The 2018 Red Sox have already had their fair share. I tried to do my best to nail down the ones that have been the most vital to their hot start, and the most surprising.

Rick Porcello keeping the ball in the yard

Porcello gave up a league-high 38 home runs in 2017, resulting in a ghastly 1.7 dingers per nine innings. It was a career high, and one of the driving factors behind his 4.65 ERA.

This season has been the opposite. No, like the total opposite. He hasn’t even given up a single home run yet in 25.2 innings pitched.

And he’s had plenty of chances. He’s faced the New York Yankees, a squad which boasts the vaunted Giancarlo Stanton-Aaron Judge-Gary Sanchez power trio. He held them to a pair of hits over seven scoreless innings. Then came the Angels, who lead the American League with 26 dingers.

He and Chris Sale have combined to create the league’s most dominant one-two punch thus far. As I wrote last week, Porcello’s success is the team’s X-factor. Him laying off the home run balls and piling on the strikeouts certainly helps.

Mitch Moreland thriving in limbo

When the Red Sox added J.D. Martinez, everything improved… aside from Mitch Moreland’s clarity towards his role for 2018 and beyond.

Mitch Moreland was more than serviceable as the team’s starting first baseman last season. With Martinez in the fold, a bit of a logjam has been created at the position. Martinez moved Hanley Ramirez mostly back to first, as he has rotated between designated hitter and outfield.

That leaves Moreland, who’s been in proverbial limbo, bouncing from the bench to the starting nine, and from first base to designated hitter.

If you want to put it into basketball terms, he’s the sixth-man. A late game defensive substitution at first. A starter when Martinez is in the outfield and Ramirez is DH’ing. He’s all over the place, and he’s been killing it.

He’s hitting .343 in his new role, with an OPS of 0.986. Against the Angels on Wednesday, he went 3-for-4 with a home run, a walk and three RBI.

If this Boston team has real World Series aspirations, depth will be key. If Mitch Moreland can keep contributing like he has (although hitting .355 for the rest of the season might be a tad lofty) the depth will be alright.

The team’s 5-1 record against New York and Los Angeles

Was anyone exactly surprised when the Red Sox opened the season 8-1 against the rebuilding Tampa Bay Rays and Miami Marlins? Not exactly. Anything less might have been a disappointment.

But to follow that up with a 5-1 record against one team expected to win its division by many pundits (New York) and another team leading the AL West (Los Angeles) all while mixing in a sweep of the Orioles? That’s a real resume booster.

The Sox have done it in a number of ways. With pitching, with hitting. In blowouts and it close wins. This, more than anything, is optimistic to see as we begin to reach the point of the season where its decided whether teams are “for real” or not.

Header photo by Richard Mackson — USA TODAY Sports

The performance of the pitching depth has been the most surprising, as Johnson and Hector Velazquez have combined to allow just two runs in 11.2 innings pitched. They’ve taken care of business where business needed to happen: in Florida, against both the Rays and the Marlins. Granted, we’re not talking turn-of-the-decade-Yankees juggernauts here, but outings like that are always very positive, especially in an environment where baseballs are being launched into the stands more than ever. Eduardo Rodriguez came back a little earlier than expected and had middling results for the first game, and with Drew Pomeranz still about a week away from returning, we’ll be seeing a little more of Johnson, with Velazquez in the bullpen for now.

On the position player side, that depth is about to get tested. Eduardo Nunez is a bench guy already playing due to Dustin Pedroia recovering from knee surgery, but as far as bench players getting a lot of playing time, he’s really the only one. That’s about to change, thanks to the weird, freak injury Xander Bogaerts suffered on Sunday. At first glance, it seemed like a rolled ankle or something just as innocuous, but it was a fair bit worse than that:

Red Sox announce Xander Bogaerts to DL with “small crack” in talus bone

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) April 9, 2018

Well, that’s a bummer. Thankfully, it’s looking like two weeks until Bogaerts returns. I really feel like crediting the Red Sox for actually letting Bogaerts heal up this time, but that seems like the sort of thing they should do in the first place, not let them play for three months with a bad wrist.

And so the Sox look for a stand-in. Deven Marrero is long gone, as he was traded to the Arizona Diamondbacks towards the end of Spring Training. Tzu-Wei Lin was called up to take Bogaerts’ roster spot, and he can play both middle infield positions, but he’ll probably take a backseat at shortstop to Eduardo Nunez, while he and Brock Holt trade off at second base. No one else can readily play shortstop for the Red Sox at the moment, and you can’t really count on Marco Hernandez showing up anytime soon, as he’s on the 60-day disabled list, and won’t appear in game action until the end of May. Mitch Moreland is strictly a first baseman, and Blake Swihart is a catcher with corner infield experience in a pinch. There’s not much past Nunez, Lin, and Holt for middle infielders, unless you want to go deep into the minors.

