Fernando Abad made minor history this offseason when he became the first player under the current ownership group to go to arbitration with the Red Sox. He wanted $2.7 million, the Red Sox felt he was worth $2 million, and, on the last day of January, the team notched its first victory of the season when the arbitrator ruled in their favor — saving $700K that they’d otherwise have to sell, like, five beers to make back. The horrors.

Will things get better for the bullpen lefty in 2017? Let’s find out.

What went right in 2016

A lot went right for Abad in 2016. He started the season in Minnesota on a minor league deal and ended up on first-place Boston after a summer trade for right-handed flamethrower Pat Light. A lefty specialist and journeyman, Abad put up a 2.65 ERA over 34 innings for the Twins, holding left-handed batters to a .163/.192/.265 line before the deal and holding opponents to a 45.2 percent ground ball rate.

What want wrong in 2016

Abad’s success in Minnesota didn’t translate to the Red Sox. He only pitched in 12.7 innings for Boston, but over that span his ERA ballooned to 6.39 as his ground ball rate fell just enough (to 38 percent) to do some real damage to his overall line. Virtually homer-proof for the Twins (0.5 HR/9), he gave up some dongers in Boston that pushed him to 1.5 HR/9, though he did increase his K/9 by nearly a full point. These are very small sample size issues, but they likely cost Abad quite a bit in arbitration. Sad!

What to expect in 2017

Especially at his discounted price, there’s a lot to like from Abad here. Last year’s Robbie Ross-or-bust approach to lefty relievers is blissfully a thing of the past, and if Abad can simply revert to the average stats of his peripatetic career — 3.71 ERA, 41 percent ground ball rate — he can be a valuable piece of a Sox team that most certainly wants its lefties to induce ground balls. At the very worst, Abad is a headline writer’s dream, a pun generator par excellence. That’s Agood thing.

Photo by Rick Osentoski/USA Today Sports Images

“Sticking to sports” is impossible. Every journalist is a human being, and every human being has his or her flaws; I’m no Christian, but I think they teach something like that. I think it’s a human flaw to be writing about Josh freaking Rutledge when the country is falling apart, and I cannot imagine there’s an enthusiastic readership today for a season recap of a guy who will compete for the Sox’s final roster spot in March — if we, as a society, make it that long. But hey, speaking of flaws: he’s got plenty.

What went right in 2016

The Golden State Warriors blew a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals with the unanimous MVP, but that’s about it. As for Rutledge, he played only 28 games due to a right knee injury, batting .265/.345/.388. I guess the six walks in 56 plate appearances were good? I’m not exactly hating the two steals, either, and while the six doubles are nice, it would have been nicer if a few of them went over the wall, because he was in the no homers club. I most think 2016 was good for Rutledge in that he was able to play at all, because that’s not guaranteed for someone of his skill level. Staying above water requires real work, and Rutledge has somehow done it.

What went wrong in 2016

The knee injury was apparently so bad that the Internet can’t figure out which one it was. Was it the left knee, as the Boston Globe reported? Or was it the right knee, as cited in a December MLB.com report? (It was the left one.) Rutledge didn’t play a game after June 14th and opted for free agency in the offseason, at which point he signed a minor league deal to return to Colorado, where he began his career, even if he couldn’t even hit at Coors the first time around. That’s hard to do! It’s even harder when the Red Sox buy back your contract in the Rule 5 Draft, as they did in December, meaning you don’t even play in Coors.

What to expect in 2017

You should expect a protracted, painful five-way “battle” for third base playing time between Pablo Sandoval, Brock Holt, Marco Hernandez, Deven Marrero and Rutledge. It’s an example of how desperate the Sox are that they brought Rutledge back in the first place, and given the depth of the competition here, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him be the first guy sent packing if this turns into the low-stakes game of Survivor it seems to be. Nothing against Rutledge, because I’d love to be wrong. I’d also like to live a world that made a lick of sense, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m getting them in while I can.

Photo by John Hefti/USA Today Sports Images

The numbers don’t necessarily show it, but 2016 was a huge year for Brian Johnson. Once a highly touted prospect — he was a first-round pick in 2012 — the lefty actively sought treatment for anxiety issues that threatened to derail his career in secret. As Alex Speier wrote, these issues presented themselves in numbness that trickled down his left (throwing) arm, down to his fingers; a distressing physical condition for anyone, leastwise someone who makes their living using the same arm. Fortunately for Johnson, he plays in an age where any organization worth a damn is both receptive to and proactive toward treating problems of this kind. With help, he’s working his way back toward the big leagues.

