In a rare swap between rivals, the Yankees sent reliever Adam Ottavino to Boston on Monday, along with pitcher Frank German, in return for future considerations. Also heading to Boston was $850,000 to defray part of Ottavino’s $8 million salary for the 2020 season, the final year of the three-year contract he signed to leave the Rockies after 2018.

Ottavino, one of the Yankees’ top relievers in 2019, had decidedly mixed results last year, putting up a 3.52 FIP but an ERA of nearly six. While Ottavino’s .375 BABIP is almost certainly a bit of bad luck — historically, non-pitchers dragooned into throwing innings have a BABIP in the .330 range — there are a few negative indicators to send us the opposite direction in evaluating him. His contact numbers were down, with nearly career-worsts in contact rate and swinging strikes, and when he was hit in 2020, he was walloped, with a five-mph bump in the average exit velocity. Yes, we’re only talking 50 batted ball events, but a 50% hard-hit rate, even in such a small sample, is a significant deviation from the 29% rate from the previous two seasons.

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Enrique Hernández’s phone should have been busy over the last three months, because he’s the kind of player every team has a roster spot for. If you have a hole in your lineup at second base, third base, or any outfield spot, consider Hernández. If your starting infield is set but you need a good replacement off the bench, consider Hernández. If your starting outfield is set but you want a backup who can capably man center, consider Hernández. If you simply want to add a veteran with loads of postseason experience to your clubhouse, consider Hernández. It is impossible not to find a use for one of the few players who can play every position in the field (minus catcher) and whose asking price is modest enough that even Pittsburgh could afford it. The only question is whether Hernández will hit.

The Red Sox believe he will, signing Hernández to a two-year contract worth $14 million on Friday — the only multi-year deal the team has handed out this winter. Boston reportedly agreed to terms with the former Dodger after missing out on Jurickson Profar, a similarly versatile player who signed with San Diego for the same AAV but for one additional year. As noted over on The Athletic, Hernández could address either of Boston’s two most glaring needs at second base or in center field and provide assistance at any other spot at which he might be needed.

Red Sox fans are no stranger to having a Swiss Army Knife on the roster. That same role was occupied for most of the last decade by Brock Holt, before he signed with Milwaukee a year ago. Like Hernández, Holt was able to log lots of playing time by providing serviceable defense everywhere on the field. But while Holt’s lack of pop limited his potential to be an impact hitter, the same can’t be said about Hernández, who has a .195 ISO going back to 2017. That power has had a knack for showing up in big moments during his playoff career, including two different game-tying homers in last year’s NLCS, one of which was a pinch-hit dinger in Game 7.

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Position: Data Engineer, Baseball Systems

Position Overview:
The Data Engineer, Baseball Systems position will be a member of the baseball operations software development team, and is responsible for integrating, collecting, processing, and storing many sources of baseball data, as well as designing and building new data solutions. This position must be comfortable with on-premises and cloud solutions, and take the initiative to explore new optimizations and cutting-edge data technologies. This individual will work closely with the team’s data architect, analysts, developers, and other members of baseball operations.

Responsibilities:

• Build leading-edge baseball solutions together with the software development team, analysts, and others on new and existing baseball systems
• Build and maintain integration pipelines, often via an API or file-based, while also identifying areas of improvement and spending time to re-architect when required. Build and maintain infrastructure to optimize extraction, transformation, and the loading of data from various sources
• Design, build, and maintain data warehousing solutions for the software development and analytics teams. Build and maintain tools for the analysts to enable more efficient and extensive data modeling and simulation efforts
• Participate in key phases of the software development process of critical baseball applications, including requirements gathering, analysis, effort estimation, technical investigation, software design and implementation, testing, bug fixing, and quality assurance
• Actively participate with software developers and data architects in design reviews, code reviews, and other best practices

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The last time he was a free agent — and one of the top free agents in the game, at that — Jon Lester struck gold, and so did the Cubs, who won their first championship in 108 years in the second season of his six-year, $155 million deal. This time around, the stakes are much lower. On the heels of a disappointing 2020 campaign, Lester didn’t even crack our Top 50 Free Agents list, but per ESPN’s Jeff Passan, he’s leaving Chicago to take a one-year, $5 million contract with the Nationals.