The quality of the middle infielders is just alright. I’d like to be higher on these guys, but we’ve seen their shortcomings. Nunez is fine, Holt is an uninspiring player nowadays, and there’s a pretty wide range of outcomes for Lin should he play a lot over the next couple weeks. I’d honestly like to see more Lin and less Holt, but I’ve been very down on Holt for a long while — with good reason! — so I feel that’s more of a personal preference. Either way, there’s going to be a lot of shuffling around second base.

The Bogaerts injury really forces them to dig deep for infielders, and it’s not like this is a common occurrence.

Injuries like this are really testing the Red Sox early on. It’s not a test to see if they can keep up their winning ways or production — they have above-average regulars at nearly every position. The Bogaerts injury really forces them to dig deep for infielders, and it’s not like this is a common occurrence. Bogaerts is a pretty healthy player, as he’s played 144 games or more in every season since he took hold of a starting job in 2014, so it’s not as if the Sox were lax in looking for a backup here. Bogaerts doesn’t often go down like this, and if it wasn’t already obvious, the “Bogaerts is soft!” complaint doesn’t really hold up.

The Red Sox were more prepared to cover for Pedroia’s absence instead, but with Bogaerts’ injury, it forces them to spread that depth thin across two positions, and potentially field someone like Holt for a not-inconsequential amount of time. That’s a sub-par outcome, for reasons including his poor production in the last two years. But this is what happens when depth is needed, especially for someone that really never needs a break — you’re forced to use guys who aren’t always cut out to be starters at certain positions. It’s times like this when you miss Marrero’s defense, even if that meant biting the bullet when it came to his offense.

This could all just be handwringing. It’s only two weeks or so! The Nunez-Holt-Lin hydra could perform spectacularly and emulate Johnson’s and Velazquez’s starts to the season. That is also possible! All of these players have had very notable runs of success before, for example: Brock Holt, 2015 American League All-Star. Personally, I’d fall on the pessimist side of things here, if only because I keep low expectations in general.

But this is why depth exists. None of them are supposed to be as good as the starter, or else they’d be, y’know, starting. The Red Sox are a stacked team with a lot of good players, and having one of the starting nine be “just alright” won’t trip them up, but it’s probably going to be a bit bland without Bogaerts out there. At least he’ll be back soon, and we can worry no more.

Photo by Greg M. Cooper — USA TODAY Sports

Regardless of his escapades on the field, Ramirez has been incredibly endearing as a player. From his infectious attitude to his trademark swagger, there’s something to like with him, no matter who you are. From shadowboxing during a live interview to staring down the camera, Ramirez is a guy you really want to root for, because when he’s good, everything is great, and someone being as contagiously fun as him is something you don’t see all that often.

The problem is those aforementioned escapades. We look back on his 2016 season fondly because of two major aspects: he was healthy and he was productive. The former is a requirement for the latter, yes, but that’s the same with every player. The problem is that the Red Sox would have him play despite nagging injuries. You probably remember him crumpling his shoulder during his disastrous outfield experiment in early May 2015, and while his first half that season was solid, with a .223 ISO and a .816 OPS, he cratered in the second half, crashing all the way down to a .449 OPS before being benched for the youngsters later on. 2017 was more of the same, although to a lesser extent. Ramirez started this season on a strict diet of starts as the designated hitter, and seldom saw the field due to a shoulder injury that limited him to 17 starts at first. While his first half in 2017 came with a solid .794 OPS, he once again faded in the second half, with his OPS dropping 100 points, his plate discipline eroding, and his batted-ball profile heading south.

It’s hard to dismiss what Ramirez has done so far, which admittedly is a very small sample, but it’s encouraging for the oldest player on the 25-man roster.

Is it fair to place the blame for playing poorly through injury squarely on Ramirez’s shoulders? Probably not, no, because 1) his desire to play wasn’t put in check by a Red Sox team that hasn’t had a good grasp on injury management for years, 2) injuries like 2015’s can be unexpected and freakish, and 3) quite frankly, I’m scared that putting that much weight on those shoulders could injure them again. Nevertheless, it became really easy to write him off coming into 2018, with the signings of Mitch Moreland and J.D. Martinez both poised to take plate appearances from the aging infielder. Ramirez said he was healthy, and had a healthy Spring Training, so maybe we were just underrating him, because he’s had one hell of a start to the season so far.

