As the Red Sox strug­gled to a 1–5 record to begin the sec­ond half, their offense ground to a vir­tual halt.  Even though the his­toric num­bers sug­gested it was an untimely col­lec­tive slump that would even­tu­ally pass, the team was flat and needed a shakeup to inject some life into the club­house as the trade dead­line loomed.

Cer­tainly, acquir­ing Roy Hal­la­day would have accom­plished just that sim­ply due to the mag­ni­tude of such an acqui­si­tion as well as the recog­ni­tion that a top three of Hal­la­day, Josh Beck­ett and Jon Lester would put the Sox in a sit­u­a­tion where merely mak­ing the post sea­son would posi­tion them well for win­ning a third World Series in six sea­sons.  Out­side of acquir­ing one of the league’s top starters, the most glar­ing need remained a potent bat for Terry Fran­cona to drop in the mid­dle of the lineup to rein­force the wilt­ing offense.

By early after­noon last Fri­day, word leaked out that the Red Sox were on the verge of acquir­ing Vic­tor Mar­tinez from Cleveland—a ver­sa­tile switch hit­ter capa­ble of catch­ing and play­ing first base and a player known as a pos­i­tive club­house pres­ence.  In Mar­tinez’ first two games with the Red Sox over the week­end, he bat­ted third going 6-for-11 with 5 RBI.  Mar­tinez played first base on Sat­ur­day and caught dur­ing Sunday’s 18 run explo­sion.  The Boston offense will be most potent when Mar­tinez catches as he will be replac­ing a far weaker hit­ter in Jason Varitek, but the strongest defen­sive team will fea­ture Mar­tinez at first base, Kevin Youk­ilis at third base with Varitek catch­ing since Mike Lowell’s defense has so badly regressed as a result of his degen­er­a­tive hip.  Suf­fice it to say, Mar­tinez is the flex­i­ble type of player that Fran­cona and the Red Sox love and Tito will have plenty of options and can adjust his lineup to best match up to the com­pe­ti­tion on a given night.

There are deeper impli­ca­tions of the trade, how­ever.  With Mar­tinez now pen­ciled into the three hole every day, Youk­ilis will return to the cleanup spot he occu­pied from the Manny Ramirez trade at last season’s dead­line up until he was forced to move to the third spot at the peak of David Ortiz’ strug­gles ear­lier this sea­son.  Ortiz will slide into the fifth spot fol­lowed by Jason Bay in the six hole.  In doing this, Fran­cona will alter­nate left­ies and righties—a strat­egy he loves to employ to mit­i­gate vul­ner­a­bil­ity to oppo­si­tion bullpen moves in later innings.  This may all seem like an incon­se­quen­tial shuf­fling of the lineup to accom­mo­date the new acqui­si­tion but the num­bers tell a dif­fer­ent story:

In each instance, this one addi­tion to the lineup allows prior Red Sox hit­ters to move back into the bat­ting order spots in which they’ve excelled.  Dig­ging even deeper, the reli­a­bil­ity Jacoby Ells­bury has brought to the top of the lineup over the last two weeks has also been a sta­bi­liz­ing force for the lineup.  When Ells­bury was dropped in the order, Dustin Pedroia and J.D. Drew each took turns in the lead­off spot.  Here are Pedroia’s numbers:

Drew has not thrived in any par­tic­u­lar role this sea­son (to his credit, he’s moved around the bat­ting order more than any­one and has not com­plained) so I won’t post his sta­tis­ti­cal break­down but his worst num­bers by far were posted in the lead­off spot where he bat­ted .190 and posted an OBP of just .299—abysmal for any bat­ter but espe­cially a lead­off man.

It should also be noted that the vast major­ity of Mar­tinez’ plate appear­ances have come as the third hit­ter, a role with which he is famil­iar and has enjoyed suc­cess.  He cer­tainly isn’t being asked to take on an unfa­mil­iar task for the ben­e­fit of the other Red Sox batters.

This is an exam­ple of how a sin­gle move can have far reach­ing impli­ca­tions up and down a lineup card.  If yesterday’s 18 run explo­sion is an indi­ca­tion, the Red Sox went a long way in solv­ing their offen­sive woes with the Mar­tinez trade by adding a stel­lar bat and allow­ing their exist­ing hit­ters to set­tle back into the roles in which they thrive.