Not great. Both put up good (Gray)/respectable (e-rod) innings totals this year but that hasn't been the norm for either. The biggest thing I wanted to get away from this winter was the constant flow of <130 IP "starters" that have been such a damn plague the last couple years and get a couple reliable guys, and I don't especially trust either to do that.
Has anyone ever looked at how far off the average steamer projection ends up being? I don't assign those things any more weight than BTV numbers personally.
+1,000,000,000 to each.
All pitchers are "Tommy John" risk, so to speak (hitters are starting to be also). But I do see a vast difference in profile between someone that misses two seasons for Tommy John and takes the ball 30 times a season in other years vs someone like Snell, Rodriguez or Sale that seemingly has a new issue one out of every two seasons. So sure, Jordan Montgomery could of course throw one pitch and need TJS, but so could every pitcher. I don't expect him to have the same laundry list of "fluke" injuries that other guys have a career of having happened to them.
The Red Sox need another two pitchers that can reasonably be expected to provide 165ip (roughly 30 starts of 5.1 innings pitched per start) of some level that I'll call "league average to slightly above." It'd be nice for that to be an SP1 and blow that out of the water, but not landing an ace doesn't mean you should instead decide it's ok to just have a bunch of injury prone guys and hope one hits. It's kind of like saying "buying a lottery ticket from multiple states" doesn't make you any more likely to hit on one. You're likely just throwing away money on different things.
Plus, even when you "hit" with that approach (lets call Wacha and Hill "hits" to be kind) you're still only getting around 130ip. There is a middle class to target between "ace" and "complete crapshoot."
I actually tried looking that up on Steamer last year, but with the free subscription, I wasn't able to see projections for the 2022 (just checked again, and couldn't see those for the 2023) seasons. But my general thought is that too many of the projection systems place too much emphasis on the past season as if that is some new career baseline, while in many ways disregarding a player's entire career up to that point.
They're useful tools with nothing else to look at (like you said, similar to BTV) but they're far from perfect.
When you bargain bin everything, you start forcing guys into roles that they're not capable of and make small sample sizes into smaller sample sizes and then extrapolate them. I'm hoping the Sox don't continue to do that.