Let’s look at a few easy ways to make educated guesses.

Age

We know one of the biggest indicators of player quality is age. Hitters tend to improve before age 27, peak at that point or close to it, and decline after. The good news for the Red Sox is they feature a number of players who are not yet 27. Xander Bogaerts (25), Rafael Devers (21), Mookie Betts (25), and Andrew Benintendi (23) are all starters who figure to improve simply based on what we know about aging curves. That’s almost half of the Red Sox lineup. Further, Jackie Bradley (28) and Christian Vazquez (27) are in their peak seasons. This is good!

Beyond, Mitch Moreland (32), Dustin Pedroia (34), and Hanley Ramirez (34) are all likely to decline in the overall skills department. Thing is, Moreland wasn’t all that spectacular last season so much more than a very gentle decline from him would make him close to unplayable. The same goes for Hanley, though he has bounced up and down in terms of quality throughout his career. What’s more, should Martinez come to Boston, both Moreland’s and Hanley’s roles would be somewhat diminished.

Pedroia is the wild card here, though his age alone indicates we shouldn’t be expecting much more than league average production.

Even so, age gives us an overall positive picture of how the 2018 Red Sox offense could look. Betts, Bogaerts, Devers, Benintendi, and perhaps Bradley could all improve, and I think that’s actually relatively likely to happen just based on how their 2017 seasons went as well. That should be more than enough to offset what little production Boston receives from Pedroia, Moreland, and Ramirez.

2018 Projections

PECOTA hasn’t been released yet and I don’t have a copy of the new BP 2018 Annual (which you should definitely buy right this instant) nearby, so regretfully, even though this is BP, we’re going to take a look at FanGraphs. The truth of the matter is, though we like PECOTA around these parts, at this point most projection systems are going to give you roughly the same thing, and that’s all I’m interested in for this exercise: rough estimates.

Going by those same rough estimates, of the Red Sox starting nine, FanGraphs projects seven of the Red Sox to improve, five of which significantly. Only Pedroia and Mitch Moreland are projected to improve only slightly from their 2017 performances. Rafael Devers is projected to perform just as he did last season, only to play a full season’s worth of games, which would be a large upgrade over what the Red Sox have been getting from third basemen over the past half decade or more. Only Christian Vazquez is projected to put up a worse performance.

That roughly matches my expectations for these individual players and it comes close to matching our guesses based simply on player age, which is a factor in the projections as well so there’s admittedly a bit of double counting going on here.

Over/Under Performance

Lastly we can look at how players did last season relative to our expectations. A good proxy for that is the 2017 PECOTA, so let’s look and see how the 2017 Red Sox, our baseline for 2018, did compared to how we expected them to do. I compared the members of the starting lineup’s projected TAv’s to their actual TAv’s. Betts, Benintendi, Hanley, and Bogaerts all came in well below their TAv projections, with Betts and Hanley at their 15th and 10th percentile PECOTA projections for TAv. That’s pretty rough. Bradley and Pedroia were right about where PECOTA pegged them, well, Bradley was a bit worse, but roughly in the vicinity. Only Moreland and Devers beat their projections. Moreland was in the 60th percentile and Devers was in the 95th, which you’d probably expect given he wasn’t supposed to make even a Triple-A roster let alone start for multiple months in the majors.

So this is the part of the article where we try to put some of this information together. Looking at all this, it seems safe to assume a good chunk of the Red Sox starting lineup should be expected, for a variety of reasons, to put up better seasons than they did in 2017. In fact, it’s not just a numerical chunk of the lineup, but the very best players in it, like Betts, Bogaerts, Benintendi, and Bradley. Devers is a bit of a wild card given his youth, as are Ramirez and Moreland for their ages, and Pedroia for his age and injury history. It’s not hard to see Ramirez turning things around, Pedroia getting healthy and hitting better if not returning to his late-aught MVP form. Similarly, this could be the end of the line for these guys. Sometimes baseball doesn’t let you down gently. Sometimes it smashes you into the concrete. But the smart guess is that both Ramirez and Pedroia have something approximating league average hitting left in them.

