Simply put, built to win
Sox should have no excuses
“How do they look?”
If what you do for a living includes writing about baseball, it’s the first question you get asked when you’ve returned from spring training.
It’s always polite to answer, “They look great,” and it’s always a guess. Especially at this stage. All we’ve seen from the Red Sox so far is a lot of batting practice, bullpen sessions and infield drills, along with the annual showdown against Northeastern University and a handful of Grapefruit League tilts.
So I can’t tell you they look great. But I can tell you they are great, because I believe the Red Sox are going to win a ton of games.
This is uncharted territory for me. Over the past five years I’ve been consistently going low 80s, at best, for the Sox. Even in 2013, when they won World Series, I graciously picked the Sox to win 82 games. The last time I bestowed preseason greatness was 2011, and that didn’t turn out to be a clever take.
What’s so special about these guys? For starters, so to speak, there’s that trio of Rick Porcello, David Price and Chris Sale plus Steven Wright. Please note the phrasing of that last sentence. For while it’s true the Sox have an eyepopping, dare-we-say-it, they’re-all-aces front three, Wright was an All-Star last year and was mowin’ ’em down until he was stopped on third-and-1 at second base that day at Dodger Stadium. He still has the shoulder thing going, so stay tuned on that.
But assuming they’re all healthy, these guys will give the Sox their best rotation since 2004, when Pedro Martinez, Curt Schilling, Derek Lowe, Tim Wakefield and Bronson Arroyo combined to make 157 starts.
The Red Sox also have this going for them: They have a truckload of young players who are emerging as solid big-leaguers at the same time, just as Fred Lynn and Jim Rice did in ’75, just as George Scott, Reggie Smith and Mike Andrews did in ’67.
Mookie Betts is already there, and Xander Bogaerts, Jackie Bradley Jr. and Andrew Benintendi are right behind him. I’m not going to bother you with a lot of position-by-position analysis, accompanied by various charts, diagrams and testimonials, other than to add that Dustin Pedroia proved last year he’s found a way to make the gettingold thing work for him.
And, yes, I do like the bullpen. Concerns? Yes. Don’t know yet if Pablo Sandoval can play third base. Don’t know, yet, how much the retirement of David Ortiz is going to hurt — in the lineup, in the clubhouse. Will Hanley Ramirez, used mostly as a DH, regress? The Red Sox do not have what the late Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver used to call “deep depth.” And can Sandy Leon hit the way he did last year, and over the course of a full season?
Speaking of Leon, it’s true that a lot of these guys had career years last year and there could be a market correction this time around. Take Porcello, for instance. He was easily Boston’s most impressive pitcher last year, settling in, making himself comfortable, submitting a 22-4 record, winning a Cy Young. He has an old-school way about him, as we saw when he plunked Kevin Youkilis his rookie season and then earned a two-point takedown in the ensuing fight, and it’s a trait that serves him well.
But he could have better stuff this year and still not go 22-4. Won-loss records can get tricky.
Please note that I’m limiting this discussion to the regular season. Once the postseason starts it’ll only be fair to dredge up all the talk about how these guys, notably Price, have not started and won a playoff game. As Abe Lincoln said about reconstruction (according to the Spielberg movie, anyway), the October Red Sox “will present us with conundrums and dangers greater than any they faced” from April through September.
Manager John Farrell has the enthusiastic support of president of baseball ops Dave Dombrowski, and presumably the players, but as I wrote last week: No Ortiz in the clubhouse, no Torey Lovullo on the bench. But Farrell no longer has to make excuses for Clay Buchholz, and it was a good sign last week that he didn’t make excuses for Rusney Castillo, the gifted athlete from Cuba who does not know how to play baseball.
This team is a no-excuses-allowed edition of the Red Sox. They were built to win.