Triston Casas: About as excited as one can get about the 2024 Boston Red Sox

Potentially the most exciting player in a Red Sox uniform since Rafael Devers

A new baseball season brings hope and excitement for every team. OK, maybe not for the 2024 A’s, but for every other one. Projections aren’t making love-eyes at the 2024 Red Sox but that doesn’t mean the team couldn’t surprise. One hundred sixty-two baseball games sounds like a lot (and, let’s be honest, it IS a lot!) but it’s also not so many that you can’t get screwy results, and yes, when you’re rooting for screwy results before Opening Day, that’s maybe not the greatest thing, but let’s live in reality, right folks? So, go screwy results!

The point is that this iteration of the Red Sox isn’t likely to be one we remember down the line. Likely this season will blend in our memories with last season and the next. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons to be genuinely excited for this season. First, it’s baseball which should be enough on its own. But, this isn’t just baseball, it’s Red Sox baseball which is the best kind of baseball, regardless of how the front office and ownership are operating.

Beyond the general though, Rafael Devers doing Rafael Devers things is always a reason for excitement, as is the quickly ripening fruit from the minor league system. But to me, there are two players on the major league roster to be excited and geniuinely curious about, and they are named Triston Casas and Brayan Bello.

How many words was that to just get to the damn point? Jeez.

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I love pitching. It’s my favorite part of the sport. So I am quite excited to see Bello throw this season. But let’s be honest, analyzing Bello isn’t exactly difficult. He needs to strike out more dudes. There. That’s kinda it. He’s got great stuff, but you just can’t be an elite pitcher with a 20 percent strikeout rate. It’s pretty much impossible in today’s game. So how does he get there? That’s a better question, but not one I’m prepared to try to answer at the moment. We’ll save that for later (don’t forget to subscribe!), mostly because today I want to write about Triston Casas.

Did you know that in his five professional seasons, Triston Casas, the 6’5, 244 pound first baseman, has never slugged .500 in a season? You wouldn’t expect it, but it’s true! Well expect that to change this season, right? It’s funny because, yes, of course Casas is going to slug over .500 this year. He’s 24 years old and coming off a season in which he slugged .617 in the second half (though .490 overall). And yet, every one of the 27 different projection systems at FanGraphs has him projected for a sub-.500 slug on the season, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you that Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system says the same thing.

So what gives? Well, as far as the projections go, it’s tough to project something that hasn’t ever happened before. That’s called an outlier, and since projection systems all project the season thousands of times if not far more than that, the finished product will have all the outliers beaten out of it by the time it goes to press. So I guess that’s me saying I wouldn’t worry about those.

It’s easy to see a big season from Casas coming, projections be damned. There’s his excellent second half last year but also his age, one where players, especially players with his pedigree, tend to improve.

Thing is, there really isn’t anything I’m not excited about when it comes to Casas. His personality is fantastic, he’s seemingly a genuine guy with some quirks and a sense of humor about himself, all of which makes him amusing and interesting to follow on a personal level. But none of that matters as much if he doesn’t hit. The standard stat to prove that he’s gonna hit is the second half split from last season that I already cited. The thought process is that after a rough first half, he figured it out, and that’s going to be his level of production going forward.

That’s a gross simplification, of course. Pitchers are always coming up with new ways to attack hitters and hitters have to keep adjusting to those new ways. The good news there is that Casas clearly did adjust. He put up a .727 OPS in the first half and a 1.034 OPS in the second. But the underlying stats on that split are just as promising. It wasn’t just a jump in batting average.

Casas walked more and he struck out less. He hit fewer ground balls and more fly balls and line drives. More encouragingly he hit far fewer infield fly balls. Infield flys are the worst because they’re effectively strikeouts, as in they’re always outs. His quality of contact got better as well: more hard hits, fewer soft hits.

But now the game continues because it’s a new season and pitchers are going to attack him in new ways. Can he adjust to those new avenues of attack?

We’ll see, but I’m optimistic. Last season Casas improved his hitting in just about every measurable way over the 27 game sample he put up with the Red Sox at the end of the 2022 season. He hit the ball harder and with more frequency at a better launch angle. All of his expected stats went up in 2023 compared to 2022. The only ones that went down were Walk Percentage (which was still in the top seven percent in the league), out of zone percentage (the percentage of pitches a batter sees outside the strike zone).

So this is the big Let’s See It season for Casas. He could repeat last season’s .856 OPS and that would be fine, I suppose, but not elite. And boy does it feel like there’s something elite lurking here.

That’s what I’m most excited about this season. Thanks for reading.