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

I’m writing about Noe Ramirez here, I promise. But first, some fun facts about the ragtag band of journeymen I’ve covered so far. In 2017, players that have been recapped by your’s truly…

• played in 23 total games
• pitched 13.1 innings
• surrendered 14 earned runs
• scored seven runs
• allowed three home runs
• hit zero home runs
• struck out eight batters
• were struck out 14 times
• allowed a batting average of .350
• batted .242
• posted a combined WAR of 0.1

I believe it is actually impossible to draw up a four-man group of players on this roster who had less of an overall impact on the franchise than these four. Three of the four are no longer with the organization, after all, and the only one that remains (Elias) is far from guaranteed to make the majors in 2018. The only other pitchers to pitch fewer innings than Kendrick — who paced this group with a whopping 8.2 innings pitched — were Carson Smith (who will contribute this year), Kyle Martin (who is still here, at least as minor league filler), and Mitch Moreland (the starting first baseman). Three hitters recorded fewer plate appearances than Davis: Steve Selsky (who was pretty bad but is still around), Blake Swihart (a post-hype sleeper), and Chase d’Arnaud (who needed one plate appearance to top Davis in fWAR). It’s the perfect storm of both barely playing and playing terribly.

How do you write 35 words for every plate appearance Rajai Davis made this season? How do you make an entire article out of Roenis Elias’ two batters faced? In some ways, these are the best Roster Recaps — it’s like writing with the difficulty set to Very Hard. I have a sense of investment in these guys now; it’s about finding value in the little things. They might be bad at baseball, but they’re great at being my baseball sons.

Or something. I don’t know, it’s 23 games, man!

Let’s talk about Noe Ramirez, or something.

What Went Right:

Not much. Ramirez’s best performance of the season came after being claimed by the Angels, where he posted a 2.16 ERA and struck out 32% of the batters he faced… in 8.1 innings pitched. As a minor leaguer, Ramirez was fine; a 3.51 ERA and 10.5 strikeouts per nine innings is pretty okay, but it’s nothing spectacular. I guess it sucks a little bit to lose a very cheap reliever with a good minor league track record under team control through 2023, but there was really nothing about Noe Ramirez’s 2017 that the Red Sox will miss.

What Went Wrong:

The great irony of me recapping Noe Ramirez is that Ramirez was waived in August to make room for one of my previous recaps: Roenis Elias. When you’re waived for the guy who faced two major league batters all season, you probably had a rough year.

Ramirez is basically just a Quad-A reliever, which is probably the least valuable kind of Quad-A player. He pitched hundreds of innings for Boston’s farm system and had a fairly strong track record, but any time he came up to the big show, he got shelled. Interestingly, each of his three major league stints (2015, 2016, and 2017) lasted exactly 13 innings. This was certainly the best one, but it still came with a FIP north of 4.00. It’s a shame that a long-time organizational guy like Ramirez didn’t stick with the major league squad, but considering he’s now 28 years old,  it’s not much of a loss.

What to Expect:

Well, Noe Ramirez is an Angel now, so for the Red Sox… nothing. Maybe he finally sticks around in Los Angeles and contributes in some kind of middle relief role, but more likely, I’d expect 60 innings in Triple-A with a respectable ERA and some strikeouts. Not great, not terrible, just fine. That should be the subtitle for all these recaps, honestly.

Photo by Kelley L Cox — USA TODAY Sports

Upon reviewing the barren wasteland that is the list of remaining players in need of recaps, I quickly realized two things. First, that I had forgotten Kyle Kendrick was a baseball player who exists. I think I can be forgiven for that one, considering prior to last season, he hadn’t made a major league start since 2015, and it’s not like Kyle Kendrick was some kind of baseball royalty. His best season in terms of fWAR was 2.0 in 2013, and his ERA that year was 4.70 — I didn’t forget Clayton Kershaw here.

That said, the second, more pressing thing was that I have no memory of Kyle Kendrick ever participating in Red Sox baseball in any form. The information simply does not exist in my brain. He played for Boston? Last year? Are you sure?

