It won't take much to transform the Red Sox from tenuous AL East leaders to clear-cut frontrunners. Hunter Renfroe anchoring the bottom of the order would be a good start.
As the heat of their nine-game winning streak dissipates and the Red Sox settle into what should be a dogfight with the Rays, Jays, and Yankees, lineup imbalance has emerged as a critical issue. The top four hitters -- Alex Verdugo, J.D. Martinez, Xander Bogaerts, and Rafael Devers -- could be All-Stars. Everyone else, to varying degrees, has just been along for the ride.
Until the calendar flipped to May, that included Renfroe, who finished April with a .167 average and one lonely home run.
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Over his last three games, however, Renfroe has started to show some promise, culminating in Tuesday's 3-for-4 night with a double and homer in an 11-7 victory over the Tigers.
Renfroe has recorded six hits, including two home runs, in his last three games. He has focused on driving the ball up the middle and to the opposite field, with impressive results.
"He's been swinging the bat well," said manager Alex Cora. "It started in Texas. He hit the home run, but then he got two hits the opposite way. He put the ball in play, and today he did the same thing. Even the out was a good swing going to the opposite field. He's in a good place now. It looks like he's having confidence. He's seeing the ball better, and it seems like good things are going to happen."
The Red Sox didn't expect Renfroe to hit .330 when they signed him this winter. They knew strikeouts would be part of the equation, but that they'd presumably be offset by power. He was supposed to join Bobby Dalbec and Franchy Cordero as bottom-third threats to leave the yard. Instead, the trio combined for just two home runs and an unsightly 69 strikeouts in April.
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"Obviously, it's not ideal," chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom admitted.
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The injury-prone Cordero has barely played over the last five years, let alone produced, and Dalbec was entering his first full season. The Red Sox built some inconsistency into their expectations. Renfroe, by contrast, blasted 85 homers between 2017-19 with the Padres, including a high of 33 in 2019. He had also earned a Gold Glove nomination in right field and started three games in last year's World Series for Tampa, homering in an 8-7 victory over the Dodgers in Game 4.
If someone was going to anchor the 7-8-9 spots in the order, it would be him. But then he struggled worse than anyone, with his April average actually worse than Cordero's .176.
"Anytime you're a baseball player, you want to see some hits fall," Renfroe said. "But it was good to stay with my approach. I knew it was going to work out. I knew that some balls were going to fall eventually. It's all I can do – go in there, work hard, keep hitting it, and they'll fall."
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The key has been avoiding the pull-happy habits that make him flail at sliders away.
"I think that most hitters really want to focus on hitting the fastball to right-center and pulling offspeed pitches," Renfroe said. "That's kind of everybody's approach for the most part, and when people are doing that with authority, hitting the fastball to right-center with authority and staying on offspeed pitches, I think that's when they're going the best, so to be able to do that means everything's going well."
If Renfroe can keep this mini-streak going, it would mean a world of difference to a lineup that right now can't afford any of its big four to slump or even take a night off. That's where the bottom of the order needs to do its part.
"I think that's going to be a huge offensive help for everybody," Renfroe said, "and just take the load off of Bogaerts, and J.D. and those guys at the top of the lineup knowing that they don't have to necessarily be on their A game when you've got guys at the bottom of the lineup picking up their slack."
