Posted on March 14 at 2:30 PM EST. Odds subject to change.

Pinnacle u79½ -110 BET365 u79½ -110 Sportsinteraction  u79½ -110  888Sport u79½ -110 

Boston under 79½ -110

Break it down any way you like but no matter how you do it, we promise you that somebody in the AL East is going to lose a lot more games than they win so let’s do a process of elimination of sorts. The New York Yankees are very, very good and could win 92 or more. Same with Baltimore. The Blue Jays are going to be a tough out and could easily be a contender (Pinnacle Sports has Toronto’s win total at 87½). The Rays are always good and 2024 should be no different. That leaves the Red Sox. This season win total has them playing near .500 ball, which is going to be near impossible if all the other AL East team projections are close. Boston winning 80 just doesn’t appear reasonable to us.

Red Sox fans are tired of hearing it but they’re going to hear it again. The Red Sox are defined more by who they lost than by who they have. Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts, J.D. Martinez, and company are gone, and they got virtually nothing in return for them. The grand plan failed, and so Chaim Bloom is gone too.

Losing an entire core of superstars—save for Rafael Devers—was the story of the 2022 Red Sox. It was still the main story for the 2023 Red Sox, and both of those teams finished 78-84. It’s once more the headline of the 2024 Red Sox who will probably be even worse this year because the AL East is so strong.

Boston can’t move on from the silhouettes of Betts and Bogaerts because they never erased them. They haven’t filled the blast craters of their absence with new prospects or free agents or even collapsed into a rebuild. They’ve just existed, stuck in a loop of mediocrity, anchored to the past by a future unfulfilled.

Now Craig Breslow is here. Perhaps it’s unfair to make any judgments so soon, and the club has been active to a degree this offseason. Chris Sale, Justin Turner, Alex Verdugo, and James Paxton are replaced by Lucas Giolito, Tyler O’Neill, and Vaughn Grissom. There are also some young players like Triston Casas, Ceddanne Rafaela, and Wilyer Abreu on which to pin hopes. In the present, it’s a bunch of lateral moves, reshuffling a pair of fives when the other players at the table all hold three-of-a-kind or better.

Losses happen—loss of games, loss of seasons, loss of franchise icons. The longer the team stays in limbo, the longer these losses linger. The Red Sox lost their identity a few years ago, and that has been picked apart and adjudicated ad nauseam. They remain adrift not because of what was lost, but because they never forged a new identity and moved on.

Catchers

At the catcher position - arguably the most important position in the game, the Red Sox must have strong convictions about Kyle Teel, the 47th overall prospect in MLB. Their first-round pick last year slashed .407/.475/.655 in his junior year at Virginia, then .363/.483/.495 in 26 minor-league games, rising as high as Double-A. Now, it’s one thing to hold the door open for Teel, but running it back with Connor Wong and Reese McGuire tears it off its hinges. Wong was one of only six players with -1.0 WARP or worse in 2023. Except for the fact that he runs well for a catcher, there isn’t a single skill in which he’s even MLB average. The greatest condemnation of McGwire is that he couldn’t even beat Wong for the starting job. This is arguably the worst catching tandem in the league.

Position Players

Triston Casas will be at the forefront of Boston’s identity. He only had a .398 slugging percentage in the first half of the season last year, but was one of baseball’s hottest hitters after the All-Star break and finished with a 122 DRC+ (Deserved Runs Created) and 2.2 WARP. Expect him to blow past his modest projections, especially if he makes gains defensively in his second full season.

There is an adage in football that if you have two starting quarterbacks, you really don’t have any at all. Now consider that Boston used 12 different players at second base last season. Grissom was blocked in Atlanta, especially since he’s probably overmatched at shortstop, but just because he’s no longer prospect-eligible doesn’t mean he’s not an up-and-comer at 23 years old. He didn’t hit well in 80 plate appearances last year—sample-size disclaimer—but he raked in Triple-A. If he’s a league-average player at second base, it’s an upgrade for the club over last season’s rotating cast, though Enmanuel Valdez will get some playing time there as well.

Devers is the source of the only dark green projection bar in the lineup. He’s a consistent All-Star caliber player, having posted 5.4, 3.6, and 4.0 WARP over the last three seasons. 2024 will be the first year of his 10-year extension. He’s the one Boston player for whom “more of the same,” isn’t derogatory.

It’s less than ideal that the projections suggest the worst starting infielder in Boston will be Trevor Story. Tommy John surgery may have reversed the trend of his rapidly declining arm strength, but it doesn’t explain his .250 on-base percentage and only three home runs in 43 games. They expect a full season from him—for better or worse—in the third year of his six-year deal.