This required research. I’m no encyclopedia of obscure Boston athletes — as much as I’d like to be — but I felt like I’d remember if a guy who has over 1,200 major league innings under his belt pitched for my team. I quickly ran a search to find out if Kyle Kendrick was, in fact, a Boston baseball player for some length of time. Sure enough, there he was. Fangraphs, Baseball-Reference, and BP all tell me he had a 12.96 ERA in two starts last year. Wow!

This goes deeper than just my faulty memory, though. This is a conspiracy. “Surely Kyle Kendrick can’t still be a Red Sox pitcher, right?” I asked myself, and for a glorious moment, I felt redeemed. Wikipedia said that he was, in fact, a free agent. To the best of my knowledge, he still is. But I’m not sure if my knowledge can be trusted anymore.

I looked through the Kyle Kendrick Google results a little further, certain in my belief that I am the only human to have Googled Kyle Kendrick’s name in the past six months apart from maybe Kyle Kendrick himself. On the second page, I discover an NBC Sports article: “Kyle Kendrick will end up in Boston’s rotation eventually.” The article was written by Evan Drellich back in March of last year, but the time stamp on Google itself? Seven days ago.

You might think I’m losing my mind. I’m not completely sure on the subject myself, but for this, I have receipts.

Why did it display this way? The Google search was performed on January 31, 2018, so it’s not like the article was seven days ago last year. Is Google trying to say Kyle Kendrick will be back? Is this a threat?

Why seven days? Why that particular article? Why were the other articles fine? Why Kyle Kendrick?

I don’t think I completely know the status of Schrodinger’s Kendrick at this point. I think he started two games for the Red Sox last season, and I think he’s no longer a member of the team. I’ve scrawled “Kyle Kendrick is gone. Don’t believe his lies.” into my hand in the event this is some kind of Memento situation.

I supposed I should talk about Kyle Kendrick’s actual performance during his alleged Red Sox stint last season, despite my mind having been torn in two. Kyle Kendrick started two games last season, gave up 12 runs, and lost them both. He was outrighted off the 40-man roster and ended up with Pawtucket, where he finished with 101.2 innings pitched and an ERA of 5.67.

And that about covers it. That’s all I’ve got on Kyle Kendrick. I’ll be pondering the mystery of his Red Sox career — along with the state of my own sanity — for some time. Was he ever really here? Will he be back? Did he kidnap Rick Porcello and pretend to be him the rest of the season? It’s hard to say.

Please sign J.D. Martinez, Dave. Give me something, anything else to think about.

What Went Right:

I’ll, uhh, get back to you on that one.

What Went Wrong:

He lost his only two games and I lost my sanity.

What to Expect:

That I will forget Kyle Kendrick again mere minutes after I submit this recap.

Photo by Steve Mitchell — USA TODAY Sports

History is littered with pitchers who showed up out of nowhere, pitched well for half a season or so, then got shelled so badly their careers were over. But Doug Fister isn’t Kason Gabbard, Aaron Small, or Devern Hansack (seriously, real guy). Fister has had real actual success before in the form of a five win season (2011) and several three win seasons besides. He’s a guy with a legitimate career, who has, in the not distant past, made many hitters out. He’s won many games! He received some Cy Young votes! Three years ago is not that long!

And still, since receiving those Cy votes, Fister has been about as desirable as Gabbard, Small, or Hansack are right now. Last season he posted 4.64 ERA with some subpar strikeout and walk numbers with the Nationals. Couple that with a minor home run issue and *flash forward* you get a guy on his fourth organization in three seasons. Now add in the fact that pitchers at his age (33) don’t tend to suddenly get much better and you get my immediate reaction of “Fluke!” Didn’t the Red Sox just try this exact thing with Kyle Kendrick?

