Spring Training Opens Up
Before last season ended, I wrote that the two clear targets this winter for the Red Sox should be Juan Soto and Max Fried. I don’t know how others interpreted this offseason, but it seems pretty clear to me that those two ended up being the top two targets for the Red Sox. Even with their reportedly strong pursuits of those players, the team didn’t come close to landing either.
Soto is a special case, and there’s no real pivot from that chase. Within 12 hours of the Yankees signing Fried though, the Red Sox reportedly gave in to the White Sox and put Kyle Teel and Braden Montgomery in a trade package together for the first time. A high price, albeit less than anticipated, that still requires a contract extension on top of the acquisition cost.
At the time of the signing, it seemed both sides were motivated to make that happen this spring. As of a couple day ago, among many comments about a possible deal, Crochet added, “part of me wants to see what I could do in a full season before, I suppose, locking myself into a certain bracket of player.” Alright then. We’ll see what happens, I’d guess a deal is more likely than not this spring or early in the season.
After months of nothing, Bregman turned out to be the Red Sox position player addition. He didn’t end up with the ridiculous $200M contract Scott Boras was shooting for, and he turned down $170M from Detroit to sign here, but not until a late concession from the Red Sox giving him opt-outs after each season.
The initial impression I got from talking to people after the news of the deal broke was that Bregman is expected to stay in Boston for multiple years. However, though $40M from both 2026 and 2027 is a lot of money, with a good 2025, that should be beatable in long-term in total value, with a reshuffled deck and possible new suitors. When asked yesterday if he feels like he is in another contract drive year, Bregman said, “I believe in my abilities and I look forward to proving it.” Take that as you may.
I was told something to watch is how purse string start to tighten around the league as a collective bargaining agreement nears its end, so that may be a tick in favor of him not opting-out.
The Red Sox acquired two very good players, but for now they are controlled for 2 years and 1 year. The Red Sox also signed Walker Buehler and didn’t get control of a second year. Aroldis Chapman and Justin Wilson were straight one-year deals. Patrick Sandoval is here for injury rehab and 2026, and is already shifted to the 60-day IL, as expected.
It’s a conundrum, the 2025 team, on paper, should be much improved, but with so many stopgaps, long-term uncertainty, and without/until a Crochet extension, this offseason doesn’t quite reach an A grade from me. It’s still a very good offseason, one of the handful of best in baseball, but it seems wild to me that the roster is set up so that there is likely mass turnover next winter if this season goes well, and you can be locked into the roster if things go off the rails.
On the topic of being improved:
85.5 Vegas over/under win total
85-77 Fangraphs projection
80-82 Baseball Prospectus projection
These feel like a pretty low win total right now. 88.5 is more my vibe on February 17th, with some fairly wide error bars in both directions, and what feels like a wide open, winnable AL East.
I think the Yankees are more solid than people are giving them credit for, but as things stand, coming out of the winter with a Goldschmidt-Cabrera/LeMahieu corner infield feels sketchy. I expected the Orioles to be WAY more aggressive this winter. They will be good, and some of their kids may explode, along with a Rutschman rebound, but it’s funny already seeing little mentions of their “window” in places like The Athletic. No idea what to think about the Rays, not having the Trop feels like it’s going to be a huge curveball for the division. Didn’t love the Blue Jays winter, Vlad Guerrero Jr. reportedly rejecting $350M is wild.
Bregman is something like a bizarro Masataka Yoshida in the batter’s box. Flip their handedness, and flip the ground ball to fly ball ratios, and it’s like spider-men pointing at each other.
Now, Bregman has been taking aim at the cheapest seats in baseball for his whole career, and now will be taking aim at the Green Monster, while Yoshida is hitting into the void of Fenway’s right field.
Masa was an above average hitter when he hit an ungodly amount of ground balls in 2023, and was a better hitter last year playing with a torn labrum and a hurt hand, so it’s at least intriguing to think about his bat when he’s 1. healthy and 2. driving down his ground ball rate. We’ll see if he’s here, and we’ll see if he plays. Breakout candidate is too strong of a phrase, but in half of his full MLB months, Yoshida has posted a wRC+ between 126 and 160, so it’s not hard to imagine his best is possibly to come.
As far as I’m aware, Red Sox hitting coach Pete Fatse has made public comments two times this offseason, on a podcast with Julian McWilliams and at this year’s version of winter weekend, and both times he mentioned Ceddanne Rafaela as a guy that stands out that can take a leap.
As the Sox Prospects guys pointed out on their podcast recently, when the team tried to adjust who he was in the batter’s box in the minor leagues, it didn’t go well, and the organization quickly let him be. There were major red flags with his minor league performance, and that led to one of the worst qualified offensive seasons in Red Sox history last year. Revisiting what actually happened last year, the numbers were outrageous.
Chase Rate: 324th/324
Fastballs: 309th/343 xwOBA
Left-handed pitching: 282nd/293 xwOBA
Right-handed pitching: 290th/374 xwOBA
Should this bury Rafaela? No.
