Last off-season, the Red Sox made Stephen Drew a qualifying offer, giving him a chance to return for 2014 with a $14.1 million salary. He turned it down, and sought a multi-year offer in free agency instead. No offers came, and the Red Sox moved on. They brought Xander Bogaerts to camp as their regular shortstop, and gave Will Middlebrooks a chance to reclaim the starting third base job. While Boras made noise about the problems with the qualifying offer system, he continued to suggest that Drew’s market would emerge once the draft occurred and the attached compensation pick went away. The draft will be held in two weeks, and so Drew could have signed with any club as a “true free agent” 16 days from now.

Instead, today, he essentially accepted the qualifying offer from the Red Sox, taking a pro-rated version of the $14 million salary he turned down seven months ago. Once he’s ready to resume facing live pitching, Drew will presumably once again take over as the Red Sox shortstop, with Bogaerts shifting back to third base, and Middlebrooks serving as depth or a trade chip once he returns from the DL.

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Mookie Betts is hitting .400. Mookie Betts has reached base in 70 consecutive games. Mookie Betts walks more often than he strikes out. Mookie Betts doesn’t have a position, but it doesn’t matter. Mookie Betts is coming.

The question is when? Since Ben Cherington took over as the team’s director of player development in 2003, the Sox have promoted 75 position players to the majors. Parsing that list for playing time, duplicates (as in someone got a September call-up but was still rookie eligible the following season) and players who weren’t really Red Sox farmhands, such as Brandon Snyder, leaves us with the following 18-player list:

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Generally, when you think of Jake Peavy, you often think “Cy Young winner.” But that was a long time ago. These days, Peavy lives on the edge between “effective enough” and “not fooling anybody.” He is living there because he has become more cautious about living in the heart of the plate, where he used to. His earned run average paints him as one of the better pitchers in the American League, but if you look beyond that there is definitely cause for concern.

It’s no surprise that a pitcher getting on in years would have diminished velocity, particularly one with Peavy’s injury history. And diminished his velocity is. In his last few starts, he has worked his way back up to an average fastball of 90 mph, but that is a far cry from the 92-93 mph heat he was flashing in 2007-2008. Actually, he has been in the 90 mph range for a number of years. According to our PITCHf/x numbers, his first season with an average four-seam fastball under 91 mph was 2011. As his velocity has dropped, he has worked hard to refine his control in order to stay effective. To wit:
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Monday featured, for the first time in 2014, a full slate of meaningful baseball, albeit with a bit of a lull in the late afternoon as the only live game for a stretch had the Rockies and the Marlins. I met a friend at a neighborhood bar a little after 5, and the bar had the game on all of its screens, and after a little conversation I found I was completely hanging on the action. Come August, I probably won’t be watching the Rockies and the Marlins, but this early in the year, everything’s interesting. And while we always know that anything can happen, there’s no cynicism around opening day. By the middle of the year, anything can happen, but we know what’s probably going to happen. In late March and early April, it’s more fun to imagine that baseball’s a big giant toss-up. That Marcell Ozuna looks good. If he hits, and if the Marlins get their pitching…

I don’t remember what most opening days are like, but this one felt like it had an unusual number of anything-can-happens. That is, events that would take one by complete and utter surprise. What are documented below are, I think, the five most outstanding miracles from a long and rejuvenating Monday. From one perspective, this is evidence that the future is a mystery and all a surprise is is a run of good or bad luck. From another, more bummer of a perspective, this is evidence that opening day doesn’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things and come on why are you already projecting Grady Sizemore to be a five-win center fielder? Why are you already freaking out about the 2014 Blue Jays? Be whatever kind of fan you like. Just remember that baseball is a silly game, and you’ll never outsmart it.

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Boston Red Sox.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Sox or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

Other prospect projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto.

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When Ryan Dempster walked away, it was pretty clear what the Red Sox needed to do. Though Dempster’s salary was too high, the pitcher served an important function as swingman and rotation depth. So it was up to the Red Sox to find a replacement, and the most obvious replacement on the market was Chris Capuano. Capuano was both a starter and a reliever just last year, and with Boston, he could compete with Felix Doubront for the fifth rotation slot in camp. In short, it’s not a surprise at all that, Thursday, Capuano and the Red Sox agreed to terms, pending a physical.