However, as some are quite fond of pointing out, pitchers are human beings and not spreadsheets, so this kind of thing, while not common, has happened. Rich Hill, anyone? Also, not everyone is Kyle Kendrick. This is a researched fact. So Fister. Is he any good?

The first and easiest starting point is to compare his ERA to his FIP. FIP attempts to take the luck of good (or bad) fielders and good (or bad) timing out of ERA. It’s not without its warts, but comparing FIP to ERA is a good quick-’n-dirty way of seeing how lucky a pitcher is. Fister’s ERA is 3.91 and his FIP is 3.99 so by FIP at least, Fister has come by his results honestly.

But we can’t sleep soundly yet because another and slightly different form of this is xFIP which is like FIP but controls for home run rate by ‘fixing’ the number of homers the pitcher ‘should have’ given up. Fister’s xFIP is 4.36, which is to say he’s gotten a bit lucky in terms of allowing home runs. Thing is though, it just so happens that the league wide ERA this season is 4.36, so even that number would be pretty valuable considering where the Red Sox got Fister and what they gave up for him. But if you exclude relievers from the league wide sample, the league wide ERA jumps to 4.49, so even adjusting Fister’s ERA twice has him at better than league average.

So the numbers like him, but what happened to the guy who wasn’t re-signed by Washington, cut by the Astros, and couldn’t reach the majors in the Angels organization?

So the numbers like him, but what happened to the guy who wasn’t re-signed by Washington, cut by the Astros, and couldn’t reach the majors in the Angels organization? It’s hard to say. That’s not that there aren’t differences between the two Fisters. There are, it’s just tough to suss out what is and what isn’t important. But let’s try anyway!

The first thing that jumps out about Fister’s 2017 other than his ERA is his ground ball rate, which sits, tantalizingly like a pie on a counter, at 50.2 percent. Fister is a sinkerball pitcher so perhaps that rate shouldn’t come as a surprise. Indeed it’s not too far off his career ground ball rate of 48.4 percent. But compare it to his last two seasons which were 44.6 percent and 45.3 percent. Those are big differences. He’s getting more grounders this season. So that’s one thing.

Another is how he’s getting that ground ball rate. You might think he would be throwing more sinkers. Sinkers equal ground balls, right? Well, maybe not so much in this case. He’s thrown fewer sinkers compared to last season and the season before that, though those percentages have bounced around during his career. In lieu of some of those sinkers, Fister is throwing a cutter. He’s always thrown the cutter throughout his career, but this is the most he’s ever thrown it as a percentage of his pitching mix. In 2016 and 2015 Fister cut way back on his cutter usage but now it’s back. It’s getting very slightly more horizontal movement but less vertical movement. And he’s throwing it faster (by 1/2 a mph). Is any of that good? Maybe? The fact that he keeps throwing it and that he’s had success probably tells us it’s not bad.

One notable difference between this season and Fister’s recent past is his velocity. Velocity is key for a guy like Fister who depends on movement and location for outs. That’s maybe a strange sentence to read but it’s true. A slight uptick in velocity for Fister could give him new life on his pitches, and that slight uptick is exactly what he’s got. The velocity on Fister’s sinker is up to the highest (89.83 mph) it’s been since his 2011 season when it was 90.68. Admittedly we’re talking about tenths of a mph here so it’s unclear what the actual difference is for hitters, but there’s two things we do know. First is that pitchers Fister’s age typically experience a velocity loss, so anything that isn’t a loss is, in effect, a gain. Second, hitters are telling us about the effectiveness of Fister’s pitches through their inability to repeatedly square them up.

One reason for Fister’s success this season could be if he were to face an inordinate number of lousy hitting teams. Facing bad lineups will make any pitcher look good, or at least better. So I went through his game logs and ranked the teams he’s faced based on their runs scored at the moment of his writing (for example: Angels are 21st in runs scored), then I averaged them out. As it turns out, the average offense Fister has faced is ranked 14th. Almost exactly average. So that’s not it.