The exact terms and structure of the deal have not been officially announced, though Passan also reported that it includes a mutual option for 2022 for an as-yet-undisclosed amount. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reported that the deal actually pays Lester just $2 million in salary for 2021, with $3 million in deferred money due in 2023. The Cubs have already paid Lester a $10 million buyout on his $25 million mutual option for 2021.

Lester, who turned 37 on January 7, is a nine-time postseason participant, six-time All-Star and three-time World Series champion with 193 career wins and 2,397 career strikeouts, but he’s coming off the worst of his 15 major league seasons. Though he went to the post 12 times and ran his streak to making an essentially full complement of starts for the 13th straight year, he was cuffed for a 5.16 ERA (116 ERA-) and a 5.15 FIP while striking out just 15.8% of the hitters he faced, the third-lowest mark of any qualifying pitcher. His drop of nearly six percentage points relative to 2019 was the fourth-largest among the 22 pitchers who qualified for the ERA title in both seasons:

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The Red Sox didn’t have much to write home about in 2020, skidding to a 24–36 record and a fifth-place finish in the AL East. Though they have yet to make a major splash thus far this winter, they did make a move on Saturday, re-signing southpaw Martín Pérez to a one-year deal that constitutes a pay cut and opens questions about a rotation that was the majors’ worst in 2020.

Pérez, who turns 30 on April 4, joined the Red Sox after an uneven 2019 spent with the Twins, during which he was very good in the first half and nearly useless in the second. He was the only Boston pitcher to make more than nine starts last season, and, well, the results weren’t stellar, as he once again faded late in the year. He did start 12 times, tied for fifth in the majors, and his 4.50 ERA in 62 innings was actually a bit better than league average (97 ERA-) despite a 5.58 ERA over his final six starts. His 4.88 FIP, though, was a significant step down from league average (111 FIP-); his 17.6% strikeout rate was only a bit off his career-high 18.6% in 2019, but his 10.7% walk rate was a career worst. All told, his season was worth 0.4 WAR, which prorates to about 1.0 over a full campaign. Pérez had been worth more in five of his previous seven seasons in Texas and Minnesota, so there’s no mistaking this for being the top of his game.

What was interesting about Pérez’s performance — and I admit I may be stretching the definition of “interesting” — was that he posted the lowest groundball rate of his career. His 38.5% rate was 12 points below his previous career mark and 9.5 below  his 2019 mark; eyeballing our season stat grid, I found only half a dozen bigger drops over the past decade, though 62 innings doesn’t tell us as much as a full-season workload. Anyway, Fenway Park isn’t a great place to start serving up fly balls, but Pérez’s 1.16 homers per nine was his lowest mark since 2017, and he had no real difference between home and road splits, which may tell you a bit about the East Coast ballparks in which he toiled.

Since Pérez is going back to Fenway, the fly balls do rate as a concern, but his Statcast numbers do show that he’s done a good job of limiting hard contact since ditching his slider in favor of his cutter in 2019. In 2020, his 29.2% hard-hit rate ranked in the majors’ 90th percentile, and his average exit velocity of 86.3 mph was in the 85th percentile, versus 96th for the former and 93rd for the latter the year before. Before that, he’d never been better than middling in either category, and sometimes bad enough to slip into the bottom quartile.

Pérez threw the cutter 30.8% of the time in 2019 and 32% in ’20, and he’s gotten good results with the pitch. When batters have made contact with his cutter in that span, they’ve produced the majors’ second-lowest exit velocity and xwOBA:

While Pérez got fewer grounders via the cutter in 2020 (34%) than 2019 (44%), that alone doesn’t compensate for his shifting profile. He also dialed back his sinker usage from 24.8% to 17.7% and compensated with his curve and changeup. That cost him some grounders, and he also got fewer grounders this past year via his four-seam fastball — a drop from 40% to 19% — while doing a much better job of keeping those pitches out of the center of the strike zone:

Thanks to the better location, batters went from hitting .370 and slugging .740 when they connected with Pérez’s four-seamer in 2019 to .233 and .533 in ’20, respectively — and he did that despite the average velocity on that pitch dropping from 94.2 mph to 92.2.