Add that to a stronger front of the lineup featuring everyone with a surnamed starting with B, and you’ve got a potentially strong lineup. So, do the Red Sox need J.D. Martinez to improve their offense in 2018? I suspect they don’t. I suspect it will get better simply by running the same team out there again. But in a league where the Astros are World Champs and the Yankees are maybe even better than that, it’s hard not to say, well, heck, get J.D. Martinez anyway. Can’t hurt.

Photo by David Kohl — USA TODAY Sports

If I had written this 48 hours ago, when the Red Sox were just coming off a 6-game winning streak amidst a 8-1 road trip, this would probably be titled something like “WHY THE RED SOX WILL WIN EVERY GAME FOR THE REST OF TIME AND THEY WON’T EVEN BE CLOSE” or something along those lines. I’d throw in a pun or two, my editor would take them out (that’s really what our dynamic boils down to [ed. note: I don’t hate puns that much, sheesh]) and that’d be that. But nope, the Red Sox have lost two whole games in a row, and I for one am going to treat this rationally by panicking for 500 words.

The Red Sox are a flawed team. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a not-flawed team, but of the eight teams that will make the MLB postseason, the Red Sox feel particularly vulnerable. There’s imbalance in the rotation, uncertainty in the bullpen, and good lord, everyone is playing with a broken limb. What are the biggest issues heading into this season’s postseason run? IT’S LISTIN’ TIME.

1. Injuries 

The Red Sox offense is very just okay. In fact, I could hear an argument that “very just okay” is a particularly optimistic way to describe it. Dustin Pedroia’s knee is clearly off. It’s being described as “achy”, which is borderline insulting considering the type of medical technology and diagnosing abilities the team’s medical staff posses. During last night’s game, Jerry Remy, who tends to be in the know when it comes to player issues, sounded ominous when discussing just how bad off the knee was. He’ll fight through it because he’s Dustin Pedroia, but when he gets that baby scoped, drained, and rebuilt after hitting .190 this postseason, we’ll all be on the same page.

Eduardo Nunez’s knee is apparently not much better, as he tweaked it almost immediately after returning to game action. There’s no timetable on his return, and while he said he’s aiming to see some game action during the Houston series coming up this weekend, that feels overly optimistic.

Lastly, and most importantly, Mookie Betts is working through some wrist issues. The Sox dodged a major bullet when the CT scan came back only showing some inflammation, but wrist injuries are no joke. There’s also this tweet from Peter Gammons, who is surely connected to people in the organization:

How Mookie Betts became one of baseball’s best base runners https://t.co/B198DmyAeY Wrist injuries can be very serious,and Betts' scares Sox

— Peter Gammons (@pgammo) September 26, 2017

Betts has shown the ability to impact the game in ways outside of hitting all year, as evident by his generally-similar WAR numbers matched up with a underwhelming season at the plate. A wrist injury is a different beast though, and if Betts is swinging with one hand for the next month, the Sox are cooked.

2. Hanley Ramirez 

It’s bad, guys. He’s hitting .211 over the last month, and .209 in the second half. At this point, would anyone be that surprised if he’s not in the team’s plans for after this season? He’s not going to be playing first base against righties during the playoffs, which isn’t unusual in itself. What makes things tricky is that even when he’s not in the field during those situations, it’s not like he’s the best option at DH, either. If – and that’s a big if – Pedroia and Nunez can play, it stands to reason that the best offensive lineup has both of them in it. Hell, keeping Christian Vazquez’s bat in the lineup when Sandy Leon is catching even makes more sense at this point. A lot’s being made about Ramirez’s spot on the roster, which seems silly at this point. Even with his struggles, his bat coming off the bench in a big spot during the later innings gives me, like, five percent more hope than anyone else the team would trot out there would. His spot on the postseason roster shouldn’t be debated; his spot in any starting lineup should.

