All your opinions on the roster seem to rely on zero injuries or ineffectiveness, which just isn’t at all realistic. Sure, the lineup and pitching staff are full- if nobody is injured before opening day. I’m not confident in that happening and think more depth is needed. If Mata and Slaten and Criswell and whoemever else are all dominating and looking good, well that’s an ok problem to have and I’m sure trades could be made.
Sure, but the Sox are in this weird place where nearly every position appears to be "filled" in some capacity, so in order to draw someone on a one year deal, no matter the position, they are going to have to 1) promise that payer playing time at the expense of someone else, and 2) deal with the ramifications of that on the players already on the roster, and move someone off of the roster. The other thing about the roster is that I think you could reasonably assume league average production at nearly every position, and there aren't many players who would get a significant benefit from more time in AAA (Rafaela probably fits this bill, but I think he makes the entire team better by playing in CF even if his offense ends up being less than stellar).
I am not saying that there are candidates for moving off of the roster, but if you are going to give a player not currently in the organization a guaranteed contract, it needs to be a "value added" contract, and it needs to add enough value to be worth the money. Throwing money around just for the sake of using it doesn't do anybody any good... this isn't a government job where if they don't spend their budget they lose it.
Soler seems like a decent value add, to me, but he's also 32 and put up his best OBP and OPS since 2019 last year, so I don't really think he's a guarantee to be $10M or so of value better than, say, Yoshida or O'Neill, or even Abreu, to be honest. Is he an offensive upgrade, yes, probably, but the team needs to decide whether he is enough of an upgrade to throw money at.
Junis is similar, in that, he may be an upgrade on what is currently on the roster, but I don't really think he is enough of an upgrade to whittle away the flexibility that they have under the luxury tax (which seems to be their self-imposed limit). If they had signed either of these guys, then they appear, at that point, to be 100% out on Montgomery (I am not convinced they are 100% out on him yet).
To me, outside of Yamamoto and Ohtani, who I don't believe were ever coming to the East Coast unless all of the Dodger/Angels/Giants/Mariners just put in non-competitive offers, this was a really weak free agent class, in my opinion. And two of the better free agents from the class are still available. I think that winning through free agency is more difficult than it has ever been. Baseball teams basically print their own money at this point, and more than ever before they lock up their core players through their prime years, and so a lot of the best free agents are hitting the market on the wrong side of 30, so it makes it harder and harder to build that way because you are almost always paying a free agent for previous success, that they probably had with a different team and that they are unlikely to replicate with your team in the long term.