This reminds me of when they opened the season with Bradley in 2013. His defense was already superb but he was overmatched at the plate for practically a whole season's worth of PAs across three seasons. I agree that working on pitch selection at the AAA level, where the competition isn't executing its best stuff, isn't likely to help.
Totally get where you're coming from on this - and I agree that AAA pitching isn't good enough to make Rafaela adjust, so he won't get anything out of being down there. I hope he's up to start the year because then I can see a path to a markedly improved defense (for whatever that's worth).
However, I think the major difference between that situation (Bradley Jr) and Rafaela's is where you'd be asking them to play and the upgrades (or not) that would be talking about defensively.
Bradley Jr came up early in 2013 and played in LF to start the year because you already had somewhere between a really good to slightly above average defensive CF (Ellsbury) and a had just signed an excellent defensive RF (Victorino) as well as someone that looked like a capable LF (at least offensively) in Nava - who was sneaky awesome in 2013 putting up a 2.9 bWAR that year, and had buttressed that by just acquiring Carp and Gomes. That outfield was already pretty well put together.
Not to mention you had the most important player in franchise history anchoring the line up at DH, Pedroia at 2b, along with adding Napoli at 1b.
The other side is that this OF offensively is basically nothing but question marks (Duran, Abreu) and meh (O'Neill, Refnsyder) and a decent hitting LF that can't play defense (Yoshida).
Bradley Jr in 2013 wasn't playing the position where he had the most value and you had someone likely to be decent (Nava) at the position where JBJr was being placed, as well as having an OF platoon from a L/R split with Carp and Gomes to in essence back up Nava.
The flip side is that really you don't have any certainty in the OF and certainly nothing close to that good defensively. Also, Gomes at least was a far more proven and consistent hitter at that point to O'Neill and Carp was a LH bet better version of Refnsyder.
So Rafaela, even though the offense would of course be suspect, would be drastically upgrading CF (Duran to Rafaela), allowing a subsequent drastic upgrading of LF (Yoshida to Duran) and cutting down the questions in RF (you'd just need ONE of Abreu / O'Neill to be decent, not both).
(Crazy to think that Daniel Nava's 2013 with a 2.9 bWAR would have made him the 2nd most valuable offensive player and 4th best player overall on the 2023 Red Sox. On the 2013 team, he was 9th (overall and 7th offensively). Of course, he also ranked ahead of Lester and Lackey which is a fly in the ointment as to how impactful WAR truly is - ie no way do I think he was more impactful to that team than Lester and Lackey - but I digress...)