3. Fatigue 

This is, admittedly, a dumb one. That’s why it’s number three. Every other team has played the same amount of games. Everyone’s hurting, everyone’s arms are dead, everyone’s *insert baseball euphemism about The Daily Grind here*. But where the Red Sox seem most fatigued, starting pitching, is what makes this an issue. Drew Pomeranz’s velocity is the hot topic this week, and rightfully so:

Pomeranz's FB velocity has been dropping since mid August. This chart doesn't include tonight's game which would extend the trend pic.twitter.com/2ryX5h1DHZ

— Matthew Kory (@mattymatty2000) September 26, 2017

Pomeranz, at 167 innings pitched this year, is now three away from his career-high. There could be a dozen other reasons for a drop in velocity, but I’m hard-pressed to believe that an unprecedented workload and a sharp dip in velocity aren’t in some way related.

Chris Sale has also looked mortal over the last month, and he’s also getting close to his career-high in innings pitched. His velocity has actually gone up over the last month or so, so who knows what to think:

He’s getting hit significantly harder over the last month or so, however, which could indicate that some of that classic baseball idiom about throwing instead of pitching might be going on. Might that be the case? Maybe, but it’s 11:30 pm and I’m already above 800 words, so that investigation will have to wait. For now, I will say that the numbers, combined with the good ol’ fashioned eye test, make it seem like Sale is dragging some. The Red Sox have spent all year preaching that it’ll be the starting pitching that carries them, relying on the belief that pitching dominates the playoffs. If that’s true, and the team sends two of their three starters out to the mound with no gas left and that offense behind them, it’s going to be a short series.

Photo by Bob DeChiara – USA TODAY Sports

Over the course of a long season we, as Red Sox fans, spend a lot of time getting to know our radio and television announcers.  As Tim Neverett takes his spring training reps alongside legendary radio voice Joe Castiglione, The Boston Herald’s Steve Buckley fills us in on the newest addition to the broadcast.  Neverett, who is a Nashua, NH native, had been working as a play-by-play host for the Pittsburgh Pirates for the last seven seasons.  Over that time he saw the Pirates move from a terrible team with a 20-year losing streak to a perennial contender.  At the very least he should be used to calling games for clubs aiming to go from worst to first.

Usually, the transition of play-by-play announcers wouldn’t seem like such a big deal, but with all of the drama surrounding the exit of Don Orsillo from the NESN broadcast last year, this move is an exception. The game of musical chairs that’s led to Dave O’Brien taking Orsillo’s spot and opened up a radio gig for Neverett means Boston’s newest broadcast will face his share of scrutiny.  Neverett considered this before taking the job ultimately deciding, “Somebody has to be the next guy. Dave is still here, Don is happy in San Diego. I was happy in Pittsburgh. At the time I was not looking for another job. I planned on being there a long time and things were going very, very well, but it’s because of my New England roots I wanted to come home.”

Unless Neverett flounders in his new market things should be set for a long while on both the radio and television broadcasts.  Neverett has reportedly signed a five-year-deal with Entercom, the owners of WEEI, and has no intentions of going elsewhere.  From what I have heard so far Neverett has been adjusting to life in the booth seamlessly and already sounds like a veteran alongside Castiglione.  I for one am glad to have him here.  As for Dave O’Brien, I think he is doing an excellent job so far and by May I think most of us will forget that there was every any controversy surrounding this talented announcer’s new job.

Quick Hits

As David Ortiz gets set to enter his final year, Nick Cafardo of The Boston Globe warns us that this is not a good thing for the Red Sox.  Many have been looking at Ortiz’s pending retirement as an opportunity for Hanley Ramirez to move to DH rather than what it actually is: the loss of the team’s best hitter.  Cafardo reminds us that Ortiz is the only player in major league baseball to drive in 100 or more runs each of the last three seasons.  Unlike a lot of other Red Sox greats Ortiz will be retiring while he is still among the most productive hitters in the game.  Time hasn’t eroded his skills as much as it has his body and his will to keep grinding.  You have to think that if he has another great year, he will always wonder how much he really had left in the tank and how long he could have gone.

