What Do We Make of the 2024 Red Sox? (What Do We EVER Make of the Red Sox?)
Are they good or not? Boston is doing their confusing thing again.
I grew up a Boston Red Sox fan, so maybe I am still abnormally prone to focus on them relative to other teams. But they’re also one of the most confounding, fascinating teams in all of pro sports, in my opinion. Here’s an exhaustive list of the stories I’ve written trying to make sense out of just how damn confusing this franchise has been for a very long time:
The Red Sox Are On The Wildest Roller-Coaster Ride In Modern MLB History (2015)
Everything Went Right For The 2018 Red Sox. Are The Champs Destined To Regress? (2019)
The Red Sox Were The Toast Of Baseball Last Year. Now They’re Just Toast. (2019)
The Red Sox Doomers Were Wrong… But they still might be right in the end. (2023)
(Note that we could also include this story about the 2011 Sox’s historic late-season collapse, plus all the imaginary stories I wish I’d written if I’d been on baseball duty during Boston’s awful 2012 season with Bobby Valentine or its shocking World Series turnaround in 2013.)
If we’re keeping track, the common theme for — checks calendar — at least 13 years (!) now is that the Red Sox are always the opposite of what you and I think they will be. Are they supposed to be good? There’s a solid chance they’ll be bad, or at least mediocre. Are they supposed to be rebuilding? If history is any guide, that means they’ll probably make a deep postseason run.
This year’s Red Sox are, of course, back at it. Despite sub-.500 predictions in spring training, the team is 16-13 to start the 2024 season — with the underlying stats of a 19-10 squad. Boston ranks No. 9 in MLB in Wins Above Replacement1 per 162 team games at 45.5, which is an improvement of 14 wins on last season and would be the equivalent of 93.2 victories if we convert WAR to expected wins by adding in the replacement level.
If the Red Sox play to that level of performance over the rest of the season, they’d land on 92.6 wins — a difference of +14.6 wins from a year ago. In turn, that would give them an average absolute change of +/- 16.2 wins year over year, per season, over the previous 13 years.
(Is this cherry-picking endpoints? Yes. LOL. But it’s also a remarkable stretch that just keeps going as the years turn into decades.)2
In modern MLB history (since 1901), only two other teams had a run with more year-to-year upheaval over a 13-year period:
1902-14 New York Yankees/Highlanders/Orioles3 (+/- 19.2 wins/162 per season)
1907-19 Philadelphia Athletics (+/- 16.7 wins/162 per season)
What’s even more typically weird of the recent Red Sox is how they’ve been winning again this season.
Boston currently ranks 12th in Baseball-Reference’s payroll rankings — the franchise’s lowest placement since sitting 13th in 1997. The team spent the offseason shedding such highly paid names as Chris Sale, Enrique Hernandez, Corey Kluber, Justin Turner, Adam Duvall and Alex Verdugo, while adding little in the way of veteran help aside from Tyler O'Neill. They did all of this in the midst of transitioning from former baseball ops head Chaim Bloom to ex-Sox pitcher Craig Breslow. By all rights, Boston should be struggling to remain at its 78-win level of the past few seasons, not breaking out early on.
And the makeup of this year’s squad is completely bizarre. The Red Sox rank fifth in total WAR value added by positive-rated — i.e., better than replacement-level — players, as led by pitchers Kutter Crawford and Tanner Houck and batters O'Neill and Jarren Duran. (Not completely who we’d expect; by contrast, Rafael Devers ranks just 10th on the team.) Meanwhile, Boston also ranks sixth in the most value removed by negative, sub-replacement players.
None of this seems altogether sustainable — although I suppose there’s an argument that the Red Sox break even if their positive and negative figures above both regress to the mean.
Either way, I’m done predicting doom for — or gassing up — this team. However good you think the Red Sox are, they will either be better or worse: It’s practically an ironclad rule of baseball at this point.
Filed under: Baseball
Using my JEFFBAGWELL version of WAR — aka the Joint Estimate Featuring FanGraphs and B-R Aggregated to Generate WAR, Equally Leveling Lists.
This is despite hurting their average by uncharacteristically posting identical win totals (78) in 2022 and 2023.
Yes, I know the Yankees disavow their Orioles Era. But the inaugural version of the Highlanders inherited at least a few players from the original Orioles.