I feel like I keep hammering this point, but what is the evidence that this team is on the upswing and that the organization is rebuilt? That seems completely up in the air to me and dependent on player development and what the Sox do with their own and other free agents (ahixh
The only players the Sox control for 2023 or beyond are (based on current roster)
IF: Devers, Arroyo, Arauz, Dalbec
SP: Pivetta, Houck, Whitlock
RP: Barnes, Brasier, Davis, Sawa, Taylor, Hernandez
OF: Renfroe, Cordero, Verdugo, Duran
C:
Some of these players won’t make it this long, and others (Seabold, Bello, Mata, Wong, Casas, Mayer) will be on the team, knocking on the door, traded by then…. But the core of this team, even two years from now….is largely unknown.
It’s not like years ago when Betts, Devers, Bogaerts etc were all locked up for a long time.
Well, yeah: it's more like 2012 or 2013 than it is like like 2015. We have a bunch of guys who
could be about to become huge prospects, and a few who look like they might be doing it right now (Yorke just responded to a promotion to high A by hitting .448/.500/.759 in his first week — he's 19!).
Saying that the crop of young talent we have coming isn't as good as the wave we had coming after 2011, which will probably end up grading out as one of the top drafts by any MLB organization ever (when you consider our first pick was #19) is not really a huge surprise. It's basically the same as pointing out that our farm now is ranked in the ten to twelve range, while by 2014 or so it was ranked in the top five, and that was before Betts and Benintendi shot it to number one. The farm we had then made it pretty clear that we were about to be World Series contenders; now the picture isn't quite so clear. But there's also more
young talent on the big league club now than there was in 2012, when our young players were... Felix Doubront and Will Middlebrooks. That's not quite fair, because you might broaden the focus slightly and choose to include Josh Reddick and Clay Buchholz and José Iglesias and Daniel Bard, but the point basically remains.
I'll take Pivetta over Doubront. I'll take Devers over Middlebrooks. The good scenario is that if we keep Duran, he can become an approximation of Reddick.
Although we lack the up the middle two-way superstar we had in Bogaerts (so far; Mayer looks to change that), the big difference between then and now is that we actually look like we might produce some starting pitchers. Reading the SoxProspects rating histories from that period is a great reminder that TINSTAAP — Anthony Ranaudo, Henry Owens, Anderson Espinoza... — but now we just have
more of them than we typically do. Houck, Whitlock, Seabold, Mata, Bello, Groome, Ward, Murphy, Song, Walter, Gonzalez, Winckowski, and German is just a ton of guys. Of these guys, you'd really only say that Houck, Whitlock, Seabold, and maybe Bello have a
good chance to make, say, 20 MLB starts, but a lot of the other guys have
some chance, which counts for a lot! You'd expect one of the injury guys (Groome, Mata, Ward) to come back strong, and who knows what's going on with Song.
So that prospect pitching
depth is really what I'm looking at here. As recently as two years ago, we had essentially no starting pitching on the horizon, but Houck and Mata made leaps, Groome came back from surgery, and Bloom added a ton of depth.