What went right in 2016

When Johnson asked for help after two bad starts at Pawtucket in May, he took a huge step forward toward a real major league career. It was not a step back. Previously sleepless and unable to concentrate on anything except baseball at any hour of the day, Johnson put the game aside and was finally able to rest. Between rest and therapy, he got himself right enough to at first begin living a stress- (and baseball-) free life, however possible. As Speier reported, he “started playing on his PS4 and going to virtually every movie he could.” Eventually Johnson started throwing and made appearances for the Gulf Coast League Red Sox and Lowell Spinner before returning to the PawSox to finish out his season. Across 77 innings at Triple-A, he put up a 4.09 ERA with a 54:36 K:BB ratio.

What went wrong in 2016

From a pure baseball perspective, Johnson’s minor league numbers have always threatened not to translate to the majors on a simple stuff level: he’s a soft-tossing lefty, albeit one with four pitches. The numbers in 2016 weren’t great, but, really, it’s beside the point. He was great in college and has been reliably good across the Sox minor league system, with an 2.60 ERA over 425.1 minor league innings. If 2016 is representative of his true talent level, he’s probably in trouble in the long-term, but there’s every reason not to nitpick last year’s performance. Sometimes it just doesn’t any damn good.

What to expect in 2017

Hopefully, Johnson remains healthy and continues his road back to the majors (he made one spot start in 2015). Unfortunately for him, the Red Sox don’t exactly lack for lefty starters at the  moment, but that has a way of changing quickly. At age 26, Johnson figures to be either running out of time or running into his peak fairly soon (or both), but if it’s the latter, it wouldn’t surprise me to see him called upon to make another emergency start or two during the year. It’s the whole reason he’s still around the organization, and hey: one start can turn into two, and two to three, and so on. The Red Sox believe in him. Thankfully for everyone, he does now, too.

Photo by Kim Klement/USA Today Sports Images

Steven Wright’s 2016 played out not unlike a knuckleballer’s best-day-turned-bad, inexplicable goodness followed by a stroke of bad luck, always on the horizon, that ended his season. He looked like the team’s best pitcher through two months, this on a squad featuring the most expensive hurler of all-time and the eventual Cy Young Award winner, and was celebrated as a revelation. Nonetheless, the Sox have added another shiny rotation piece entering this season, which could push Wright out of the rotation for good. But should it? Let’s take a look back and see.

What went right in 2016

The first half. Before the All-Star break, Wright was 10-5 with a 2.68 ERA. Over the same stretch, Rick Porcello was 11-2 with a 3.66 ERA and David Price was 9-6 with a 4.34 ERA. With his flat-brimmed cap and everyday countenance, he seemed like the everyday hero helping the Sox through a tough time, and for it, he rightly earned an All-Star appearance. Which is crazy! From now until the end of time, he’ll have that “All-Star” banner on Baseball-Reference.com thanks to one blistering, inexplicably great half of baseball. And it was great. Remember this?

Humans were not meant to try to hit this @Knucklepuck23 knuckler: https://t.co/aaZrxHyTe4 pic.twitter.com/3X3wk84PTN

— Cut4 (@Cut4) May 30, 2016

What went wrong in 2016

In early August, Wright pinch-ran against the Los Angeles Dodgers and suffered a shoulder injury that derailed his season. After the game, he told Evan Drellich of the Boston Herald: “It feels all right, it’s just inflamed right now. It’s a little sore when I get to certain spots when I lift up my arm. Hopefully in a couple of days I’ll be able to start throwing and hopefully make my next start.” He’d only make two more for the rest of the season before going back on the DL for aggravating the same injury.

What to expect in 2017

That’s the question, isn’t it? Wright is one of three people fighting for two rotation spots — the other two are Drew Pomeranz and Eduardo Rodriguez, and there are compelling arguments both to put Wright in the Opening Day rotation and to hold him back as a super-reliever, ready to step into the rotation at the first sign of trouble. In all likelihood, this is a “six of one, half-a-dozen of the other” arrangement, and Wright will be starting sooner rather than later, either out of necessity or by design. Can he repeat last year’s performance when he does? It’s foolish to predict how the knuckleball will dance — but we’ll have our dancing shoes on just in case.

Photo by Peter Aiken/USA Today Sports Images

The big question heading into this offseason was how the Red Sox would replace David Ortiz, but that was always a dead-end. The whole point of Papi was that he was irreplaceable and Dave Dombrowski, seemingly recognizing this, decided not to overextend the Sox at first base, instead opting to trade for the best pitcher in the American League. I’m into it, and if that means we see a lot of Mitch Moreland, so be it.

Moreland is not exciting, but he’s cheap ($5.5 million) and, critically, is a powerful left-handed bat who’s potentially got fielding skills for days. He won last year’s AL Gold Glove award at the cold corner and should see playing time against righties, allowing Hanley Ramirez to DH. Despite an eminently respectable fielding performance in 2016, that’s probably for the best for Hanley from time to time. Moreland’s not great, but he doesn’t need to be. It’s a good match.

