After a last-place finish and being maligned all winter, the Red Sox needed only 36 games to reinvent themselves as a plucky team of overachievers. By putting the ball in play more than all but one team in MLB, Boston jumped to a 21–15 start.
What can we make of 36 games? Seventeen previous Red Sox teams won at least 20 of their first 36 games. All of them finished with winning records, and 13 of the 17 lineups reached the postseason. These Red Sox have only six All-Stars on their roster, but their approach at the plate is graduate-level wizardry. It is best exemplified by newcomers Masataka Yoshida, a contact-hitting machine, and Justin Turner, a grinder who essentially replaced J.D. Martinez as the primary designated hitter.
“There’s more contact,” manager Alex Cora says about his lineup. “And it’s sharing information. There was a narrative going on here that we had a bad clubhouse last year, and that’s not the case. It’s just different guys. The impact JT is having with this team is similar to the impact we had with J.D. in ’18, but in a different way. J.D. was more like the hitting guru ... J.D. is more mechanics. J.D. is more process-oriented. [Turner] is more just like, ‘Let’s find a way here. Just grind.’”