In Spring Training news, yesterday was the first time that Christian Vasquez caught in a game since undergoing Tommy John surgery last April.  John Tomase of WEEI notes that Vazquez isn’t concerned with where he is going to start the year and is just happy that he is back playing.  He looked good while calling the game and should settle back in quickly giving the Red Sox a luxury that most teams do not have: three major league-ready catchers.

Having three capable backstops is hardly a problem but with such a glut of talent you can expect teams to come calling.  Mark Normandin of OverTheMonster.com reports that teams have already begun calling the Red Sox about veteran catcher Ryan Hanigan and his availability.  The Red Sox are not likely to make any sort of a move here with Matt Wieters providing us the most recent example that Tommy John surgery isn’t always as straightforward a recovery process as it seems.  I think it would be wise to keep Hanigan at least until the All-Star break to be sure that Vasquez is not rushed along too quickly.

Down on the farm the Red Sox’s consensus number five prospect Michael Kopech has found himself in trouble yet again. ESPN’s Scott Lauber reports that the 19-year-old right-hander broke his throwing hand after getting into a fight with his roommate a few days ago.  This story would be troubling normally, but coming on the heels of Kopech’s suspension for Oxilofrine, a banned stimulant, it proves that his judgement is poor to non-existent.  We have seen far better prospects than Kopech fail to get off the ground due to off the field issues and he is on that path right now.

Let’s end on a high note as Ian Browne of MLB.com takes a look at Andrew Benintendi’s “Meteoric rise.”  If you aren’t familiar with Benintendi’s story the young outfielder was not always a star, in fact, during his first year at Arkansas he hit only one home run while batting .276 and didn’t impress anyone.  Benitendi says, “I know my freshman year, I think I was trying to be a different kind of player than what I had been in years previous to that.”   Luckily for Red Sox fans he remembered who he was and went on to win the Golden Spikes award as college baseball’s best player in 2015.  His skills are advanced across the board and if all goes well he may get a cup of coffee with the Red Sox this September

 Photo by Kelly O’Connor/www.sittingstill.smugmug.com

Lowe is worth an article himself (I’m sure I’ll get to him at some point), but today it’s time to celebrate Jason Varitek. Famous for being a stalwart Sox player through the entirety of the first decade of the millennium, Varitek was a critical piece of the team’s 2003 playoff run as well as the squad’s 2004 and 2007 World Series victories. The fourth team captain in the franchise’s long history, Varitek remains a beloved and respected figure for the team’s fans today.

At times, Varitek was also lauded as one of the greatest players in the league, or at least one of the game’s best catchers … an assertion that the numbers at the time never really backed up. Today’s goal is to explore Varitek’s overall value and answer a few questions with the new data at hand: was Varitek legendary, or more ordinary?

Instead of breaking down Tek’s value on a year-by-year basis, as I often do in Olde Sox, I’d like to break his performance down into offense and defense. Varitek had a reputation as a good-hitting catcher through most of his career with Boston, and I’d like to touch on his skills and performance in that arena before talking about his defense–an especially appropriate and exciting topic given the release of Baseball Prospectus’s new catching metrics.

So let’s get into it. A switch-hitter with power and on-base skills, Varitek at his best was everything one could want in an offensive catcher. His career True Average (TAv) of .261 posits him as a league-average hitter over his career, no mean feat for a catcher. Catchers typically hit closer to 10% below league-average during that timeframe, so Varitek obviously was a good hitter for a catcher.

A switch-hitter with power and on-base skills, Varitek at his best was everything one could want in an offensive catcher.

