I generally try and stay away from clickbaity stuff like this, but I was inadvertently egged on by Matt Collins and Bryan Joiner of the Over The Monster Podcast who drafted their top fives on their most recent episode. And, I say this with love, they screwed it up so badly. OK, not really, but kinda? Have I couched that enough to upset Bryan? I’ll certainly find out!
The topic is clickbaity, but it’s also an interesting thought exercise, as these things go. Who are the most important Red Sox players in the upcoming 2021 season? There are a few criteria. “Most important player” does not mean “best player.” It means, who does the team depend on the most to play well and stay healthy in order to have success in the 2021 season? Thus the criteria can be whittled down to, in essence, a cross between indispensability and quality. So, for example, Ryan Brasier might be a good reliever in 2021 or he might not be, but there are a lot of relievers who could step in for him if it’s the latter, and if it’s the former, the impact on the team is likely to be minimal, relatively speaking.
With that in mind, here’s my list, which it should be noted, is correct. We’ll start with number five and go up from there to amp up the suspense.
Alex Verdugo
Back in 2018 the Red Sox had a really good outfield, but I’m not sure I ever realized how good it was until I looked at the 2021 Red Sox Roster Resource page on FanGraphs just now. The Red Sox have one starting outfielder and then a bunch of Tetris pieces that Alex Cora gets to fit into place on a daily basis. The only guy who figures to start in the outfield every day and who figures to hit above a league average level is Verdugo. The rest will be platooned and managed and shuffled and massaged and folded and starched and hung gently on a wrack to dry, so imagine what this outfield would look like without Verdugo. It would be utter chaos, with cows roaming freely, sprinklers going off with no notice, the occasional hole to China, everyone would be in mismatched socks, and also it would be a lot worse.
Part of the reason Verdugo is fifth on this list of five though is that Jarren Duran exists. Duran isn’t ready to start in center field yet, he has work to do defensively and he probably still needs some at-bats in Triple-A, but if Verdugo was swallowed up by a passing alien ship the Red Sox could call up Duran and it’s not likely to be a massive disaster.
Rafael Devers
There are other third baseman the Red Sox could use if Devers was suddenly eaten by a cabal of cannibal clowns, Bobby Dalbec could slide over to third for example, or even more likely, Marwin Gonzalez would probably get regular at-bats there. The damage to the lineup would be heavy though, which is why Devers slots in here. Devers is, in my mind and here at Sox Outsider, a great hitter and primed for a breakout kind of season, so obviously subtracting that from the lineup would be damaging, but there are ways of replacing him in the lineup, in the physical sense. Meaning, they could find guys on the roster who could actually stand at third base during a game and look like they belong there. They’d wear hats and pants and know which way to stand so as to face home plate. They’d just bat have to bat eighth or ninth instead of third or fourth, and the lineup already has enough eighth and ninth batters and not enough third and fourth batters. So. Yeah.
Also, will you look at this smile? My gosh! Now that’s irreplaceable!
Eduardo Rodriguez
Now we’re getting into dangerous territory. Rodriguez is Boston’s best healthy starting pitcher and I don’t think it’s all that close. Before missing 2020 with COVID-19 and a resulting case of myocarditis, he was coming off a four win 2019 season that saw him break the 200 innings pitched barrier for the first time in his career. So if Rodriguez were to be run over by a series of progressively larger runaway freight trains, the Red Sox chances at contention would similarly be flattened (I’m sorry) (sort of).The reason Rodriguez ranks ahead of Verdugo and Devers is because of how much better he is than his peers, but the reason he doesn’t rank at the two or one spot is because of the depth the Red Sox have built into their rotation this off-season. If Rodriguez was dismembered in a tragic blimp accident, Boston could turn to Garrett Whitlock, Matt Andriese, Connor Seabold, or Tanner Houck, or if a plague of locusts had carried all of those guys away, Daniel Gossett, Kyle Hart, or Ryan Weber, or Matt Hall. The first group has some level of upside and/or competence while the second would be place holders in advance of Chris Sale entering the rotation or the team acquiring someone from outside the organization via trade, a waiver claim, or Chaim Bloom sneaking down to Tampa and absconding with some eighth starter we’ve never heard of who will one day make the All Star team.
