Data off a Cliff

BY KEVIN KERNAN

Cleanup on Aisle Four.

That is what I am doing now with items in my notebook you need to know.

Let’s start with the Nerds in Charge and how they continue to destroy teams from within, and let’s call this segment of Baseball or Bust: Data Driven … Off a Cliff.

Red Sox ace Garrett Crochet landed on the injured list Wednesday with inflammation in his pitching shoulder. So, if you are keeping score at home, that’s the reason why his velocity nose-dived this season. Sonny Gray is on the IL as well with a hamstring injury.

How are all those Driveline methodologies working out for you Craig (Fire Away) Breslow, pitching and hitting? The 12-19 Red Sox have scored one run over the last 19 innings.

The big lefty was made a starter by the White Sox in 2024 and pitched 146 innings. He was then traded to the Red Sox for four prospects. Breslow and the Red Sox upped his innings to 205 in 2025. Now he’s pitched 30 innings in 2026 and is on the shelf with arm fatigue. Maybe the Red Sox will dodge this bullet, but it has been a terrible April for them. Crochet is eligible to come off the IL May 11.

Gee, who could have seen that coming? Going back to his college days at Tennessee, Crochet had never pitched more than 65 innings in a season. But the Anyone can Play Anywhere Crowd applies to pitching too — and the Red Sox thought it would be no problem moving Crochet to a 200-innings starter even with not much year-to-year buildup.

Crochet said that he just needs to “build strength’’ in the shoulder. We’ll see. Either way, when your ace goes on the IL with shoulder issues early in a season that is a concern; Wednesday’s erratic starter Brayan Bello was lifted in the fourth inning by interim manager Chad Tracy after walking the No. 9 batter and the Red Sox trailing the Blue Jays, 3-1. The first batter reliever Greg Weissert faced, Ernie Clement homered. Five times this year Red Sox relievers have given up home runs to the first batter they faced, which is the most in baseball.

Coming off the mound and on the bench, Bello repeatedly shook his head in disgust and disbelief as his ERA zoomed to 9.12. He showed up Tracy, who should have gone Earl Weaver on the pitcher. Here are more numbers for the number crunchers in Boston to consider after the 8-1 loss: the Red Sox are 1-18 when their starters fail to go six innings.

All this too on the 40th anniversary of Roger Clemens striking out 20 Mariners – without a walk – in a 3-1 Boston win.

Don’t know how Clemens did that back in 1986 without data guidance from the Nerds. Amazing.

It’s all about the sizzle these days and not the steak.

Whoever is pushing the pitching buttons now for the Red Sox or making the next matchup – and you can be sure that is data driven, because it sure wasn’t just Alex Cora going on a pitching whim – has scrambled all the numbers.

Also noticed on Wednesday that the Red Sox placed one of their top pitching prospects Juan Valera, 19, on the shelf because he is going to have an MRI on his sore right elbow. Red Sox world was aglow because earlier this year Valera threw a pitch that was 101.7 and he struck out 17 batters over 9 1/3 innings in his first two starts.

It’s all about the sizzle these days and not the steak.

Meanwhile, Cam Schlittler, who in college pitched from a mound that was exactly 1.4 miles from Fenway Park, Northeastern’s Parsons Field, is tearing it up for the Yankees.

A few weeks ago I was doing some “reporting’’ for this column trying to find the reasons the Yankees were able to steal Schlittler (4-1, 1.51 ERA) right from under the Red Sox’ noses with the seventh-round pick in the 2022 draft (220 overall) and was told that, to their credit, the Yankees have a great working relationship with Mike Glavine, the coach at Northeastern. So, first of all they had great intel from Schittler’s coach.

Mike is Tom’s brother. “He’s a straight shooter,’’ I was told, so the Yankees and their scouts got an inside look at Schlittler’s makeup — you know that is what scouts are supposed to do, dig deeper than the numbers. At least that used to be called scouting, but now Nerds have made the draft a data driven experience in too many ways. I knew Mike Glavine from his short stint with the Mets as a first baseman and pinch hitter and it was obvious that just like his Hall of Fame brother, he was a baseball gym rat. By the way, the Red Sox had the 219th pick right before the Yankees picked Schlittler and chose a pitcher named Caleb Bolden who has a 6.48 ERA this season at AA Portland.

