BOSTON — Craig Breslow’s Red Sox are heading into Friday night with the kind of early-season questions that can linger if they are not answered quickly. After three straight losses to the New York Yankees, Boston sat last in slugging at.331 and 26th in runs scored with 92 through 25 games.
The numbers were not just bad by Boston standards. The Red Sox had hit only 14 home runs through their first 25 games, and a National League executive told MLB.com's Mark Feinsand he was surprised by how little pop the lineup had shown. The executive said it was striking to see Marcelo Mayer, Roman Anthony and Jarren Duran with one home run apiece, while Ceddanne Rafaela and Carlos Narváez also had one apiece. Only three players, including backup catcher Connor Wong, were slugging above.340.
That kind of production is a problem for a club that made the playoffs in 2025 and entered the 2026 season with hopes that its young core would supply more force. Some preseason projection systems already had been skeptical about Boston’s power, but even that warning light looked dimmer now after a start that left the Red Sox well behind the pace expected from a contender.
The concern was not limited to the lineup. The same executive said Garrett Crochet’s velocity was a concern and something to monitor, noting that Crochet’s MLB innings last year were basically equal to the previous three seasons combined. He praised the deal and extension that brought Crochet in, but said that kind of workload made fatigue this year a plausible issue.
Boston gets no long breather. The Red Sox were scheduled to open a three-game series against the Baltimore Orioles on Friday at 7:05 p.m. ET on NESN, with pressure already building for a club that needs its offense to look more like the one it expected when the season began.