How’d he succeed? Varitek hit for a little power with 193 career homers and a .435 slugging percentage. Most of his damage was done in four seasons: 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2005. During those years, he wasn’t just a good hitter for a catcher, he was a good hitter. In each of those seasons, his TAv was .277 or higher, which would be suitable for a hitter at nearly any position, not just the toughest one on the diamond.

Varitek was also skilled at reaching base despite a just-okay career batting average and little to no baserunning ability. Tek had a career walk rate of 10.5 percent, which helped him post a career .341 on-base percentage despite his middling .256 batting average. Though his bat earned him only three All-Star berths and a few down-ballot MVP votes, he was a good enough hitter to win a Silver Slugger in 2005.

Also, Varitek was able to succeed in the postseason … once. Truthfully, his overall postseason numbers aren’t that great, but Tek made an effort to power the Sox to the World Series during the 2003 failed bid for the AL pennant. During that run, he hit four homers and posted a .706 slugging percentage in 11 games. Unfortunately, the rest of his postseason career was nothing to write home about–even with those games as part of the calculation, his career postseason line includes a .292 OBP due to a drastically slashed walk rate during October contests.

His one true Achilles’ heel was, well, attached to his heels. In nearly each season of his long, storied career, Varitek cost the team a substantial amount of runs on the basepaths. Over his entire career, he cost the team 40 runs via BP’s BRR metric for baserunning, though other metrics like FanGraphs’ BsR are slightly more forgiving. That’s four or more wins over the life of his career, and often between two and five runs per season. While not a lot of cost individually, this certainly adds up over the course of his career … you could say this is like taking one of his better seasons (before accounting for BP’s new catcher defense stats) and wiping it from the ledger.

Overall, Varitek wasn’t truly a premier offensive catcher, though he did have a few very good seasons, and a host more where he was average or good, if not great. Without FRAA in the conversation, Varitek’s WARP runs 23.2 wins above a replacement player–that’s a good, but not great career total. But, as we know now, offense (and position adjustment) aren’t everything. Varitek had the reputation of a great defensive catcher, and that deserves its day in the sun as well.

Now, with the new catcher defense statistics debuting today as part of “Catchella,” we can break down Tek’s defense into its component parts, and paint an even clearer picture of his excellence. Now, catcher defense has been broken down into four primary metrics, and we can see where Varitek rates among the best backstops at each of them.

We’ll start with the thing that, for many years, was the hallmark of catcher defense: the running game. Varitek never received much in the way of kudos for his arm, and that bears out using a statistic called Swipe Rate Above Average (SRAA). Among the thousands of catchers rated by SRAA, Varitek has the seventh-most runs to the negative in SRAA, having cost the Sox 16.5 runs more than an average catcher. That’s not great, and works out to a little more than a win and a half of value that he cost the team over his career. Funny enough, the guy Varitek unseated at catcher, Scott Hatteberg, has the third-worst SRAA in the existing sample, with -19.6 SRAA over his career.

There’s another, smaller factor in the running game that we can measure, and that’s Takeoff Rate Above Average (TRAA). This measures how good a catcher was not at throwing out runners, but rather preventing them from taking off at all in the first place: holding them on the bag, or using reputation to keep them from stealing. Over his entire body of work, Varitek was worth 0.5 TRAA, a very, very slight positive. Now, most catchers–even the greatest ones–never put up huge numbers in this category, and most registered within a run of average. Varitek’s mark is par for the course … another Sox legend is second all-time, as Carlton Fisk earned a (comparatively) enormous 7.6 TRAA over his career. Johnny Bench, by the way, has the greatest TRAA in history with 12.4 runs above average–a true outlier.

