Will Pablo Sandoval help the Red Sox in ’17, or is that cause already lost?
Debate the answer with Chad Finn and Boston sports fans at The Sports Q.
COMMENTARYWelcome to Boston.com’s Sports Q, our daily conversation, initiated by you and moderated by Chad Finn, about a compelling topic in Boston sports. Here’s how it works: You submit questions to Chad though Twitter, Facebook, email, his Friday chat, and any other outlet you prefer. He’ll pick one each day (except for Saturday) to answer, then we’ll take the discussion to the comments, where the mission is to have a sports conversation with occasional controversy, but without condescension or contrarianism. Chad will stop by the comments section several times per day to navigate. But you drive the conversation.Saw Pete Abe’s piece on Pablo Sandoval with the estimate that he’s lost 30 pounds. Obviously a good sign, but can they really count on him to help? I feel like they’re depending on him too much. Third base looks like a black hole if he doesn’t return to form. – Dewey24
You sound skeptical, Mr. Evans, and I’m with you. It’s a great sign that he lost so much weight, because that’s not usually how it’s going to work when a player who battles the scale misses essentially a full season with an injury. He played just three games last season, with seven hitless at-bats, before he succumbed to shoulder surgery.
He has at least $54.8 million remaining on his contract. Such riches can steal a player’s motivation. Kudos to him for trying to get his act together at age 30.
I’m just not sure what the precise form is to which he is capable of returning. No matter how much Panda merchandise the Red Sox marketing arm envisioned moving, this is a player they never should have signed in the first place, let alone for so many years and so much cash.
In his final four seasons with the Giants, his OPS declined from .909 to .789 to .758 to .739. Perhaps they couldn’t have predicted his cliff-dive of a drop to a .658 OPS in his first season with the Red Sox in ’15. But there was plenty of evidence that he was an offensive player in decline. In his first season in Boston, his glove turned faulty as well.
The Red Sox signed Sandoval in part because even a league-average player would have been an upgrade over the slider-phobic Will Middlebrooks and stagnated prospect Garin Cecchini after the frustrating ’14 season. He was far from a league average player (75 adjusted OPS).
Two years later, there are still questions at third base, and top prospect Rafael Devers’s arrival is at least a year away. I worry that the Red Sox are about to be fooled twice in their hope that Sandoval, slimmer and motivated though he may be, can be a steadying force when the reality is that it’s been years since he was any kind of force at all.
Whaddaya think? Are we about to see a Sandoval redemption? Or will this continue to trend as the worst free-agent signing in franchise history that doesn’t involve Carl Crawford? Set me straight or throw me a wrinkle in the comments.
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