Happy Projection Season!

There's no national buzz around the Red Sox but maybe there should be

Back in the day before I started all this writing stuff I used to wait at my mailbox for the Baseball Prospectus annual to arrive. Or maybe that’s not quite true because did they even mail books 20 years ago? I don’t honestly remember. Maybe I bought it at a bookstore. Remember those? They were places you can’t go anymore that sold things you don’t read anymore. It was truly quite a concept. I do remember getting excited to read the Annual though! Would those smarty-pants BPers like the Red Sox off-season? Would they hate it? Would they agree with me that Lars Andersen is a sure-fire Hall of Famer? Of course they would, that kind of thing isn’t debatable, but I wanted the BP experts to answer the other questions, so it was always exciting when I could sit down, crack open the book, and learn about the baseball season before the baseball season.

Years (decades?) later, after being published in multiple BP Annuals myself (ego alert!), I still look forward to the publication of the book. It’s not just that it’s good (it is!), the book means Spring Training is here (and we’ve discussed that!), and more importantly, the baseball season is, like a group of construction workers carrying an overly long pain of extremely breakable glass, right around the corner.

BP isn’t the only projection system in town anymore though. The internet is seemingly full of them. Like my son pouring milk in his cereal bowl until the very concept of surface tension is compromised, the internet can hardly contain them all. One of these mornings I’m going to come downstairs and find projections all over the kitchen floor.

Actually, it’s not that many, I just didn’t want to cut the ‘surface tension’ joke. As far as I can tell, there are two big projection systems, Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs, and one lesser known but still absolutely worthwhile system from former Baseball Prospectus super smart man Clay Davenport. I looked at all three (it wasn’t very hard) and the top line takeaway is good news, generally speaking. This year’s Red Sox should not, I repeat NOT, be a disaster. After 2020 that’s probably good to hear. Maybe? I guess I don’t have a great sense of how the typical Red Sox fan feels about this team, though if you’re reading this you’re probably not the typical Red Sox fan. Either way, they shouldn’t be bad, but it won’t be the 2018 team. Mookie Betts (and my heart) is still in L.A. Chris Sale is still on the DL. There is a ways go to to rebuild this roster and the projections show that.

Baseball Prospectus is the low system on the Red Sox, pegging them for fourth place in the division ahead of only Baltimore. BP has the Red Sox winning 79.7 games. There are some points of contention if you’re the optimistic sort. BP projects the Red Sox to score 752 runs, which would be less than last season’s 788 if you project their 2020 season over a 162 games, which I just did. I think the team will hit the 800 runs scored level this year, even with some of the weaker bats at the end of the lineup. I’m optimistic about Bobby Dalbec at first base, a JD Martinez comeback, and I think Rafael Devers will have a big year, something BP’s projection system doesn’t see coming. That said, it’s unlikely the Red Sox will get anything near what they got from Kevin Plawecki last season (.341/.393/.463), and I don’t think Alex Verdugo is quite as good as his 2020 season either (.308/.367/.478). Those are two items BP agrees with so, you know, tradeoffs. On the whole, as you’d expect from BP, wholly plausible though on the conservative side of the ledger.

FanGraphs is more bullish. They have the Red Sox at 85 wins and in third place, two wins ahead of the Rays. That would be more fun. FanGraphs also likes Boston’s offense a lot more than BP does, and quite possibly more than I do. They project the Red Sox to score 849 runs, which would be quite a lot! That’s about what they project the Dodgers to score, although the Dodgers are doing that with their pitcher batting at least once a game. They also have the Yankees and Blue Jays scoring even more than the Red Sox, something which you should consider when grading the Red Sox pitching staff later in the year.

It’s a bit hard to see where they’re getting that great-ish offense from. The only starters on the Red Sox they project with a .500 slugging percentage are Rafael Devers and JD Martinez (though they have Bogaerts slugging .495 so pretty close). It’s probably the fact that just about every player who projects to get playing time is roughly league average at their position if not better. Not having a huge black hole anywhere in the lineup goes a long way towards papering over Boston’s lack of star power.

Interestingly, they project Chris Sale to have the second most valuable season of any Boston pitcher, and in only 86 innings, something that A) is strange, and B) I could absolutely see happening. As for the pitching staff, they like Nick Pivetta, but don’t expect him to be around for many innings (just 65). They don’t like Tanner Houck but do expect him to be around for a good number of innings (94). They project the most innings to be thrown by Martin Perez (let’s hope not) and, close behind, Eduardo Rodriguez (let’s hope so!), though they think Rodriguez won’t quite live up to his 2019 breakout season.

It’s hard to figure out what to make of this bullpen, and both projections show that. How good will Hirokazu Sawamura be? Neither projection thinks he’ll be much beyond a replacement player. The Red Sox gave him a two year deal though, so perhaps they know something the systems don’t. Interestingly both BP and FanGraphs are pretty high (relatively speaking) on Matt Barnes, projecting him for right around one win, which is a pretty good projection for a reliever. The only other reliever of note is recent Yankee Adam Ottavino, who FanGraphs likes to be somewhere in between his excellent 2018 and his more average 2020, while BP doesn’t really like him at all, I’m guessing because of his age (35).

Lastly, Clay Davenport’s system. Davenport has Boston wining 84 games, and finishing a game behind Toronto and two behind Tampa. He likes Bogaerts a lot (seconded!) and Devers, though not quite as much with the on-base percentage for Devers. He’s expecting a JD bounce back campaign, and strong seasons from Bobby Dalbec and Alex Verdugo. As for pitchers, he’s big into Eduardo’s comeback from COVID, and Matt Barnes making good on what could be his last year in Boston. He expects a good amount out of Chris Sale in a very few innings and decent if not quite good seasons from Nick Pivetta and Garrett Richards.

All the projections are worth looking at. Davenport’s and the ones at FanGraphs are free (though both kindly request a donation for all the hard work they’ve undoubtedly put in, a request that’s worth accommodating if you have the means). BP is, as always, a subscription based site, and as a member, I heartily recommend it.

Here are the links to the projections if you want to take a look yourself (only some of the BP stuff is behind their paywall):

Clay Davenport’s projections (league/Red Sox)
FanGraphs (league/Red Sox)
Baseball Prospectus (league/Red Sox)

What do I expect from this year’s Red Sox? I’ll get into more detail in a post soon enough, but on the whole I tend to think the projections are about right. The mid-80s is about where this roster sits in terms of wins. If Sale comes back and crushes it, if they get some help from the farm system, and if they make some moves to improve the roster at the deadline, they could do better than that. Rosters are always in flux, and none more so than that of this Red Sox team.