If a slight note of caution is to be sounded it’s due to his walks. Fister has walked 9.9 percent of the hitters he’s faced, a number well above any he’s posted in any season in his career. So far it’s been offset by a big jump in strikeout rate to 20.8 percent from last season’s 14 percent. Perhaps that’s the work of the velocity increase coupled with throwing more cutters. In any case, the walk rate itself is fine as long as the strikeouts are there, but if the strikeouts go back to rates resembling last season’s, the walks will become very difficult to overcome.

Through all of this though Doug Fister appears to be the same guy he’s always been. His strikeouts and walks are up a bit, but they’re not way up in a silly way. He’s not generating ridiculous numbers of ground balls or fly balls, nor is he throwing a new pitch or from a different angle. He’s been neither extraordinarily lucky nor unlucky and faced perfectly average competition along the way. He’s not bad nor is he fantastic. He’s just Doug Fister: tall dude in a hat. That’s not bad for the Red Sox though. In fact, it’s pretty fantastic. That’s the word that should come to mind when thinking of Doug Fister’s season.

Photo by Kim Klement – USA TODAY Sports

Best Game

There have been quite a few gems in the first half, so picking one was predictably difficult. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that watching exciting highlights is easy.

With that said, the winner, as is the case with most things, is Mookie Betts. On July 1st, Betts went 4-6 with two homers and eight RBIs. It was the second time in less than a calendar year that Betts had 8 RBI in a game, which is absurd.

If you wanted to give the award to Andrew Benintendi for his five-hit, two-homer, six-RBI game in Texas that was capped off with a highlight-reel catch in left, I wouldn’t stop you. But we’re an analytics-focused site, and 8 > 6 (by 2!) so Markus gets the award. Way to go Markus.

Runner-up: Andrew Benintendi vs. Texas

Worst Game

One of Pablo Sandoval’s probably. (ed. note: this is extremely likely.)

Best Pitching Performance 

Chris Sale, 4/20 (nice) vs. Toronto: 8 IP, 4 H, 0 ER, 13 K, BB

Sale’s been as advertised, posting a 2.08 FIP over 18 starts so far. The following is a list of statistics that he’s posting career bests in this year:

H/9 – 6.6
BB/9 – 1.6
WHIP – 0.90
cFIP – 59

He’s also on pace to break 7 WARP for the first time in his career. He started the All-Star game for the AL, and barring some sort of disaster (please god no) he’s in line to win his first Cy Young. He’s only gone less than six innings once all year and has hit double-digit strikeouts in 10 of his 18 starts. Ironically enough, he registered a no-decision in that April 20th gem, so here’s the space to get angry about wins and losses again. It’s been a blast to watch Sale pitch every five days this year. Hopefully Joe Kelly gave him one of those ‘He’s the Ace’ shirts.

Runner-up: Drew Pomeranz

Worst Pitching Performance

Kyle Kendrick, 5/10 vs. MIL: 4.1 IP, 10 H, 6 ER, 2 K, BB

The Kyle Kendrick Spot Start Campaign came to a swift and painful end that night in Milwaukee, as Kendrick hasn’t been seen since. With Doug Fister being fine I guess and Eduardo Rodriguez ready to come back after the break, we’ve probably seen the last of Kendrick in a Red Sox uniform.

Runner-up: Rick Porcello.

Most Surprising Hitter 

Tzu-Wei Lin (!!)

This is admittedly what being a prisoner of the moment looks like, but sometimes being a prisoner of the moment is fun. In 15 games since being called up, Lin has hit .333/.435/.436 with a bunch of singles and two triples. While he’s never hit much in his time spent in the Red Sox system, he did look competent last year, hitting .302/.379/.419 over 48 games in Double-A Portland. His return to Earth is coming soon, but he’s been a fun story at 3rd base for the last two weeks, which is more than any other third baseman on the roster can claim.

Runner-up: Mitch Moreland and his broken toe.

Most Disappointing Hitter 

Chris Young.