Those first two numbers paint Varitek in a bit of an unflattering light, but the next two redeem him, and then some. Errant Pitches Above Average is a measure of blocking ability the same way the other two measure control of the running game, and by this metric, Varitek is one of the greatest defensive catchers since 1950. Among all catchers, Tek ranks eighth all-time in overall blocking value, sandwiched on the leaderboard between Hall of Famers (and Mets) Mike Piazza and Gary Carter. His score of 10.9 EPAA undoes most of the trouble his arm caused the Sox, and underscores that blocking, while valuable, may only be worth a win or so even during a career as long as Varitek’s.

The real value for a catcher comes from pitch framing, and the BP statistic to judge that is Called Strikes Above Average (CSAA). This measure only dates back as far as 1988, but Varitek has amassed the 13th-most value by that metric over a career since that date. His CSAA of 85.6 tells us that he added more than eight wins to the Red Sox by getting extra called strikes and presenting pitches to the umpire in a favorable light. (This may have been one of the reasons why Varitek also caught a then-record four no-hitters in his career.)

It’s not surprising that Varitek also has the 13th-most overall catcher defense added overall in the history of the game, with a total of 80.5 runs added over his career.

With his CSAA stats so great, it’s not surprising that Varitek also has the 13th-most overall catcher defense added overall in the history of the game, with a total of 80.5 runs added over his career. That’s a huge amount compared to most catchers, and every drop of that value went to the Sox over his 14-year career.

When looking for a comparable to Varitek, it’s easy to bring up Blake Swihart, who also is a switch-hitting catcher with some solid offensive potential. It would take a couple of better-than-league-average offensive seasons for Swi to match up with Tek, but it’s a possibility. The trouble is this: in his 2015 rookie season, Swihart wasn’t nearly a Varitek on defense. In fact, he was nearly the opposite of the long-time vet’s defensive profile. The team’s rookie backstop cost the Sox six runs by framing, and 0.6 EPAA in terms of blocking. Swihart’s arm was fine, earning him no points by TRAA, and 0.3 runs by SRAA.

On the other hand, Christian Vazquez’s 2014 season was an elite framing year, earning him 13.4 CSAA, which is a number that is excellent … and in line with Tek’s best framing seasons. Varitek actually had five seasons in which he posted more CSAA than that, the best of which was a remarkable 25.8 CSAA in 2002. Now, CSAA tends to fluctuate a bit from year to year, so there’s certainly a chance that Swihart could develop his skills more behind the plate and come to approximate Varitek’s value, but right now it’s the other talented young receiver on the roster who looks more similar to Tek in the area that perhaps matters most.

The point of these Olde Sox columns is to help us understand Fenway’s greats just a little bit better through the use of more modern metrics. There’s literally no metric more modern than today’s release of the BP catching statistics, and those are very useful for helping us understand how much value a player like Varitek can earn by playing catcher at a high level for such a long run. His offensive stats, on the other hand, are a member of public record, and have been a mark in his favor for years … in sabermetric circles and otherwise.

Numbers don’t exactly peg Jason Varitek as a Hall-of-Fame player, but he was undeniably a huge part of some of the best and most important seasons in Red Sox history. Today, he’d be a sought-after commodity as teams look for catchers with defensive skills, and his bursts of slugging prowess and on-base ability would make him an asset to any club. But Varitek is also special for his durability and loyalty to the Red Sox, playing 1,546 games in Sox gear. He may not have been the greatest catcher in Red Sox history, but Jason Varitek has a substantial claim as one of the most talented and reliable players in the franchise’s storied existence.

