Grading The Red Sox: Hitterish Edition

In which I review and grade all notable Red Sox hitters for the 2022 season

I’ll start by saying this is an idea blatantly stolen from Fenway Rundown, Mass Live’s Red Sox podcast with Chris Cotillo and Chris Smith. It’s a good podcast and this was a good episode. That said, I found myself talking to, uh, myself while listening. In a good way? Hard to say. Regardless, in the ever-present quest for content, I’m horking their idea. Sorry guys.

Below you’ll find letter grades for Red Sox players for 2022 along with some comments. It’s pretty simple. I guess that’s it.

But before we get to it, if you like the Red Sox, consider subscribing to this newsletter. It’s free and it’s all about the Red Sox and it’s written by me, Matt Kory. And as should probably be the newsletter motto, two outta three ain’t bad. Thanks.

I’m not exactly sure why, but we’re going to start with Kiké Hernández.

Kiké Hernández
Grade: D+

It was a rough season for Hernandez both on the field and off it. He dealt with injuries that cost him 69 games (not nice) and likely hurt his production even when he was able to play. The end result was good if not great defense in center field, a bit of positional versatility, and well below average production at the plate. In short, not great, Bob. The Red Sox could have weathered this particular storm, had it not been for all the other particular storms they had to weather. Ultimately, this was one reason, if not the reason, the Red Sox failed to repeat their successful 2021 season.

Bobby Dalbec
Grade: F

Speaking of reasons the Red Sox failed in 2022! After a promising 2021 season that saw Dalbec slightly exceed league average with his bat (almost entirely due to hitting 21 homers), the Red Sox effectively installed him as their regular first baseman by not bringing in any competition. Instead of seizing on this opportunity, Dalbec whiffed on it like he was facing, well, any kind of pitch thrown by any kind of pitcher that was not over the very middle of the plate. Dalbec was so bad that the Red Sox brought up an outfielder who had never played first base before in Franchy Cordero from Triple-A to take Dalbec’s spot. Despite a few “moments!” Franchy was bad (we’ll get to him shortly), but not as bad as Dalbec. Eventually Dalbec lost his roster spot to Triston Casas.

The Red Sox ended the season 25th in first base fWAR. The decision to depend on Dalbec is probably the signature failure of the 2021 Red Sox, non-pitching division.

Sorry, I wanted to make this comment funny but instead it’s just sad. Please don’t read anything into that.

Christian Vazquez
Grade: B+

It’s easy to forget how good Vazquez was for Boston in 2022. The numbers show he was an above average defender and well above average with the bat. That’s not just above average for catchers, that’s for all players, a higher standard that Vazquez bested. For whatever reason, the Red Sox didn’t value Vazquez and despite professing to compete for the playoffs, dumped him on Houston for two borderline at best prospects at the trade deadline, damaging their pitching staff, their catching depth, and their clubhouse in the process.

A different question is, how good is Christian Vazquez really? Because there’s ample evidence that he’s not actually as good as he looked during his 2022 Red Sox tenure. The front office is surely aware of this, but that didn’t make it easier on the public or the clubhouse when they decided to deal him. The problem wasn’t so much the change, at least on paper, but how the decision to move on from Vazquez looked and felt to the players and fans, something that may or may not have adequately been taken into account.

Vazquez didn’t hit well after going to Houston, and was relegated to backup duty behind Martin Maldonado, who it should be noted, Can. Not. Hit. Also, for what it’s worth, the catchers who replaced Vazquez in Boston, Connor Wong and Reese McGuire, outplayed Vazquez’s production, at least at the plate.

None of that changes the fact that Vazquez played very well while he was in Boston in 2022.

Trevor Story
Grade: C

The Red Sox asked a lot of Story in 2022. He needed to move to a new city, a new team in a new league, and learn a new position, all while recovering from COVID, and having a new baby. It was a lot to ask. Maybe too much. The results sure seem to indicate that. Story played exceptional defense at second base and posted a league average bat in 94 games. That’s sort of the bare minimum the Red Sox asked for in exchange for $23 million.

