Blue Jays 6, Red Sox 1: Crochet cracks, bats freeze during frigid night at Fenway

The second stinker in a row sends the Sox back to .500

There’s many old adages in baseball. We could spend all night compiling a list, but one that holds firm in the sands of time is the nugget about how most every team will win a third of their games and lose a third of their games. It’s the middle third that really determines your fate.

Normally, the most frustrating batch comes from that middle third basket. The games you blow in the ninth inning. The games you strand a small village of men on base. The games you waste a great outing from your starter and lose 2-1.

The biggest problem I have with tonight is this wasn’t one of those middle third games. Garrett Crochet went to the mound for his first Red Sox start at Fenway Park and just flat out got beat by a guy who entered the night with a 7.71 career ERA. Sure, it was miserably cold, and the defense did him no favors, and he did manage to hold the Jays scoreless into the sixth inning, but Crochet also allowed nine baserunners (five hits and four walks) all on his own, and simply couldn’t close the door in the sixth inning after the defense let him down. He ran out of gas and couldn’t pick up his team when they were struggling.

If you truly have an ace, you should be able to count on one partially dismembered hand the number of games that look like tonight throughout a season when they take mound. It’s not just that the Sox easily lost without much of a fight, it’s that Crochet games were supposed to bring an energy back to the ballpark we haven’t seen in years. Maybe they still will, but the weather and the game combined to make this first one a massive underwhelming dud!

At minimum, when an arm like Crochet takes the mound, you expect a compelling, middle basket type game that’s hard fought and packed with drama. Other times, you’ll cruise to a rocking chair victory. This garbage we saw tonight however is exactly the type of game you’d like to see virtually eliminated from the equation every five days, so to have it appear on the very first homestand in Crochet’s first Fenway start is supremely annoying.

Overall though, it’s probably just part of one weird night where westerly winds and a guy named Easton combined to freeze the Sox bats.

Three Studs

(We’re gonna have to expand outside of the game itself to fill this quota.)

1. Trevor Story. 2-4, and didn’t make an error like to the two guys playing on either side of him.
2. Ceddanne Rafaela. 2-3 and knocked in the only run. He also made another great catch (see below).
3. Jarren Duran. For having the guts to share his story about a suicide attempt back in 2022. This is a huge victory for mental health awareness! With the Netflix documentary releasing, something good still came out of Fenway Park tonight.

Three Duds

1. Crochet. I’m grading on a curve here as others were worse, but you simply need more from him going forward if he’s going to be the guy.
2. Alex Bregman. 0-4 with two strike outs and a throwing error. Awful night!
3. Literally everything and everybody else for making it so I could have copied and pasted what Bryan wrote in the recap last night for this part of the exercise. Take a look:

Three Duds

Mother Nature. Absolute garbage tonight from our girl. Do better.

The fans who weren’t there. Nowhere near a full house. Do better.

Sox hitting. Do better.

Play of the Game

Gotta be the Rafaela catch.

Oh, and amazingly, the play of the game was a Rafaela catch again.