To the Yankees’ credit, area scout Matt Hyde and Yankees scouting director Damon Oppenheimer have that strong relationship with Glavine that paid off in Schlittler’s get-it-done mentality being known; the Yankees then did a great job of developing Schlittler in the minor leagues putting that inside knowledge to the field test, trusting their scouts and their development people.

That brings us to the other data side of the story. I’ve been told Red Sox area scout liked Ben Rice as well, but the Red Sox did not pull the draft card of Rice simply because the Red Sox bigwigs didn’t have enough “data’’ on Rice, who was born in Cohasset, Massachusetts.

You see, Rice was at Dartmouth when the world was crazy shutting things down in 2020 and 2021 – especially the Ivy League schools – so there was no baseball in those two years.

The Yankees, however, had scouts’ eyes on Rice as he played in various leagues and trusted their scout, Matt Hyde, while the Red Sox did not have as much faith in their area scouts’ eyes, simply because of the lack of data.

Rice was taken in the 12th round of the 2021 draft and is a Yankee star now with 10 home runs and a ridiculous slugging percentage of .714 (a good Yankees number) and had three more hits Wednesday in a 3-0 loss to the Rangers, raising his batting average to .327 and his OPS to 1.157.

The lesson here: Trust your eyes and trust your scouts, dig deeper than the numbers and if for some reason there are no numbers, allow the scouts to do their job. And believe me, the Red Sox are not the only team to fall into this trap. One day I will tell you how one NL East team (not the Mets) made one of the biggest mistakes in their draft history not too long ago because they did not listen to a scout who knew what he was looking at on the amateur ballfield.

Remember, baseball is not played on spreadsheets; it is played on a ballfield.

EXTRA BASES: MLB is better when Donnie Baseball has an important role for a team. The Phillies have a Mets-sized hole to dig out of, but I will be rooting for Don Mattingly to succeed as interim manager after Dave Dombrowski chose him to replace Rob Thomson. Alex Cora told Dombrowski he did not want to come back now and manage the Phillies because this is going to be a Family Summer for Cora; good for him and good for Mattingly. I texted with Cora this week and he is in a good place.

One of the Phillies’ problems is they are getting old fast and can’t fire to the fastball. Mattingly did a great job last year helping the Blue Jays hitters and maybe he can do the same for the Phillies. Consider this: Even with a bad back, an aging Mattingly batted a combined .293 over his last three seasons with the Yankees. Maybe, just maybe, an old dog can teach some Philadelphia old dogs some new tricks.

A pro tip for baserunners: Watch the baseball and make sure to check out the outfielders’ positioning and the infielders’ positioning. This is something Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez were great at; they took the time to look for the fielders as they took their leads. Now I know that takes away from your time celebrating at second base after you hit a double, but I have seen so many baserunners doubled up on line drives this year. The Red Sox were trying to claw back into the game Wednesday and had the bases loaded in the fifth. Caleb Durbin was at second base when Toronto reliever Braydon Fisher came into the game. A line drive was hit right to the shortstop and Durbin madly raced off the base, right into a double play. “Situational baseball and base-running have never been worse,’’ one talent evaluator told BallNine. The reason? “They are always looking at screens in the dugout and are never watching the game. As a result, their baseball instincts are terrible. They don’t work on base-running like players in the past.”

One of the most interesting players in the next draft is left-handed pitcher Brody Bumila, out of Attleboro, Massachusetts and Bishop Feehan High School. He is 6’9”, 250 lbs and is a tremendous state championship winning basketball player, averaging 40 points and 20 rebounds in the playoffs as well – so that shows he has athleticism that can transfer to the mound. I expect the Nationals to take him because of their desperate need for pitching and the fact their new president of baseball operations Paul Toboni was with Red Sox for 10 years.

The Last Word: This from a longtime, deep-thinking baseball man, telling me how experience has been pushed out the door, in not only baseball but life. “We would rather have people making decisions that have been staring at screens their entire lives telling people that spent their lives in the trenches how to do things … That is exactly what MLB has become.’’