3 bright spots of the Red Sox season so far

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The Red Sox did not anticipate the bad start of the 2019 season. It was not the first month that anyone – Dave Dombrowski, Alex Cora, the players or the fans – wanted.

On May 1, the Red Sox are 13-17 and fourth in East Alberta, seven games away from the Tampa Bay Rays.

Can they reverse the situation? It's no longer 2018, but that does not mean that the Red Sox have not found a positive point in the first month of the MLB season.

Here are three positives for the Red Sox after a month of play:

Ryan Brasier and the office are strong.

Craig Kimbrel was the Red Sox's closest player for three seasons. When Dave Dombrowski said the Red Sox would not sign Kimbrel, the dominant issue in the offseason was Alex Cora's strategy.

Ryan Brasier, the 31-year-old who started MLB's minor league season in 2018, made as good a start as he did during the Sox World Series race last October. In 9 playoff games, Brasier clocked a time of 1.04 and guided the Red Sox through hard sleeves each time, allowing no more than two hits in each appearance.

In 2019, this has hardly changed: Brasier made 14 appearances, posting a validity of 1.32. He made six saves on seven occasions. He has played in the last two rounds of 12 of those 14 games and averages less than four shots per batter.

The bullpen is not a one-man show. Matt Barnes has won some big rounds: 10 of his 12 appearances with the Red Sox have been scored by less than three points, tied or behind by one point. He contributed to two saves and only allowed seven hits on 48 batters.

Of the Sox pitchers as a group, the efforts have been fair: Brasier and Barnes, as well as Heath Hembree, Brandon Workman and Colten Brewer, have all thrown between 11 and 14 innings this season. According to Baseball Reference, the Red Sox would boast the MLB's fourth best enclosure so far in 2019.

Michael Chavis has an impact early in his career at MLB.

According to Bleacher Report, the Red Sox was the worst farming system of the MLB on January 2nd of this year. Michael Chavis, the best hope of the team, was not among the top 101 prospects of the Baseball Prospectus this season.

Nobody seems to have told him.

Aged 23, Chavis has scored three goals and scored seven goals since he debuted in MLB on April 20th. Until April 30, it reduced by 0.33 / 0.436 / 0.625. According to Baseball Reference, its 0.6 WAR (a calculation of the number of wins added by a player over a replacement level player) is tied with JD Martinez for fifth place among the Red Sox hitters .

Chavis has adapted well to the MLB in his first 10 games while playing in the field. In the absence of Dustin Pedroia, Chavis mainly played the second goal, but he started a game each at first and third base. On 38 defensive occasions, he made only one mistake. Rafael Devers, for example, made a mistake on nearly 12 defense chances that he has encountered this season.

The speed and overall performance of Chris Sale are strengthening.

The Red Sox have awarded Chris Sale a contract extension of $ 145 million over four years until 2024 before the start of the season. Its bad April spate threatened to turn this extension into a $ 145 million hill on which Dave Dombrowski would die.

"I keep repeating the same things, but it's a step in the right direction," said Sale after his last start, a seven-run effort against the Rays that resulted in a defeat of 5-2 for Sox.

Dirty was right, though. This game was a step in the right direction. Sale dropped eight batters, pitched seven innings for the first time this season, and made the most strikes of the season (15) against the Rays.

According to FanGraphs, Sale's average fastball speed has not yet reached its peaks of the 2018 season. But since it dropped below 90 mph when it left on April 2, the speed has increased.

Chris Sale obviously needs to make further adjustments to get back to his best form, but as he said, it's a step in the right direction.

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