Dustin Pedroia’s sad connection to Jim Rice, and other surprising Red Sox numbers

Cover the Red Sox for a year and you’ll spend a lot of time staring at Baseball-Reference, the pre-eminent site for the kind of stats you would’ve found on a Topps card in 1986, as well as many of the advanced numbers that have transformed the modern game.

Over the course of a season, some numbers will occasionally jump out at you. Here are five, from lowest to highest, that caught my attention in 2019.

.001 — The difference in OPS between Rafael Devers (.916) in his superstar breakout year and Mookie Betts (.915) in his lackluster MVP follow-up. Anyone who watched the team knows that Devers was the more impactful offensive player, especially from May through July, when the Red Sox still believed they had a shot at the playoffs. And yet when all was said and done, their numbers were virtually identical. It turns out that context matters.

3 — Hits for Dustin Pedroia since the start of 2018. He’s had just 31 at-bats in that span, but that has been enough to drop his lifetime average from .300 to .299. He’s almost certain to become a victim of the Jim Rice Effect. The Hall of Fame slugger was a .300 hitter for almost his entire career, dropping below that threshold on May 5, 1989. He played only 29 more games, and finished at .298. Let the record show that Pedroia was still a lifetime .300 hitter (technically .299535, but baseball rounds up), until grounding to short to lead off his penultimate game against Baltimore’s Dan Straily. If this is it, he’ll finish his career two hits shy of .300.

A consideration of both numbers and the meanings that they can hold.