The Dustin Pedroia/Kevin Gausman reminder
File this under the "Almost too specific to be true" category ...
Just more than a week ago, Triston Casas was sitting in solitude, eating a pregame meal in the bowels of Camden Yards. His batting average was hovering closer to .100 than .200, and way too much time was being spent on pushing aside all the doubt that came with such a start.
"You know the story of Dustin Pedroia?" Casas was asked.
"Not really," he responded.
The Red Sox rookie first baseman was then told of what happened in the first month of the 2007 season, when Pedroia started his season by heading into May 3 hitting just .180 with a .535 OPS while getting his big opportunity to become the Sox' starting second baseman.
On May 4, then-Red Sox manager Terry Francona gave Pedroia the first game of his team's series in Minnesota off. It was then the second baseman got together with hitting coach Dave Magadan, made a few minor adjustments and then went on to collect two hits against one of the best pitchers in the game at the time, Johan Santana.
Seven months later, Pedroia was the American League Rookie of the Year.
"But what if I don't hit by May 3?" Casas said with a smile.
Well, as it turned out, he did.
For just the second time this season, Wednesday night, Casas finished with a multi-hit game, notching three hits, raising his batting average from .128 to .157. (If not for the cold, windy and damp New England weather, he would also have added a grand slam to his night, as well.)
Will Casas mirror the story of Pedroia and use his own May 3 as a launching point? That story has yet to be told. But the lessons - and patience - that got him to this point can't be ignored.
"I lived it in 2007, right? We were very patient with Pedroia here," said Red Sox manager Alex Cora after his team's 8-3 win over the Blue Jays, its fifth win in a row. "It just happened the other second baseman (Cora) was raking. But you have to be patient. You have to be patient not only with rookies, but I think with everybody, right? When you make decisions roster-wise on April 1 or whenever the season started, you cannot just go the other way because they're 3-for-20 or 5-for-40. There's other ways that you can contribute. ... This is the toughest league in the world. It's the best of the best. The scouting reports and people just watching you and just kind of like, this is where we're going, it's tough here. But little by little, you recognize who you are, what you want to do. ... With Casas, we saw in September last year, the numbers average-wise weren’t great but he was getting on base. He controls the strike zone and when you do that, he should be fine.
"You’ve just gotta make sure you help him throughout the process. I think that's the most important thing. Talk to them, looking for certain matchups to help him get out of whatever he's going through. And the good thing about Casas, although the numbers don’t reflect that, he’s been playing some good base. That's something, going back to Pedroia in ’07, that's what caught our attention as veterans. He was hitting .180, but he made sure when he was playing second, whoever was hitting was hitting .182, because he tried to make every play, he played with passion, he ran the bases well whenever he got on. And that's what you want from them, because at one point, talent is gonna take over and you're going to be fine."
Watching Casas go about his business prior to the games even before Wednesday night, it was evident what Cora was referencing. Fielding. Baserunning. Batting practice. All were done with a noticeable intensity.
Still, none of that means anything until the consistent results are uncovered.
For Pedroia, the early-May fork in the road sent him down a path that saw him hit .415 with a 1.072 OPS in the season's second month. For a guy like Bobby Dalbec, the improvement might be there, just a bit more modest.
A year ago, it was Dalbec trying to find his way as the Red Sox' starting first baseman, finishing April hitting .147 with a .449 OPS. Through some perseverance, things did improve somewhat in May, with the batting average going up to .238 and OPS rising to .715.
In this case, it can't hurt that Casas has someone who has already helped a teammate weather such a storm in his own manager.
“Yeah, every day I come in, AC makes sure to tell me to keep going and not let it get in my head. He instills that confidence in me,” Casas told reporters after the Sox win. “Some days I'm down and he sees it and he picks me up right away.
“Having a manager like that shooting me straight, who is always honest with me, lets me know how he feels, that’s everything I could ask for in my first manager. I think everybody in this room is behind him. And he's got all of our backs. But for me personally, the support is immense.”