The Red Sox, lo and behold, are a little something

And what the Red Sox have done is, frankly, too mystifying to not enjoy at least a little. Even the darkest ones have to give something back to this group.

“We’re playing good baseball,” manager Alex Cora told reporters Tuesday after the first of two straight wins over the Giants. “We’re a month away from the end of the season and we still have a long way to go, but we just have to keep doing the things we preach. We play better defense, we run the bases better. The offense is going to be better. The pitch will be coherent.

Thirty-nine players have participated in an 18-14 start, and a 40th is expected Friday, when Vaughn Grissom makes his debut in the opener at Minnesota. The 39 was tied with three other teams for the most majors.

Two of them, the White Sox (6-25) and Marlins (9-24), have been terrible. The other, the Mets, are National League Red Sox, hovering around .500 while pitching better than expected. They did, however, get the good versions of Starling Marte (their “if healthy” guy for a few years now) and Luis Severino that they thought they needed to be wild card chasers.

Trevor Story and Lucas Giolito, meanwhile, will no longer play for the Red Sox this year. Triston Casas won’t do it again for months. As you know, we could continue.

The most interesting comparable for me is the Giants who just left. A big-market team that stumbled hard after a surprise playoff run in 2021, it took a different path to Boston this winter — kept the team builder, fired the field manager and spent big.

They are below .500, three games worse than the Red Sox after losing two of three at Fenway. Ace Logan Webb looked terrible on Tuesday. Blake Snell’s turn arrived on Wednesday, but he is injured. Programming ? Tenth of 15 NL teams in runs and 12th in bases.

“We’re all kind of in the same boat. We’re all working,” Matt Chapman told The Athletic. “We had some good hitters, but we couldn’t get anything going.”

In reality, this is all still just statistical noise, but victories matter and someone – probably several people! — are going to emerge from this gaping baseball environment, play in a handful of World Series games themselves, and spend the next few years trying to tell you that they actually did something.

It seems less likely to be the Red Sox given their divisional competition, against whom they will have played only three games in mid-May – then seven against last-place Tampa from May 13-22.

But here we are still content with this idea, and that is not nothing.

“I think it would be very easy to look at the injuries – and particularly who suffered from those injuries – and sort of think that it would be really difficult to overcome them, and that the odds are against us. Instead, I think just the opposite happened,” chief baseball officer Craig Breslow told WEEI on Thursday. “I think it’s a credit to Alex (Cora) and his ability to create a really positive, strong culture, to connect the guys, to interact with them and get them to believe in what we let’s try to do it here.”

“You have to give (Breslow) a lot of credit,” Rob Refsnyder retorted. the globe THURSDAY. “He came in and recruited some really, really good players and good guys in the clubhouse.”

Andrew Bailey and his “Run Prevention Unit” still have historic pitching, with the staff ERA (2.58) nearly half a point ahead of the field. The specific results may not be sustainable, but they are not a coincidence. The result of a deeply structured offseason and a focus on, among other things, attacking the zone with good stuff, creating a chance to attack hitters with a pitcher’s best.

Granular on-field data may vary from service to service, but the Red Sox’s fastball usage is by far the lowest in baseball for all. This is intentional. And it works.

What’s not as good is the offense – a rarity here, but somewhat understandable given the absences. Although they are fourth in the AL in runs per game (4.69), Thursday’s four hits were Boston’s ninth in scoring a run or less — only Colorado (7-24) and the White Sox have the same.

There is still this dregs. Hey, you throw a 17-0 and a 12-2 every once in a while, that’ll help the season average. If only a salad every two weeks was as effective.

Boston is third in OPS (.747) with empty bases, 16th with men in scoring position (.722) and 20th with men in scoring position (.685). In “late and close” moments – seventh inning or higher, tied, up one run, or with the tying run at least on deck; Boston has been in for 16 games – they are tied for 28th (.559), with only Miami behind them.

Not what you want. Ripe for a correction, especially when your third best hitter is undoubtedly Connor Wong. And all of this is still happening with the Sox figuring out what the playoff line would be.

As was clearly demonstrated this winter, when Tom Werner was proclaiming “it’s about having great players” and then running at full throttle, 2024 is not specifically about that line. It was a year of hanging out on the sidelines and seeing if anything happened.

Frankly, something has already happened, because if I told you what the injury situation would look like in February, you would have been crazy not to assume that these White Sox-y and Marlins-y records were the future future.

It’s another baseball season in New England. A spectacle amusing enough that the box office got a few advertisements for it. I spotted two on Thursday: highlights of Tanner Houck’s “Maddux” game and Ceddanne Rafaela’s seven-RBI game, adorned with nothing more than play-by-play and RedSox.com/tickets.

Monster standing room tickets were available for less than $50 mid-week. Those unwashed masses that Lee Elia loved so much at Wrigley in the dark 1980s would have had a field day.

Such is life in the dull world of baseball, waiting for a winning scratch ticket. Where it has already been better than expected. And it could certainly be much worse.