Three Places The Red Sox Can Easily Improve In 2021
Like easy, easy
2020 was a bad year for many, but moving past things that actually matter, it was a really bad year for the Boston Red Sox. There was the pandemic that produced a start and stop and start again season without any minor league action. There were the results on the field where the team finished behind the consensus worst team in baseball in their own division. There were injuries, under-performance, rabid badgers… I’m pretty sure there were rabid badgers. But the good news is this 2021 team can’t be that bad. It simply can’t, and here are three big reasons why.
Reason 1: J.D. Martinez
Martinez had his worst season since getting cut by the Houston Astros following the 2013 season. He finished 2020 with a batting line that looked like it came from a utility infielder from the 1980s: .213/.291/.389. The good news is 2020 was a unique set of circumstances extremely unlikely to be replicated in 2021. It’s hard to explain how strange, bizarre, and one-off the 2020 season really was, but fortunately if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you lived through it and know already.
Looking deeper into it, Martinez’s metrics don’t look that strange beyond being the small sample size that they are. His output was bad, but his actual batting data wasn’t all that different than what he’d done in 2019. He struck out a bit more, walked a bit less, hit the ball a bit more weakly, but there wasn’t much different about his swing rates or his barrel rates or his actual batting metrics. He actually increased his launch angle and still was among the better hitters in barrel percentage, barrels, expected slugging, expected isolated power, and a bunch of other stuff.
Martinez played 54 games and struggled, but in a normal season that would be about a third of what he’d play. A bad third of a season isn’t a good sign, but it’s not the death knell some are thinking it is either. All six of FanGraphs projections think JD bounces back to be one of the better hitters on the team, about 20 percent above league average, depending on the projection system. Baseball Reference agrees. Only Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system thinks Martinez is essentially done as an elite hitter. But even they think he’ll improve on his 2020.
Martinez has been an elite hitter every season from 2014 through 2019 and there are many reasons to think the 54 games he played in an aberrant 2020 season were just that, but even if not, even if he doesn’t return to his top form, he figures to be significantly better than he was last season.
One final note about Martinez before we move on to Reason 2. Much has been made of Martinez’s inability to watch in-game video, a fact that has been pointed to to explain why he wasn’t able to make adjustments during games, whereas he was in previous seasons. For that to be true, you’d expect in previous seasons that he improved over the course of the game, but in 2020 he didn’t. In fact though, none of that is accurate.
But if you look at his batting stats by innings in 2019, Martinez’s best batting stats came in the third inning, followed by the first, followed by the fourth, sixth, eighth, ninth, fifth, second, and seventh innings. Here are those numbers.
Presumably the longer the game went, the better the data he had on opposing pitchers, but can you detect a pattern here? If video was so important, why was Martinez better in the third inning than the fifth, sixth, seventh, or ninth? Why was he worse in the ninth than the second, third, forth, or eighth innings?
Now compare that to the 2020 season.
I’m not getting a pattern here. This seems like as random a sampling of innings as if you wrote them on pieces of paper and picked them out of a hat.
This is all to say that, while I’m sure video is important to Martinez in some ways, it’s not what makes him an elite hitter. Whether video is available to him again in 2021 won’t be the deciding factor as to whether or not he returns to pounding the ball or not.
Reason 2: Second Base
Boston got some of the worst production from second base in 2020 in all of baseball. The Jose Peraza experiment, valiant though it may have been, was a Hindenburg-level disaster, to the extent that I’m surprised and happy its flames didn’t consume Xander Bogaerts at shortstop. The good news is Peraza is gone, cast out to the winds, doomed to pop weakly to shortstop forever in the cornfields of Dyersville, Iowa. Instead, GM Chaim Bloom has assembled a pot pourri of second base options, all offering their own slightly sweet scent to offset the predominance of poo still reeking from the Manny Machado slide that ended Dustin Pedroia’s career.
The Red Sox can start any one of a group of guys, including but not limited to, Marwin Gonzalez, Enrique Hernandez, Christian Arroyo, Michael Chavis, Tom Brady, Serena Williams, Ted Williams, the Easter Bunny, Punxsutawney Phil, and the Sasquatch. You’d think one of them could field the position and hit at a major league average level, right? No question the Easter Bunny can do that, though can he hit lefties?
The point is, with redundancy after redundancy after redundancy, new/old manager Alex Cora should be able to piece together something resembling league average from the position. And then there’s top prospect Jeter Downs who could be ready to step in and play second base on a full time basis sometime mid-season, if he performs in Triple-A. If the Red Sox can simply achieve league average at second base, that would be a 26 percent improvement on what Boston second baseman did in 2020. Seems doable!
Reason 3: The Rotation
Let’s play a game. How many guys would you draft from the prospective 2021 pitching line of succession before you’d take anyone from the 2002 rotation? I’ll start. Assuming Chris Sale pitches some in 2021, take him first. Eduardo Rodriguez gets drafted second. Garrett Richards goes third. Then we come to Nathan Eovaldi who will be a part of both rotations. That means Eovaldi, who was the “ace” of the 2020 group, figures to be the number four starter once the season finishes. They didn’t sign Trevor Bauer, but even so this is a massive improvement.
How massive an improvement? Let’s remember some rotation guys! The 2020 Red Sox rotation put up a 5.34 ERA. That was sixth worst in all of baseball, and if you sort by FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching), Boston had the second worst production from their rotation in MLB. Boston had to start 16 different pitchers in 2020, and, well, look at this list!
None of those Some Guys (copyright 2021, David Roth Enterprises) are going to start a game for the 2021 Boston Red Sox. Not a single one. And that’s a lot of chaff to cut off.
The 2021 Red Sox, even without Chris Sale, can roll about 10 deep before having to get into any of that, with Eovaldi and Martin Perez the only commonalities. In all the talk about being cheap and the whining about trading Betts and Benintendi (guilty as charged), did anyone stop to notice how deep this rotation is? It is ‘Crater Lake with snow melt’ deep. It’s ‘Shakespeare to me in 10th grade’ deep. It’s the Red Sox version of the Dodgers roster deep. Not all these guys are going to be great, but all of them should be able to stand on a mound and get guys out at about a league average or slightly below (I’m looking at you, Martin Perez) rate. This isn’t a Hall of Fame pitching staff, but it’s a massive leap above and over what they were running out to the mound last season.
The Red Sox were held back by a few things in 2020. A few guys had bad seasons, like JD Martinez, like Andrew Benintendi, like anyone who played second base, like anyone who pitched for the 2020 Red Sox. Martinez, well, look above. But he’s got a track record that’s impossible to ignore and certainly putting it aside for 54 games of a crazy-bananas season seems reckless at minimum. Benintendi was and I believe is primed for a bounce-back season, but he’s KC’s problem/solution now. The Red Sox will be platooning the heck out of left field and should be able to better Benintendi’s 2020 batting line in 2021 which, I believe, featured at least one if not multiple fart noises in between the slash lines.
But most of all, the bounce back of the Boston Red Sox starts with the starting rotation, which was bad on a level that Boston had never encountered before. Yes, the 2020 Red Sox rotation was literally the worst in team history. It’s hard to be worse than worst, and given the players Boston has assembled in 2021, given the pitchers returning from injury, given the fact that oh my gosh it’s just hard to be that bad, like you actually have to get out there and give it the ol’ college try to be that bad, the 2021 Red Sox figure to improve a lot over their predecessors.
None of this guarantees a division title or a parade down Boylston Street, but if you were categorizing things in a binary manner, as bad or good, these things would have been bad in 2020 and figure to be good in 2021. That’s what teams are supposed to do, right? Get better? These three areas figure to do that in 2021.