Is his career doomed? No.
Should he be handed a starting job without competition? No.
There is literally nowhere to go but up offensively. Controlling his chase rate would be the hardest, but best possible outcome. It’s historically a very hard skill to meaningfully improve at the MLB level. At the very least, he should be able to handle regular season fastballs without whiffing on them 31% of the time. A repeat performance against LHP also seems implausible.
He’s posted a wRC+ above league average 100 in 1 of his first 7 months in the majors. 4 of the months have been between 33 and 80. Simply avoiding the true disasters would do wonders here.
As we are now inside a week until spring training games, a reminder that in 2024 spring training he played a lot and hit .270/.319/.508 with 6%/19% BB/K and the 3rd highest Pull% in the league.
It’s no secret that the Red Sox l-o-v-e Kristian Campbell, and there are somehow whispers that even with staggering improvement and performance last year, he was a standout improver this winter as well.
With Roman Anthony and Campbell sitting 2nd and 4th on the Baseball America Top 100, there were obviously glowing reports on them from all corners of the baseball world this winter. One improvement area repeatedly mentioned for them though has been ball flight.
Anthony hit .344/.463/.519 (52% GB%) in his short time in Triple-A, and Campbell hit .286/.412/.486 (59% GB%) in his shorter time there, but I think the below chart from Triple-A highlights what the reports are talking about.
This is based on their 100 and 50 batted balls with Worcester. New level, age, sample, being worn down at the end of the season all factor into these. But it’s scary to think about what paths to top of the spectrum outcomes open up if they are able to combine their best exit velocities with sweet spot launch angles. That is something another young Red Sox player seems on path to achieve:
My ears perked up when Alex Cora mentioned how good Garrett Whitlock looks the other day. What a weird path. 2023 had him throwing a 48% whiff sweeper and 32% whiff change up, with a 5.5 K/BB, but he ended up having horrible outcomes. Last year he made 4 strong starts, but whiffs never materialized, there was a ton of zone contact, and he ended up having internal brace surgery on his elbow before making a 5th appearance.
Healthy again, can a renewed focus on the bullpen, and pitching department optimization, turn him into a long term cheap closer? Won’t begin 2025 that way, but carefully watching how much his control and zone contact rebound, and what his sinker (fastball) looks like coming out of his recovery.
Back to Bregman for a minute, all the “cooked” talk from this winter was wildly overblown based on a wicked outlier of a month in April. He buoyed himself in May, and closed the year with 4 great months and a 3-for-8 postseason, including a liner off the wall versus Tarik Skubal. Overall, not worried.
Have yet to really understand what’s been going on with him against left-handed pitching, though. Tons of fly balls, but this year, 1/5th of them were on the infield. Only 41% pulled the last two seasons. This very much needs to be remedied for Fenway Park, and maybe the best thing for him was changing teams and getting new eyes on it.
Fixing this could be his best path to a top-tier season. But also makes it notable that it looks like Crochet, Shane McClanahan, Fried, and Carlos Rodon are the only left-handed starters in AL East rotations at this moment.
To actually be very good this year, the Red Sox need most of their returning auxiliary pieces to at least hold serve on solid 2024s, if not improve. The first raised eyebrow in that area came the other day with this:
In more positive news about these guys:
Makes a lot more sense than the fantasy-land trade proposals that were overflowing online from Red Sox fans / media / whatever yesterday, continuing a wild trend this winter.
It wouldn’t be a shock if Jarren Duran’s 6.7 fWAR in 2024 was a peak year, but it would be a fairly devastating blow if his 2025 backed off as much as these projections.
He has shown multi-year positive trends in key areas across his offensive profile, so maybe it will just take longer for these to catch up with what is hopefully a new baseline.
He’s among many Sox players that need to drastically improve against left-handed pitching, but even with that, I’ll take the overs across the board on the above numbers.
A lot has been made about Bregman coming in and instantly controlling the clubhouse as the lead dog. With Nick Pivetta officially signing with the Padres this week, the pitchers will also have a new lead dog to follow. I think it’s fair to say that some people around the team think that is a good thing, but people on and with the team would probably push back on that stance. Either way, 4 solid years of service, a heroic ALDS performance, a strong ALCS start, and a compensation pick returned when walking out the door. A nice Sox tenure.
Today’s whole Rafael Devers / third base mess is just another spectacular blunder that continues this organization’s years-long problem of perpetually stepping on rakes and smashing themselves in the face.
Insane. The Red Sox had a solid core, a good team last year, and ownership decided to cut payroll rather than add and reinforce. That decision went public in January, months before Casas and Trevor Story even got hurt. Yet, for most the season, the players gave us a good ride. The only support the team got were trade deadline additions that turned out to be horrible. Yeah, insane.
Only the Braves have fewer spring training games with Statcast available than the ten the Red Sox have. A bummer since there are so many interesting threads to pull on with this team, and that data would be by far the most interesting thing about games after the first few are played. Maybe someday with the flip the switch at JetBlue.