For being a lefty-crusher, he sure isn’t crushing very many lefties. He’s hitting .245 against them this season, a 20-point decrease from his career average (.266). His 2017 wRC+ against lefties is 72. Seventy-two. He’s yet to take one deep, and has a .038 ISO against them this year. He hasn’t even been unlucky against them, either. Just kind of bad. He’s been especially bad at home against them, hitting .095 over 23 plate appearances. Luckily, the Red Sox outfield doesn’t necessarily need him to hit in order to keep winning, but after a great 2016, it’s been a bummer to see Young struggle.

Runner-up: The team’s power as a whole.

Best Home Run

Retire his number now.

Photo by Jasen Vinlove – USA TODAY Sports

The Red Sox handled David Ortiz’s retirement and the subsequent loss of his offensive prowess by doubling down on run prevention with the trade for Sale. That deal brought in one of the premier starters in baseball, but it also added a seventh to what had already been six Red Sox starters, though the trade of Clay Buchholz to Philadelphia brought that number back down to six again. Still, six is one too many and Rodriguez, by virtue of his age (23) but mostly his remaining minor league options was the odd man out. Now, oh how things have changed. 

Now David Price is out for the foreseeable future and maybe longer. Now Drew Pomeranz has a sore triceps muscle in addition to any lingering issues from last season’s injury. Now Steven Wright is fully healthy, but is 32 and coming off a shoulder injury sustained from sliding into second while pinch running. He may pitch 200 innings this year, or he may pull a lat stabbing a particularly frisky juice box with a plastic straw and spend the season rehabbing. That’s three-fifths of the rotation that ranges from actively injured to remarkably fragile. 

Of course, that’s the nature of pitching. The next pitch could always be the last one. That speaks to the importance of depth because not every team can be the 2016 Blue Jays and get 29 starts or more from five different guys. This is why Rodriguez has taken on so much importance of late. Not only is he healthy but he’s not any of Boston’s starting pitching depth, which consists of Rockies cast-off Kyle Kendrick and the stalled careers of former prospects Brian Johnson and Henry Owens. Johnson is coming off a lost season due to anxiety issues and, though he seems to be feeling better, his pitching has looked rusty to say the least. For Owens it’s the same old control problems that he’s never been able to shake. Kendrick has looked quite good but, again, it’s Spring Training, and we’re talking about a pitcher who A) hasn’t pitched in the big leagues since 2015, and B) put up an ERA over six that season. Right now the fewer innings pitched by those three, the better the Red Sox will be. 

Every game started by former sixth starter Rodriguez is a game the Red Sox don’t have to dip into that nonexistent depth.

Starting pitching depth not withstanding, it seems fair to say after looking at Boston’s roster that this could be a very good baseball team. PECOTA projects them for first in the East by three games. But the more games Kendrick starts, the more games the bullpen has to soak up after Owens throws 50 pitches and can’t get out of the second, the further down the standings the Red Sox will plummet. Every game started by former sixth starter Rodriguez is a game the Red Sox don’t have to dip into that nonexistent depth. As good as the Red Sox could be, they’re in no position to throw games away.

So that’s why Rodriguez is important. He’s a starter with an arm attached, a healthy shoulder, a healthy elbow, and his name isn’t Kyle Kendrick or Henry Owens. That’s a good start! But might Rodriguez actually be good in 2017? I should start by noting PECOTA isn’t especially jazzed about him, pegging him for just under a win (0.8 WARP), a 4.18 ERA, and eight quality starts out of 16. Meh. What PECOTA doesn’t know though is that Rodriguez struggled with his command, with pitch tipping, and with just about everything following a knee injury during spring training. After giving up nine runs in 2.2 innings to Tampa in late June, Rodriguez was sent to Pawtucket. At the time of his demotion, he had thrown 29.1 innings on the year and given up 29 runs. 

