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Healthy Red Sox bullpen peaking at right time
- Updated: September 22, 2016
As the Red Sox pull away in the American League East, there’s plenty of credit to go around, and most of it is landing in expected places. Just think about Mookie Betts, who has inserted himself squarely into the AL Most Valuable Player Award conversation; Rick Porcello, who has done the same with the AL Cy Young Award; Hanley Ramirez, who has been one of the best hitters in baseball for months; and, of course, the continuing heroics of the retiring David Ortiz.
All four — and others like Sandy Leon and David Price — deserve all the praise they’re getting and then some. But perhaps we’re overlooking a much-maligned unit that’s become an increasingly big part of Boston’s success. “Hey,” you might be wise to point out … “what about that outstanding bullpen?”
If that sounds crazy, well, we get it, because the bullpen hasn’t exactly been the source of strength it was expected to be. Through the end of August, Boston’s bullpen had put together a 3.94 ERA, the 19th best in the Majors. In August alone, that number was 4.70, better than only six other teams, and the final week of the month saw some high-profile implosions, like when Matt Barnes and Robbie Ross Jr. helped turn a 4-0 lead into a 10-4 loss to the Royals on Aug. 28. Two days later, deposed starter Clay Buchholz allowed a tiebreaking Evan Longoria homer in a 4-3 loss to the Rays. The local headlines, full of doom and gloom, were exactly what you’d expect they were.
Yet here we are, three weeks later, and the Red Sox’s bullpen in September hasn’t just been good, it’s been great — to the point that their 0.86 ERA as of Thursday isn’t only the best ERA of the month, it’s the best that any bullpen has had in any month over the past two years. Now, ERA is obviously an imperfect way to evaluate a bullpen over a small sample, and there’s some unsustainable performance in there — for example, they won’t continue to strand 92 percent of runners on base, not when the Major League average is 74 percent.
Still, there’s some real reasons why the Red Sox’s bullpen now and headed into October looks better than it has all year. Here’s three of them.
Craig Kimbrel and Koji Uehara are healthy and dealing When Boston acquired Carson Smith from Seattle last December, he was expected to help form an effective back-end trio in front of Uehara and Kimbrel, who had been acquired from San Diego in November. But Smith went down early in the year with an elbow injury, and then Kimbrel required knee surgery in July, and shortly after Uehara injured a pectoral muscle, and for a stretch of a few weeks, the Red Sox had none of their projected top three available.
Kimbrel returned on Aug. 1, and since then, he’s been unbelievable — in 15 1/3 innings over 17 games, he’s allowed a single earned run, striking out 44 percent of the …
