Foolish to compare 2013, 2023 teams
Say what you want about the Red Sox front office, but the marketing team has been top notch over the last decade-plus.
Which leads us right to the promotional schedule that’s already available on the team website.
Two days stand out: Monday, April 17, the Marathon Day game against the Angels, and Wednesday, May
31, against the Reds.
Not that the Sox need giveaways for Marathon Monday — the annual 11:10 a.m. game attracts 32,000plus fans regularly — but the first 7,500 people that enter the park for this year’s matinee will receive a Boston Strong T-shirt with the number 617 on the back.
And then on May 31 the Sox are giving away a 2013 championship bobblehead that will feature Koji Uehara jumping into the arms of catcher David Ross.
Fantastic ideas. The Red Sox celebrate 10-year anniversaries for all their championship seasons. There’s no reason to skip it this time around.
There’s only one problem with all the 2013 talk that’s already started on Jersey Street: the comparisons.
The Red Sox surely knew what they were doing by inviting Jonny Gomes, Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Will Middlebrooks to their Winter Weekend festivities in January. They held a panel entitled, “2013: Ten years later.” And principal owner John Henry reminded fans that history could repeat itself in other ways, too, telling an angry crowd at the town hall that nobody liked former general manager Theo Epstein when he traded Nomar Garciaparra in 2004, but that trade worked out in the end.
Last week, the great Peter Gammons wrote a spectacular piece about the 2013 Red Sox over at The Athletic, but there was one quote that didn’t make a whole lot of sense:
“We didn’t have star players, we didn’t have anyone with superstar seasons,” Gomes told Gammons.
Wait, what?
David Ortiz is a Hall of Famer and he had a Hall of Fame regular season and postseason in 2013. Dustin Pedroia was on a Hall of Fame track and had one of his best defensive years while hitting .301, despite playing the entire season with a completely torn ulnar collateral ligament in his left thumb. Jon Lester was in the middle of his prime as the staff ace. And Uehara had one of the best seasons ever by a relief pitcher.
They are superstars. And those were superstar seasons.
The 2023 Red Sox have one superstar and three former superstars who aren’t exactly in their primes.
Rafael Devers is the clear superstar while Chris Sale, Kenley Jansen and Corey Kluber, who will be 34, 35 and 36 on Opening Day, respectively, were once in that class.
Trevor Story was a star in Colorado before he hurt his elbow, which could cost him most of this season as he recovers from surgery. Masataka Yoshida was a star in Japan, but has never before faced major league pitching. Triston Casas was a star at the Olympics two years ago; does that count?
“We might not look up there with some of the other teams in terms of superstar talent or whatever, but at the end of the day, I feel good about my guys and I think that we have the potential to shock a lot of people,” Kiké Hernandez told reporters at Winter Weekend two weeks ago.
Hernandez is right, the Red Sox don’t have a lot of superstar talent.
The ‘23 Red Sox have only two similarities with the ‘13 team: they’re not expected to be very good, and the Sox’ offseason approach was once again one in which they skipped over all the top guys in free agency and instead built a team with old guys in the final stages of their careers.
The comparisons end there.
Fans are setting themselves up for disappointment if they’re hoping that the ‘23 roster will have the same flair, scrappiness and confidence as a team of much more talented players that carried a city’s pain in 2013.
And that’s not to say the ‘23 team can’t surprise people. Chances are, it will.
Manager Alex Cora has a way of getting the most of players, and giving him a roster of guys who were once elite players is giving him a chance to pull a few miracles.
Justin Turner was once an MVP candidate. Sale was once a Cy Young candidate. Kluber has two Cy Young Awards on his trophy case.
There is upside in the form of veteran stars.
But once you start matching up the 2013 roster to the one the Red Sox will enter spring training with in two weeks, there are serious discrepancies.
Who will play the role of Ortiz on this year’s team? It’d have to be Devers. That’s plausible.
Who will serve as the Pedroia of this team? Hernandez is the most likely candidate, but he’d have to be even better than he was in 2021, when he had a career year
ho is the Jacoby Ellsbury, Shane Victorino and Mike Napoli of this year’s team?
Jarren Duran would shock the world if he played like Ellsbury. Yoshida could possibly offer the same type of competitive at-bat Victorino once offered. And if Casas breaks out, a Napoliesque season isn’t out of the question.
Still, it seems like a stretch to ask these guys to all have career years.
Meanwhile, the starting rotation looks a lot different than the 2013 team’s did.
There’s no Lester, one would be quick to notice.
Spring breeds optimism in baseball, and that’s swell. Optimism will be needed to root for the 2023 Red Sox.
But please, spare us all with the comparisons to the 2013 team.