Maybe he just likes playing in Florida. I don’t know. Either way, it’s hard to dismiss what Ramirez has done so far, which admittedly is a very small sample, but it’s encouraging for the oldest player on the 25-man roster (until Dustin Pedroia comes back). Of all the optimistic stuff we’ve seen, the most intriguing has been his batted-ball profile. Yesterday, Cam Ellis wrote about the Red Sox being more aggressive on pitches in the zone, and Ramirez has certainly picked up on that. His swing percentage on pitches in the zone jumped over 10 percentage points from 2017 to a hearty 80.6 percent, and with that came a nice spike in contact rate in the zone too, jumping up to 93 percent from 86 percent in 2017. He’s swinging more, and making more contact. That’s pretty good, as long as the quality of said contact is improved, and to some extent, it has. Line drives and fly balls are slightly higher than his 2017 marks, and the grounders are disappearing. There’s a lot of pop-ups mixed in those fly balls as well, but with the six-game sample size we’re using, that’s to be expected.

But in the end, we’re still talking about that relatively tiny six-game stretch. There’s got to be something else other than hoping those numbers can play out over the next 156 games, right? Sure is! Let’s take a look at Hanley’s home run from Monday.

That’s not exactly a towering blast, but there’s a lot of strength involved. Trevor Richards hangs a slider that doesn’t catch a ton of the plate, but hovers over the outside corner. Ramirez whips it all the way around to left field for a home run. I understand Richards isn’t a mystifying pitcher, but that’s some subtly impressive power, and he doesn’t (or can’t) do that with a hurt shoulder. Those cranky joints of his are going to be the most important things when gauging how well he can do. Hanley with two healthy shoulders can hit those hanging sliders. Hanley with less than that gets eaten up by them. Imagine what he could do with a third shoulder!

It was difficult to watch that game on Monday and not think Ramirez was going to go on a tear. He hit that homer, had a single to go along with it, and was diving for baseballs on the infield dirt like he was ten years younger — which they don’t have highlight videos of, sadly, because when Hanley’s feeling good, you can tell. He emphatically fist pumps when the Red Sox turn a clutch double play. He goes all-out for hard-hit grounders and plays some empirically good defense. He shows why his goal of a 30/30 season isn’t just a pipe dream, even though everything from age to potential playing time is against him.

This is fun. This is exciting. This is what a healthy Hanley Ramirez is, and I hope he sticks around, because he makes the Red Sox so much better.

Photo by Steve Mitchell — USA TODAY Sports

Interesting spring for Devers
42 PA, 3 HR, 3 2B, 3B, 0 BB, 4 K, 1.000 OPS

— Red Sox Stats (@redsoxstats) March 20, 2018

I get that the account is referencing the fact that over 42 spring training at-bats, Devers had yet to walk, and even if that’s not actually that interesting, it got me thinking about what a good 2018 from Rafael Devers looks like.

As a quick refresher: Devers hit .284/.338/.482 in 240 plate appearances over 52 games. He crushed that shot off Chapman at Yankee Stadium in the top of the 9th inning to go along with the other nine less memorable homers. He posted a 111 wRC+, .344 wOBA, and looked surprisingly ready for major-league pitching for a 12-year-old. With that said, it wasn’t perfect. He swung at a lot of pitches, many of which were not strikes. He posted a swing percentage four percentage points higher than league average, yet only swung at strikes at a league-average clip.

It’s tempting to look at Devers’ numbers and think about what he could do with 150-ish healthy games under his belt. His offensive potential seems to a central focus this spring, and rightfully so. I think there’s a case to be made, however, that improving his defense is what’s most important towards maximizing his value to this year’s team.

By my count, Devers is the Red Sox’s fifth-most important hitter as it stands currently. The top tier belongs to Mookie Betts and J.D. Martinez, followed by Xander Bogaerts and Andrew Benintendi in no specific order. Mitch Moreland and Hanley Ramirez cancel each other out, while Jackie Bradley Jr. and Christian Vasquez provide more value on the defensive end, with the occasional hot streak sprinkled in every few weeks. Devers matching last year’s offensive production out of the middle/bottom of the order, as a 21-year-old, would be a dream come true.

