This is not the company the Red Sox hoped they’d be keeping. When they face off against the Brewers tonight, they’ll be trying to avoid joining the Rockies, White Sox, Pirates, and Rays as the only teams in baseball with three separate losing streaks of at least four games this season. Boston currently sits fourth in the AL East and 2 1/2 games out of the final Wild Card spot. According to our playoff odds, the Red Sox have seen their postseason probability fall by more than half since Opening Day, dropping from 56.2% to 25.3%. Only the Braves, Orioles, and Rangers have had a bigger decline.

Boston’s most recent win also provided its biggest loss of the season thus far. When Alex Bregman signed back in February, there was every reason to believe that the Green Monster would be his best friend. His game is designed around lifting the ball to the pull side, and he’s already bounced five doubles and a single off the wall on the fly, to go with three homers launched over it. But the Monster betrayed Bregman on Friday. In the first game of a would-be doubleheader against the Orioles (the second game was postponed, and Saturday became a doubleheader instead), Bregman scorched a single that short-hopped the wall, but as he chopped his steps to back off an aggressive turn, something looked off.

“I was rounding first base and digging to go to second and I kind of felt my quad grab, so I didn’t continue running to second base for the double,” Bregman said. “I just kind of stopped and came back to the bag so I wouldn’t make it any worse. After I felt it, I knew I needed to come out and see the trainer.” Bregman left the game with right quad tightness, telling reporters that he initially feared that the injury might be more severe, but that he felt more positive after the game and hoped he could avoid an IL trip. “Hopefully, I sleep good and it feels great,” he said. “We’ll just see how it presents and take the next step there, just kind of follow the training staff, their lead. But right now, it’s just quad tightness.”

Bregman didn’t sleep good. Pain from the quad kept him up during the night, and an MRI on Saturday morning revealed a “pretty severe” strain. Bregman compared it to the left quad strain he suffered in 2021. That strain kept him out 69 days, from June 17 to April 25. In case the Red Sox are looking for consolation, Bregman looked like himself upon his return that season, running 115 wRC+ before the injury and a 112 wRC+ (with better exit velocity numbers) after he came back. But that’s cold comfort. With a 160 wRC+ this season, Bregman has been the team’s best player, and he’ll be out for at least two months. Read the rest of this entry »

After missing significant chunks of the past three seasons due to injuries — including all but 26 games last year — Trevor Story has been healthy enough to play in 48 of the Red Sox’ first 51 games. He hit well over the first few weeks of the season, but lately he’s fallen into a deep slump. With Boston struggling to climb above .500 but awash in promising young players, he may wind up fighting for his job.

The 32-year-old Story entered this season having played just 163 games since the Red Sox signed him to a six-year, $140 million deal in March 2022. He played just 94 games in 2022 due to a hairline fracture in his right wrist and a contusion on his left heel, then just 43 in ’23 after undergoing internal brace surgery to repair a torn ulnar collateral ligament, and 26 last year before fracturing the glenoid rim and tearing the posterior labrum of his left shoulder. That’s not only a lot of time missed — basically two seasons out of three — but it’s also time missed at a pivotal juncture in his career. Even without catastrophic injuries, not many players are the same at 32 as they were at 28, and the version of Story capable of producing at least 20 homers and 20 steals while providing strong defense at shortstop may be gone.

Through Wednesday, Story has hit for just a 65 wRC+, the seventh-lowest mark among AL qualifiers. That’s bad enough, but his recent performance looks even even worse if we simply split his game log down the middle, with 24 games played on each side:

Read the rest of this entry »

Connelly Early has emerged as one of Boston’s best pitching prospects. A fifth-round pick in 2023 out of the University of Virginia — he’d spent his first two collegiate seasons at Army — the 23-year-old left-hander has a 40.4% strikeout rate, a 1.88 ERA, and a 1.73 FIP over six appearances comprising 24 innings with Double-A Portland. Moreover, he’s allowed just 12 hits, none of which have left the yard. Assigned a 35+ FV when our 2024 Red Sox Top Prospects list came out last July, he was recently added to The Board for 2025 and bumped up to a 45+.

