It doesn't take a baseball savant to see that the Boston Red Sox have been producing much more at the plate in recent weeks than they had for the first two months of the season. However, it's not obvious why things have changed.
According to The Athletic's Jen McCaffrey, prior to their three-game series against the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field, the Red Sox changed the way that they handled their pre-game hitters meeting. Instead of doing a group meeting, they'd do a shorter group meeting with individual hitter meetings to follow.
The results have been great, and the players seem to really appreciate the change.
“Personally, I like it,” David Hamilton said. “I’m kind of a simple guy, so I don’t really like too much information. It makes me overthink, I guess.”
In June, Hamilton has hit .298 with a .796 OPS, two home runs, seven RBIs and seven stolen seven bases. And, he's not the only one who's enjoying the new approach from the coaching staff.
“When we used to do the team meetings, it was kind of like a generic approach,” said Jarren Duran, who is hitting a remarkable .356 with a 1.031 OPS, three home runs, 10 RBIs, 10 walks and eight stolen bases this month. “I feel like some guys handle different locations better with different pitches so the individual plan has really helped guys be like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to look in this specific area like we talked about. I can look somewhere that works best for me.'”
Manager Alex Cora explained why these individual sessions are working with their roster and helping them move above .500 for just the second time this season.
“It’s more of a one-on-one basis,” Cora said. “It’s more structured to the hitter. Sometimes we get caught up on this idea of what we’re going to do against this guy but (Ceddanne) Rafaela is different than Connor (Wong), and Connor is different than (Rob Refsnyder).”
It would be incredible if Boston continued this run of offensive success, but it's tough to do for prolonged stretches. Hopefully, this shift will help them minimize the valleys in their performances as they move closer to the MLB trade deadline.
