BOSTON — The bat leaned against a pile of boxes next to Andrew Benintendi's locker, just inside the Red Sox clubhouse at Fenway Park. It had snapped almost completely in half, from the knob to a point around where the handle meets the barrel.


 


The break occurred abruptly in Monday’s third inning, in an easily overlooked moment in a Red Sox loss to Sean Manaea and the Oakland Athletics. Mookie Betts was on third base. Benintendi was at the plate. The Red [...]

BRIAN MacPHERSON Special to The Journal

BOSTON — The bat leaned against a pile of boxes next to Andrew Benintendi's locker, just inside the Red Sox clubhouse at Fenway Park. It had snapped almost completely in half, from the knob to a point around where the handle meets the barrel.

 

The break occurred abruptly in Monday’s third inning, in an easily overlooked moment in a Red Sox loss to Sean Manaea and the Oakland Athletics. Mookie Betts was on third base. Benintendi was at the plate. The Red Sox trailed by a run against a pitcher who had no-hit them less than a month earlier. They needed to capitalize on every opportunity they could muster.

 

With two strikes on Benintendi, Manaea tried to get him to chase a slider off the outside corner. Benintendi laid off. Manaea then went after Benintendi with fastballs off the inside corner. Benintendi fouled the first one off. The second one got just enough of the plate for Benintendi to get his hands inside it and get the bat to the ball — which both broke the bat and got Benintendi on base via an infield single, allowing Betts to score Boston’s first run.

 

It was far from the game’s most dramatic moment, but it was meaningful — particularly given the matchup.

 

“That pitcher is really tough, and he can run that two-seam fastball in on lefthanders,” Red Sox assistant hitting coach Andy Barkett said. “We had a plan to look for something over the middle of the plate and stay in the middle of the field, and he did run it in on him a little bit, but he was able to get enough on it. He’s a talented young man.”

 

Entering play Monday, Manaea had stifled lefties to the tune of a .260 slugging percentage. He’d struck out 14 and walked just two — one of whom was Benintendi, who laid off a series of sliders to draw a walk in the ninth inning of the no-hitter.

 

Meanwhile, Benintendi came into Monday’s game hitting all of .143 with a .229 slugging percentage against lefties. He didn’t collect his first extra-base hit against a lefty until May 1. He was one of a number of Red Sox hitters who seemed unable to touch lefties, among them Rafael Devers, Eduardo Nunez, and, worst of all, erstwhile center fielder Jackie Bradley Jr., who has hit under .100 with 13 strikeouts and no walks against lefties this season.

 

The depths to which Bradley has fallen were the reason Benintendi was in center field, flanked by the lefty-mashing (and righty-mashing) J.D. Martinez in left field.

 

All else being equal, the Red Sox would rather see Bradley in center field than Benintendi. Both came out of the SEC as pedigreed center fielders, but Benintendi has turned out to be a squarely average big-league center fielder while Bradley remains one of the game’s greats.

 

It was easy to imagine Bradley hauling in the Dustin Fowler triple off the left-center field fence on Monday that Benintendi failed to catch and then let ricochet behind him. Bradley has made just that catch before — and not just once.

 

All else, of course, is not equal. Bradley is mired in the kind of slump that makes one wonder if the peaks really are worth the troughs. Since the All-Star break a year ago, Bradley is slugging .287 and has struck out nearly four times for every walk.

 

And that makes Benintendi all the more important — both in his ability to man center field and his ability not to be an automatic out when a lefty takes the mound.

 

What Manaea did in Monday’s third inning was what lefties — and, often, righties — have done frequently to Benintendi. It’s textbook, but it’s still tough to counter. They’re going after him hard inside and then trying to get him to chase breaking pitches away. That lefties often work inside with sinkers, pitches that dive at or under his hands, only makes his task more difficult.

 

To Barkett, the most impressive part of what Benintendi did against Manaea wasn’t his broken-bat single — it was the two-strike slider two pitches earlier that Benintendi laid off. Not chasing that slider gave Benintendi a chance to do something with the fastball in on his hands.

 

“He’s a disciplined young man who has an idea of what he’s doing up there,” Barkett said. “It’s not so much the swings, the pitches he swings at — the pitches he takes can be the difference-maker. Like Mookie, he’s got that recognition. They can see things out of the hand of the pitcher sooner than most.”