Going Deep

The meetings of the general managers takes place this week in Boca Raton, Florida. The meetings will be the first for Dave Dombrowski and Mike Hazen as leaders of the Red Sox front office. While it is unlikely that much player movement will happen during these meetings, Rob Bradford of WEEI.com reminds us that they are a gateway to the offseason, an opportunity for club leaders to lay the groundwork for future moves. Right now a lot of attention is being paid to the free agent market; and rightfully so as it holds a deep crop of great players. The Red Sox will probably be in the mix to sign one of the top-flight free agent starters, but what is a lot more fun—and much more difficult—is determining and evaluating trade candidates. To a large extent, Dave Dombrowski’s reputation comes from his trading prowess, so we can expect him to make a trade or two in the coming months. Along these lines, Scott Lauber of BostonHerald.com outlines five teams that he thinks could be good transaction partners for the Red Sox, and Sean McAdam of CSNNE.com takes a stab at identifying specific pitchers for whom the Sox could trade. Regardless, Brian MacPherson writes in the Providence Journal that the trade market presents an early test of Dombrowski’s knowledge of his new farm system, something that Dombrowski is well aware of. Outside of trading Mookie Betts or Xander Bogaerts I think anything should be considered.

That outlines things from more of a general perspective, but how about some specific speculation on the Red Sox moves this offseason? Two great, Boston-focused writers, Peter Gammons and Chad Finn, do just that in recent articles. Gammons focuses on the rotation, considering options beyond Zack Greinke, who Gammons sees as the top prize. He outlines the difficulty that Boston will have in luring a top-of-the-line starter to pitch in the American League East, its hitter friendly parks, for the next five-to-seven years and, when those pitchers could opt for a team in the National League West and all its pitcher friendly parks. Alas, we get back to considering trade partners. One really intriguing option that Gammons presents is Chris Sale of the White Sox. It is likely wishful thinking, but he outlines how the two teams could line up on a trade that involved Boston sending Blake Swihart and Javier Guerra to the Windy City. Sale would be a huge get for the Red Sox, as Sale is really good (opponent TAv .227), left-handed, only 26-years-old, and signed to a team-friendly contract. Finn states that he has no idea what the Sox are going to do, but again leans toward trades as the best way to acquire pitching. He reminds us that the offense is fine, having scored the fourth most runs in baseball last year without much production from two important pieces. Pitching is the need. Someone like the Reds’ Aroldis Chapman, the Indians’ Carlos Carrasco, or one of the Mets’ fireballers would be solid acquisitions, but the prices in Queens are likely too high. Finn’s primary caveat for any trade is, like I suggested above, Betts and Bogaerts should be untouchable.

Quick Hits

Perhaps the most glaring part of the roster that is in need of correction is the bullpen. However, fixing said bullpen is a complicated matter. Re-positioning players currently in the organization like Matt Barnes, who the Sox have ticketed for relief duty in 2016, is one approach, but Tim Britton of the Providence Journal shows there are plenty of relief options outside the organization that should be explored.

The decision to move Hanley Ramirez to first base affects the immediate big league future of Travis Shaw, who in the last two months of the season showed that he has the potential to be a productive major league first baseman. Ian Browne of MLB.com reports that Shaw is hoping versatility will get him regular playing time. He has been playing third base in winter ball in Puerto Rico, and could even play some games in the outfield if it means getting into the lineup.

Christian Vasquez is rehabbing from the Tommy John surgery that derailed his 2015 season by playing winter ball in Puerto Rico. He is being used exclusively as a designated hitter and while he is performing well, Scott Lauber of BostonHerald.com writes that, because he is not performing full catching duties, his readiness for the coming season won’t be certain until the Spring.

While much remains to be determined with the Red Sox roster for the 2016 season, the future appears bright, as the farm system is loaded with talent. As mentioned above, over the next few months many of these up-and-coming players will be bandied about in trade rumours. Bryce Brentz for Clayton Kershaw? Sure, I’d consider it. If you are wondering about where the players who are getting mentioned rank within the organization, check out the consensus Top-60 that the staff at Sox Prospects released last Friday.

According to a report from CBSSports.com, a couple of former Red Sox players are frontrunners to be the next manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Both Dave Roberts, of 2004 ALCS Game 4 stolen base fame, and Gabe Kapler, who played in Boston from 2003 to 2006, have given impressive interviews in their chance to take the reigns in Chavez Ravine.

Photo by Bob DeChiara/USA Today Sports Images