Xander Bogaerts
Grade: A

Bogaerts came into the season with questions about his defense. To his credit, he answered them positively. Whether through better positioning, better training, or outright witchcraft, Bogaerts posted his best defensive season since 2015 when he was 22 years old, according to FanGraphs. StatCast agrees, putting Bogaerts’ defense in the 89th percentile, which is quite good.

Offensively, Bogaerts continued to hit. He showed decreased power (15 homers, his fewest since he hit 10 in 2017), but offset it with singles and walks. It’s fair to question how sustainable Bogaerts ability to punch singles through the hole in the right side is (he hit an outright unsustainable .343 on ground balls this season compared to .291 for his career) so you can ask, if the power doesn’t come back is he going to be able to hit? And can he keep up his improved defense as he enters his 30s? These are questions for the future though. For 2022, what happened happened. Xander was great.

Alex Verdugo
Grade: C+

Alex Verdugo is fine. His personality is bubbly and excitable and he clearly loves playing in Boston for the Red Sox. And those things are great. But after several seasons I feel confident in saying that on the field he’s just kinda eh.

There are things he does quite well. For example, he doesn’t strike out much. That’s good! However, he doesn’t walk much either (6.6 percent in 2022). He also doesn’t hit for much power despite that huge uppercut swing of his, and 2022 saw Verdugo’s defensive value plummet. The total package is a player who I think the Red Sox were hoping had more to give. We heard as much from Alex Cora when he was asked about Verdugo during his end of the season presser.

Verdugo was fine in 2022. He wasn’t the reason the Red Sox performed as they did, but he’s not really much beyond a reasonable placeholder either. He can man right field or, better yet, left field and not look awful or out of place if you want to put resources elsewhere, but unless something radically changes with him, 2022 showed us he’s not a long term piece.

Jackie Bradley, Jr.
Grade: D+

On one hand it’s not fair to hold Bradley’s obvious deficiencies against him. Asking him for something he can’t give isn’t on the player, it’s on the person asking, i.e. the front office. For example, if you said, Matt, I’m hiring you to walk a high wire between two super tall buildings in Manhattan, it wouldn’t be my fault when after two steps I slipped, fell, and turned into a puddle of goo after slamming into the pavement. Theoretically.

The point is, it’s not like we didn’t know who Jackie Bradley, Jr. was coming into the 2022 season. Perhaps there was something there the Red Sox thought they could unlock, but whether they just misread the room on that or closed their eyes to Bradley’s faults as a player more than they should have, the end result was entirely predictable: a below replacement-level player masquerading as a starter.

That kind of thing can only be sustained for so long and eventually the Red Sox had enough and DFA’d Bradley. Again, this is hardly on the player himself, but because that’s who is getting graded, that’s where the grade goes. This goes down as the second big failure of the front office.

JD Martinez
Grade: C+

Perhaps this is overly harsh. The offensive environment in 2022 was down significantly, so Martinez’s batting line, while looking pedestrian, was actually good for 17 percent above league average, which was 10 percentage points above the league average DH.

If there’s any criticism of Martinez, it’s that he was a non-factor or even an outright liability with the bat during the team’s swooning months of July and August. On June 26th the Red Sox beat Cleveland 8-3. That put them 11 games above .500 on the season. Over the next two months, the Red Sox went 21-37 while Martinez put up wRC+s of 62 and 67. Of course, the Red Sox didn’t lose solely because Martinez didn’t hit, but my gosh it sure would be nice for the guy whose only job it is to hit to, well, hit.

That said, I don’t think Martinez is finished as a productive hitter. Still, for 2022, he wasn’t quite what the Red Sox wanted and when they needed him most, he wasn’t there.

