Welcome to Rates and barrels. It is Wednesday, August 13th.

Derek Benriper, Eno Seris, Jed Lowry here with you on this episode. We are going to dig in to the Boston Red Sox. You know, the team that's capturing headlines for weird reasons, but actually playing pretty well. We're going to figure out how good they actually are. Are they good? Are they very good? Are they dangerous even? We'll explore those questions here in just a few minutes. We'll have a little bit of baseball news. You should know, including a quick follow-up on Josh Hader. And the big question, we're going to try and answer on today's show. How do players change over the course of the season? I felt like that was a great topic for us to explore because we're kind of in the dog days right now.

Post-trade deadline, maybe free stretch run right now where you're either cruising because things are going really well or you're starting to grind because the season is starting to take a toll on you.

So let's start today with the Red Sox sitting, I would say somewhat quietly in second place right now in the AL East behind the Blue Jays, 66 and 55 entering play on Wednesday, a 70 and 51 Bethagorean record.

So they've slightly underperformed, at least based on run differential, four and a half games back of the Jays right now.

I just want to ask you guys, what's working for this team so far this year?

Because the lineup stands out as very good, especially by Woe, but tied for fifth right now with the Cubs.

And this is the team that traded away Raphael Devers, as we've said many times and talked about many times on this show.

But where are they getting the extra production from?

Sure, Alex Bregman was a great signing.

But there's much more going on there.

Roman Anthony looks like a superstar out of the box.

What do you attribute their success overall as a lineup to this season?

Where do you think the biggest surprises actually lie? I was surprised to find this, but I just

look through some key indicators over the last 30 days. And I have to say, I think there's a little bit

of luck going on here.

Because if you look at their ranks in the last 30 days for hitting and pitching in key performance indicators, they aren't doing that well.

They're 14th.

That's hitters.

They're 14th in walk rate, 20th in strikeout rate.

They do hit the ball hard.

And this is, there's an important thing here because they, there's a couple key performance indicators that they do rank well on. And I think they, they care about these as an organization. But they hit the ball hard. But other than that, barrel, 16th percent, Babbup, 12 percent, WRC plus, 14th percent. You said they were doing well in W in woba but that you have to park adjust that

...