The Red Sox won’t be bad, but can they get us to care?
No team fortunate enough to have Mookie Betts on its roster can be totally boring. That’s an unwritten rule of baseball that I’m now putting into writing.
But beyond watching Betts, such a complete and charismatic all-around player, and perhaps anticipating what Fred Lynn-alike Andrew Benintendi might achieve in his sophomore season, the 2018 Red Sox look … well, they look the same. They look just about the same.
That’s not much to get overly excited about, even at that habitually anticipated time of year when pitchers and catchers report to Fort Myers and all of the clichés about the arrival of spring and sunny days ahead start to come true.
There has been so little to talk about regarding the Red Sox that we’ve already gotten tired of talking about how there is nothing to talk about.
Do not mistake this for a suggestion that this is a bad team. The Red Sox won 93 games and their second consecutive American League East title in 2017 before succumbing to the eventual champion Houston Astros in a four-game American League Division Series.
Even though the Yankees, who won 91 games last year, now look like a baseball version of the Monstars with Giancarlo Stanton joining fellow slugging beast Aaron Judge in the middle of the order, the Red Sox should still be a serious playoff contender at least.
No, it’s not a bad team. But it’s almost the same team. And that’s not good enough, or especially interesting. It feels like something is missing, maybe more than one thing, and they are the same somethings that were missing last year.
Part of it is palpable and obvious in a baseball sense. The Red Sox needed a cleanup hitter last year – you may have heard once or 755 times that they finished last in the AL with 168 home runs in ’17. And as they matriculate to Fort Myers, so far, there is not a new cleanup hitter among them.
I appreciate that Dave Dombrowski has refused to bid against himself for J.D. Martinez and succumb to agent Scott Boras’s wishes during this strangely and suspiciously uneventful offseason. But it had better work. The Red Sox’ apparent decision to leave a reported 5-year, $125 million offer dangling there like a hanging curve doesn’t end up with Martinez accepting a slightly lesser offer from another place he’d prefer to be.
Martinez hit 45 home runs last year, a remarkable 29 in 62 games with the Diamondbacks. The Red Sox need him or someone like him, and there aren’t many like him. Signing Logan Morrison would not be a consolation prize. He’d be an acknowledgement that they blew it with Martinez.
Martinez would be the lineup anchor they need. Surround him with Betts, Benintendi, Xander Bogaerts (the two-time Silver Slugger winner is practically certain to have a better season) and the other assorted talented but sometimes underachieving holdovers, and I guarantee you the Red Sox would finish nowhere near the bottom of the AL in homers in ’18.
I don’t know if Martinez would help in another way this team needs. But I’d like to find out. The Red Sox don’t lack in talent, but they do lack in charisma. Part of this is because we hold them to the impossible standard of the relatively recent past.
Fans miss the star power of David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, and Pedro Martinez, still and always. It’s remarkable that they had those three players at the same time. You’re lucky if you get one player as interesting and dominant as Papi, Manny and Pedro in a single generation. It will never be that way again. Ortiz’s retirement after the ’16 season left a void in the lineup, and in the team’s overall appeal.
Betts is a wonderful player and a pleasant personality, but he’s guarded. We might say similar things about Benintendi after this season. Chris Sale is a delight to watch every fifth day, but being an accountable teammate doesn’t necessarily equate to a compelling personality. And for all of his achievements last year, he has something to prove: He had a 4.09 ERA over his last 11 regular season starts and took two losses (with an 8.38 ERA) in the brief postseason visit.
There are still too many players on the roster who go to extremes. Rick Porcello won the Cy Young Award two years ago (22-4, 3.15 ERA). Last year, he led the league in losses (17, with a 4.65 ERA). Hanley Ramirez was terrific in 2016 (30 homers, 111 RBIs) and aggravatingly unreliable in ’15 and ’17, when he combined for 115 RBIs despite often hitting cleanup.
Can Joe Kelly be consistent? What about Jackie Bradley Jr? When will Dustin Pedroia be back, and what will he be when he returns in his age-34 season? Will the Red Sox continue to systematically destroy Blake Swihart’s prospects? And let’s not even get started on David Price. The inconsistency and unpredictability is exasperating, even when it comes from players who are ultimately productive.
The biggest change is not in the lineup, but with the man who writes it out. Alex Cora is a novice as a big league manager, yet he should be an upgrade on John Farrell. The Red Sox’ Pythagorean won-lost record – essentially, what their record should be based on the team’s runs scored and runs allowed totals – usually indicated that the Red Sox should have won more games than they did under Farrell.
Despite winning three division titles and one World Series in his five years here, Farrell’s won-lost record was 12 games below what the Pythagorean W-L told us it should have been during his tenure. We don’t know if Cora will be an asset. But we do know that Farrell is not a loss.
The team Cora takes over is not a bad one, no. But other than his presence, it is the same team that was pretty good a year ago, but not good enough for Red Sox fans to eagerly anticipate seeing them again.
