Can part-timers and position shifters carry Red Sox to something more?
COMMENTARY
Welcome to the time of year when a baseball fan can convince themselves of just about anything. Even in the land of people angry to find Ben Affleck in their drive-thru.
We’re not even a year removed from collectively deciding the Bruins firing Bruce Cassidy for Jim Montgomery was a bad idea, and boy did we nail that. On this Tuesday of pitchers and catchers, with Opening Day a shade more than six weeks away, let’s imagine we’re similarly stupid.
The only thing Rob Manfred’s Major League Baseball might love more than gambling is mediocrity, given the perpetual optimism it produces. A third-place team just made the World Series, and boy, don’t think that isn’t fuel for hope in a lot of places as another season dawns.
Your Red Sox might not be a top-10 contender in mid-February, but there are plenty of scenarios where they could manage to win 86 games, and that’s about all anyone needs to make October’s Get Hot For A Month Invitational.
So, how do they get there? You know some already: Chris Sale stays healthy for, heck, let’s say 25 starts. Rafael Devers gets enough lineup protection and produces like the player he’s now paid to be. Masataka Yoshida is worthy of the “best pure hitter from Japan since Ichiro” dreams. The bullpen jels the way it looks like it could.
More generally, though, the part time excels as full time. No thought process better captures whatever plan letter Sox architect Chaim Bloom ended up on for 2023.
After an offseason laden with goodbyes, sixteen names on the 40-man roster are new since the end of the 2022 season. Nearly two dozen are new in the last 12 months, starting with Trevor Story, whose inevitable transfer to the 60-day disabled list will open another spot.
It feels like less than $200-odd million used to buy, but that’s inflation for you, I guess. Consider, from least to most concerning:
Kiké Hernández, shortstop
Relevant Experience: 100 games and 64 starts across nine seasons, with 163-plus innings there since the start of the 2019 season.
No one has tried to claim the 2023 team as his own as much as Hernández, a bilingual player with experience both in the everyday lineup and as a role player. He was playing catch with the Bruins at the Winter Classic. He was the subject of a social media push from the team last week. He is the loudest voice in a growing “nobody believed in us” chorus that actually applies.
That goes doubly for his specific situation.
“Been waiting my whole life to play short at the Major League level on a daily basis,” he told reporters during the team’s Winter Weekend party last month. “I believe shortstop has the potential to be my best position. I’m really looking forward to it.”
That will likely wait until after the World Baseball Classic, where he may play center for Puerto Rico, a position we have come to know he is very good at. But Hernández, as he made clear, really wants this. He’s overachieved since his first days here. Plus, he’s spent this winter working hard as he ever has after an abdominal injury ruined his 2022.
“We’ll talk in October. We’ll talk in November,” he told Chris Rose earlier this month. “Watch me. That’s it.”
Christian Arroyo, second baseman
Relevant Experience: His primary position in a six-season career, but topping out at 51 games (43 starts) in 2021 and 40 (35) in 2022.
This is a significant jump into some wishcasting from Hernández, but we are talking about a first-round talent.
Fun fact: If I asked you to name the two 2013 first rounders on the current Red Sox, you would not get either because they’re catcher Reese McGuire, who went 14th to Pittsburgh, and Arroyo, who went 25th to San Francisco seven picks before the Yankees took Aaron Judge.
Arroyo roared through the minors and debuted with the Giants at 21, but six years and three franchises on has never gotten more than the 300 plate appearances in a season that he did last year. Injuries, most fluky, and circumstance cost him months and years.
Story’s injury has given him another opening. Yes, the Sox have added Adalberto Mondesi — another infielder yet to meet his hype coming out of the minors — as a switch-hitting potential platoon partner, but he likely won’t be ready for Opening Day.
This will be Arroyo’s job to start, and his work in two-plus years here offers at least a glimmer of hope he could run with it given some overdue breaks.
Adam Duvall, center fielder
Relevant Experience: A nine-year outfielder who’s spent almost all of that in left, he has a shade less than 600 innings in center, with 74 games (68 starts) the past two seasons with Atlanta.
Duvall is what he is at the plate to almost a comic degree. Since the start of 2020, no hitter in the majors with 1,000 plate appearances has a lower ground-ball rate. He’s pull happy and both strikes out and homers more than his share; even before a torn tendon sheath in his wrist ended his 2022 season in July, those latter two numbers were both moving in the wrong direction.
But even if he does the unlikely and produces to his career averages — .230/.289/.465, 32 homers, 169 strikeouts — I’m more concerned what he does in the field. That’s where he really needs to produce.
Duvall won a 2021 Gold Glove in left, and the Sox are betting on the promise he’s showed in center field since. With the spectacular Ceddanne Rafaela still in the system (and at least the chance Story will be back at short in the second half of the year), it doesn’t have to be a long-term bet, but it’s a critical one given what will be flanking him.
Alex Verdugo, right fielder
Relevant Experience: A six-year outfielder who’s split time at all three spots, Verdugo has exactly 100 starts in right since joining the Sox before the 2020 season.
This is my No. 1 concern about the 2023 team. No, really.
That’s not entirely Verdugo’s fault, of course. It’s Jackie Bradley Jr.’s, too, though that’s as much on Bloom as Bradley.
When the Sox reacquired the defensive wizard from Milwaukee last winter, we mostly told ourselves it was as a fourth outfielder. That the Red Sox would supplement around him, and give him a chance to surprise after being arguably the worst player in the majors in 2021. We, in a spring tradition, talked ourselves into it.
We shouldn’t have. Bradley didn’t get support, and was instead the starter in 19 of the first 24 games. Defense? Great, as usual. But he was hitting .156 at the end of April, .219 at the end of May, and watching from the bench in Toronto by year’s end.
It was the worst kind of wishcasting, and I can not sit here and pretend it didn’t happen when I’m thinking about the prospect of Alex Verdugo playing one of the most difficult outfield spots in the majors.
Verdugo, despite playing fewer than 450 innings in right last year, was one of the 15 worst RFs in the majors by defensive runs saved. By UZR, he was fourth-worst, and he’s bottom 15 across all his time there in Boston. Outs Above Average was more complimentary in 2022, but Verdugo was still below average.
“I think the transition has been pretty seamless,” former bench coach Will Venable told The Athletic last summer about Verdugo in right. “He spent a lot of time in right field before and spent a lot of time all over so I think it’s really about consistent reps out there . . . He works on it and does everything he needs to be prepared.”
It’s not about work ethic. I love Verdugo’s energy. I love watching him play. Just not in right.
Dwight Evans made it look easy. Jackie Bradley Jr. and Mookie Betts made it look easy. It’s not easy.
It’s hard to see it working. Even in February.
Even in this, the era of Mediocre League Baseball.
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