Some outfields have a rigid structure, but Boston’s is more theme-and-variation. O’Neill slides into the role Verdugo vacated—underwhelming, perfectly average corner outfielder who doesn’t hit as many home runs as he ought to. Like every other right-handed-hitting acquisition in Red Sox history, the thought is that the Green Monster will reinvigorate his dormant power, only this time it’ll work…right?

Jarren Duran is an above-average defender when he plays CF. He made meaningful progress at the plate a year ago, reducing his strikeout rate from 28.3% to 24.9% and boosting his hard-hit rate from 38.0% to 46.3%, but his 85 DRC+ and .381 BABIP indicate that his .828 OPS isn’t repeatable. Furthermore, the reason why Duran is projected to spend more time in right than in center is Rafaela, who is already an elite outfielder. Rafaela has an unusual combination of skills, but the overall report is pretty straightforward, he’s a speed and defense center fielder who might be a bit too aggressive out of the zone, and might not hit for enough power to be a star, but he’s a high-probability regular.” Wilyer Abreu also impressed in a late-season sample of playing time and will see plenty of at-bats against right-handed pitching.

Masataka Yoshida’s debut season in Boston looks great by his top-line numbers and 123 DRC+, but featured some bizarre splits. He had an extraordinary 9.0% strikeout rate at home, but an 18.5% strikeout rate on the road. That’s not usually the kind of stat that has drastic home/road splits, so how that portends for the 2024 season is anybody’s guess. FanGraphs’ Jake Mailhot recently described that he hit the skids in the second half of the season.

Rotation

The starting rotation is a microcosm of the Red Sox as a whole. It’s not bad, but nothing stands out and there’s no ace. It’s a staff composed entirely of no. 4 starters, and that problem is compounded by the fact that all of their best prospects are position players.

The best of the no. 4 starters is Lucas Giolito, if only because he has been a no. 2 starter in the past. He signed a complex deal with a bunch of opt-out clauses for somewhere between one and three years. He adds value as a workhorse, having started at least 29 games every year since 2018 except for the pandemic-shortened 2020. Everything was going fine in his run-up to free agency until his trade to the Angels and subsequent waiver claim by the Guardians. He lost his command over the last two months and saw his walk rate skyrocket. By the time the dust settled, he led the AL in home runs allowed with 41. If he keeps the ball in the park in 2024, he will test free agency again next winter.

Brayan Bello is a developmental victory, posting an 88 DRA- over 28 starts in his first full season despite a below-average 19.8% strikeout rate. He relies on a sinker-changeup mix against both righties and lefties to generate ground balls. If he finds a way to generate more swings and misses, he could still climb another rung.

Nick Pivetta is listed as a starting pitcher, but it’s more accurate to call him an agent of chaos. To wit: on July 17, he threw six no-hit innings (the third through the eighth). In his next appearance five days later, he authored a 1-2-3 eighth. Three days after that, he entered in the second inning and pitched five shutout frames. Six days later, he started the game and lasted into the eighth. On the whole, it was the best season of his career, but he’s better as a do-it-all wild card than an every-fifth-day starter.

Kutter Crawford enters the season with a lock on a starting gig for the first time. He has a six-pitch arsenal, with his split-change helping him neutralize lefties last season and enabling him to take steps forward. Tanner Houck and Garrett Whitlock are both veteran sinker-slider types who have bounced between the rotation and the bullpen.

If everyone stays healthy and effective (they won’t), the Red Sox have an adequate six-man group, but 17 different pitchers started at least once last season. The club’s seventh-best starter is Mr. Bullpen Game. They need to hope their depth, or lack thereof, isn’t tested too much. This is the worst starting rotation in the AL East and if we compared it to the entire league, it wouldn’t even be average and the bullpen won’t compensate for it.

Bullpen

Boston’s closer and setup man are 36 and 37 years old. Kenley Jansen’s once-legendary cutter lost a lot of its horizontal movement last year, leading to a career-low 27.9% strikeout rate. When pitchers have the worst season of their career in their mid-30s, they don’t usually get better the next year. On the other hand, Chris Martin is an ageless wonder. His 82 DRA- led the team and he allowed only five unintentional walks in 51.2 innings, earning the Award for Penultimate Penultimacy.

Beyond those two, is there anyone in this bullpen who inspires confidence? The second-best projection belongs to Greg Weissert, who they acquired from the Yankees in the Verdugo trade, but he shuttled between Triple-A and the majors five times last season. There are a handful of guys who are just okay, but it’s exactly the bullpen you’d expect from a 75-win team if everything goes well.

The Red Sox aren’t a bad team. They’re not good either, nor are they interesting, exciting, hilarious, ridiculous, or fascinating. “Unobjectionable” is the most apt superlative for them, and their purpose is to give someone else an opponent 162 times as they wait for Breslow to turn them into something—anything—other than the remnant of an unrequited future. Bank on cashing this ticket.

Sherwood

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