Strengthening the left side of the Red Sox’ defense, however, would be more important to this team this year. Xander Bogaerts has a good glove by some metrics and a bad one by others, which is tremendously unhelpful. Bogaerts is undoubtedly a major-league shortstop, but it’s just a matter of how good of one. Andrew Benintendi has some work to do in left field, too. Neither are horrendous at their positions, but I’d be a lot more comfortable if the entire left side of the Red Sox defense wasn’t shaky at best.

Even if Devers spends long stretches of this year in a slump, the Red Sox offense should be able to carry the team into the postseason. If Devers continues playing the type of defense that gets him demoted for Deven Marrero during the playoffs, the team’s going to suffer. I love Brock Holt as much as the next guy, but depending on Holt to hold down a position for large chunks of the season just isn’t realistic anymore. Eduardo Nunez and his bad knees need to be ready to replace Dustin Pedroia and his bad knees. I’ll believe the Blake Swihart experiment when I see it outside of Florida backfields. Third base is firmly Devers’ this year, and his progression on defense is what the Red Sox need the most from him this season.

But if he wants to hit more homers off Chapman, that’s fine too.

Photo by Kim Klement — USA TODAY Sports

Presenting the full list 2017 Roster Recaps, listed with the authors that wrote them. An asterisk denotes a player who has, as of March 13th, dearly departed the Red Sox. We’ll miss them all terribly.

Catchers

• Sandy Leon (Cam Ellis)
• Blake Swihart (Jake Devereaux)
• Christian Vazquez (Brett Cowett)

Infielders

• Xander Bogaerts (Chris Teeter)
• Chase d’Arnaud* (Matt Kory)
• Rafael Devers (Kory)
• Marco Hernandez (Cowett)
• Brock Holt (Devereaux)
• Tzu-Wei Lin (Cowett)
• Deven Marrero (Cowett)
• Mitch Moreland (Cowett)
• Eduardo Nunez (Teeter)
• Dustin Pedroia (Kory)
• Hanley Ramirez (Devereaux)
• Josh Rutledge* (Cowett)
• Pablo Sandoval* (Cowett)
• Sam Travis (Teeter)

Outfielders

• Andrew Benintendi (Ellis)
• Mookie Betts (Kory)
• Jackie Bradley Jr. (Cowett)
• Rajai Davis* (Daniel Poarch)
• Steve Selsky (Ellis)
• Chris Young* (Cowett)

Pitchers

• Fernando Abad* (Ellis)
• Matt Barnes (Cowett)
• Blaine Boyer* (Cowett)
• Roenis Elias (Poarch)
• Doug Fister* (Kory)
• Heath Hembree (Kory)
• Brian Johnson (Teeter)
• Joe Kelly (Ellis)
• Kyle Kendrick* (Poarch)
• Craig Kimbrel (Cowett)
• Austin Maddox (Ellis)
• Kyle Martin (Poarch)
• Drew Pomeranz (Ellis)
• Rick Porcello (Teeter)
• David Price (Ellis)
• Noe Ramirez* (Poarch)
• Addison Reed* (Ellis)
• Eduardo Rodriguez (Cowett)
• Robbie Ross* (Cowett)
• Chris Sale (Cowett)
• Robby Scott (Cowett)
• Carson Smith (Teeter)
• Ben Taylor (Cowett)
• Hector Velazquez (Devereaux)
• Brandon Workman (Ellis)
• Steven Wright (Kory)

Header photo by Winslow Townson — USA TODAY Sports

LEAST STUPID/ONES I’M ACTUALLY KINDA INTO 

Blake Swihart is going to make the 25-man roster. 

Admittedly, it hasn’t gotten to this quite yet. BUT IT SHOULD. Swihart is doing really well in early March, which is absolutely always an indicate of how well he’ll perform over the next eight months. Still – it’s fun to see Swihart put together a run of good baseball, no matter what the calendar says. As it stands, there’s not a whole lot of power coming off the Red Sox bench (unless you think Hanley Ramirez is coming off the bench, which I think would be news to him). I think there’s a real case to be made for Swihart getting turned into a version of Brock Holt with power, and I’d be supremely here for it. He’s out of options, so something’s gotta give. I’d never put it above Dave Dombrowski to trade prospects, but Swihart playing a notable role for this team this year would be a delight.

The clubhouse is more relaxed. 