Rafael Devers
Grade: B-

Before the season, I made some jokes on twitter about Rafael Devers winning the MVP in 2022. To be clear, they were jokes because Rafael Devers did not win the MVP in 2022. Had he won the MVP in 2022, they would most certainly not have been jokes. But he didn’t. So they were. Got it?

Through the middle of the year, they weren’t jokes. Not at all. Devers was pummeling the ball. He had 22 homers through the first half of the season and a wRC+ of 170. He was the team MVP and absolutely in the running for AL MVP as well. There was a period of time in the middle of the season when Devers was ahead of Aaron Judge in fWAR. Then Devers hurt his hamstring in late July and that was kind it for the productive portion of his season.

After posting slugging percentages in the upper .400s to low .700s in all previous months of the season, Devers slugged .288 in August. .288! You might say, okay, Matt, but he probably only played like three games or something. No! He played 26 games in August! Twenty-six! With a .288 slugging percentage! I mean, YIKES! I know this isn’t in-depth analysis, but I guarantee you there are times when even members of the Rays front office look at a single stat and just yell YIKES and this is one of those YIKES times. YIIIKES!

We know Devers isn’t a true talent .288 slugging guy, and crazy stuff happens in baseball in small sample sizes, plus it’s very difficult to play through an injury. That’s all true, but even so, it’s difficult to yada yada yada your way through something so bad. The Red Sox were swooning hard, the team badly needed him, and Devers was playing his worst baseball, perhaps since his first full season in 2018, and maybe his worst since becoming a major league player.

I’m not sure there’s much to take away from all that, except YIKES.

Christian Arroyo
Grade: B+

I’m not going to go through every hitter who put on a Red Sox uniform in 2022. You’d be here forever and actually no you wouldn’t because I wouldn’t ever finish this thing so you’d never get a chance to read it in the first place. So in the interest of our collective healths, I’ll just hit a few of the important ones, and Christian Arroyo is one of those.

We’re starting to grow accustomed to what constitutes a Christian Arroyo season: good-not-great hitting, positional flexibility (Arroyo played six positions in 2022), and a healthy dose of injuries (pun most certainly intended). Still, for a backup who can come in and hit when your starter needs a day off or hits the IL, Arroyo is quite good. He can play competently just about anywhere on the diamond, and he’s solidly league average with the bat. These are great traits for a bench bat.

Plucking Arroyo off the waiver wire has proven to be a strong move.

Kevin Plawecki
Grade: D+/B-

Plawecki wasn’t good in 2022. He didn’t hit (wRC+ of 61, 39 percent below league average), and he wasn’t much of a defender behind the plate either. He was extremely popular in the clubhouse though. He invented the post-homer cart ride, and generally kept people loose and in good spirits. Hey, if you can’t actually do your job on the field, it’s great if you try to take on some other responsibilities to make yourself useful, right? Plawecki did that.

Unfortunately, that put the Red Sox in a tough position because A) Plawecki was bad, and B) they couldn’t really upgrade from him without upsetting people. Ultimately they decided, whatever, who cares, F this, and they sent Plawecki packing. Predictably some people (like me), wondered about this decision.

Plawecki is the kind of player who would be lionized on a championship club, but on a mediocre team struggling to stay around .500, he was just ballast.

Rob Refsnyder
Grade: A+

If you go to the 2022 Red Sox team page on Baseball Reference and sort all Red Sox hitters by OPS+, the name on the top isn’t Rafael Devers, JD Martinez, or Xander Bogaerts. Nope. It’s Rob Refsnyder.

Refsnyder hit .307/.384/.497 in 57 games for the Red Sox filling in mostly in the outfield corners. It was far and away Refsnyder’s best season in a career that has seen him bounce between nine organizations over 12 seasons. Refsnyder will be 32 next March, so we’re not talking about a new long-term part of the outfield picture, but if the Red Sox can get something close to a repeat of his 2022 production next year, he’s worth keeping around.