Early began opening eyes last summer in his first full professional season. Effectively establishing himself as a sleeper within a well-stocked Red Sox system, the Midlothian, Virginia native threw 103 2/3 innings between his current level and High-A, logging a 3.99 ERA and a 3.24 FIP, as well as a 30.8% strikeout rate that ranked highest among Boston farmhands who threw at least 80 frames. Early did so with both a better understanding of his craft and a revamped repertoire.

“From college, the only same grip I have is my [four-seam] fastball,” Early told me at the onset of the current campaign. “My changeup is completely different. The curveball grip is different. The sweeper is completely new. My cutter/gyro slider is pretty much the same, but I’ve worked a lot more on it this year than I did in college.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Red Sox bandwagon was crowded beyond the capacity limit this offseason, as you’d expect for a team that added Alex Bregman and Garrett Crochet over the winter, and put two near-majors prospects in the top seven of the preseason Top 100. I confess I was a passenger on this bandwagon; it was incredibly sweaty and at least one stranger sat on my lap for a couple stops.

But for all that hype, a quarter of the way through the season the results have been a bit of a let down. Boston is right where it was last year: around .500. Disappointing as that may be, most of the individual performances by Red Sox players have been within the realm of expectation. Surely it’s a bummer that Jarren Duran and Walker Buehler have only been about average this year, for instance, but I don’t know that it’s a monumental shock in either case.

The one player whose numbers are really knocking me out of my chair right now is Tanner Houck. Read the rest of this entry »

Since 2019, Rafael Devers has put up 25.2 WAR for the Red Sox. Over that span, only one other player has even reached 10.0; it was Xander Bogaerts, who is no longer with the team. With the exception of the shortened 2020 season, Devers has never finished worse than second on the team in WAR. That includes last season, when he recorded 4.1 WAR despite playing through injuries to both shoulders. He was arguably the worst defensive third baseman in baseball, but he hit so well that he was inarguably the best player on the team, the face of the franchise, and one of the most productive third basemen in the game.

The Red Sox traded away Mookie Betts. They let Bogaerts walk. They kept Devers. When erstwhile chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom signed Devers to a 10-year, $313.5 million contract extension in January 2023, Michael Baumann’s headline read, “The Red Sox Have Finally Extended Rafael Devers.” He’s the longest-tenured member of the team, and only Kristian Campbell, whose extension contains team options for 2033 and 2034, is under contract further into the future. The Red made Devers the cornerstone, but in something straight out of a Suzy Eddie Izzard bit, they have spent the past couple months trying to dig him up and plop him down in different spots. The moves make baseball sense. That’s not the problem. The problem is communication. The team seems to be doing its level best to alienate its biggest star, repeatedly saying one thing in public, and then another to Devers in private. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Bacsik is best known for having surrendered Barry Bonds’s 756th home run. The August 7, 2007 bomb at San Francisco’s AT&T Park gave Bonds the most in MLB history, one more than Henry Aaron. Unlike the legendary bashers, Bacsik is but a mere mortal. A left-handed pitcher for four teams over parts of five seasons, the now-Texas Rangers broadcast analyst appeared in 51 big-league games and logged a record of 10-13 with a 5.46 ERA in 216 innings.

Despite his relative anonymity, the gopher wasn’t the only noteworthy happening in Bacsik’s career. Moreover, those didn’t all take place with him on the mound.

“In my first 14 at-bats, I didn’t get a hit, didn’t strike out, and didn’t walk,” explained Bacsik, who finished 5-for-50 at the dish. “Apparently that’s a record for not having one of those outcomes to begin a career. I didn’t know this until last year when we were in Detroit and they brought it up on the broadcast.”

In Bacsik’s next three plate appearances, he doubled, singled, and struck out — all in the same game. Two years later, in his 44th time standing in a batter’s box, he drew his only career walk.