What went right in 2016

Some of the Moreland’s raw numbers on offense were good. He hit 21 doubles and 22 homers in 503 PA, so the pull-side pop is real. As for the Gold Glove, well, look: Rafael Palmeiro famously won the AL award at first base in 1999 while playing a grand total of 28 games there, so perhaps this encomium doesn’t mean too much, but Moreland won it anyway and now has to try to field with a gold-plated mitt, smh (that’s how it works, right?). And he was okay, for sure. He put up a respectable 3.5 FRAA, right around his 3.0 career average, though in 2015, he put up -7.8 FRAA, which is Very Bad, and in 2012, he put up a 9.1 FRAA, which is Very Good, so he’s been all over the place. Anyhow, that’s the good part.

What went wrong in 2016

It gets hot in Texas in the summer, so I might not call Moreland’s extreme whiff tendencies “wrong,” insofar as they may have cooled some people off, but the guy has real trouble making contact and doesn’t walk too often. Unfortunately, his .233/.298/.422 slash is in line with his .254/.315/.438 career average, as were his 118 whiffs over those 503 PA. His BABIP last year was a paltry .266, which goes a long way toward explaining his slightly down year, but even in his average (near .300) BABIP years the numbers aren’t too much better. He is what he is, and that’s a player who depends on the kindness of the baseball gods to be average.

What to expect in 2017

He will hit around .240/.300/.415. He will play too much and frustrate and excite you exactly as much as a $5.5 million regular should. He will strike out a lot (though less than, says, Chris Carter would have) and hit home runs (ditto, except “fewer” instead of “less”). He will make some nice plays at first base. You will like those. Then he’ll strike out some more. Or pull a moonshot. That will be good.

Then he’ll strike out again.

Photo by Sean Porkorny/USA Today Sports Images

Last season went as well for Henry Owens as “Our American Cousin” did for Mary-Todd Lincoln; take out Owens’s effectively one walk per inning in his limited big-league run (or a similarly bad rate in AAA) and you might feel some fondness for the performance, much as Mrs. Lincoln may have enjoyed the show at Ford’s Theater, spousal murder notwithstanding. That, of course — as the line from a far more famous play goes — is the rub, and in neither case can we get past it.

But Owens’ Red Sox career, and his long-term future in Major League Baseball, is still alive. There is not a lot of hope, but there are examples of players with durable arms figuring their stuff out later in their careers, or at least after the age of 25, and a tall lefty is gonna get every chance to prove himself over the long term. If Owens fails himself out of Dave Dombrowski’s good graces, there’s almost no question that another organization will try to salvage him; one man’s trash, etc. At the very least, Boston’s current glut of potential starting pitchers (so many of them lefties) eases the burden on Owens to perform well right away, at least in theory. In practice, no number of starting pitchers is too many, and as long as he’s around, Owens might be called on for some garbage time innings in 2017. In the rare event they’re not garbage when he starts, they probably will be when he finishes. He’s got a long way to go.

What went right in 2016

On April 29, Owens pitched six innings of two-run ball at Fenway against the Yankees in a game that the Red Sox would eventually win 4-2. He struck out three, walked three, allowed a homer to A-Rod (his 691st) and six hits total. He left facing a 2-0 deficit, but the Sox would score two in the bottom of the seventh and take the lead for good on a David Ortiz two-run homer in the eighth. He neither pitched particularly well nor got the win, but it was unequivocally and far and away his best performance of the year out of the grand total of five appearances he made.

What went wrong in 2016

He was beaten out by Sean O’Sullivan for an emergency rotation spot, which says most of what you need to know. Owens’s other four appearances were a disaster, and his time in the minor leagues was *slightly* better. He was so bad in the show you’d think that he’d been replaced by Daniel Day-Lewis… except in that case you’d expect DD-L to be, you know, good. Owens was awful. The next time he toed the rubber following the Yankees start, he lasted three innings on the South Side against the White Sox, walking six, striking out two and allowing two runs. He’d only appear in two games after that: a spot start in Detroit in August (5 IP, 8 ER) and another one in September after the Sox had clinched the east against the Yankees in the Bronx (4.2 IP, 2 ER). At no point did it seems like there was any “there” there with Owens, who threw 120+ IP at Pawtucket over the year and still couldn’t find the plate (5.3 BB/9). But hey, he had a 3.53 ERA! Which leads us to…

What to expect in 2017:

Can Owens find the mound at Fenway this year? Barring a miracle turnaround or a disastrous sequence for the Boston rotation, the answer is probably NONONONONO PLEASE NO. At the same time, I don’t see how the Sox could find much value in moving on from him now… which doesn’t mean they won’t, but Owens’s value is either at a historical low or never existed to begin with. That sounds harsh, but the former is still more likely than the latter. There’s not much incentive to give up on Owens now — in fact, there’s a disincentive. The only thing left is upside, but there’s no telling if Owens really has a second act, or we’re already at the end.

