Ballou on Baseball

Baseball’s All-Star break is a mental halfway point more than physical and 2024 is no exception.

The Boston Red Sox are likely to be active in the trade market. That will have some sort of trickle-down effect in the farm system since the Sox will be looking to add experienced major league help.

Heading into the resumption of play later this week, here are some things to look at:

— Worcester is four games under .500 at 44-48 and still has a chance, especially if it gets some of Boston’s promising Double-A players, of compiling its fourth straight winning season. The WooSox are behind last year’s record at this time when they were 46-40 at the break.

Worcester is piling up runs but those runs are often coming in lopsided games. Overall the WooSox have a chance at being the highest scoring Boston Triple-A team ever going back to 1940. Louisville scored 852 runs that season. This year’s WooSox project to scoring 855.

— Polar Park attendance is down slightly from last season, at least box score attendance. The WooSox are averaging 6,453 fans through the break.

Team president Dr. Charles Steinberg said he sees attendance as being comparable to previous seasons, sees interest in the team remaining very high and projects that Worcester will sell more than 500,000 tickets for the third year in a row (becoming the only Minor League team to do so).

“The main reason (for the drop) is that some of the corporations who had season tickets in a three-year deal that they bought before we built the ballpark converted from season tickets to group outings, so you lose the guaranteed sales of those seats in April and May.

“Don’t know if we’ll catch up in the warmer weather but we’re seeing that group sales are really hot, and we’re still seeing terrific interest in groups, single games and season tickets, but whether you can make up for April and May, I don’t know.”

— Individually, Niko Kavadas has a shot at being a team Triple Crown winner. He leads in average among qualifiers at .294, in home runs with 16 and in RBIs with 60.

The last Red Sox Triple-A player with a team Triple Crown was Mauro Gomez in 2012 with Pawtucket. Chris Carter did it in 2009, Izzy Alcantara in 2001. Other PawSox to win team Triple Crowns are Trot Nixon (1998), Carlos Quintana (1988) and Jim Rice (1974).

Every PawSox on that list played in the major leagues.

— Chase Meidroth has already tied the WooSox record for most walks in a season with 71. David Hamilton also had 71 last year. Meidroth could be the first Sox Triple-A batter with at least 100 walks since Rick Miller had 106 with Louisville in 1971.

— Here is a prediction: Chad Tracy will not be back for a fourth season as WooSox manager in 2025. He will be on some major league staff somewhere, if not in Boston.

At the break, Tracy is two victories away from becoming the 12th manager in Boston’s Triple-A history to win 200 games. With 58 games left in the schedule, Tracy should finish 2024 with 445 overall games managed. That would be eighth on that list, ahead of Darrell Johnson and behind Mike Higgins.

Both of them wound up managing in Boston, as well as Triple-A.

— Starting with 2021 when Worcester rejoined Triple-A baseball, the WooSox have compiled the fifth-best overall record out of 20 teams in their league.

Worcester is 272-243 for a .528 winning percentage. It is close, though. Buffalo is fourth at 273-241, Omaha sixth at 271-243 and Toledo seventh at 273-257.

Durham has the best divisional record in this span at 296-217 (.577). Charlotte has the worst record at 199-318 (.385).

Buffalo, Durham, Nashville and Worcester are the only teams with a winning season every year starting with 2021. Nashville is the only one above .500 so far this season.

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TRIPLE-A TRIVIA

1. WooSox pitchers have combined to throw 20 nine-inning shutouts through the years. Who has been the starting pitcher for more of them than anyone else?

2. Which Worcester batter holds the team record for most singles hit in a season?

Answers below.

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Seven batters have hit home runs for both Worcester and Boston this season.

Enmanuel Valdez has the most combined with 13, seven in Boston. The others are Bobby Dalbec with 12, one in Boston; Wilyer Abreu with 10, eight in Boston; Jamie Westbrook with nine, one in Boston; David Hamilton with seven, five in Boston; Rob Refsnyder with five, four in Boston; Romy Gonzalez with four, one in Boston.

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The Boston Red Sox could do their partners here in Worcester a big favor by acquiring Rochester’s Travis Blankenhorn at the deadline. Offer Rafael Devers, Jarren Duran, Ceddanne Rafaela — any one or all three, even — for the good of their Triple-A affiliate.

Blankenhorn’s three home runs at Polar Park last week gave him 12 career homers versus the WooSox, the most of any opposing player. Nine of them have been hit at Polar Park. Blankenhorn has hit four with with Syracuse, the rest with the Red Wings.

He has hit them against 12 different pitchers.

Worcester and Rochester have six games left with each other this season.

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CATCHING UP WITH….

Personable southpaw Rio Gomez is having a great season for the Wei Chuan Dragons in Taiwan. Gomez is 4-2 with a 1.01 earned run average in 34 appearances, two of them starts.

Rhode Island native Thomas Pannone is back from parts of two seasons in Korea and is 4-8 with a 4.37 ERA in 19 starts for the Iowa Cubs.

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New reliever Trey Wingenter is the 208th player in WooSox history and the second-tallest at 6-foot-7 behind Chris Martin at 6-8. Wingenter is surprisingly just the second Worcester player from Alabama. Both are on the current roster as he joins Richard Fitts. … One reason, the main reason in fact, that the WooSox have outscored the opposition by 58 runs but are four games in the red is their inability to hold late leads. Worcester has been outscored from the sixth inning on by 33 runs including 48-29 in the ninth and extras. … Strange but true is that, here at the break, the WooSox have had as many sacrifice bunts as triples. That number is seven. The bunts are already a WooSox record. The Boston Triple-A record for fewest triples in a year is 10, set in 2018. Those PawSox had 1,158 hits total. The team leaders with two were Tze-Wei Lin, Aneury Tavarez and Jantzen Witte. Rusney Castillo did not have a three-bagger in 511 plate appearances. … Looking to the major leagues, Boston is 4 1/2 games out of first place at the break. The 1967 Sox were six games out at the break and won the American League pennant outright. The 1988 Joe Morgan Red Sox were nine games behind at the break and won the AL East championship.

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TRIVIA ANSWERS

1. Connor Seabold has started five WooSox shutout victories. The only other pitcher with more than one is Daniel Gossett.

2. Yairo Munoz had 108 hits in 2021, 80 of them singles. Nick Sogard is next with 74 singles last season.

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The addition of J.P. Ricciardi to the WooSox broadcast team has added major league experience to what was already a major league presentation. WooSox games are must-watch baseball TV.

Here is what Ricciardi had to say about the approaching trade deadline and the pressure for teams to either buy or sell:

“There is definitely a time to stand pat. If you’ve got all the pieces in place, why do you want to disrupt it?”

Bringing in new faces means that some of the old ones will have to go and that can be a tough sell with a team that has been successful, he added.

“I think there can be a case where, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” Ricciardi said. “Everybody could always use something but you have to weigh it against what’s gonna happen in the clubhouse.

“You look at the Orioles and maybe some small tweaks, but that’s a club that can win in the playoffs. The Dodgers can win in the playoffs. The Phillies can win in the playoffs. You have to weigh it against how is it going to change the temperament in the clubhouse.

“When you walk into that clubhouse you have to have an answer why. The times we stood pat (in Toronto) the answer was — I like the team we have.”