Still, it was an unremarkable season all told for Pérez, and effectively, he’s taking a small pay cut after making $6 million in 2020 and then accepting a $500,000 buyout after having his $6.85 million club option declined. He’ll get a $4.5 million base salary for 2021, with additional boosts of $100,000 for passing the 130-, 140-, 150-, 160-, and 170-inning thresholds. Those same thresholds also add $100,000 apiece to his $6 million club option for 2021, while reaching 180 innings adds another $250,000, meaning that he could max out with a $6.75 million option.

While Pérez is a solid choice to provide stability at the back of a rotation, the real question is how much closer to the front of the Red Sox rotation he’ll be in 2021. Between the departure of Rick Porcello via free agency, the inclusion of David Price in the Mookie Betts trade, and the subsequent losses of Chris Sale to Tommy John surgery and Eduardo Rodriguez to COVID-19-related myocarditis, the Sox had just one rotation holdover from 2019 to ’20: Nathan Eovaldi, who was limited to nine starts by a right calf strain. As a result, the team was forced to call upon the likes of rookies Tanner Houck and Chris Mazza, veterans Colten Brewer, Zack Godley, Nick Pivetta, and Ryan Weber, and assorted openers to round out their starting five. The results were dismal: The unit’s 5.34 ERA ranked 25th in the majors; its 5.50 ERA 29th; and its 0.4 WAR dead last.

The plan is to have Eovaldi — who hasn’t made more than 21 starts in a season since 2015 — and Rodriguez in the rotation to start 2021. Sale, who went under the knife last March, will hopefully be back by midseason, as the team is taking a conservative approach with his rehab. The Sox are still in the market for a mid-rotation upgrade, with the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier listing names such as Rich Hill, Jake Odorizzi, James Paxton, José Quintana, and Masahiro Tanaka among the potential targets. Unless they land one of them, then Houck, Pivetta, and the recently signed Matt Andriese will be in the mix to fill the other two spots at the start of the season. Prospects Bryan Mata and Connor Seabold, who have 18 starts between them at Double-A and nothing higher than that yet, could be in play for later in the year. Most of those pitchers may be better fits in the bullpen than the rotation, but if the Red Sox aren’t pushing to compete, now is the time to find out what they’ve got. Meanwhile, chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom is reportedly considering the possibility of a six-man rotation given the increased workloads his starters will face. Besides Sale and Rodriguez, none of the other pitchers currently on the roster threw more than 135 innings in 2019.

All of which is to say that amid so many question marks, Pérez brings the Red Sox a bit of certainty if not a great deal of upside. He’ll eat innings in what isn’t likely to be the most memorable Red Sox season of the millennium. If he’s good enough, he might pitch himself onto a contending club down the stretch.

Position: Advance Information Coordinator

Location: Boston, MA; Travel is required with the Major League team

Description:
The Boston Red Sox are seeking an Assistant to support the Major League coaching staff while working closely with the Major League Hitting Coach and baserunning coach, Analyst in Baseball Analytics, and their Advance Information department.

This is an opportunity to work in a fast-paced, intellectually curious environment and to potentially impact player performance and on-field strategy.

Responsibilities:

• Effectively present analyses through the use of written reports and data visualization to disseminate insights to members of the Major League coaching staff.
• Travel with the Major League team throughout the season, including to Boston’s spring training facility. During the offseason this position will be based in Boston working with Baseball Analytics.
• Other projects and related duties as directed by the Major League Hitting Coach, Analyst in Baseball Analytics, and other members of Baseball Operations leadership.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Boston Red Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. As there was no minor league season in 2020, there are some instances where no new information was gleaned about a player. Players whose write-ups have not been altered begin by telling you so. For the others, the blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report. As always, I’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside the org than within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, I’ve primarily focused on data from there. Lastly, in effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both in lists and on The Board: MIRP, or multi-inning relief pitcher, and SIRP, or single-inning relief pitcher.

For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of Future Value’s merits and drawbacks, read Future Value.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It can be found here.

Editor’s Note: Miguel Bleis was added to this list after he agreed to a deal with the Red Sox on January 15.

Frank German was added to this list after he was traded to the Red Sox from the Yankees as part of the Adam Ottavino trade.