Photo by Kamil Krazynski/USA Today Sports Images

It is legitimately possible to argue that in a Red Sox season where David Ortiz had the best swan song of all time and Rick Porcello won the Cy Young Award that the team’s biggest surprise was Hanley Ramirez becoming an above-average fielding first baseman on the fly… and that was merely part of Hanley’s redemption. It’s hard to express how far Ramirez came last year, but I’ll try.

In mid-2015, Ken Rosenthal wrote a really bad column saying that the Red Sox’s new additions, Ramirez and Sandoval, needed to be “traded, like, now.” This was Rosenthal being his peripatetic, insatiable self, divorced from any real team strategy. Selling low is rarely a good idea, and Hanley’s 2016 showed exactly why that is so. Without further ado, let’s put a bow tie on Hanley’s bounce-back season.

What went right in 2016

Ramirez headed into the year as the biggest — or perhaps just most expensive — active question mark on the Red Sox roster. To say 2015 was unkind would be an understatement. Ramirez batted .249/.291/.426, and his play in left field made Manny Ramirez’s glove look like Jackie Bradley Jr’s. A veteran of the infield, the theory went that if Brian Butterfield could work his magic, maybe Hanley could stay alert enough to put on a passable performance in the field. I didn’t think it was likely; I was hoping for “mediocre at best.”

He did so, so, so much better than that! Last year’s preseason poll asked all BP Boston staff members how many errors Hanley would make; the answers ranged from as high as 25 (from yours truly) to as low as seven (from the faithful Jake Devereaux). The actual number, over 133 games at the cold corner: four! For reference, the NL Gold Glove winner at first base, fellow once-traded Red Sox blue-clip prospect Anthony Rizzo, committed six errors in 154 games there. There’s more to life than errors, but that’s pretty good.

At the plate, Ramirez spent the first half of the year confusing the crap out of us before mashing his way through the second half. His .305/.400/.442 May line seemed to signal that the changes he had made during the offseason — compacting his batting stance and cutting down on pre-swing movement — had taken hold for the better, but then he spat out a .224/.324/.396 line in June, and those, like me, who doubted the May spike seemed vindicated. Victory was at hand!

About that: From July 1st through the end of the year, Hanley hit the cover off the ball. His second half slash: .284/.354/.593. I’ve never been so happy to be owned.

What went wrong in 2016

On a basic level, nothing went wrong for Hanley in 2016. A dedicated pessimist would say that the downside to last season is that it represents the best possible Hanley Ramirez at this point in his career, but that’s a reach. It is nonetheless entirely possible that this ends up as his best season for the Sox, but I would bet, even in that case, that Hanley is much more likely to imitate 2016’s numbers than 2015’s for the time being.

What to expect in 2017

First, I expect him to make more than four errors, and not as a result of somehow regressing from whatever his “true” talent level is as a starting AL first baseman, fielding-wise. It’s just the way the ball bounces.

At the plate, last years was easily the best full year he had since 2010. He was astonishingly good in a half-season in 2013, throwing up a ridiculous .345/.402/.630 slash for a 1.040 OPS, (Glorioski!) but as a perpetual up-and-down player, he had OPSes in the .700s for the previous three years to that. Last season was the first year he was anywhere close to his career average, and he pretty much nailed it, .866 to .861. There’s no way to tell which Hanley is going to show up at any given moment, but if he can just repeat 2016, we should all be happy. For maybe the first time in his own peripatetic career — Blue-chip prospect! Batting champ! L.A. savior! Bum! — all Hanley Ramirez needs to do is be himself.

Photo by Greg M. Cooper/USA Today Sports Images

How will the Red Sox replace David Ortiz’s production?:

“Wheel of Fortune” is a living dinosaur at this point, but it remains the source of one of my favorite analogies. For years, the contestants negotiating the final puzzle got to choose five consonants and one vowel before having to 30 seconds to guess the answer; for years, they chose R, S, T, L, N and E a huge percentage of the time. Eventually, those six letters were automatically gifted to each contestant, who instead got to choose three consonants and another vowel on top of those.

Answering this question feels a little like choosing the final four letters. Every one of us in this thought exercise tackled the Edwin Encarnacion angle pretty early in our columns because it’s the simplest answer to the question. It’s also probably wrong, but understandably tempting. Replacing Ortiz’s 2016 offensive production seems unlikely, but if Encarnacion — or anyone — can provide 85 percent of it while playing the field, that could go a long way toward filling up the box score like Papi did. It did not escape me that this question asked specifically about replacing “David Ortiz’s production” rather than “replacing David Ortiz,” as the latter is obviously impossible, but insofar as Ortiz was larger than life, it’s tempting to look to someone like Encarnacion to fill the bill. It’s probably the wrong way to look.

