A good offense will require multiple someones to take a step forward. Raffy could go through a season without an extended slump and improve on his usual 130 OPS+. Casas can put it all together and have the first .900+ OPS season of his professional career. Story and O'Neill could return to their pre-injury forms. Yoshida might to be the first half guy from last year and not the second half. I'm not holding out a lot of hope for Rafaela to do much with the bat, but hopefully he can eke out a .300 OBP. If everyone simply replicates their performance from last year, the offense is going to be a problem.
Well, I get what you're saying, but the bolded is sort of an impossibility.
They were sixth in runs in the AL in 2023. For plus hitters, they lost Duvall 119 OPS+, Turner 114. Verdugo was 100. Arroyo, Hernandez, Story, and Chang all had over 100 ABs, and an OPS+ of 70 or less.
This year they're replacing really bad performances at SS and 2B with what appears to be a huge upgrade to at least competent defense and offense (Story, plus Valdez/Grissom). They've also upgraded the OF defensively, and Duran/Rafaela/O'Neill looks to be an offensive upgrade over Yoshida/Duran/Verdugo.
DH may be a "downgrade" from Turner to Yoshida, but if we're looking at your 2023 numbers premise, the difference is Yoshida's 109 OPS+ v. Turner's 114.
The main problem is there's not really a track record for Grissom, Rafaela, Abreu. Story and O'Neill should be competent MLB hitters, but have recent injury history. (But then again so did Duvall, coming off 102 and 86 OPS campaigns before 2024.)
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I think we're fine without heroics and will end up a top 5 offensive club. But let's put some AL context numbers on it and look at the 2023 AL team positions by OPS (does not have OPS+):
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/team_compare.cgi?request=1&year=2023&lg=AL&stat=OPS
C: #9 in AL. My 2024 guess? Same/possible improvement. Wong's simplified his swing.
1B: #2 in AL. 2024: same. Last year Turner had 150 good ABs here. A mild improvement by Casas (i.e., just not having a cold start) will erase the loss of those.
2B: #13. 2024: huge plus. Valdez/Grissom should be average or better on offense. For context if Valdez's 2023 OPS is the average for our 2B, we'd have been #5 in the AL.
3B: #2 in AL. 2024: same. Last year everyone who spelled Raffy (including Turner) hit below a .540 OPS.
SS: #12 in AL. 2024: huge plus. Last year was awful, although interestingly, Reyes and Rafaela did well in about 100 ABs - enough so if that were the whole year, the Sox would have been 5th or so. This year, it's Story as the primary for defense. But his offense? The floor is low: Story at only .700 OPS would have bumped them up to #8 in 2023. 2022 Story gets them to #6. Story at his career average OPS (.834) would have bumped them up to #2.
LF: #2 in AL. 2024: same/mild downgrade. That was mostly Yoshida, plus the rest of the OF crew. Now it will be mostly Duran, with some Yoshida.
CF: #2 in AL. 2024: unknown. That was Duvall/Duran. Now mostly Rafaela, who is projected by bRef to have a 750 OPS or so, which'd be 6th in the 2023 AL spread for CF.
RF: #9 in AL. 2024: same/plus. That was almost all Verdugo. O'Neill seems to be as good or better defensively and offensively.
DH: #8 in AL. 2024: mild downgrade. That was mostly Turner/Yoshida, with Turner having the better numbers.
I realize personnel have changed elsewhere, that other players will develop, etc. Also, all these raw OPS numbers qill trend down a bit, given the number and quality of backup at-bats. Which is always going to be lower. However, the 2023 rankings include some pretty awful backup numbers, and some pretty good ones (mostly OF). And I think our 2024 depth has more of a competence-level of offense to it, rather than any pure-defense types like Chang.
So my takeaway here is
approximate and conservative-ish:
3B: top 2 to top 2
1B: top 2 to top 2
LF: top 2 to top 3
2B: bottom 3 to top 5
SS: bottom 3 to top 6
RF: top 9 to top 7
CF: top 2 to top 8 (735 OPS or so)
DH: top 8 to top 9
C: top 9 to top 9
We go from 2023's:
2, 2, 2, 2, 8, 9, 12, 13
to:
2, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9
I think that's a mild but significant improvement in terms of offense alone, which does not require anyone take a massive step forward. And this package comes with much improved defense.
Still volatile, and there's not a ton of org-depth for the bats right now. Injury or a kind of catastrophic regression can still tilt that quite a bit. But so can the slightly-better outcomes for Yoshida, etc. A just-below-career average Story, and a slightly-worse than first half Yoshida, and an as projected Rafaela makes this:
We go from 2023's:
2, 2, 2, 2, 8, 9, 12, 13
to:
2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9