One of the “Best of 2020” articles that ran here at FanGraphs over the holidays featured an under-the-radar right-hander with a unique backstory and a knee-buckling bender. Titled Rangers Prospect Cole Uvila is a Driveline-Developed Spin Monster, the story chronicled, among things, a curveball that had spun upwards of 3,300 RPM in Arizona Fall League action. Honed with the help of technology, the pitch profiled as his ticket to Texas.

He’s no longer throwing it. Instead, Uvila is endeavoring to channel former Cleveland Indians closer Cody Allen.

“In my head, I was going to throw it until my career was over,” Uvila said of his old curveball. “Then the pandemic happened. There was a lot of time to look in the mirror, and you just don’t see big-league relievers throwing 76-mph curveballs. It’s not really a thing.”

Uvila started talking with people in the Rangers organization, as well as to the instructors he’s worked with at Driveline over the years. Their messages were essentially the same: With breaking balls — much like fastballs — velocity is king.

“Driveline R&D has this metric called Stuff Plus, which essentially takes every breaking ball over the last five years and gives it a number,” Uvila told me earlier this week. “It’s kind of like wRC+, where 100 is average. I think the highest one was a dude with the Cubs, named [Dillon] Maples, and his graded out at something like 240. So there’s this range of pitches, and looking at the list, I saw this theme of curveballs at 84-85 [mph]. I said, ‘Man, I need to throw this pitch harder.’” Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

On the field, Curt Schilling was at his best when the spotlight shone the brightest. A top starter on four pennant winners and three World Series champions, he has a strong claim as the best postseason pitcher of his generation. Founded on pinpoint command of his mid-90s fastball and a devastating splitter, his regular season dominance enhances his case for Cooperstown. He’s one of just 18 pitchers to strike out more than 3,000 hitters, and is the owner of the highest strikeout-to-walk ratio in modern major league history.

That said, Schilling never won a Cy Young award and finished with “only” 216 regular-season wins. While only one starter with fewer than 300 wins was elected during the 1992-2014 span (Bert Blyleven), four have been tabbed since then, two in 2015 (Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz) and two in ’19 (Roy Halladay and Mike Mussina), suggesting that’s far less of an obstacle than before.

Schilling was something of a late bloomer who didn’t click until his age-25 season, after he had been traded three times. He spent much of his peak pitching in the shadows of even more famous (and popular) teammates, which may have helped to explain his outspokenness. Former Phillies manager Jim Fregosi nicknamed him “Red Light Curt” for his desire to be at the center of attention when the cameras were rolling, while Phillies general manager Ed Wade said, “Schilling is a horse every fifth day and a horse’s ass the other four.” Whether expounding about politics, performance-enhancing drugs, the QuesTec pitch-tracking system, or a cornerstone of his legend, Schilling wasn’t shy about telling the world what he thought.

That desire eventually extended beyond the mound. Schilling used his platform to raise money for research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and, after a bout of oral cancer, recorded public service announcements on the dangers of smokeless tobacco. In 1996, USA Today named him “Baseball’s Most Caring Athlete.” But in the years since his retirement, and particularly over the past half-decade, his actions and inflammatory rhetoric on social media have turned him from merely a controversial and polarizing figure to one who has continued to create problems for himself. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Boston Red Sox.

Batters

The Red Sox took a great deal of heat for the zeal with which they traded Mookie Betts last offseason, practically advertising to the world their intent to deal him as if it were a point of pride. When was the last time you saw a restaurant send out a press release announcing that their food was going to get worse? However you feel about the wisdom of the trade, it was a significant short-term downgrade for a team that had nearly fallen off the proverbial cliff in 2019. As a bizarre silver lining, Boston struggled so much in 2020 that, even in a 16-team playoff, it seems unlikely that they would have made the playoffs if they had retained Betts. He wasn’t five wins better than his replacements, after all.

While Boston finished the season in last place in the AL East, even looking up at the Orioles, the offense didn’t really have a lot to do with that bleak result. Ranking 12th in baseball in wRC+ and 11th in overall runs scored doesn’t exactly reek of awesomeness, but it’s at least respectable, something .400 teams aren’t particularly known for. Nor was there a dramatic drop-off in Boston’s very ordinary defense. Some things did go right, but certainly not everything:

• J.D. Martinez and Michael Chavis were dreadful.
• Rafael Devers took a step back from his 2019 season.
• Andrew Benintendi’s ribcage strain could arguably be called his seasonal highlight.

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