This is by no means an indictment of John Farrell. Farrell managed the team to a World Series title; he had his limitations, but teams can do much worse than John Farrell. But from a personality fit, Farrell was always better suited for 2013’s roster. As the Jon Lesters and the Jake Peavys and Shane Victorinos gave way to the Mookies, Xanders, and Andrew Benintendis, it became increasingly clear that it was no longer a great fit. Say what you want about his in-game decisions, but Farrell’s disconnect with the increasingly-young core lost him the job. Judging from the half-dozen reports about clubhouse culture this spring, players seem happier. Alex Cora brings in a reputation as a players’ manager, and it genuinely seems like people are enjoying themselves more. Maybe all these happy feelings go away when Spring Training gets old in like three days, but happy teams are fun teams.

PRETTY STUPID/ONES I GUESS I GET BUT EH, I DON’T KNOW

David Price is corrupting the younger players. 

I want to state on the record that I think this falls much farther under the first half of this category than the second. Price and his beef with the local media is well-documented, and both sides deserve their share of blame. Since I am not in the clubhouse after every game and do not live in Boston and do not actually cover the Red Sox, I obviously also don’t know what goes on in there. But Price is, by all accounts, a fantastic leader. Every team he’s been on has gone above and beyond to make that known. The Red Sox have always had a leader, the beat just didn’t like him. It goes without saying that it’s not appropriate to ambush a reporter or team employee on a plane, but do we really think Price is telling the other players to do that? Is Price really letting Rafael Devers know that the best way to deal with the local media is to stage elaborate, season-long beefs with people who write about you every single day? Price is an immensely talented pitcher and noted leader, so he can tell the younger players whatever they want for all I care.

The clock’s ticking for Xander Bogaerts.

I get it, I really do. I wanted Bogaerts to hit 30 home runs too. Nothing makes you delirious like a power-hitting shortstop prospect. Fans have spent his entire career getting angry that his standup doubles weren’t home runs. He was hurt for most of last season and “only” hit .273/.343/.403. You don’t have to look too far up the lineup to see an example of someone else whose power developed later in their careers, so it’s worth holding out hope. But in the meantime, let’s not sit around getting angry that Bogaerts is only pretty good.

EXTREMELY STUPID/SO STUPID THEY DON’T WARRANT A 2ND TITLE

The Red Sox are boring this year.

Chris Sale, David Price, Mookie Betts, Craig Kimbrel, J.D. Martinez, Xander Bogaerts, and Rafael Devers all play for the Red Sox. Andrew Benintendi does too. Their lineup is just one of the best power hitters in baseball surrounded by a bunch of young players who were top prospects. Their rotation has two Cy Young winners and Chris Sale. One of the three best closers in baseball pitches for them and his silly posture theatrics are generally fun. They’re going to play in 300 nationally televised, heavily-produced games against the ’27 Yankees incarnate this year. If these Red Sox are boring, I suggest inserting adrenaline directly into your heart.

Photo by Kim Klement — USA TODAY Sports

That offseason, the Red Sox famously brought in future Hall of Fame pitcher and future Hall of Fame-level asshole Curt Schilling to, as it turned out, co-front the rotation. They also brought in Mark Bellhorn, Terry Francona, and maybe even more importantly, Keith Foulke. It was a murderer’s row of talent, from the front office on down. As it turned out, it was just barely enough to get past the Yankees in a second consecutive ALCS Game Seven. That was elation so high it lifted my ankles off the floor.

That two-year period where the Red Sox went from so close to winning to losing to so close to losing to winning represents certainly the most intense rivalry between two teams I’ve ever experienced or endured in my lifetime. And now, dear reader, 200 words into this, here is my point. The rivalry is back, my dudes! . It’s back! The Red Sox and the Yankees are the two best teams in the division, two of the three best in the AL and probably two of the best five or six in baseball. This season, this 2018, is going to be another huge brawl of a season. They got Severino, we got Sale. They got Judge, we got Betts. They got Stanton, we got JD. So I thought it might be instructive to look and see how these two teams stack up against each other, a tale-of-the-tape, if you will, or even if you won’t.

Let’s start here. PECOTA. The PECOTA projections are here and they are spectacular. Though maybe not if you’re the Red Sox. I’ve already detailed how the Sox individual projections maybe aren’t as positive as we’d wish they were, but in the end and as we all know, games are won on the field not inside spreadsheets. Which is good, because PECOTA has the Yankees finishing seven games up on the Sox after winning 96 games. By any measure, 89 wins for the Red Sox would be an unsuccessful season, but that’s where things stand as of now. FanGraphs does their own full season projections as well, and theirs are slightly more favorable to Boston (which makes them worth mentioning). They have the Sox at 93 wins, a game behind New York’s 94. Better, but not what we’re looking for.

