In Which I Discuss Boston's Pitching And Try To Avoid Getting Upset

The Red Sox enter the 2024 season with a pitching staff balanced on the head of a pin. I mean, it *COULD* work...

Spring!! (Photo by Mark Tegethoff on Unsplash)

Good morning! Opening Day is around the corner though you wouldn’t know it from how often I’ve been posting there. Still though! Opening Day! Yay!

I say that now, though you know there’s going to be a time, probably somewhere around mid-May, where I look at the calendar and think, holy crap, there’s another how many months of this?

But right now: yay!

Things are settling in on the Red Sox front. Players are playing, coaches are coaching, and pitchers are getting injured. Just your normal baseball spring, really.

The Red Sox have already lost Lucas Giolito to not-quite-Tommy John surgery. That’s “nqTJS” for those of you scoring at home. Giolito had what is called an Internal Brace procedure which makes it sound like something you’d learn in your sophomore high school physics class. For our purposes here, because we don’t even play doctors on TV, this qualifies as good news. The internal brace procedure comes with a quicker recovery timeline than does regular old Tommy John surgery. Not fast, but faster, so this good news is relative.

Still though, the Red Sox should recover some amount of value from the now-certain-to-be-two year contract they handed out, though as Giolito will still miss all of the 2024 season, that value won’t come until 2025. Next season: when the rubber really meets the road! It’s like the bar with the permanent sign that says “Free beer tomorrow!” Red Sox baseball: excited for next season!

In Giolito’s stead, the Red Sox front office has admirably sprung into action and done absolutely nothing whatsoever. They’re the proverbial old guy who refuses to go to the doctor because if you ignore it then it’s not there.

As such, the starting rotation now stands as follows:

Brayan Bello
Nick Pivetta
Kutter Crawford
Tanner Houck
Garrett Whitlock

It’s worth pointing out that this is the exact same rotation as last season minus Chris Sale. They added absolutely nothing to a rotation that finished last season 22nd in starter ERA. If that’s not crossing your fingers while sticking your head in the sand, I don’t know what is.

The funny thing about this is I’m vaguely bullish on each of these guys. It’s not too hard to see each as a league average or slightly better pitcher in 2024. And, if everyone works out to their highest potential, this is, in fact, a very good rotation. But as an entire group, there are so many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ here (also ‘butts’) that the math starts to look sketchy pretty quick.

I’m not a gambler, but there’s a reason the house loves parlays (basically, betting on multiple things simultaneously). Even if each is a singularly good bet, the more you layer bets together the more unlikely all are to hit, and if you lose just one, you lose the whole thing. That’s about where the Red Sox are.

That might even be acceptable if there was significant depth at starter in the minors but there really isn’t. Like that person who nobody remembers inviting to the party and who won’t leave even though you’re out of beer and the sun is coming up, pitcher injury is always there.

They’ve already lost Giolito, and now Chris Murphy has a “high grade tear” in his UCL. Is a high grade tear better than a low grade one? No idea, but any kind of UCL tear regardless of grade seems like bad news to me. We’ll know more soon enough, even if maybe we’d rather not.

If any of the five guys in the rotation get hurt and have to miss significant time, which, again, is a virtual certainty these days, the next men up are Brandon Walter and Cooper Criswell. Yes, Josh Winckowski could also be moved to the rotation from the bullpen, but we’ve all seen that play before and I don’t love the ending. Or the middle. Often the beginning isn’t so great either. Even so, it might be a better play than Walter or Criswell, whose plays went straight to VHS. Yes, they’ll eat innings, but in the way your eighth grade friend ate ketchup packets at Burger King. They went down, yes, but they came right back up, and ultimately nobody benefited.

But that’s where we are. There are certainly items to be excited about with this Red Sox team, and if everything goes well (ha ha) I do think a playoff spot is within reach. But a whole lot of things are going to have to not implode for that to happen. This is you driving your grandpa’s ‘60s convertible sports car across the country. It could be fantastic, seeing the country with the top down, but when the engine blows out somewhere in Kentucky there’s going to be a very unpleasant reality to face.

Sorry to be so dark. I am legitimately excited for the season. It just strikes me that, unless there’s something I’m missing with the pitching depth (a legitimate possibility, I’ll grant you) this thing could so easily derail. They say it’s not the destination, it’s the journey itself, and I do think that’s true, but it feels like the front office isn’t looking at this season as the journey so much as the walk to the car. They’re not even going to bother starting the engine until next off-season.

Thanks for reading.