What if it all goes right/wrong?
Exploring the best and worst-case scenarios for the 2022 Boston Red Sox
Yesterday I went and got groceries. There are five stairs up from the street to my front door and as I was carrying my bags up the stairs, I caught my foot on the last stair and stumbled. For a moment, a tiny split second, there was a chance that I would face-plant into the porch and everything I was carrying would get tossed up into the air and land, hard, probably on the back of my head, one item after another, like something that happens to Wile E. Coyote in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. In that split second, all was possible. I could have ruined my shopping and seriously hurt myself, or I could catch myself somehow and go about my day, likely forgetting that moment ever happened within minutes.
This is the moment in which the 2022 Red Sox find themselves. Everything can go right, or everything can go painfully, horrendously wrong.
Last season things went pretty right. Other than Chris Sale, the team stayed remarkably healthy, especially the pitching. None of the main players, Devers, Bogaerts, Eduardo Rodriguez, Nate Eovaldi, suffered a down season. The role players mostly all played up, think Hunter Renfroe, Enrique Hernandez, and the deadline moves worked. Thinking of you, Kyle Schwarber! No they didn’t win the World Series, but when 2021 was finished and the time came to look back and reflect on it, it felt like a success. To me. Your mileage may vary.
This season?
There are a lot of aspects to the team that could go either way. Let’s get into them, right after I beg you to subscribe.
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For every season there are pivot points, aspects or actual moments in time when things go one way or the other. For example, last season the Red Sox were extremely healthy. They did have a few injuries, yes, but compared to other teams, the vast majority of their players stayed on the field and that allowed them to avoid putting backups and backups to backups onto the field.
If we finish the 2022 season and the Red Sox do well with injuries, they should do pretty well in the standings as well. Last season, this was a real and probably underreported strength of the team. Witness:
The teams on the left avoided injuries while the ones on the right very much did not. That green dot on the upper left is the Red Sox. They stayed incredibly healthy in 2021 and while I think their depth is improved over 2021, there are a few players who, if they go down for any significant period of time, could cause a real problem. That’s of course true for every team, but it strikes me that Nathan Eovaldi would be next to impossible to replace. The Red Sox simply don’t have another starter who can step in and give them the number of above average innings. Rafael Devers’ bat would be almost impossible to replicate, even if you moved Bobby Dalbec to third and brought up Triston Casas. It’s just not going to be nearly as potent a lineup without Devers.
Another key to a successful season is avoiding bad seasons. This sounds elementary and it probably is. To put a finer point on it, the issue isn’t whether Xander Bogaerts puts up an .850 OPS or a .900 OPS, it’s that Xander Bogaerts doesn’t put up a .725 OPS. That’s extremely unlikely, but if you look back to some underperforming teams in recent seasons, often it came down to injuries and bad seasons from star/important players. Not to pin this all on Xander. Rafael Devers, JD Martinez, and now Trevor Story are all going to be important pillars in the lineup. Just like last season, Red Sox stars have to be stars on the field.
Similarly, for a good outcome at season’s end, the Red Sox need to get more production than expected from certain spots. For this one, Bobby Dalbec is a pretty good place to start. Last season Dalbec hit pretty much nothing in the first half of the season and pretty much everything in the second half. It was pretty stark. By wRC+, Dalbec was 24 percent below league average in the first half and 49 percent above league average over the second half.
That’s a huge variance there. Dalbec could be a well above average hitter and cement himself as a lineup fixture for Boston. Or, he could do what he did in the first half and pretty much play himself back to the minor leagues, and do a bunch of damage to the Red Sox’ playoff chances as well in the process.
Trevor Story is another spot where the team could get much better production than they did last season. In 2021, the Red Sox second baseman collectively had a 91 wRC+, meaning they were nine percent below league average. That put the team 18th in MLB for offensive production from second base. If Story puts up the season most projections are expecting, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent above league average at the plate, he’d vault Boston into the top 10 and possibly top two or three teams.
Alternatively, the Red Sox lost Eduardo Rodriguez and replaced him with two starters of varying quality, which is a nice way of saying they might not be very good. Rich Hill and Michael Wacha will combine to earn $12 million this year, about two million less than Rodriguez will earn in Detroit. Will they, together, be able to equal his production? I have my doubts. The Red Sox do have more depth this season, as they can more easily put Garrett Whitlock into the rotation, or call up Josh Winckowski or Connor Seabold from Triple-A, or maybe later in the season, Jay Groome, Brayan Bello, or Chris Murphy could be ready. Heck, maybe Chris Sale or James Paxton will get healthy! Point is, there are options. It’s just not clear those options are going to be nearly as sizable as the hole Rodriguez has left behind.
I’ll have more on this in my season preview tomorrow, but I think this might be the last gasp of this version of the Red Sox, rather than any step forward. But, that doesn’t mean this version of the Red Sox doesn’t have one more run in them. While they’re not like the 2018 team where they can survive a lot of bad luck or under-peformance, they are a strong team. They can do what they did last year and surprise a lot of people. But, with the roster they have in the division they’re in it’s going to be a challenge. Although as Red Sox fans know, the best and most memorable times often come from challenge, come from difficulty, come from the toughest moments. This Red Sox team, for better or worse, will have a shot at those moments.
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