The first home run that Bacsik allowed — there were 41 in all — was to Kevin Millar. It isn’t his most-memorable outside of the Bonds blast. Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t expect this from Wilyer Abreu. Don’t get me wrong. I love Abreu and I spent much of the offseason writing about him. I even developed a (literal) sliding scale to tabulate just how often and how intensely he dirtied his uniform. Abreu is a high-effort player who absolutely deserved the Rookie of the Year votes and Gold Glove he got last season. But I worried about him too. Abreu has done nothing but hit and play great defense since his 2023 debut, but he’s a lefty who’s been strictly platooned, and he only recently reached a full season’s worth of big league plate appearances. He seemed like a regression candidate, and that was before a gastrointestinal illness cost him a chunk of spring training and several pounds. The Red Sox weren’t even sure he’d be ready to start the season, but he was and he’s raked from day one. After this hot start, should we be all-in on Abreu?

First, I was worried a bit about Abreu’s defense. I didn’t expect him to turn into a pumpkin. He really was the best right fielder in baseball last season by pretty much any measure you can think of, and I expected him to remain great. Although he’s not a speedster, his instincts and effort have allowed him to make three three-star catches, two four-star catches, and one five-star catch this season. However, a ton of his value last year came from nine assists, and as I wrote in the Positional Power Rankings, that’s a volatile stat. You can’t just expect someone to rack up assists year after year, if for no other reason than the fact that word gets out about a rocket arm like Abreu’s. Those gaudy out totals would turn into smaller credits for keeping runners from taking extra bases. Or so I thought. Read the rest of this entry »

Lucas Giolito is looking to return to form following elbow surgery that cost him all of last year. Now 30 years old and in his first season on mound with the Boston Red Sox, Giolito has made a pair of starts — one solid, another squalid — in which he has surrendered 15 hits and nine runs over 9 2/3 innings. At his best, he’s been a top-of-the-rotation pitcher. From 2019-2021, the 6-foot-6 right-hander fashioned a 3.47 ERA and a 3.54 FIP while making a team-high 72 starts for the Chicago White Sox.

Turn the clock back 10 years, and Giolito sat atop our 2015 Washington Nationals Top Prospects list. Our then-lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel was understandably bullish about Giolito, writing that the 2012 first-round draft pick had true no. 1 upside.

What did Giolito’s FanGraphs scouting report look like at the time? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what McDaniel wrote and asked Giolito to respond to it.

———

“Giolito was nationally known by scouts all the way back to when he hit 95 mph at age 15.”

“I always threw hard,” Giolito said. “I was one of the hardest throwers in Little League and everything like that. I started long tossing a lot around the time I got to high school, and just kept building and building. I think I hit 90 when I was 14, and then 95 maybe closer to my 16th birthday. So yeah, it kept going up until I blew my elbow out.

“Probably,” Giolito responded when asked if the velocity was too much, too early. “There wasn’t too much understanding on the medical side, like strengthening, stability — all the stuff that we’re doing now to maintain the little muscles, the big muscles, to support your body when it’s outputting that much force. I was also very skinny. My shoulder blades winged out. I didn’t have much muscular development at that age, but I was moving very fast. It eventually caught up to me.”

“[He] was in the running to go 1-1 as one of the top prep pitchers of all time, until he was shut down with a sprained UCL in his elbow. This led to an expected Tommy John surgery one outing after he signed for an $800,000 overslot bonus as the 16th overall pick.”

“I remember having an outing where I think the Astros’ GM came to see me pitch in person,” Giolito said. “I pitched really well that day. I was on top of the world. It was like, ‘Oh my God, I might be the first-overall pick if I just continue what I’m doing for the rest of the season.’ It was the next outing, or maybe two outings later, where I hurt my elbow. I had to shut down. We didn’t want to do the full TJ yet, because we thought that would hurt me in the draft. Plus, if I was going to get TJ, I wanted to be in a professional organization where you get access to the best care. I tried to rehab it.

“Going into the draft, I had no idea,” added Giolito, a product of Harvard-Westlake High School. “I thought I’d be picked somewhere in the first three rounds, that a team would take a flier on me. I didn’t know I’d be in the first round. That was kind of the beginning of the pre-draft-deal era, but I literally was watching the draft on the TV when they said my name. That was when I found out I was drafted in the first round.

