As the Red Sox divi­sion lead rapidly melted away mor­ph­ing from a 3 game cush­ion to a 2 game deficit in under a week, the opti­mism Red Sox Nation felt about the team’s chances enter­ing the break—falsely buoyed by the Yan­kees’ three losses to the Angels and the Red Sox three wins over the Roy­als lead­ing into the break—dissipated faster than Jason Bay’s bat­ting average.

Despite the dis­turb­ing short­com­ings of the bullpen in recent weeks, epit­o­mized in two epic melt­downs, pitch­ing con­tin­ues to be this team’s foun­da­tion.  Build­ing the team around pitch­ing was, after all, Theo Epstein’s plan dur­ing the off­sea­son turn­ing to rehab­bing vet­er­ans Brad Penny, John Smoltz and Takashi Saito with low-risk, high-reward con­tracts after fail­ing to sign Mark Teix­eira.  Despite the ugly 1–5 start to the sec­ond half, the pitch­ing has posted an ERA of 4.22 fol­low­ing the break so far, only slightly higher than the team’s 4.07 first half ERA which ranked sec­ond in the Amer­i­can League.

Boston can win with this pitch­ing staff assum­ing there are no cat­a­strophic injuries to Josh Beck­ett, Jon Lester or Jonathan Papel­bon and the remain­ing pieces sim­ply hold their own.

The bats, how­ever, appear to be a dif­fer­ent story.  This might seem like a state­ment of the obvi­ous as the offense has limped out to an ane­mic sec­ond half start rank­ing last in the Amer­i­can League in runs, hits, RBI, bat­ting aver­age, total bases, on base per­cent­age, and slug­ging per­cent­age.  With the excep­tion of Mike Low­ell, Dustin Pedroia, David Ortiz and Kevin Youk­ilis, the rest of the Red Sox bat­ters have com­bined for 6 runs, 10 hits and 4 RBI in 111 at bats over six games amount­ing to a .090 BA, .172 OBP and .171 SLG.  That’s two-thirds of the lineup when you con­sider that Low­ell is now a part-time player.

Ok, so one of the losses came against Roy Hal­la­day.  Another came against Kevin Mill­wood who doesn’t strike fear in the hearts of oppos­ing line­ups but is a steady vet­eran nonethe­less.  But Marc Rzepczyn­ski, Tommy Hunter and Dustin Nip­pert (com­bined career mark of 10–12 with an ERA around 6) won the other three games, each sur­ren­der­ing just a sin­gle earned run in their dom­i­nat­ing efforts.

Much has been made of the the­ory that Kevin Youk­ilis’ intense style of play wears him down through­out the sea­son.  It has also been noted that Low­ell is a noto­ri­ous first half player who then strug­gles in the sec­ond half.  The same has been said about Brad Penny.  Could it be that the Red Sox’ strug­gles over the last week (and really dat­ing back to the dev­as­tat­ing bullpen implo­sion in Bal­ti­more) is an accen­tu­ated sam­pling of the roster’s his­toric sec­ond half numbers?

With this in mind I looked at each Red Sox hit­ter who had at least 1,000 at bats over the prior three sea­sons (2006–2008) and tracked per­for­mance pre and post all star break.  The results are below with the dark­ness of the red or blue indi­cat­ing the degree to which that player heated up or cooled off in the sec­ond half.

(For AB/HR and AB/RBI, the per­cent­ages make it seem back­wards since you want these num­bers to shrink unlike the other stats.  But I used a for­mula where neg­a­tive always rep­re­sented a decline and vice versa.)

The results are highly var­ied.  Youk­ilis, Bay and Low­ell indeed tend to cool off after the break to vary­ing extremes but some play­ers, led by David Ortiz, pick up their per­for­mance.  New acqui­si­tion Adam LaRoche’s num­bers back up his rep­u­ta­tion as a sec­ond half player and the over­all weighted aver­age for the play­ers assessed shows a slight up tick in offense.

The les­son to be learned here, other than the fact that it’s nec­es­sary to remain even keeled even when the team looks its worst, is that the knee jerk reac­tion to the hideous offen­sive dis­play of the past week is to demand a trade to address what­ever appears to be the imme­di­ate need.  The Sox front office, known as pio­neers in saber­met­rics and reliance upon sta­tis­ti­cal facts over emo­tional whims (just ask Grady Lit­tle) doesn’t see Jason Bay’s plum­met­ing aver­age and panic.  Sure, they’d pre­fer to see him hit­ting but they view the team through a (much more com­plex and lay­ered) lens such as this table.  It likely explains why they weren’t in a rush to resign Bay when his stock was at its peak as he mashed his way through the early months of the sea­son.  It may also explain their loy­alty to Ortiz amidst his strug­gles know­ing how his per­for­mance trends upwards as the sea­son pro­gresses.  Finally, it helps explain the LaRoche trade.  With Low­ell and Youk­ilis prov­ing the most extreme exam­ples of first half per­form­ers, LaRoche slides in as a player who tends to get hot later in the year and in addi­tion to hope­fully hit­ting, can poten­tially help Youk­ilis and Low­ell wear down less dras­ti­cally by pro­vid­ing extra breaks.

This is the same Red Sox team that started the first half 2–6 with a bevy of one-run losses only to recover and race out to the best record in the Amer­i­can League.  While there cer­tainly are some red flags (some­thing about this sea­son feels like 2006) and the trad­ing dead­line could still see the Sox make a sig­nif­i­cant move, let’s take a deep breath and relax about the offense for now.