What’s more of a surprise are the terms themselves. Capuano signed for one year, despite having looked for two earlier in the offseason. And his guaranteed base salary is just $2.25 million, with incentives that could push the deal up to a maximum of $5 million. Granted, there might’ve been a discount because the Red Sox just won the World Series. Granted, there might’ve been a discount because Capuano grew up in Massachusetts. But if there were substantially bigger offers out there, it stands to reason Capuano would’ve taken one of those, so it’s curious that he was available so cheap.

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As I approach the wrong side of thirty, I find myself shifting preferences when it comes to video games. While my earlier days were filled with shooters or the latest Madden game, I now play more low-key offerings. I’ll still throw in a Bioshock ever now and again, but my game playing time is for more serene these days. Less quick-twitch shooting, more strategy. I play a lot of Civilization V. I play a lot of Out of the Park Baseball. And lately, I’ve been playing a LOT of Kerbal Space Program.

Kerbal Space Program is a sort-of simulator in which you control an alien race that is trying to explore space. You build rockets, achieve goals, and push to discover as much as possible. It’s insanely fun. In fact, as I typed those last few sentences I had to fight a strong urge to save what I was writing and fire the game up again. You start off with small goals — break the planet’s atmosphere, achieve gravitational orbit, land on one of the planet’s moons, etc. But after all that is done, it’s time for interplanetary travel. This is where things get tricky. Not only do you need to design rockets that toe the fine line between needed fuel and mass, you need to check and double check every stage of your rocket to make sure things execute as desired. You don’t want to leave one of your adorable cosmonauts floating around in space with no fuel to get home. There’s a ton of planning and designing to do and when you’re confident you have what you need … you wait.

See, when you’re ready to go to another planet, you can’t shoot out of the atmosphere willy nilly and go. You have to be in proper alignment. If your destination is behind the sun relative to your location, you can’t point and shoot. The stupid sun is in the way. Also, there are gravitational forces at work. In order to conserve fuel, you need to have gravity work for you. Therefor, your destination must align perfectly with your point of origin in order to assure proper trajectory. In Kerbal Space Program, this means waiting. This also means the takeoff windows are fairly small. When the planets align, you have to be ready. This, of course, is a terrible and terribly long analogy for baseball and player development. I could go longer, but I won’t. Instead, I want to talk about Xander Bogaerts. Read the rest of this entry »

From just missing out on the Marlins’ first World Series title to being a member of the Red Sox’s eighth, Ryan Dempster has experienced plenty in his big league career. He might have just had his final experiences as a player however, as the 36-year-old Canadian native announced on Sunday morning that he will be sitting out the 2014 season. If this is the end, it has been a good run for Dempster, who has achieved some notable things in his career. And while the announcement comes at the dawn of spring training, his retirement doesn’t create a panicked situation for Boston in a vacuum, as the team has several pitchers ready (or close) to graduate to major league duty.

Dempster certainly isn’t going to be mistaken for one of the greatest pitchers of all-time, but in a way, he was. Using our leaderboards, we can see the following:

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On Saturday, Buster Olney mused on who would hit leadoff for the Red Sox this season. And it’s an interesting question, since the Red Sox had grown accustomed to Jacoby Ellsbury at the top of the batting order. As we’ve discussed a couple of other times this offseason, it’s one of those good problems — Boston has a plethora of talented hitters, so it isn’t like they have to shoehorn a bad hitter into the top spot. But a decision still has to be made, so let’s take a look.
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On the one hand, I’d feel like an unoriginal hack for going over Grady Sizemore’s career history. It is, after all, familiar to just about everyone — or at least everyone reading this website. He’s kind of like an outfield version of Mark Prior or Rich Harden: unbelievable talent, unbelievable fragility. He was amazing in 2008. But Franklin Gutierrez was amazing in 2009. Sizemore’s just another guy who hasn’t been able to stay on the field, and he’s well past the point of people thinking it might be bad luck.

On the other hand, over the past couple years it’s not like Sizemore’s provided anything to write about. Since the start of 2012, Sizemore has as many big-league plate appearances as Barry Bonds and Eddie Collins. And so if you’ll indulge me, I think it’s worth the very briefest of refresher courses.

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