“The Nationals picked me. I was a prep arm with a blown-out elbow, which is a big, big risk. I have Stephen Strasburg to thank, because he was a big prospect who came up, blew his elbow out, got Tommy John, and had a relatively successful recovery from that. The Nationals kind of saw me in that same vein. It was, ‘OK, we’ll get this guy. He’ll have TJ, but we feel confident with this.’”

“The stuff was all the way back this year as he dominated Low-A at age 19/20 in his first full year coming off of surgery. The Nationals were understandably conservative with pitch and innings counts.”

“My first full season back they had my innings count at 100,” Giolito recalled. “I got to 100 innings and they shut me down, and that sucked, because our team was so good. Our starting rotation consisted of me, Reynaldo López, Nick Pivetta. Austin Voth was in the rotation, but he got sent up to High-A at some point that year. We had a really nasty one-two-three with me, Reynaldo, and Nick, but then I got shut down with a few weeks left in the season and had to be a cheerleader. We ended up losing in the playoffs.”

“His knockout curveball, which gets 65 or 70 grades from scouts, is his signature offspeed pitch.”

“Not any more,” replied the righty. “I still have it, but I don’t throw it as often. I always say that Tommy John gave me my changeup. When I was recovering I messed around with changeup grips a lot and found one that was comfortable. I threw it a lot in that same season you mentioned, that Low-A season. I threw a ton of changeups, because the curveball made my elbow hurt that first season back.

“My curveball was good in the minor leagues — I still used it — but we mixed that changeup in a lot. Over time, especially when I developed the slider, the changeup really became the big pitch for me.”

“He has true no. 1 starter upside.”

“Yeah, I mean, I had that with the White Sox for a couple of years,” Giolito said. “I still have confidence that I have true no. 1 starter upside. I just have to come back from this thing and develop some good consistency.”

——

Previous “Old Scouting Reports Revisited” interviews can be found through these links: Cody Bellinger, Matthew Boyd, Dylan Cease, Matt Chapman, Erick Fedde, Kyle Freeland, Randal Grichuk, Ian Happ, Jeff Hoffman, Matthew Liberatore, Sean Newcomb, Bailey Ober, Max Scherzer.

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. For once, I don’t have a fistful of double plays to show you. I don’t even have that many great catches. The baseball I watched this week was disjointed and messy, the regular season at its finest. Making the easy plays tough? We’ve got that. Bringing in your lefty to face their righty slugger? Got that too. Doubles that weren’t? Collisions between out-of-position players? Yes and yes. So thanks Zach Lowe for the wonderful article format, and let’s get started.

1. Tell ‘Em, Wash
I mean, how hard could first base be? Incredibly hard, of course. The Red Sox and Rangers are both on to their respective Plan Bs at first base after Triston Casas ruptured his patellar tendon and Jake Burger got sent down to Triple-A. No big deal defensively, right? Each team plugged in a utility player — Romy Gonzalez for Boston and Josh Smith for Texas — and moved on with life. Look how easy first is:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Red Sox dropped to a .500 record over the weekend, but that bit of unpleasantness was overshadowed by the loss of starting first baseman Triston Casas to a serious knee injury. Running to first during the first of a three-game set against the Twins on Friday, Casas collapsed suddenly while trying to beat out a slow roller fielded by the pitcher, Joe Ryan. It was revealed on Saturday that Casas had ruptured his left patellar tendon, and on Sunday he underwent surgery. Without Casas, the second-place Sox have to reconsider their short-term options at first base, ideally before they fall too far behind in the AL East.

Boston could find no cause for optimism to put a positive spin on what happened. Chief baseball officer Craig Breslow came right out and said the team doesn’t anticipate Casas to return in 2025. So, if you were hoping the first baseman might sneak back in time for the playoffs, that appears to be highly unlikely.

So what does this mean for Casas? Well, from a baseball standpoint — rather than a rehabilitation one, as I’m even less qualified to make medical pronouncements than Dr. Nick Riviera — coming into the season, ZiPS saw Casas as a solidly average first baseman, with a projected slash line of .246/.350/.462, a 125 wRC+ and 1.6 WAR. That last number was on the low side simply because ZiPS projected him to play in only 108 games, partially due to his being platooned in the past but also owing to his history of injuries. I expressed some concern about his profile in the preseason because of his struggles with making contact.

