Mazz: This solar eclipse is Minor League

With the solar eclipse happening during the Felger and Mazz program on Monday, resident eclipse expert, Tony Massarotti, was sent outside to do a live report of it. Mazz was very underwhelmed with the latest solar eclipse.

This eclipse.....minor league

Felger: Mazz is joining us now via zoom. Mazz, are you there?

Mazz: I am, yeah. Can you hear me?

Mazz: Yes. What can you report now at this hour?

Felger: So I can tell you from the second I got out here that I think relative to Wyoming, which is the only frame of reference I have, this thing is minor league. This thing is a second rate eclipse. I'm looking up there right now, it's a crescent. A crescent sun, obviously not a crescent moon. It looks like one of the toenail clippings that Zo usually leaves in the studio, Mike. They've called this, like, 93% eclipse....that's complete and total bullcrap. There's plenty of light out here as you can see. The temperature has only dropped like, I don't know, ten degrees, maybe. It was a lot colder in Wyoming. This thing is Mickey Mouse if you want my opinion.

Felger: So it sucks and blows?

Mazz: I would say so, yes. I think as far as eclipses go, this one kind of sucks.

Felger: Okay. I was just out there, I saw it, I was kind of impressed. Now it is throwing off quite a bit of light, even though only 8% of the sun is showing. Don't you find amazing that it is still as light as it is with 8% of the sun showing?

Mazz: Yeah. Which is why I think really, you know, you have to be on the path of totality to appreciate these eclipses full bore. But look, it's a powerful thing, what do you want me tovtell you? It's a burning ball of fire in the middle of the universe. It emits a lot of light. This thing to me, again, I think it kind of blows.

Listen to Felger and Mazz from 2-6 every Monday-Friday on 98.5 The Sports Hub, with hosts Mike Felger, Tony “Mazz” Massarotti, and Jim Murray “Big Jim”. You can listen live in the Sports Hub App and subscribe to their podcasts here. Follow @FelgerAndMazz on Twitter to keep up with the show!

Results matter most, but the 2024 Red Sox do have their share of flaws.

Nonetheless, as the Red Sox return home from a season-opening 10-game road trip to Seattle, Oakland and Anaheim, they sport a 7-3 record that translates into a nifty .700 winning percentage, a figure that places them ahead of all but five teams in major league baseball. Will we take it? Of course. And pending free agent manager Alex Cora will celebrate that as much as anyone given what the Sox have deteriorated into over the last few seasons.

“It was a great road trip,” Cora told reporters yesterday after the Sox' 12-2 pounding of the (wannabe) Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim). “Going into the season, we recognized how challenging it is to come to the West Coast right away. The organization did everything possible to put these guys in a situation where they were going to be fresh and ready to go. Credit to [the players]. They did an outstanding job.”

So there you go.

Tomorrow's home opener will be a reason to celebrate, after all.

Yah, Mazz, so what's the %$*&!@! problem? No problem - at least not yet. Let's just call them observations that have been pretty apparent and could become issues as time goes. The major league season, as we all know, is very, very long and will feature thousands of pitches, plays and situations. Nobody gets them all right. But there are always patterns and tendencies that bear watching, particularly with a roster that already has suffered some injuries (Trevor Story, Lucas Giolito, Vaughn Grissom) and was hardly awe-inspiring to begin with. So when we saw the Red Sox still have their share of flaws - and the mighty Los Angeles Dodgers do, too - that is merely a statement of fact and reality of life for each of the 30 major league teams.

But here are some things to keep an eye on:

Lament all you want about the simplistic nature of traditional metrics, but errors are still errors. The Red Sox have eight of them, which is tied for the fourth-most in baseball. More importantly, they have come at costly times. Wilyer Abreu had a sloppy outfield misplay in Seattle that was a key element in one of the Sox' three losses. Ditto for Rafael Devers' misplay with two outs in the sixth innings of the Sox' eventual 2-1 loss on Saturday night. (The Sox led 1-0 at the time.) While the Sox have allowed a major league low 24 runs thus far, a whopping nine of them (37.5 percent) have been unearned. (Ceddanne Rafaela, of all people, dropped a routine fly on Friday that helped lead to four of them.) Yes, the Sox are better afield. But if the A's and Angels were good teams, the Sox might have two more losses at least.

True fact: As of this morning, newcomer Tyler O'Neill leads the majors - yes, the majors - in OPS, one place ahead of Mookie Betts. (Who needs him, anyway?) The problem is that the Red Sox still look vulnerable against left-handed pitching, the most obvious example being Saturday's 2-1 loss to lefty Reid Detmers and the Angels. Of the Sox' 13 home runs this season, only one has come against a left-handed pitcher. (Interestingly, the left-handed-hitting Reese McGuire provided it yesterday.) Obviously, it's early. But with Trevor Story (a career .299 hitter against lefties) now out, too, the Sox lean even more heavily to the left.

If you've watched any Sox game this season, you're likely to have seen a lot of strikeouts. From the pitching perspective, this has been a pleasant surprising. From the hitting perspective, it's starting to get worrisome. Red Sox batters right now have the third-most strikeouts in baseball, which obviously flies in the face of Alex Cora's mantra to put the ball in play. Triston Casas leads the Sox with 12 strikeouts, but there are low-contact hitters splattered throughout the Sox lineup. (Jarren Duran is batting .349 but has 11 strikeouts.) With a man on third and less than two outs - when contact is critical - the Sox are 2-for-20 with eight strikeouts. That won't hurt too much against teams like the A's and Angels. It will when the opponents are better.