Every time someone asked Boston Red Sox manager Terry Francona where Carl Crawford or Jacoby Ellsbury or Adrian Gonzalez or Dustin Pedroia or Kevin Youkilis would hit in his lineup, Francona offered a version of the same stock answer: If everyone hits, the order in which they hit doesn’t matter.

Sure enough, as the Red Sox enter the season’s second half, just about everyone was hitting.

And as it has turned out, the lineup Francona assembled has come pretty close to optimizing its opportunities to score runs. Sluggers Gonzalez, Youkilis and David Ortiz have had the more runners on base when they’ve come to the plate than any other hitter, thanks in large part to the .377 and .395 on-base percentages that Ellsbury and Pedroia, respectively, have compiled at the top of the Red Sox batting order. Not surprisingly, Gonzalez (77), Youkilis (63) and Ortiz (55) all rank among the top 12 in the American League in RBI.

And while the Red Sox have dealt with bouts of leaving runners on base — they left 10, 16 and 11 runners on base in one tough three-game stretch in early April — that’s partly because they’ve gotten so many runners on base.

No team in the major leagues comes close to the .354 team on-base percentage the Red Sox have compiled this season. The New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals are tied for second at .340, and the average major-league team comes in at .319.

No team comes particularly close to the .456 slugging percentage the Red Sox have compiled, either. The Texas Rangers rank second with a .446 slugging percentage, and the average team is under .400.

Not surprisingly, despite the runners left on base that cause so much hand-wringing in some corners, the Red Sox have scored a major-league-best 5.36 runs per game so far this season. The Yankees (5.17) are the only other team averaging more than 5.0 runs per game, and no National League is even above 4.75.

In other words, the Red Sox batting order has performed even better than Francona and general manager Theo Epstein could have drawn it up.

“You can never say, ‘We’re going to lead the league in everything,’ but I thought we’d be one of the top offensive clubs in baseball,” Epstein said. “In a year where offense is down, we’re doing some pretty impressive things offensively. It’s a nice testament to the depth of the lineup we’ve had here.”

Perhaps most impressive of all, the Red Sox have done all of that despite getting next to nothing from their catchers in April and getting next to nothing from their right fielders all season long.

Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Jason Varitek hit .216 and .111, respectively, in April, and they didn’t draw walks or hit for much power, either. But both Saltalamacchia and Varitek began to hit for power in May — they slugged .475 and .533, respectively — and they’ve maintained that production ever since.

Red Sox catchers finished the first half with the second-best on-base percentage and third-best slugging percentage in the American League, trailing only the Alex Avila-backstopped Detroit Tigers.

The only real black hole for the Red Sox has been in right field, where J.D. Drew has seen his numbers take a nosedive this season. Drew last season saw his on-base percentage and slugging percentage take dips of 50-plus points, and the trend has continued this season. He’s getting on base at a career-worst .329 clip, and he’s slugging .317 — third-worst among all American League outfielders with at least 250 plate appearances.

But Josh Reddick caught fire after the Red Sox called him up to replace the injured Crawford. Even after he went hitless in three at-bats in his final game of the first half, he still was hitting .393 with a .429 on-base percentage and .672 slugging percentage in 70 plate appearances this season.

Epstein still has to decide whether to pray for a Drew rebound, to ride things out with the streaky Reddick or to make a move for an outfielder. But it has to be encouraging for the Red Sox that, even with the second-worst right-field production in the American League, they’re still scoring more runs than any team in baseball.

They’re even hitting left-handed pitching — which was one of the concerns in spring training, given how lefty-heavy the early-season lineup was. Thanks in large part to Gonzalez and the resurgent Ortiz, the Red Sox lead the American League in on-base percentage against lefties (.357) and rank third in slugging percentage (.442), behind only the Yankees and the Toronto Blue Jays.

All Francona has ever said is that he wants his hitters to keep the line moving, and they’ve done exactly that all season.

“Hitting is contagious,” Varitek said. “You saw us not hit. Only a couple of people hit over that last road trip, and we didn’t win too many games. It gets the ball rolling, and each part has a job day in and day out.”