Casas was off to a slow start this year, hitting .182/.277/.303 with a bleak 58 wRC+. That’s worrisome for any player, but even more so for a platoon first baseman without much defensive value. All 27 games he started this season came against a righty. April’s gonna April, but the bad start did put a bit of a damper on his long-term outlook. Crank out some projections, ZiPS-o-Matic!

Without factoring in his injury, Casas’ struggles to start 2025 caused a clear drop-off in his next-five-years projections, though I don’t personally think it was enough to fundamentally change our perception of him. He’s still a power-hitting first baseman you’d be happy to have in your lineup, but he’s not a major star to build around. As an aside, ZiPS is far less worried than the Red Sox are about letting Casas face left-handers; he is projected for a .226/.317/.395 line against southpaws in 2026. That’s not ideal, but it’s also not an unusually large platoon split for a left-handed slugger.

ZiPS is aware of injuries, but mainly in hindsight; it factors in the time missed after the fact because I don’t like being the position of diagnosing current injuries. But in this case, because we know that Casas’ rest-of-season projection is almost certainly going to be zero plate appearances, I don’t mind breaking the rules and telling ZiPS that 2025 is over and Casas missed more than 100 games with a knee injury.

As you can see, the season-ending injury has slightly soured his projection. But if there’s a silver lining here, it’s that Casas’ game isn’t really based on speed, meaning that ZiPS expects the overall long-term impact of the knee injury to be less for him than it would be for a faster runner. By contrast, when I run the same projection for Jarren Duran after giving him a serious knee injury — Sorry, Jarren! — his projected 2026 WAR declines from 3.5 to 2.2 WAR.

Casas ought to be back in 2026, but the Red Sox have to answer the question of what to do at first base for the next five months. Romy Gonzalez has been Casas’ platoon partner this year, and at .327/.382/.449, he’s hit well in his 55 plate appearances as of Monday morning. But he’ll probably lose a hundred points or so from his current .421 BABIP, so it’s unrealistic that he’ll keep up that line. That said, he has been making hard contact this season, with a hard-hit rate approaching 60%, up from 50% last year, meaning that his production is not a stone-cold fluke, either. ZiPS projects Gonzalez to post a 107 wRC+ the rest of the season, a reasonable performance for a Plan B first baseman, but the Red Sox should be a bit more ambitious than settling for reasonable, especially when the player in question is more of a substitute utilityman than a true first baseman.

But whom should they target then? That’s the harder question. Rafael Devers would seem to be the likely internal option, and the team hasn’t explicitly ruled that out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Red Sox decided not to switch his position again considering how he responded when they moved him off third base after signing Alex Bregman. In this case, perhaps discretion is the better part of valor. Boston also does not appear to be inclined to temporarily move to prospect Roman Anthony to first base.

Outside the organization, pickings are slim at the moment, as few teams have completely given up on the season. Andrew Vaughn is probably available, and his peripherals suggest that he’s performed better than his actual numbers during his brutal start, but I’m not sure Boston really wants a reclamation project here. The recently demoted Jake Burger would result in the same objection. If the Nats are interested in trading Nathaniel Lowe, he may be the best option out there, and he’s not a free agent until after next season, though that might make them less likely to move him. And the Brewers probably aren’t yet at a point where they’d let go of Rhys Hoskins for cheap. Anthony Rizzo is still a free agent, and Jon Singleton is now in Triple-A with the Mets, but if those are the two best options out there, I think the Red Sox would be better off just rolling with Romy. (I want to see Marcelo Mayer get some time at first, but that’s mostly so I can make some kind of lame Romy and Marcelo’s High School Reunion joke.)

The injury to Casas doesn’t doom his future outlook too much, nor does it shatter Boston’s chances to contend this season, but the Red Sox need to decide what they want to do here fairly quickly. Sure, the impact of any first base move would be limited, but even a marginal upgrade could make a difference in a tight AL East race.