If you take Dave Dombrowski at his word, though, per a recent Alex Speier piece, the Sox might look instead to improve incrementally across the board while waiting for Yoan Moncada, Sam Travis and even, yes, Pablo Sandoval to emerge/return, rather than making a splash on the Encarnacion-ian level, but Dombo could also just be negotiating through the press at this point. However it shakes out, the Sox’s strong core plus Moncada is a wonderful starting point. There’s not as much work to do as we might think. As Matthew Kory wrote, Carlos Beltran might be the perfect piece to complement the roster as-is, without forcing the Sox to break the bank, and apparently they covet him.

I also think Ben Carsley’s idea of a Todd Frazier trade makes a huge amount of sense, but I’ll add another name to the list: Miguel Cabrera. Maybe Dombo isn’t set up to work well with his former employer, but if he is, and could get the apparently extremely available Miggy in a package that kept Moncada in Boston, it would be a certified coup. Cabrera’s getting on in years, but he’s still friggin’ incredible, and Dombo knows it as well as anyone.

How will the Red Sox bolster the bullpen?:

Carsley’s proposed White Sox trade would also net the Sox Nate Jones, and while that seems perfectly reasonable, so do a lot of bullpen ideas that would be easier to pull off. The straightest-line plays would be for the Sox to sign Aroldis Chapman, Kenley Jansen or Mark Melancon; my money would be on the latter, because it would be so much less of the Red Sox’s money.

I don’t see Brad Ziegler returning, but with Carson Smith waiting in the wings, I think Dombo continues to go the supplementary rather than foundational route in shoring up the ‘pen. Matt Collins, who thinks more about Red Sox relievers before noon on New Year’s Day than the rest of us do all year, says Neftali Feliz could be in the mix, and that sounds right. Chris Teeter thinks Brett Cecil could be a target, and given the Sox’s disproportionate dependence on Robbie Ross Jr. last year, another lefty would be a good addition, no matter how good Smith’s reverse splits have been.

Will the Red Sox add to the rotation? If so, how?:

I doubt it. They have David Price, Steven Wright, Rick Porcello, Drew Pomeranz, Clay Buchholz and Eduardo Rodriguez set to return. They technically don’t need another starter, but if they don’t break the bank for Encarnacion (or, you know, whoever), I, like everyone else, could see the appeal of re-signing a, or the, Rich Hill, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Of course, then there’s Chris Sale, Dombo’s white whale. Circumstantially, a Sale/Moncada et al. trade has never been likelier. The White Sox need help, Sale has been a pain in their butts, Moncada is a sure thing, Dombo likes trading prospects for bona fide superstars, and it’s not the middle of a productive season. Furthermore, Sale’s value might not be lower anytime soon — he wasn’t one of the three finalists for the AL Cy Young Award, even if he’s probably the AL starter you’d most likely pick in a win-or-go-home game. It’s all right there in front of us, but it just seems too obvious. I’m much more of Carsley’s opinion that Frazier would net a better return from the South Side in the short- and long-terms.

Will the Red Sox trade more elite prospects? If so, for what/who?:  

Even independent of a potential Sale deal, I’d say: Probably. It’s Dombo’s calling card, and he’s been given a fat stack of prospects with which to work. If not a White Sox, how about Paul Goldschmidt? That was Chris Teeter’s take, and why not? Goldy is pretty dope, and the Sox have newly minted front-office connections in Phoenix to exploit. I guess my fear on that account is that it would seem a bit *on the nose* for them to turn around and deal one of the 10 best players in baseball to their former employers, even if it might, in theory, benefit the D-Backs in the long-run. The optics are probably just too bad to make it a possibility about which I’d worry too much.

I’m in on Jake Devereaux’s Joey Votto-ought-to-be-available theory, but I fear Votto isn’t really going anywhere. Dealing Votto might be the rational move for a franchise stuck in a rut, but if the franchise was all that rational in their decision-making they wouldn’t have gotten stuck in that rut in the first place. Votto hit approximately 1.200 in the second half, which is so good it’s impossible, and it makes it harder to trade him for a franchise short on star power. Plus, I’d rather have Goldie anyway. I just don’t see that happening. 

Something will, though, and if it’s not Frazier I think it’s more likely to be a different good player in a crappy situation rather than a superstar we’ve thought of. If a move is likely, I think it would be for Frazier or Cabrera (or even Verlander, just to increase my chances of getting one right), and I think the prospects in any such deal would be good enough to trigger answering “yes” to this question. Even if the chances of such a deal are only like 1 in 3, .333 is pretty good in baseball, as we well know.

Miscellaneous thoughts

So much of this exercise feels less like trying to figure out what will happen than it does trying to stake out our turf for the future. Between the lot of us, we’ve staked out a lot of it, but much like the robots in Westworld that [SPOILER] literally can’t see a door in front of the if they’re programmed not to see it, we may just not have the privileges to see what’s really going on.  And, like those robots, the more I see that expands of my field of vision, the more secret doors that actually open, the more I’ll be coming online.

