What’s red and white and keeps letting the baseball dribble between his legs?
Hall of Famer Jim Rice ripped into the Boston Red Sox (7-8) Friday night after watching his former team commit five errors — leveling a league-leading total up to a whopping 19 — en route to an 11-1 drubbing at the hands of the 3-10 White Sox.
“You’ve got to make the routine plays, those are the key things,” said Rice, who played 16 seasons with the Red Sox from 1974-89. “It’s not difficult…”
Tom Caron and Jim Rice called out the Red Sox defense after Boston committed 5 errors in the 11-1 loss. https://t.co/5lIfKVDspe pic.twitter.com/Q366pCs7oj
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) April 12, 2025
The two-time Silver Slugger and eight-time All Star continued, “It seems [to me] like — ‘I don’t want the ball to be hit to me. I’m going to go out and take ground balls tomorrow, maybe I get a little better [then], but I don’t want the ball to be hit to me right now.’”
As Tom Caron, Rice’s co-host on the NESN postgame show observed, “It is far too early to panic, but it’s not too early to worry about the trend.”
And worrying the trend is — because this story is a familiar one.
In 2024, the Sox committed an appalling 20 errors through 20 games. By season’s end, the total had climbed to 115 — the second-highest mark in the league, behind only the Miami Marlins (117).
One would think that playing second-fiddle to the Marlins should have been a strong enough motivator to revisit the fundamentals during yet another long offseason — 2024 was the Sox third consecutive year missing the playoffs.
And yet, so far through 2025, the only catches at Fenway worth writing about are coming courtesy of this fan and whatever kind of sandwich he’s holding.
Nineteen kerfuffles through 15 games are the most Boston has committed since 1996 — the league average was 7.7 as of Friday — but at least the wealth is being spread.
Cleveland Guardian’s third baseman Jose Ramirez holds the distinct honor of most errors this season, five, but the Sox boast eight players in the top-50.
Friday night’s debacle featured two catcher’s interference errors and three fielding errors.
Newly acquired $120 million second-baseman Alex Bregman had said he saw “something special” in this team, but his club-leading three errors certainly isn’t it.
“What I’m afraid of,” Rice said Friday night after the Sox dropped the series opener against the team ranked last in the majors in runs, hits, and OPS — and with the worst batting average in the American League, “is that it … gets in your head, so maybe could be making some more errors down the line.”