A Few Questions and Attempted Answers About Your 2022 Red Sox
Some select Qs brought about by the happenings in Spring Training
I’m working on a season preview, but since Opening Day isn’t until Thursday, I decided not to rush it. I’ll keep it in the hopper until later this week. Instead, I offer you, the Red Sox fan, or maybe my mom (hi mom!), this seemingly disconnected list of important-ish questions facing the 2022 Boston Red Sox. Oh, and I’ll also be attempting to answer these questions. So stick around for that.
But first, hello, welcome to Sox Outsider, my Red Sox newsletter. I’m Matt Kory and I run this joint. You might know me from The Athletic, Vice Sports, Sports on Earth, FanGraphs, or maybe another place. I’ve written at a lot of places! Now, I’m here. You’re here also. That’s good! Stick around, please, and while you’re sticking around, you may as well subscribe. It makes sticking around easier. Also, it’s free so probably can’t hurt. How’s that for a selling point? Sox Outsider: Probably Not Painful!
Let’s get to the five questions. Here they are in no particular order.
Is Tanner Houck a legitimate starting pitcher?
It’s clear Tanner Houck is a major league pitcher. The only question is which role is best for him? Right now, as in while I type these words, the Red Sox have Houck in the starting rotation. He joins Nathan Eovaldi and Nick Pivetta. After them there is a fair bit of uncertainty. Those uncertainties are named Michael Wacha and Rich Hill, who Alex Cora today announced as the fifth starter to begin the season.
With Chris Sale out with a broken rib, this setup makes sense. Get what you can from Hill and Wacha, neither of whom is well suited to a bullpen role, but after those guys, until Sale (or James Paxton) returns, they need someone else. Houck is competing with Whitlock for that last starting gig.
While Whitlock boasts three real pitches, Houck is still working to develop his third. With his arm angle, he’s incredibly tough on right handed hitters, but lefties get a great look at his fastball/slider combination. He has to be able to throw his splitter to effectively to keep lefties off the other two pitches. Can he do it?
I have my doubts. It would be a boon to the organization if he could, but ultimately it might be best for him to keep his two above average pitches and use him in a more targeted role out of the bullpen. For now, this is the right thing to do though. Give Houck a shot while there’s an opening. Maybe he’ll surprise us.
Is Rafael Devers the greatest hitter ever in the history of hitters?
Devers has almost a 1.742 OPS this spring. He’s hitting over .400 with six homers in 27 plate appearances. Just for fun, at that rate over a full season Devers would hit 133 homers. So I’ll be charitable and put the over/under at 120 homers.
But seriously, folks. There are real reasons to think there might be a breakout on the horizon for Devers, which is saying something because last year Devers was a very good hitter. He’ll be 25 this season, which is the beginning of a hitter’s peak.
Also, look at Devers’ batted ball data. It’s just silly. Here’s what he did in 2021.
Red is good and the numbers in the bubbles are league percentiles. What these numbers are saying is that Devers crushed the ball last season. Although he chased pitches out of the zone as well, he’s actually taken steps forward on that front over the past few seasons. If those steps continue in a forwardly direction, there is potential for improvement. The combination of his elite bat-to-ball skills, Devers’ immense power, combined with some plate discipline and control of the strike zone would be devastating to opposing hitters and people who have sold his baseball cards to me.
Is Matt Barnes even rosterable at this point?
Perhaps that’s a hyperbolic question. But we all saw what Matt Barnes did at the beginning of last season. He was electric, striking out 44 percent of hitters while walking only seven percent. He also kept the ball in the park and made his first All Star team. It was well deserved. Then, in the second half, it all fell apart. His K rate plummeted to 28 percent, his walks jumped to 11.4 percent, and his home runs allowed more than doubled. It got to the point where closing out a blowout was a dangerous ask. He was eventually dropped off the playoff roster in the ALCS.
The hope is he’d be able to put the bad stuff behind him with an off-season of rest. So what have the spring results told us? Well, they’re spring results so don’t take them with less than a bag of salt, but even when attempting to find answers here, it’s kind of a mixed bag. The numbers are actually fine. He has faced 17 hitters, struck out six of them and walked only one. That’s good! Not great, but good, and certainly not a flaming disaster.
The problem has been his velocity. He’s been sitting in the low 90s and there is legitimate fear that that won’t play once the regular season begins and the minor leaguers and Quad-A guys exit the stage.
The Red Sox really need Matt Barnes to be a serviceable reliever. If he’s the All Star of the first half of 2021, fantastic, but he can’t be the guy he was in the second half. The Red Sox seem to think they’ve figured out a flaw in his delivery that is costing him mph. We’ll see if that’s the problem. Even beyond that, there are real questions that can only be answered in the regular season.
Can Jackie Bradley Jr really hold down the starting right field gig?
When the Red Sox traded starting right fielder Hunter Renfroe to Milwaukee right before the lockout, the thought was that the return package of Jackie Bradley and two prospects was really about the two prospects. Bradley is coming off a horrendous season with the Brewers that saw him post the worst batting stats of any player in the league (minimum 200 PAs). I’ll say that again: JBJ was the worst regular hitter in baseball last season. Based on that, it was assumed he’d take a fourth outfielder role to Seiya Suzuki or Kyle Schwarber, or some other available free agent or trade acquisition.
As it turns out, nope. Maybe they tried, but the end result is, at least for now, the Sox are rolling with Bradley. Currently Bradley has a .960 OPS with three homers this spring. Very promising stuff! But as we all know but conveniently all forget every February, Spring Training stats just don’t mean much if they mean anything at all. Bradley won’t be judged on his Spring OPS but on what he does once the lights come on this Thursday.
I said I’d give my opinion on this, so here goes. I think two things. One is it’s pretty hard to come back from where Bradley was last season. If he’s twice as good as he was last season he’s still unplayable. That’s how bad he was. So there’s a long way to go and I’m not optimistic based on 28 PAs in spring.
That said, Bradley did homer on a 95 mph fastball the other day, and that was a pitch he could not hit last season. Also, while age comes for us all eventually, JBJ is just 32 so while it wouldn’t be unheard of if this was it for him, it’s also a perfectly reasonable age for a starting outfielder. Perhaps there’s a tweak to the swing, or some alteration to his step or the way he holds the bat that will unlock an extra split second of bat speed. That brings me to my second thought. If there’s a place that might be able to do that, to remake Bradley enough to make him serviceable again, it’s Chaim Bloom’s Boston Red Sox. Say what you will about the front office, but this is kinda their thing.
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