Biggest Acquisition: Miguel Cabrera
Biggest Departure: Jackie Bradley Jr. (via trade)
Biggest Surprise: The Sox don’t even kick the tires on Edwin

Lineup

Photo by Brett Davis/USA Today Sports Images

I hereby declare a moratorium on whining about Jon Lester no longer being on the Red Sox. Thank you for your compliance. — Admin

— snakes (@bryanjoiner) October 24, 2016

Even if (definitely not) the editor of this site did not agree:

@bryanjoiner

Bryan,

Jon Lester should be a Red Sox

— Def Not Ben Carsley (@BenCarsley) October 24, 2016

Which got Brett and I thinking: Why can’t we quit Jon Lester? We headed to email to figure it out. The conversation is below and has been only lightly edited for clarity, because we’re generally clear AF:

Bryan: This will be fun. I’ll basically let you start, here’s the softball. You and I are both sort of sick of the bellyaching over Lester, even if we love the guy. Why does it bother *you* so much? I have my reasons, but I’m curious about yours.

Brett: We get it — the Red Sox spent money elsewhere that wasn’t spent on Jon Lester. Yes, the Red Sox low-balled him early in 2014. Apparently, the thinking regarding that “insulting” offer is that it soured him on the idea of re-signing with them that winter, but it’s easy to forget that the Red Sox were one of the final teams he considered. It’s not like the $70 million offer they made in Spring Training made him think, “Well, screw these guys, deep dish pizza for life!” He wanted something different, and no amount of money that the Red Sox were willing to offer was going to change the mind of a guy who wanted a change.

The worst part is that this train of thought leads people to believe that the Red Sox signed Pablo Sandoval with all the money they *could’ve* spent on Lester, as if they had the divine power to choose between the two players with no outside influences. That complaint is so fraught with terrible reasoning that it hurts me just to mention it.

Bryan: I agree with this, and I’ll  throw this in there: They traded him! It was obvious why they did it, but once the seal was broken, I can see why he didn’t feel obligated to return to Boston — which was a total shitshow at the time, devoid of both the manager and general manager under whom he had played most of his career. So maybe he wanted a change, or maybe a change was forced upon him, and he just decided to roll with it … while making more money in the first place.

On top of that, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the Sox basically turned Lester’s contract year into Rick Porcello, who is the Cy Young Award favorite in the American League. I know that technically the Sox could have had their cake and eaten it too, but this seems to fall into the ever-expanding category of Sox fans taking the team’s success for granted and being overly melodramatic about the bad moments, or, in this case, merely less than perfect.

I also think that David Price’s relatively poor performance is overly influencing our thinking here, and I think Lester’s history with the Sox — beating cancer, anchoring a World Series-winning team — is properly influencing it, but my main complaint for the time being is that this World Series is not about us any more than the 2004 World Series was about the Cleveland Indians after their best player had decided to come here. All that said, I’m fine with people being pissy about it once the Series is over. I’m dead inside, but that doesn’t mean everyone else has to be. What about you? Do you think this is a temporary or permanent problem? And how do we solve it?

Brett: I agree with the fact that is isn’t about us anymore, because it really isn’t at all. I’m very okay with being happy for Lester and the other former Sox, because they were good and fun guys. They’ve moved on now, and so should we. Cheer for whomever you want. Sure, the Sox made bad choices revolving around these guys, but I’d rather focus on how they’re doing now, not how’d they be doing in Boston.

Personally, I think this is a temporary problem, but it all comes down to Price. People will lament not having Lester until Price finally turns in a postseason that equals the ace pitcher reputation he has. Until that happens, and as long as Lester is good, the complaining will continue. There’s nothing we can really do to solve it individually, barring a J.D. Drew-like change of heart. If Price never does that, and can’t live up to the very high expectations people set for him, then it’ll just become a constant source of regret, and we’ll never hear the end of it.

It just comes down to the players the fans have the most disdain for: Price and Pablo. Hanley and Porcello have redeemed themselves but if either has a bad 2017, you’re going to hear the same thing about both of them. They need to perform, because we’re not going to stop people from those dreaded hypothetical scenarios.

Bryan: The fun part is that if you dig into advanced stats, Price might have a better season than Lester. Baseball Prospectus (w00t) had Price at a 2.90 Deserved Run Average and 6.5 WAR and Lester at 3.10 DRA and 5.3 WAR. FanGraphs had Price at 4.5 WAR and Lester at 4.3. Only Baseball-Reference supports the results of the eye test; they have Price at 3 WAR and Lester at 5.3. You can take all these with enough salt to melt a driveway, of course, but it doesn’t change the fact that pitching in the NL Central is a far more desirable job than pitching in the AL East. Remember when Adam Vinatieri left the Patriots to go kick in a dome? Yeah, me too. This seems kinda like that.