When he came back, he was a completely different pitcher. In the next 77.2 innings he gave up 28 runs, one fewer than he had in his first six starts. He struck out 79 of 321 hitters he faced, or 24.6 percent. For some context, last season Jon Lester struck out 24.8 percent of the hitters he faced. David Price struck out 24 percent, Jake Arrieta K’d 23.9 percent, and Cole Hamels 23.6 percent. That’s good company. Of course, it means less if comes with a ton of walks and homers. After returning to the bigs, Rodriguez walked 8.7 percent of the hitters he faced (8.4 if you don’t count intentional walks) and he gave up seven homers, or one every other start, which is perfectly reasonable. The guy who went down to Pawtucket was not a major league-quality pitcher, but the guy who came back was a number two in most starting rotations. 

There isn’t anything in those numbers that looks unsustainable either. The BABIP was good but not ridiculous, the batted ball profile matched the results, and so did the strikeouts, walks, and homers. The Rodriguez that spent the second half in Boston was legitimately a very good pitcher.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Rodriguez’s reemergence was the alteration of his pitch mix. When he started the season he was throwing mostly fastballs with the occasional changeup and a very occasional cutter. Only rarely would he employ a slider. Then after coming back from Triple-A, the cutter disappeared, usage of the change dropped from 18 percent to eight percent, and the slider became his favorite off-speed pitch. That changed bit-by-bit, month-by-month until September and October, when the change had reemerged as the preeminent out-pitch, though the slider remained a frequent offering. Overall, Rodriguez seems to have learned not to lean too heavily on any one pitch. 

With the obvious caveat that Spring Training stats aren’t extremely meaningful, we haven’t seen anything this spring to indicate we should expect anything other than the second half Rodriguez, the good Rodriguez, this season. His velocity is good, his strikeouts are there, and his control looks strong. 

He will have bad starts. All pitchers have them. And for all the excitement of this article, Rodriguez has shown a proclivity towards injury in his career, including tweaking a knee in winter ball this past December. While it is fair to be concerned about those injuries, the positive is that none have been arm or shoulder injuries. If one really wants to paint the linings silver, you could say they’ve even functioned so as to limit Rodriguez’s innings over the past few seasons, which should hopefully keep his arm fresher. In reality though, no injury is ever good, but there’s no real reason to think Rodriguez is especially injury prone either.

With the precarious position the Red Sox find themselves with regard to the starting rotation, it’s good they have someone like Eduardo Rodriguez poised to take the next step. In fact, Rodriguez really already took that next step last season. Now he just needs to do it for longer than 77 innings. We already know he is someone who can make up for injuries suffered by his rotation-mates, and keep the team from having to put too many weak band-aids on sweaty hands. This year though a once strong Red Sox rotation had him on the outside looking in, but now the opportunity to be more than just a guy has arisen. Now he may just be the guy who holds this thing together. It’s funny how things work out sometimes. 

Photo by Aaron Doster – USA TODAY Sports

Despite a minor medical miracle taking place, the biggest ripple effect the news had on the team was the sudden spotlight placed on its starting pitching depth. There was the indictment of Dave Dombrowski because he traded Clay Buchholz for pennies on the dollar. That was followed by speculation about what it would take to trade for another ace, because apparently that’s the Red Sox’s only move now. Those zesty takes were followed, however, by the most daunting exercise of all: a look at the team’s internal options. The Red Sox have about a half dozen options to turn to in case of a serious injury, and only one of them inspires one ounce of confidence. Quantity certainly doesn’t assure quality, which is ultimately a pickle that the Red Sox know they’re one sore elbow from having to address. From the lot of current Triple-A guys, here’s one (now incredibly relieved that this is a hypothetical exercise) fan’s guess at who would be best option to turn to.

The (hopefully, presuming I cherry-pick the right stats to show) Good

Eduardo Rodriguez/Steven Wright

This one comes with a bit of a caveat, because it’s more likely than not that they both make a significant number of starts this season even with Price being presumably healthy. It’s still too early to tell how the Red Sox are going to handle dealing with the fact that they have two spots for three starters; it seems that Rodriguez is ahead of both Wright and Pomeranz when it comes to health, but Rodriguez is also the only one of the three with options left. There’s obviously a desire for patience and precaution when it comes to Rodriguez, but there’s also no doubt that the Red Sox would prefer to have a lefty who’s shown flashes of being a front-line starter when healthy pitch more frequently than two arms who, while dependable, have significantly lower ceilings (All-Star appearances aside).

