SB Nation Reacts: Confidence, defense and extra innings rules

Welcome to SB Nation Reacts, a survey of fans across MLB. Each week, we send 30 polls to plugged in fans from each team. Red Sox fans, sign up HERE to join Reacts.

We are back for another week of SB Nation Reacts polls. As will be the case all season, we start this time around off with a look at the confidence level fans have in the organization, and then today we also look at fans’ views of their defense along with a look at a couple of league-wide issues.

Red Sox Fan Confidence

It should come as no surprise that the confidence in the Red Sox is only trending up as they continue to have one of the hottest starts in all of baseball. Following Saturday’s win to open up their current four-game set against the White Sox, the Red Sox stand at 10-4. That is three and a half games better than any other team in the division, and only the 13-2 Dodgers have a better record in baseball.

So with that, the fans of the Red Sox have upped their confidence level from 54 percent to 71 percent. That’s still not super high, and there’s still 18 teams with a higher rating as of now, but that’s largely due to where things stood coming into the year. Things were as low as can be before the season started, and it takes a bit to recover from that.

Defense confidence

So that was the overall team confidence, but this week we also looked in the confidence specifically regarding the team’s defense. Here, the Red Sox decidedly did not grade out well, with more than half of the respondents indicating they did not have confidence in the defense. To an extent, it makes sense. There are major defensive questions on the left side of the infield, and while I think they have a good outfield defense there are still complicated feelings, to say the least, of their former outfield — which was about as good as it gets defensively — all having left. I think this lack of confidence will improve some as the year goes on.

League-wide issues

In the first of two MLB-wide polls, we look at the extra inning rule in which a runner starts on second to start every extra inning. Unsurprisingly, fans overwhelmingly are not in favor of this rule. This seems to be the general consensus among fans. I will say that I agree, though I’m not sure I dislike it to the extent everyone else seems to. It does ratchet up the intensity a bit, but at the end of the day I do think it’s too gimmicky for me.

I also agree with this one, which strangely enough has the exact same percentages as the other poll. I certainly haven’t noticed a difference with many balls hit a long way this year. But it is, of course, terribly unsurprising that MLB has no idea what is going on with their baseball on a year to year basis.