I agree with you that we’ll probably never be rid of the hypotheticals until Price turns in a great regular season or postseason, but it’s important to remember that at this point last year Porcello was considered an utter failure, and we have short memories when it serves us to have them. I still have hope for Price, and I think the actual difference between him and Lester at this point is mostly academic. As much as Price is skewing our perceptions, so are the Cubs writ large versus the Sox — Boston’s organization is one of the best in the league, but there’s no question that Chicago is better right now, and Lester seems to benefit from his exalted company. To paraphrase “our” Senator (this is a very loose “our,” as neither of us live in Massachusetts), the Cubs have been great, but he didn’t build that organization: Theo did.

And there’s the rub. Epstein’s involvement, along with Lester’s and matched by Francona’s and Napoli’s on the other side, makes us feel heavily invested in the result of the series. “Invested” might be the wrong word, actually; I think we feel like we’re entitled to make judgments about these guys because they’re all Red Sox legends. I think we’re sort of right, actually, but there’s enough excess baggage with Lester than I think we generally go too far. I think you correctly ID’d not merely Price, but Sandoval, as the general catalysts for this, though I think there’s a compelling argument that if the Sox had made it out of the first round this would have been tamped down, and if they had made the World Series, it might have been smothered altogether.

Of course, none of that matters, and now I’m trafficking in hypotheticals. I guess my next and maybe last question is this: Do you think this is something we’ll still be talking about in 10 years? Like, when Price and Lester are both good and done, do you think it’ll still haunt and/or bother us? My suspicion is that it rests not merely on how the Sox do, but the Cubs as well. Given how well they’re set up, it seems like we might be talking about this for awhile.

Brett: A decade can change a lot of things. I don’t think Sox fans sorrowfully regret letting Pedro go after 2004 anymore, mostly because the teams in the late 2000s were so good. But I don’t think this’ll be something we’ll remember in a decade, especially if the Red Sox continue to make runs deep into October. Winning breeds forgiveness, at least partially. But you are right — the more successful the Cubs get, the more we’ll hear about it. It’ll only get magnified with how many more times the Cubs and the Red Sox make the playoffs and make a Boston-Chicago World Series a possibility.

I don’t think it’ll haunt the team that much, however. The Red Sox probably didn’t see Jon Lester as part of their new core, which will be based around the Killer Bs and how much they can grow. It hurt the Sox in the short-term because of how terrible the team has been with developing starting pitching. But looking forward, there are some things that can alleviate the Red Sox’s pitching woes. You have Michael Kopech and Jason Groome. You have the incredibly stacked 2018 free agent class. None of them will be Lester, and probably will never have the reputation he had, but it’s well worth a shot. Lester is not the only good starting pitcher out there.

It might end up being a footnote in 10 years, since something like that pales in comparison to the dumpster fire that was most of the 2012 season. In the end, if the Red Sox are good, and make the postseason a ton of times, does it really matter? The Red Sox are still successful! Just because one of the starting pitchers isn’t Jon Lester should be irrelevant. The Red Sox are playing in October. That much should be enough. Despite that, pundits will take their fortunes in the postseason as a microcosm of the previous six months, and keep bringing this up. Sooner or later, we have to realize that the Red Sox are succeeding without Lester, and we have to appreciate that. Would it be nice to have him? Sure, I’ll admit that. But the Red Sox do not. Oh well.

It’s better to put faith in the guys currently on the roster than pine for someone who isn’t there anymore.

Bryan: Aye, aye. Well said. We can leave it at that. I still pine for Jonny Gomes, though.

Photo by USA Today Sports Images

Craig forgive me for using in-season WAR as a measuring stick, but it was hard not to notice that Price merely ranked as the best pitcher in all of baseball, which… is good. That’s a good thing. Ricky Bobby would be proud: He’s first, and everybody else is last. (As of today, he’s actually in second place, so just trust me when I say he was in first on Monday.)

ESPN’s award predictor thinks Porcello is the favorite, but I think the historical voting patterns that “predict” these things are likely out of date. I don’t think Porcello will win, or I didn’t until last night, when it became a stronger possibility, both statistically and narrative-wise. Now I’m not so sure about being not so sure, which serves me right for daring to write this a day early… but I still think Price is a better candidate, good stories be damned.

I also do not think Price will win, because he has a high enough ERA to be disqualifying to most voters. It’s currently 3.91, which is not good. It is basically the only statistic of his that is not good, and while we have moved past win-loss records as singularly qualifying or disqualifying for the award, I don’t think we’re there for ERA — nor have we needed to be, as for the most part there have been better pitchers vying for the award with better lines than Price’s this year.

But this year is not most years, and this year Price may actually be the best option despite “earning” nearly four runs per nine innings for his opponents. You would likely not be reading this website if you didn’t believe in the vitality of advanced stats, so if you believe a 4 ERA is a nonstarter for a Cy Young candidate, you’re best off stopping now.