In the long run, Wright just feels like the odd man out, which is entirely unfair. Rodriguez is never going to be a spot-starter, and the team will ride with Pomeranz a little longer – whether they want to or not – based on what they saw from him in San Diego and what they gave up to get him. That being said, there are much worse things than having an All-Star caliber knuckleballer as the backup option. Wright is the most versatile of the bunch, which ironically means he’s the most likely to get sent to the bullpen. Baseball sucks sometimes.

The (probably, but maybe not?) Bad

Kyle Kendrick

He gets placed in this tier simply because he’s logged a bunch of major league innings over his career and would presumably limit the damage a tad more effectively than anyone who follows. There’s not a lot that stands out when you look at his numbers, as he’s been roughly a replacement-level pitcher since he broke through with the Phillies in 2007. If there’s something positive to be said about Kendrick, it’s that he’s dependable – only once in his career has he pitched fewer than 100 innings (2009). He doesn’t strike people out (career 12.7 K%) and his walk numbers (career 6.6 BB% and 2.59 BB/9) are neither fantastic nor alarming. He has a tendency to give up homers (career 1.24 HR/9 and 12% HR/FB), although playing in Colorado last season surely played into the career-worst performance he put up in those categories last season. He’s a prime candidate for some small bounce-back this season, but even a positive regression to career norms isn’t thrilling anyone.

Brian Johnson

I’m aware that having Johnson this high up could be seen as a stretch and I’ve admittedly always been higher on him than is probably accurate, but hear me out: when Johnson isn’t hurt, the numbers say he could be a useful insurance policy. Staying healthy has always been his biggest battle, but it wasn’t that long ago when he was putting up 118 innings of impressive baseball (1.75 ERA, 3.15 FIP, 7.55 K/9 in 2014) in Double-A. Take this for what it’s worth, but the reports about Johnson from camp so far have been overwhelmingly positive. David Price he is not, but it only gets worse from here, so for now, a healthy Johnson should – but probably won’t – get a crack at the majors before any of his Pawtucket teammates.

Hector Velazquez

For the time being, Velazquez represents the least reliable yet most intriguing option in this tier. He’s only pitched in Mexico, and his numbers, barring last season, are incredibly average. To his credit, he put up a 2.79 FIP while striking out just over eight batters per nine innings and walking a hair above one (!) batter per nine as well. Those are good numbers, and numbers that the Red Sox would be thrilled with from a depth/bullpen option. He throws hard, but so did Daniel Bard (is that comparison less sad if it rhymes?). Velazquez represents an intriguing option who’s more than likely going to end up spending most of the season in the minors with an outside shot of helping the bullpen at some point later in the summer.

The Ugly

Roenis Elias/Henry Owens

I’ll group these two together because you’re not any more interested in reading separate entries for these guys than I am writing them. It’s sad that we’ve arrived here, considering there was, at one point, pretty substantial (albeit cautious) optimism for both of these guys not too long ago. At this point in both of their careers, they simply just don’t have the command to be successful or even viable major league options. Owen’s well-documented struggles have helped distract from the slightly-less-horrible-but-still-concerning stats that Elias has been putting up under essentially the same workload. While a look at their numbers suggests that they’re more similar than not, previous call-ups over the last season or two suggest that the team still views Owens as the preferred option. Whether that makes sense or not – Elias is basically Owens with one fewer walk per nine innings – is an argument for another time. Still – either one of them getting substantial innings on the major league roster would indicate that something went very, very wrong. If the Red Sox are truly as all-in as their last two offseason’s worth of moves have indicated, there’s no way they seriously roll the dice with either Elias or Owens.

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