The Red Sox Are Good Now! Also, Sox Outsider Podcast Is Go!
Smart people say so. For serious!
I really am concerned about the Red Sox defense. I wasn’t just making that up to have something to write about. The Red Sox really do have what I think will likely be a below average defense and the best case scenario isn’t much better than league average. But! I was recording the first episode of the Sox Outsider podcast(!) last Friday with Eno Sarris of The Athletic (more on that below!) and Eno pointed this out to me:
Let’s try that again, but this time with a bit of selective highlighting
And now, with feeling, I’d like to draw your attention to one more specific area on that chart.
This is FanGraphs 2021 projected standings, sorted by winning percentage, for the whole of Major League Baseball. There’s the Yankees at the top, followed by the Dodgers, Padres, Mets, Blue Jays, Red Sox, Astros and just wait a darn minute who was that after the Blue Jays???
The fine folks at FanGraphs are feeling pretty good about your old Boston Red Sox, aren’t they? They have the Red Sox allowing more than a whole run a game less in 2021 than they did in 2020. There’s your starting pitching, folks. It’s amazing what basic competence can do for you. And it gets better! FanGraphs thinks the Red Sox will score a half a run per game more than they did in 2020 as well. That’s not half bad!
Their projected winning percentage of .548 would have been enough to grab the first Wild Card spot last season. Over a whole 162 game season (a length we might not get in 2021 but still it’s worth dealing with a valuation we are all familiar with) that’s 89 wins, which if you buy at the deadline could put you over the 90 win mark. That’s probably the upper bounds of what anyone thinks is possible for this Red Sox team, so to see FanGraphs lay it out like this is at least a little exciting, right? It’s February so yeah, Let’s Go!
It is worth noting that two of the teams ahead of them are also in their division, so that’s not great. The Blue Jays have had themselves an off-season to remember, adding George Springer, Marcus Semien (darnit!), and Kirby Yates. If their young players come around, they could be a team to be reckoned with both in 2021 and beyond. The Yankees brought back D.J. LeMahieu, signed Corey Kluber, and traded for Jameson Taillon. That’s a step up for their rotation, but mostly the Yankees are just supplementing their already strong core. In both cases though, those teams improved at least marginally and in the Jays case, by a lot.
What you might noticed is that the team that won the division last year, the team that won the entire American League last season, isn’t among the top teams. Right now FanGraphs has the Rays at 83 wins, which would be six games behind Boston. Excuse me for a minute while I relish this utterly meaningless yet still entirely enjoyable moment.
So look, it is fun to think about how the Red Sox could be good in 2021. They could be more than the sum of their parts, they could take steps forward, they could have big comeback seasons, they could get healthy, they could they could they could. And they might! But right now there is still so much to do - the off-season isn’t even over yet! - and we don’t know when Spring Training will start, let alone the regular season. But we’re getting towards the spring, minute by minute, transaction by transaction. It’s a cold and drizzly Portland day so thinking that baseball, good baseball, good Red Sox baseball, might be in our future is about the best thought I can think of.
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One last note, the Sox Outsider Podcast is up and running! I’ve been promising to reboot the podcast and I’ve finally done it. The first episode is up now on iTunes, but iTunes is being a bit wonky, so if you can’t find it on iTunes, you can listen to it on the site the podcast lives on, Podbean. The link is here:
I talked a bit about the Red Sox, introduced myself a bit more, and then the real good part, I interviewed Eno Sarris of The Athletic. We talked Red Sox, specifically Andrew Benintendi, some defensive stuff, and a few other items. I think we talked for a good 40 minutes or so. It was a really fun talk, Eno is always fun to talk to, and I learned a lot as I tend to do when Eno talks. It’s definitely worth a listen, so check it out above. I hope you enjoy it.
It is the first episode so I know it doesn’t sound perfect, but hopefully I can get it dialed in sooner rather than later sound-wise. Let me know what you think in the comments, and who you’d like me to have on. I’m always open to ideas!
As always, thanks for reading and now, for listening as well. It’s much appreciated.