Red Sox's Slumping $44M Flamethrower Takes Subtle Jab At Teammate

On Tuesday, Hicks lamented his own passivity when it came to pitch selection in recent outings, and said he thinks he needs to assert himself more when Narváez calls something he doesn't like.

“If I’m going to be giving up these kind of runs out of the bullpen, I should really be throwing the pitch I want to throw,” Hicks said Tuesday, per Tim Healey of the Boston Globe. “It’s something I had to realize. That’s probably my mind-set moving forward. You have to throw what feels good in the situation. If you have any second thoughts, you’re not going to throw your best pitch.”

Per Healey, Hicks said he sometimes hasn't thrown the pitch he wanted because, “being on a new team and trusting your catcher and just trusting what they might be seeing also, I feel like I’m kind of in that middle ground.”

Hicks said he wants to rely more on fastballs moving forward, since he feels his sinker and four-seamer are his dominant pitches.

“It’s more seeing how dominant in my eyes the fastball has been, how late everybody is on it,” he said, per Healey. “Why am I even throwing anything else when the only hits they’ve really gotten (off the fastball) have been through the shift and in the infield, on the ground?

While it's true that the two most recent home runs have come on breaking pitches, Hicks' sinker has a 47.6 percent hard-hit rate since coming to Boston, and his four-seamer is even worse at 53.3. Plus, he's lost the zone with both pitches at times, and it's hard to fault a catcher for calling a breaking pitch if a hurler can't seem to put a fastball over the plate.

Maybe Hicks will make the necessary adjustments, and maybe this new mentality is the key to unlocking it. But when you're new to a team and carrying an ERA over six, suggesting in any way that your teammate has led you astray probably isn't the smartest move.