So let’s go deeper. Let’s go position-by-position and see who has the advantage. I’ll give you the names and their projected WARP in parentheses.

Catcher

Gary Sanchez (4.4) vs. Christian Vazquez (1.7)

This is one of the Yankees’ biggest advantages. Sanchez is, bizarrely as it is to say, perhaps as good a hitter as Judge. Vazquez is a fantastic defensive catcher, but at this point in his career, that’s mostly all he is.

Picks

PECOTA: Yankees

Matt: Yankees

First Base

Greg Bird (1.5) vs. Moreland/Ramirez (combined 0.4)

We don’t really know what Greg Bird is as a player yet, but he was as highly touted as Judge was prior to the 2017 season, so there’s some nightmare fuel for Red Sox fans. He missed most of last season with an injury and didn’t hit well upon return, but he’s young and talented so much more is expected of him this season. Moreland is Moreland, and it’s still unclear to me why the Red Sox felt it necessary with a glut of talent available on the market, to give him a two year contract. Best case he and Hanley combine to form the two sides of a successful platoon, so that could happen. Or Hanley could remember that he’s actually a great hitter.

Picks

PECOTA: Yankees

Matt: Push

Second Base

Gleyber Torres (0.1) vs. Dustin Pedroia (1.3)

Torres is yet another great Yankee prospect, but for now we don’t know what he is at the major league level. Pedroia is an aging middle infielder coming off of surgery. So who knows on either of these guys.

Picks

PECOTA: Red Sox

Matt: Red Sox

Shortstop

Didi Gregorius (1.7) vs. Xander Bogaerts (1.4)

Ever since he’s put on the pinstripes, Gregorius has continued to get better. Over a similar timeframe Bogaerts’ numbers are going in the opposite direction. I’m still a Xander Believer though, more so than Gregorius who hacks at everything and seems like exactly the kind of hitter the juiced ball turns into something he isn’t.

Picks

PECOTA: Yankees

Matt: Red Sox

Third Base

Brandon Drury (0.4) vs. Rafael Devers (1.8)

Drury is Gregorius with a more boring name. He’s got some pop but he doesn’t take walks and he’s not much beyond average defensively. That’s a fine profile for a team with Sanchez, Judge, and Stanton, but it doesn’t move the needle much either way. Devers might be the second best hitter on the Red Sox. He’s that good.

Picks

PECOTA: Red Sox

Matt: Red Sox

Outfield

Left Field: Giancarlo Stanton (3.9) vs. Andrew Benintendi (2.1)

Center Field: Aaron Hicks (1.2) vs. Jackie Bradley (1.0)

Right Field: Aaron Judge (4.0) vs. Mookie Betts (5.2)

We’re doing outfield together because this is getting long. The funny thing to me is that the Red Sox are a team built on the strength of their outfielders. Their best hitter and maybe their second best hitter are both outfielders. Their best fielders are outfielders. This is an outfield-heavy team. And yet, up against the Yankees, the strength of this Boston team falls back. The Yankees won’t be able to keep up with Boston defensively but they won’t be bad there, and what ground they lose there will more than be made up for with their bats. Good lord, those bats. The “ifs” here are health. The Red Sox players haven’t shown any predilection for missing games to injury, but Stanton and Hicks both have missed significant time over their careers.

Picks

PECOTA: Yankees

Matt: Yankees

Designated Hitter

Brett Gardner (1.8) vs. JD Martinez (2.9)

I don’t actually know who is going to DH for New York, so I picked the best Yankee projection not included in the above sections and put him here. That’s Gardner. But no leftover Yankee is going to hold a candle to J.D. Martinez in the hitting department.

Picks

PECOTA: Red Sox

Matt: Red Sox

I was going to do the pitching staffs as well, but this has already gone on too long. We’ll leave that for next time. For now, the results. Counting the outfield as three separate positions, PECOTA has Yankees 6, Red Sox 3. I have Red Sox 4, Yankees 4 with 1 push.

Any way you slice this, and I’m sure Yankee fans would disagree with my analysis, it’s close. That we know. PECOTA shows that. FanGraphs shows that. Our eyes show that. It’s going to be another fun season. Buckle the heck up.

