What Will Roman Anthony’s Role for Boston Red Sox Be?
The 22-year-old outfielder is set to make his long awaited return from the injured list.
Video Transcript
What's up everyone?
Zach Coe here for Roundtable.
Roman Anthony will make his long-awaited return to the Red Sox lineup on Sunday afternoon as the Sox take on the Yankees in the final regular season matchup of the twenty twenty-six season, and he'll lead off and serve as a designated hitter.
But with an already crowded outfield picture, I wanna take a minute to talk about the role that Anthony's going to play down the stretch.
Despite the Red Sox offensive success since July 1st, they've had a glaring hole in the lead-off position.
They've used a number of players, whether it be Jarren Duran, Mickey Gasper, Nick Sogard, Masataka Yoshida, Jamai Jones, just to name a few.
None of those players have taken advantage of that opportunity and held down the position in Anthony's absence.
They rank in the bottom 10 in baseball from their leadoff hitter in batting average on base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, and weighted runs created plus.
And it's really just putting a lot of strain on the rest of the lineup to pick up the slack.
You see a lot of the production coming from the five, six, seven, eight, nine guys, and it's because the top of the lineup is just immediately coming to the plate with one out because their leadoff men just simply aren't getting the job done.
So, Tracy told reporters that the plan was for Anthony to lead off upon his return, but it was unclear whether or not he would lead off against both right and left-handed pitchers thanks to the success that Jamai Jones has had against lefties.
But with the right-handed Will Warren on the mound on Sunday, Anthony is back atop that lineup.
He'll also provide a much-needed offensive boost.
The Red Sox offense ranked second in baseball and runs scored in the month of August, but they've really struggled over the last week, scoring just nineteen runs in the first six games of this seven-game road trip that'll conclude on Sunday, including two shutout losses on Wednesday in Miami and then the Friday night series opener against the Yankees.
Much like some of the problems that they were having earlier in the season, they've struggled with runners in scoring position going just fifteen for seventy-five, which is good for a two hundred batting average over the last seven games.
And it's really been the reason why they've lost some of these games, including that opener on Friday night.
Despite his underwhelming slash line of two twenty-nine with a six seventy-five OPS in the thirty games before landing on the injured list, we've all seen what type of talent Roman Anthony has and what he can do for a lineup, whether it be in his first taste of big league action in twenty twenty-five, or when he starred for Team USA as a part of the World Baseball Classic.
Finally, it'll just be a consistent presence in the lineup and another guy that teams have to circle and game plan around.
That was one of the biggest issues that a lot of people, myself included, saw with this Red Sox lineup entering the season.
There just wasn't a guy in there that you had to circle and say, "Okay, this is the guy that we aren't going to let hurt us."
The Yankees have that in Aaron Judge.
You had that with Rafael Devers before trading him last year.
Every good team in baseball has that guy
