiz, Nava, and Carp against fastballs (wFA = number of runs above average they are creating when thrown a fastball) are very high. Pedroia, Ross, and Ellsbury are hitting 2-seam fastballs (wFT) well. But then look at what they do against sliders (wSL) which is pretty terrible for Pedroia, Ellsbury, Salty, and Nava. If you click through you can see the whole team and get a better idea of just how bad Middlebrooks really is doing so far this season.
This is something that Red Sox will adjust to… we hope. We'll see how well those adjustments go as no doubt the Twins staff tonight will be looking to do the same thing.