Martinez is obviously the best power hitter on the Red Sox right now. He slashed .303/.376/.690 last year with 45 home runs.  Of all MLB hitters with at least 400 plate appearances, no one had a higher slugging percentage than Martinez (.690). His Isolated Power (.370) last year was almost 200 points higher than the league average (.171). Over the past four years, he’s posted wRC+’s of 154, 136, 141, and 166. He makes hard contact at a rate that’s close to double the league average without sacrificing his OBP in the process. The great DH-by-committee experiment of 2017 is officially over. He’s the real deal:

If the Red Sox cross the finish line on J.D. Martinez, the lineup is transformed, Dave Dombrowski will have made good on his word re: offense and ownership will have opened its wallet again.

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) February 19, 2018

Red Sox lineup is going to be actually pretty good this year, and it's not just because of JDM. They already scored 10th-most runs last year, and you'd assume that Betts/Bogaerts won't spend half of 2018 playing through injury again.

Plus, I love Cora pushing aggressiveness.

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) February 20, 2018

The Red Sox's signing of J.D. Martinez allows them to match the power of Giancarlo Stanton without paying the premium that the Yankees are paying. @zachkram:https://t.co/5fYOondCEj

— The Ringer (@ringer) February 19, 2018

Sure, there are some health concerns. He’s only reached 600 PAs once in his seven-year career and has missed at least 40 games in three of his past four seasons. His age doesn’t exactly instill much confidence either, as power hitters typically don’t age spectacularly. It should be noted, though, that Martinez’s power developed much later on than most, and he’s actually been more consistently healthy over the last four years than he was the three years prior. He’s also going to be playing the outfield significantly less often now than he was in Detroit or Arizona, mitigating the likelihood of an injury there.

Hanley Ramirez probably isn’t thrilled. Ramirez needs 497 plate appearances to vest the 2019 option and cash in on a cool 22 million guaranteed dollars. Skill-wise, he’s been a platoon guy for the last couple years, but now the ABs are going to reflect that. While I am certainly here for Hanley Ramirez, pinch-hitting hero, I have my doubts that Hanley is too.

J.D. Martinez is on the Red Sox. People thought it was going to happen in November and then December and then January and now here we are. It happened. Never has something so predictable felt like such a fun surprise. This offseason was so dumb.

Photo by Mark J. Rebilas — USA TODAY Sports

With that said, PECOTA gives us approximately 50,000 projections per team, so there’s plenty to get sincerely angry about. As literally every single Kansas City Royals fan will tell you, PECOTA doesn’t always get it right. I took a look through the Red Sox projections and cherry-picked a few, sorting them into arbitrary groups that have very little to do with one another. Let’s see how it worked!

Three Projections That Stood Out

1. Chris Sale’s 2.44 ERA

I’ll be honest: when I saw this, I immediately went to check how it stacked up against Corey Kluber’s ERA, and hell yeah, Sale’s is marginally better, so 2018 Cy Young confirmed.

But yes, that is an absurdly low ERA, even for Sale. The only two starters to post an ERA lower than 2.44 last season were Kluber (2.25) and Clayton Kershaw (2.31). It would be Sale’s lowest ERA since the 2014 season and mark the first time he ever posted back-to-back seasons with a sub-three ERA. What makes things even more interesting is that most of Sale’s other projections predict a small regression, so something doesn’t match up. This might be more of an argument against the reliability of solely looking at ERA more than anything else, but that’s a really low number.

2. Joe Kelly coming for Matt Barnes’ innings

Man, PECOTA did Barnes dirty this year. After (barely) leading the bullpen in innings pitched last year, Barnes is projected to be fourth on the totem pole this season. Craig Kimbrel, Carson Smith, and Joe Kelly are all projected to throw more innings than Barnes. The first two make sense, but it’s interesting to see Joe Kelly sneak in front of Barnes. Granted, a healthy Tyler Thornburg also means less innings to go around for righties, but Barnes really feels that the worst. Kelly threw 58 innings last year and is projected to throw 51 this season. Barnes threw 69.2 innings last season and is projected to come in at 46 this year. Kelly doesn’t get the strikeouts that Barnes does, and they both walk way too many batters, but the latter was undeniably bad in important situations last year and probably needs to earn some trust back. Maybe this should be titled “Tyler Thornburg coming for Matt Barnes’ innings” but my bet is Kelly starts the year as the seventh inning guy.

