ZiPS 2021 Projections: Boston Red Sox

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.

There’s a lot of work to do, and it’s unclear if Boston has the ability to do it quickly. Moving a year of Betts wasn’t enough to restock the farm system single-trade-edly, and there isn’t a lot of immediate help for the lineup in the minors. Alex Verdugo’s fine, but even if we assumed that he was a one-for-one replacement for Mookie — he’s not, of course — Boston faces the prospect of replacing Jackie Bradley Jr., and perhaps both Martinez and Benintendi on top of that. ZiPS is still projecting a bounce for both players, but that’s far from a guarantee, and the projected comebacks aren’t star-level.

Hunter Renfroe is unlikely to be the savior in this regard. Yes, I’ve seen the pretty home run overlays that show a bunch of Renfroe outs becoming homers in Fenway, but that kind of exercise is highly misleading. You can do that and get similar results for most right-handed sluggers due to the park dimensions, but if it actually worked that way in practice, you’d see significant batter-friendly park statistics for righties. Fact is, Fenway hasn’t been a huge haven for right-handed hitters for something like 35 years now.

ZiPS remains optimistic about Devers despite a 2020 season that can fairly be classified as a disappointment. His contact numbers regressed, but they don’t reflect a broken approach at the plate, and it’s important to remember he was just 23 last season. If you wiped out his statistical record prior to 2020 and pretended that this was his rookie season, you’d likely be at least somewhat satisfied with his moderately successful debut. That he was a legitimate superstar in 2019 shouldn’t make your feelings worse!

Has Xander Bogaerts become the most underrated shortstop in baseball? Short season or not, we have another datapoint suggesting that his 2018 offensive improvement represents a new baseline rather than a blip, but with the Red Sox struggling, that’s gotten lost in a league with an unreal number of extremely talented young shortstops. Bogaerts is slowly building his Hall of Fame case and still projects as a .277/.343/.474 hitter in 2026. 2,500 hits and over 350 homers, as ZiPS is currently projecting, ought to be enough to get him to Cooperstown.

First base looks like a serious weakness, but I fully expect Mitch Moreland to show up in the spring, and for the Red Sox to assume that someone in the front office must have signed him for a year at $4 million or something.

Pitchers

ZiPS is a bit grumpier than Steamer when it comes to Boston’s pitching by just under two wins, enough to drop Boston’s rotation into the bottom-third of baseball. On the other hand, considering the Red Sox starting five finished 30th out of 30 in WAR in 2020, that could be considered a triumph.

Well, maybe not, but the starting pitching will struggle to, well, struggle as much as they did in 2019. The team won’t have Chris Sale for the entire season, but it seems likely that they’ll get his services back sometimes in the summer, a definite improvement over the zero innings they got from him in 2020. As difficult as Sale’s loss was, don’t forget that Boston also lost Eduardo Rodriguez, who had a solid case for being the team’s most valuable pitcher in 2019. Based on WAR, the Red Sox lost seven wins before the season even started due to those two players’ injuries, and even a team trying in good faith to win would have had tremendous difficulty replacing them with no advanced notice.

One big thing separating Steamer from ZiPS is the very different projections each has for Nathan Eovaldi. I’m personally closer to Steamer than ZiPS in this fight; Eovaldi got his walks back under control, and I don’t think ZiPS is compensating enough for his injury interruptions in 2019 as a mitigating factor. But hey, if I agreed with every projection, I could just write down my personal feelings rather than run algorithms, couldn’t I?

Where Steamer and ZiPS do broadly agree is the bullpen, with the WAR differences coming down to the fact that ZiPS uses leverage index in its projections. Both systems see a solid Matt Barnes, three more solid, middle-of-the-road relievers in Ryan Brasier, Josh Taylor, and Darwinzon Hernandez, and a whole lot more question marks.

What the Red Sox do really depends on where their organizational priorities actually land this winter. The team hasn’t really telegraphed how steep this retooling process will be. The Red Sox need to add quite a lot this offseason, but they’ve given little indication that they’re any more willing to bust through the luxury tax threshold that they were last year, even after resetting the penalty in 2020. As it stands now, our estimate is that, including player benefits, they’re already at $177 million for 2021. Relief pitching is likely to be relatively inexpensive, so I can see some additions there, but starting pitching won’t be, and the team needs more outfield depth, too.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2021 due to injury, and players who were released in 2020. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Finnish industrial death metal fourth-wave ska J-pop band, he’s still listed here intentionally.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. ZiPS is assuming that the designated hitter will continue in force in 2021; if it does not, there will be widespread minor adjustments across the board come April.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article, or get angry at Dan on Twitter or something.