Where does Dustin Pedroia go from here?
Headed back to Florida for extended spring, the 35-year-old has a job waiting for him in the majors.
Red Sox spring training ended with a whimper on Tuesday afternoon, the world champions trounced by the Cubs in Arizona to finish their slate at 12-17-1. It’s a significant step down from a year ago, when their 119-victory campaign for the ages was preceded by a 22-9 spring.
Spring numbers don’t quite mean nothing, of course, but they’re pretty close. (J.D. Martinez’s longest homerless streak in his 43-homer 2018 were the 47 at-bats he had in the spring.) One number of relevance from this spring, however? Thirty.
That’s the number of major-league innings Dustin Pedroia played second base, spread across seven games. The last of those were Tuesday in Mesa, Ariz., when he went 0-for-2 and played the first five against the Cubs.
While his teammates head to Seattle for the season opener on Thursday night, however, Pedroia will head back to Florida for extended spring training and continued buildup in hopes of the 2008 MVP being a contributor for the long term.
“There’s been no setbacks, nothing out of the ordinary. It’s just that we feel we need more time to do the back-to-backs, more innings,” said manager Alex Cora to reporters last week. “This is not only for this year. It’s a plan for three years. We need him to keep playing and he’ll be OK.”
Pedroia is yet to play a full game this year, which is hardly out of the ordinary for the spring, and is yet to play back-to-back days once. (He did play in a pair of minor-league games in addition to the seven with the top squad.) Eager as he is to get back on the field, he understands as well as anyone the team’s caution. A year ago, his season lasted just three games; he went back on the shelf in May and ended up on the surgeon’s table to have a scar tissue cleanup in July.
“I don’t think the team was expecting me to come in and look the way I look,” he said. “They just to want to be sure they do it right.”
It doesn’t seem out of the realm that Pedroia could be ready Tuesday, April 9, for the team’s home opener, which follows an 11-games-in-11-days road trip to begin the Red Sox season. Minor-league games begin a week from Thursday, giving the 35-year-old a chance to see game speed before experiencing the real thing.
Cora’s comment above references the three years left on the eight-year, $110 million deal Pedroia signed in July 2013, one which at the time was widely hailed for going down in the salary the final three seasons of the deal. Pedroia, who made $16 million for his three-game 2018, will get $15 million, $13 million, and $12 million the remainder of the contract.
It’s not as though there’s any great push from within the organization to replace him at second base. The three primary players there a year ago were Eduardo Nunez (a free agent to be playing on a $4 million option), Brock Holt (making $3.575M in his last year before free agency), and trade deadline pickup Ian Kinsler, who departed for San Diego in December.
Tzu-Wei Lin had an excellent spring, hitting .321 in 12 games primarily split between second base and shortstop, and will begin the year in the minors. Marco Hernandez remains a possibility within the system, but he’s had shoulder surgery each of the last two years and was probably no more than a utility type at his best.
Second base is, to be clear, Dustin Pedroia’s job to reclaim in the short term. The Red Sox have support options via Holt and Nunez, but neither has Pedroia’s ceiling.
It’s simply a question of when exactly he’ll reclaim his spot, and to what degree his body can sustain it anymore.
“When you’re coming back from something like this, no one thinks you can do it,” Pedroia said last week. “If I’m not confident about it, it’s not going to happen.”