Xander Bogaerts
Bogaerts is the best hitter and, really, the best player on the team. He plays a position at which the organization has almost no depth at all, and he’s also effectively the team captain in all but name. So how come he’s not first on this list? That is a good question! You could put him first and I couldn’t really quarrel with you too much (in fact I think Bryan, to his eternal credit, did pick Bogaerts first in the Over The Monster Podcast draft) for those reasons. The reason I put Bogaerts second has less to do with Bogaerts and more to do with how difficult it is to find replacements at shortstop and at [redacted].If in the middle of the night Bogaerts were plucked from his bedroom window and gobbled up by man-crunching giants, the Red Sox would find themselves in quite the pickle! They’d be close to dead in the water unless the Rockies wanted to gift them Trevor Story (which, it’s the Rockies, so you never know), but they could call up Jonathan Arauz who could probably handle the position competently for a short period of time while Chaim Bloom looked for an appropriately sized building to throw himself off of. Beyond that, there are bad shortstops out there they could get and if the rest of the team was in the midst of a great season, they could probably persist. Somehow. Maybe kinda.
Christian Vazquez
Maybe it’s 1 and 1A between Bogaerts and Vazquez, but the difference to me was that while Bogaerts is a great hitter and team leader, he’s not exactly a great defender. He’s fine, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not more than that, and if he were vaporized in a science experiment gone wrong, the Red Sox could probably find someone who could play the position defensively much better than Bogaerts for not that great a cost. But Vazquez? If Vazquez were eaten by an escaped Tiger from the zoo, the Red Sox would miss his offense and his defense AND they don’t have anyone who can step in and play the position!
Have you looked at the Red Sox catching depth chart? It’s the kind of thing serious Red Sox fans could use for an eye chart because nobody has ever heard of any of the players names before.
Quick quiz! Which of these is not currently a catcher in the upper levels of the Red Sox minor league system?
1. Jett Bandy
2. Jhonny Pereda
3. Franklyn Diaz
4. Chris Herrmann
No looking it up! Leave your answers in the comments! But point is, if Vazquez goes down, one of these dudes is getting regular starts behind the plate. And your starting catcher is Kevin Plawecki who is a perfectly cromulent backup catcher and has no business being anywhere near the starting role (and no I don’t want to hear about his amazing 2020 numbers, thank you very much).
Notable Exclusions: Chris Sale, J.D. Martinez, Nathan Eovaldi
Sale is no doubt extremely important, but the 2021 Red Sox aren’t built around expecting him to contribute. He might return healthy from Tommy John surgery in June or July firing shutout innings in every direction (Duck!), but it’s equally possible he won’t return at all or that he’ll return in some sort of diminished state as he ramps back up to full health. Regardless, this team can make the playoffs without him. (It should be a different story in 2022, however.)
J.D. Martinez is a great hitter (I think; after his 2020 I have a sliver of doubt) but he’s also a DH. If, God forbid, Martinez were turned into a frog by a passing magician, the Red Sox could replace some reasonable portion of his contributions in a not extremely expensive trade, or they could just elevate a bench bat (say Marwin Gonzalez) to the role. It’s not that losing Martinez wouldn’t be a big loss, it would be - please keep him away from all magic acts! - but he’s just not as important and impactful to the team’s success as the above five.
Eovaldi is a fun pitcher to watch, but I’m not sure he’s much better than Garrett Richards and he’s definitely not as good as Eduardo Rodriguez. Losing him would be (and some might say, will be) difficult, but there is depth in the organization and the drop-off wouldn’t be excessively steep.
So there you have it. The Top 5 Most Important Red Sox In 20201. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to…
Entertaining read. I couldn't stop thinking about this topic after finishing the article, so I wrote my own FanPost on OTM explaining my Top 5 in an effort to join the conversation.
https://www.overthemonster.com/2021/3/18/22338827/my-turn-the-red-sox-top-5-most-important-players-entering-2021
(Spoiler alert: mine look very different from everyone else's)
I like your list better than OTM’s, and I LOVE your creative assortment of calamities that could befall the Sox. Reminds me of The Simpsons baseball episode.