Road trip! Beginning in quaint little Fenway Park.
As you probably recall, the Blue Jays had their way with the Red Sox in 2022, beating them 16 times in 19 tries. The Jays have an eight game winning streak in Fenway Park itself. Surely this can not continue forever, as swell as that would be.
The Red Sox were the consensus pick to finish last in the AL East this season - it's where they ended up a year ago. Losing star shortstop Xander Bogaerts in free agency seemed unlikely to make them better. They would have moved Trevor Story back to shortstop, after he spent his first season in Boston playing second base, but Story is out for at least the first half of the season with a bad elbow (everyone seems to be trying their utmost to avoid Tommy John surgery.)
But the Sox are hanging in there so far - they've managed to win more games than they've lost (barely, they're 15-14), mostly by scoring lots of runs. They need to do this, because they give up lots of runs as well. Just two teams in the AL are scoring more frequently; just three have been scored on more frequently.
Some of this is surely a park effect - Fenway will always be Fenway, even if it's not the hitter's paradise it was Back in the Day. It's not the Red Sox have a particularly scary lineup. For every decent hitter they have, like Devers or Yoshida, there's another guy who mostly makes outs, like Casas or Arroyo.
Matchhups!
Mon 1 May - Berrios (2-3, 4.71) vs Kluber (1-4, 6.75)
Tue 2 May - Kikuchi (4-0, 3.00) vs Houck (3-1, 4.50)
Wed 3 May - Manoah (1-1, 4.88) vs Pivetta (1-2, 5.11)
Thu 4 May - Gausman (2-2, 2.33) vs Bello (0-1, 6.57)
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=2023050107210866