Alex Cora’s bold move backfires as Red Sox lose to Orioles

Alex Cora showed a lot of trust in his bullpen on Monday night.

This time, it backfired.

Starter Martin Perez was cruising through five innings of one-run ball on just 74 pitches when Cora replaced him with Matt Andriese in a tie game to start the sixth inning. Andriese promptly served up the go-ahead homer on a blast by Trey Mancini as the Red Sox eventually fell to the Orioles, 4-1.

There’s a strong argument to be made for keeping Perez in the game for at least another inning. The lefty had looked strong, ending the fifth inning on just 14 pitches after striking out Austin Hays on a well-placed cutter on the outer half of the plate.

Perez is certainly stretched out, having thrown 91 pitches in his last outing.

And while the modern game has been trending toward taking the starting pitcher out before he goes through the batting order a third time (Blake Snell surely has some thoughts on that), Perez has not been one of those starters with substantially worse numbers the third time through.

This year, he’s holding hitters to a .190 average with a .451 OPS the third time facing them. Last year, same thing: he held them to a .190 average and .571 OSP the third time through.

Mancini was 6-for-13 against Perez entering the game, but 0-for-2 in his first at-bats against him. He does hit right-handed, so Andriese certainly gave the Red Sox the platoon advantage in that matchup. But Mancini has hit righties just as well as he’s hit lefties throughout his career.

Whatever Cora saw, or whatever data he had available to him that prompted the move, is uncertain.

Either way, it didn’t work as Andriese threw a breaking ball through the bottom of the zone that Mancini easily hammered well over the fence. It was his seventh homer of the year. And it broke a 1-1 ballgame and tilted it in the Orioles’ favor.

The loss snapped the Red Sox’ four-game winning streak. They now head home to face the first-place Oakland A’s in what should be an entertaining series at Fenway Park.

Other takeaways from Tuesday’s game:

1. Perez ran into trouble only briefly in the second inning, when Ryan Mountcastle got a juicy fastball and demolished it into the left-field bleachers for a solo homer. Perez looked shaky that inning, allowing two batters to reach as he worked the count to 2-2 with two outs against Ryan McKenna. But Christian Vazquez took control, pausing the game and motioning to Perez to calm down and take his time. Vazquez did this four or five times while waiting to give Perez the sign. The next pitch, Perez struck out McKenna. The O’s didn’t threaten off him the rest of the game. Perez now has a 4.01 ERA on the season.

2. The Red Sox offense was surprisingly quiet against right-hander Jorge Lopez, who entered with a 5.63 ERA but kept the Sox to just one run over 5 2/3 innings. J.D. Martinez had two of the four hits off him. It was just the fourth time this year the Red Sox were held to one run, and first since April 28-29, when the Mets’ Jacob deGrom and the Rangers’ Kyle Gibson each pitched very well against MLB’s top offense.

3. Xander Bogaerts made a rare mistake in the field that led to the O’s adding some insurance runs in the bottom of the eighth. The speedy Cedric Mullins lifted a blooper to the edge of the dirt between third and short, but Bogaerts couldn’t come up with it. He reached the ball on the run, but bobbled the catch a few times as Mullins ran all the way to third base. The O’s plated two in the inning.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3vVcg8n