If you are still here, it turns out that by simply by replacing ERA with anything better turns Price’s season into something special. BP uses Deserved Run Average — which, semantically speaking, seems no worse or different than Earned Run Average, but it’s best I don’t get into the weeds on that one. By DRA, Price is, at the time of this writing, in a virtual tie with Chris Sale at the top of the AL leaderboard. That is a fancy way of saying he’s behind by a few hundredths of a point. Sue me.

Porcello’s start last night really threw me for a loop, but it’s still clear that if you look at any numbers beyond ERA (which I’ve covered) and wins (to which we ought to be immune), Price is a better choice than the Pork Chop. Why don’t we call Porcello “Pork Chop,” by the way? Seems like a missed opportunity. Anyhoo… adding in DRA, here’s Price versus P-Chop, which seems pretty relevant today.

Porcello: 201.2 IP, 3.12 ERA, 3.48 DRA, 167:29 K:BB ratio, 21-4 record, 4.5 WAR

Price: 211.2 IP, 3.91 ERA, 2.72 DRA, 217:44 K:BB ratio, 16-8 record, 6.7 WAR

Right so… Price has been better. It’s close, but he’s been better. It’s not surprising that we’ve missed it, given Porcello’s wonderful season-long redemption story and the early hole from which Price had to extract himself, but we’ve certainly missed it. So again, the question is: How?

For a team perpetually short on starting pitchers, Price’s health has been a skill, just as it has been for his entire career.

The answer is that we take volume for granted, and one steadily accumulates WAR by going out there every so-and-so number of days and doing the damn thing. Price has done exactly this. For a team perpetually short on starting pitchers, his health has been a skill, just as it has been for his entire career. The same is true of Pork Chop, but he doesn’t lead the league in innings pitched — Price does, even after Porcello added nine innings to his total last night. This may not make Price a great Cy Young Award candidate, even if it makes him more like the actual, workhorse, Cy Young.

Let’s expand our look from Price versus Porcello to both of them versus the rest of the field. I’m excluding Zack Britton because, frankly, he’s not relevant and anyone telling you differently is trying to sell you something. I’m also excluding Jose Quintana, because his numbers don’t stack up, no matter how underrated everyone thinks he is. Finally, I’m excluding J.A. Happ because I want to and I don’t think anyone will really care. Here’s my list:

Porcello: 201.2 IP, 3.12 ERA, 3.48 DRA, 167:29 K:BB ratio, 21-4 record, 4.5 WAR

Price: 211.2 IP, 3.91 ERA, 2.72 DRA, 217:44 K:BB ratio, 16-8 record, 6.7 WAR

Sale: 210.2 IP, 3.03 ERA, 2.65 DRA, 215:44 K:BB ratio, 16-8 record, 6.8 WAR

Hamels: 186 IP, 3.42 ERA, 2.74 DRA, 187:75 K:BB ratio, 14-5 record, 5.8 WAR

Kluber: 204.2 IP, 3.12 ERA, 2.97 DRA, 215:54 K:BB ratio, 17-9 record, 5.9 WAR

Quickly, let’s look at the three non-Sox candidates to see how Price stacks up.

In the case of Sale, outside of ERA, his numbers and Price’s are virtually identical. It’s actually kind of creepy how similar they are? Sale probably makes a better candidate by being a more exciting pitcher at this stage of his career, but he’s also on a crappy team (which, whatever) and placed himself at the center of two patently absurd scandals this year, which is not endearing to me, given how stupid they were. I’d say Sale is a marginally better candidate in a vacuum, but we don’t vote in a vacuum.

In the case of Hamels, his low IP and high walk totals — he leads the league in walks! — are quickly disqualifying in this context. He is a fine pitcher having a fine season, but he hasn’t been the best.

Kluber is still my favorite to win the award, as he has pretty much everything going for him, or did until last night’s Porcello start. There is a real argument that Price has been as good as Kluber or better — more innings, more strikeouts, fewer walks — but it’s hard enough to isolate even in this context, where I’ve taken pains to spell it out, and will likely be invisible to voters. This is fine: Kluber is great and is the clear-cut best pitcher on a first-place team, unlike both Porcello and Price, who must contend with one another, and unlike Hamels, who hasn’t put in the innings to qualify in this columnist’s opinion, has walked too many people, and won’t win anyway.

All of this is academic, of course. Price won’t really be considered because of biases both old and new, and logic both sound and flawed. He knew that his contract came with sky-high expectations, and it’s his “failure” to meet certain high standards seems to have disqualified him early on from anything better than a fifth-place finish or so. That’s too bad, because he’s had the strongest season of all Sox pitchers, and maybe the strongest in the American League. Believe it. 

Photo by Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports Images