Their leadoff man is hitting .213 with a .278 OBA, their center fielder is hitting .224 with a .281 OBA, and their $70 million right fielder is hitting .244 with four home runs. Their cleanup hitter is tied for 67th in the major leagues in home runs with eight. How did the Red Sox end up with a 9.5 game lead on the Yankees?

The easy, and as it happens, correct answer is that the Yankees took some hits early in the season, while Boston turned out to have a better pitching staff than anyone had given them credit for. Certainly, Boston pitching has been one of the biggest stories of the season so far — after correcting for park effects, the 3.92 runs a game they’re allowing is vastly better than any team in the league. Josh Beckett’s long-awaited emergence as a fullblown ace, Hideki Okajima’s stunning first two months as a set-up man, and the refusal of Curt Schilling and Tim Wakefield to pitch like 40-year-olds deserve a great deal of credit for Boston’s 40-22 record, the best in baseball. Still, something seems amiss when a team can watch a third of its lineup play as badly as Julio Lugo, Coco Crisp, and J.D. Drew and still run up a divisional lead nearly twice as big as any other in the game. Are the Sox due for a crash?

Unhappily for Yankees fans, probably not. If anything, the Red Sox are probably more likely to play better than they have over the rest of the season than they are to suddenly collapse. The problem is that while a few Sox players are having genuinely awful campaigns, the players hitting better than could have been expected aren’t punching that much above their weight. If everyone just starts to hit as they usually do, the Sox offense will actually improve.

Lugo and Crisp, for instance, are both hitting well below the level that’s usually necessary to keep a player on the field. Lugo’s slugging average is .318, Crisp’s is .300. There are pitchers who hit better than this. Through their careers, these two have generally hit about 10% worse than the league average, which isn’t great but is perfectly fine for players at premium defensive positions. If they start hitting today as they have throughout their careers, that will be worth somewhere around four extra wins for the Sox over the rest of the season; if they don’t start hitting soon, either capable backups like Alex Cora and Wily Mo Pena are going to start getting a lot more playing time, or the Sox are going to make a trade. Either way, the Sox will improve.

Somewhat similarly, Drew has been an outright dominant hitter when healthy throughout his career, and over the last two weeks he’s hitting a robust .290 BA/.353 OBA/.548 SLG, over which time Manny Ramirez has hit .400/.538/.600. The Red Sox built their lead without getting the kind of offense they expected from the outfield corners; with these two hot and likely to hit as they usually do for the rest of the year, the team’s lineup is just going to get stronger.

The flipside of all this is that while some Sox have badly underperformed, others have overperformed. Thirty-three-year-old Mike Lowell, most notably, is hitting .312/.372/.549, numbers he hasn’t approached since his prime, which ended several years ago. It isn’t just him, though — first baseman Kevin Youkilis is fifth in the league in OBA, while rookie second baseman Dustin Pedroia is batting .316/.399/.441. According to the logic that says that what is now down must come up, shouldn’t what is up come down?

This is true to a point — Lowell is probably not going to hit like David Wright for the rest of the year. Youkilis, though, is a good, 28-year-old hitter who’s probably just enjoying a career year, while Pedroia entered the year as perhaps the surest bet among rookies to enjoy a solid major league career. He’s hitting a bit better than could have been expected, but only a bit. Even if these three all return to their career norms, improvement from areas where the Sox have been weak will more than cancel it out — and the Sox’s offense has been plenty good to this point in the season, not as good as those of Cleveland, Detroit, or the Yankees, but more than strong enough to support a 95-win team.

There’s a great deal of baseball yet to play, and a variety of ways the Sox might choke their lead away. I wouldn’t, for instance, place a large bet on the Sox ending the season with a 2.90 bullpen ERA, or on Beckett ending the season 22–0, and who knows? Maybe Ramirez will decide he’d rather not play baseball in the second half, while the notoriously fragile Drew will strain something and Crisp and Lugo will prove they just can’t play in Boston, as has been true of others before them. Odder things have happened. For now, though, Boston’s weaknesses look a lot like strengths waiting to uncover themselves. The Yankees just might get back in this race, but they’re going to need another six-game winning streak and a whole lot of good luck.

tmarchman@nysun.com