3. Rafael Devers hitting .258

Devers’ value to the 2018 Red Sox is hardly (if at all) connected to hitting for average, but .258 feels low. He hit well throughout his time in the Red Sox system and slashed .284/.338/.482 during his 60-game stint in the majors last season. Even if he can’t hit above .280 during his first full season in the bigs, .254 seems underwhelming. He’s a free-swinger who doesn’t draw a lot of walks, yet he posted a league-average OBP last season. His natural talent as a hitter makes me think his floor is closer to .265-.270, and that’d be just fine. And on that note, some quick hits:

Three Projections I Loved

1. Rafael Devers hitting 21 home runs
2. 22.9 Fielding Runs Above Average – best in the AL East, third-best in the AL, and top-five in all of baseball.
3. Mookie Betts looking a lot more like 2016 Mookie than 2017 Mookie.

Three Projections That Spooked Me

1. How similar Drew Pomeranz and David Price’s seasons look.
2. Steven Wright getting the fifth spot in the rotation over Eduardo Rodriguez.
3. Xander Bogaerts having a lower TAv than Hanley Ramirez.

Photo by Patrick McDermott — USA TODAY Sports

You may recall that in my article last week I looked at three primary factors/indicators that bode well for a Red Sox offensive bounce back. The first was age. The Red Sox lineup is mostly young and aging towards their peak seasons or already in their peak seasons. That means improvement is in the offing, very generally speaking. The second was 2018 projections. We will return to this. The third was under/over performance last season. I took the members of the 2018 Sox lineup, looked at what they did last year, and then compared that to what they were projected to do in 2017. This was an attempt to look at how the 2017 team hit compared to what a reasonable expectation would have been at the time. I found that, unsurprisingly, the team under-performed what was expected of them almost across the board.

Two of those three items — the players’ age and their under-performance relative to expectations last season — were true at the time and will remain so after this article. Now to the second item, the 2018 projections. Here’s what I wrote last week about what FanGraphs’ projections said about the Red Sox lineup:

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.

So that’s what FanGraphs has to say. PECOTA, however, sings a very different tune. Of the Red Sox starting nine, which at the moment includes Hanley Ramirez, only two are projected to improve on last year’s WARP total. Those two are Andrew Benintendi (projected to go from 1.8 WARP to 2.5) and the aforementioned Ramirez, who is projected to go from -0.1 WARP to 1.5. Other than that Rafael Devers and Christian Vazquez are both projected at about what they did last season (within 0.1 WARP either way). For Devers that’s problematic because he’s projected for most of a full season in 2018 where as last year he came up in late July. This means he’s projected for less value per plate appearance despite, well, everything about him. For Vazquez, it’s the same story, but in his case it makes more sense. His offense last season had the whiff of unsustainability about it, so should he come back to earth a bit, and thus he would need more playing time to achieve the same value.

The scary part of the projections comes when you look at the meat of the lineup. Mookie Betts is projected to drop a half win. Xander Bogaerts is projected to drop a win. Jackie Bradley is projected to drop 0.2 WARP but he was at 1.2 last season — a number I don’t agree with considering his defense. Mitch Moreland is projected to be worth 0.0 WARP. So that’s your 2018 Red Sox lineup. Only one guy over 2.5 WARP, and just two over 2.0.

This is probably a good time to point out a few things. Firstly, PECOTA doesn’t know Moreland and Xander played through injuries that very much impacted their performance. It only knows their performance, but presumably, with some health, there’s more performance in there for both those guys. It’s a similar story for Jackie Bradley’s knee injury at the start of the season.

Furthermore, these are only projections and conservative projections at that. To pull from another somewhat notable team, Aaron Judge is projected to drop three wins from last season’s total, and Giancarlo Stanton is projected to drop 4.5. So, you know, things could be worse.

On the whole, these will probably be solid projections, but no set of preseason projections is going to be wholly 100 percent correct. The Red Sox offense could be vastly improved over last season’s output, and if I had to guess, that would be where I would go. I still think last season was a dip in what was and is an overall good offensive team. I think more players are closer to their peak-age seasons, and with some more health, a more modern hitting approach implemented by the new hitting coach, and a bit more luck, the team should be better and far more productive in 2018.

That all said, PECOTA’s projections offer a different viewpoint, and indeed, a greater argument for signing someone like J.D. Martinez. Replacing or augmenting Ramirez’s production by adding Martinez could go a long way if indeed the offense falters in the way PECOTA is saying it will.

Then again…

Given the sheer number of free agents out there, all projections, depth charts, and fantasy predictions are kind of moot, aren't they? Either 100-plus guys' careers are over or they're going to sign and kick over all the dominoes. (Pardon my nihilistic mood.)

— Steven Goldman (@GoStevenGoldman) February 8, 2018

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