Reese McGuire
Grade: A

After hitting like Jackie Bradley in Chicago, the White Sox were quite happy to send McGuire to Boston for Jake Diekman at the trade deadline. (And after watching Jake Diekman pitch, the Red Sox were quite happy to send Diekman anywhere that wasn’t Boston at the trade deadline.) McGuire, whether through luck or newfound skill or some combination of the two, went from one of the worst hitters in baseball to one one of the best upon touching down at Logan. Odd the effect that airport has on some people, huh?

McGuire probably isn’t a true-talent .300 hitter, nor is he a true-talent .377 on-base guy, nor a true-talent .500 slugging guy, but he sure did all those things in Boston in 2022, so credit is due. What to do in the future is the subject of a different probably far more depressing article.

Eric Hosmer
Grade: [shrugging emoji]

Eh.

Franchy Cordero
Grade: C-

When the Red Sox acquired Cordero, I probably wasn’t the only one to think of Wily Mo Pena. The Red Sox got Pena from the Cincinnati Reds back in 2005 for Bronson Arroyo, another surprisingly useful Arroyo. Pena was a massive man, brimming with athleticism and strength. Unfortunately he wasn’t quite brimming with baseball ability. He could run, he could throw, and he could hit tape measure home runs… in theory. On an actual field during an actual game facing an actual opponent, things didn’t go nearly as well. As it turned out, he couldn’t field well, he swung at everything, and he rarely made contact.

The Pena experiment ended poorly, all while Arroyo went on to throw 1700 innings of league average ball for Cincinnati over the next nine seasons. Oops.

It’s not fair to Cordero, but when you look at him, it’s not hard to see Wily Mo Pena. Light tower power, a great arm, speed, and little to no idea how to apply it on a baseball field. While he has the speed, he doesn’t have the instincts for the outfield. If he could hit, you could probably teach him first base, but he can’t hit enough to support time at the position (unless the guy he’s replacing is Bobby Dalbec). Every once in a while he catches up with one and you go WOOOW but then that memory fades, clouded over by strikeouts, misplays in the field, and other unproductive minutiae.

You can argue Cordero’s career isn’t over, and it isn’t, but after 2022 his time with the Red Sox organization probably is. Chalk this up to a good try if you want, but it feels a bit too much like deja vu to me.

Tommy Pham
Grade: C-

There’s been talk that the Red Sox should’ve signed Tommy Pham back in the off-season. They had discussed it at the time but decided to pass. Clearly, as we discussed in the Jackie Bradley Jr portion above, they should’ve signed someone, but it’s dubious at best that it should’ve been Pham.

Pham is an intense guy, and he gets credit for that. That can be a good thing to have in the clubhouse. And about five years ago when he was crushing the ball for the Cardinals and Rays you could make the case that he’d have been a good fit in an outfield corner for the Red Sox. But the age-34 Tommy Pham wasn’t that guy on the field anymore. He was fine filling in for essentially nobody in left field and for a team that wasn’t going anywhere, but that’s about it.

Triston Casas
Grade: A

It wasn’t that Casas was a revelation when he came up. He wasn’t. He was fine. And fine from a 22 year old in their first appearance in the majors is good!

More to the point, Casas was the first player to play first base for the 2022 Red Sox who looked like he could actually play first base. At the plate, Casas struggled initially with major league pitching, but that’s not to be unexpected. The numbers might not jump out at you. Yes, he hit only .197, but his 20 percent walk rate (!) pushed his on-base percentage to an above-average .358. That’s what Rafael Devers’ on-base percentage was this season, and it was good for fifth on the team (if you count Jaylin Davis’ .407 OBP in 12 games). Casas also hit five homers in 27 games, a 30 homer pace over a full season.

Casas wasn’t a revelation so much as he was a breath of fresh air. The Red Sox should’ve seen enough to hand first base over to a youngster for the second time in two off-seasons, but unlike Dalbec, this one should stick.

We’ll do the pitchers soon. Then we’ll get to some free agents, hopefully all before the off-season gets going in earnest. Thanks for reading.