If you thought the Red Sox were looking at a 60-game season as an opportunity to try some weird stuff, to mix up their pitching staff and squeeze a bit more out of guys like Nathan Eovaldi and Eduardo Rodriguez, you were overestimating their creativity.
Or, perhaps more accurately, overestimating their sense of urgency.
It’s not about 2020, as the team has proven with its decision-making over and over again in the last nine months. It’s about the future.
And the Red Sox sound like a team that will not go crazy trying to take advantage of a 60-game season because A), they don’t think they have to, and, B) they don’t want to.
“We know anything can happen, we know there will be surprises,” Red Sox manager Ron Roenicke said during a Zoom call with reporters on Monday. “There’s always surprises from teams you don’t expect to do well and all of a sudden in two months a team is leading their division who was picked to finish fourth or fifth, so those surprises will be there.
“We don’t feel like we would be a surprise. We feel like we have a good team and we just need to get hot, whether it’s the first week or the first month or whatever it is. You need to play a good .500 ball and then get hot somewhere.”
If you’re a starting pitcher with a history of getting hurt, like Rodriguez and Eovaldi, that might be music to your ears.
The manager isn’t going to force it. He wants to take it easy and play it smart.
That’s why, even though there’s talk about the Indians using a four-man rotation and the Mariners using a six-man rotation, among other teams mixing it up, the Red Sox are playing it straight with a five-man rotation that’ll likely start with Rodriguez followed by Eovaldi and a pair of journeymen in Martin Perez and Ryan Weber. An opener is likely for the fifth spot.
Here’s Roenicke’s explanation: “I feel like these guys have done a five-man rotation in the past. And I know the importance of 60 games. The last thing I want to do is put these guys in positions they are not used to. I know 40 years ago, 50 years ago, when we had four-man rotations, that’s what those guys were used to. That’s what their bodies, year after year, adapted to. I don’t want to put somebody in a position where I can hurt him. I care about these guys, their careers, their families, and I don’t want to do something that would hurt that career. So that’s why I haven’t even approached this.”
It’s a swell idea for a team that can afford it. And maybe the Red Sox feel they can. A 60-game schedule, as Roenicke said, can create room for surprises.
Maybe a team like the Royals, Tigers or Rangers — teams not really expected to push for playoff spots — will take a risk this year.
The Red Sox don’t see themselves as a team that needs to do that.
Asked Friday if the 60-game season would help the Sox, a team largely picked to miss the playoffs by most pundits back in February, chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom didn’t think it would.
“I think you could very easily, for any club, argue either side of that question,” Bloom said. “I think the game is humbling enough that we should be careful about thinking we know too much about how this different schedule will be an advantage or disadvantage for teams. A lot of things that make teams successful for the long haul will also make them successful for a 60-game sprint. But there are going to be some other things that are different. Given that we haven’t done this before, especially under these circumstances and especially after this layoff, I don’t think we really know.
“I think there’s a lot of reasons to be optimistic that it can work in our favor, but I think that to construct too much of a case would be to pretend we know more about this racket than I think we can.”
The short version of that answer: I don’t want to eat my words later, so I’m pleading the fifth.
For the rest of us: Heck yeah, a 60-game season helps the Red Sox. They lost Rick Porcello to free agency and replaced him with Perez, who strikes out fewer batters than any other starter in baseball at a time when any contact might result in a home run.
They lost Chris Sale to Tommy John surgery, albeit at an opportune time, and have a starting rotation with only two above-average pitchers.
On paper, they can’t compete with the Yankees, or even the Rays.
So yeah, one could argue it’s time to push them. See if Rodriguez and Eovaldi want to pitch every four days instead of five. Get Darwinzon Hernandez ready to throw two or three innings behind them twice a week. Push Matt Barnes and Brandon Workman to their limits and see if you can make a run at one of the 10 playoff spots (the 16-team playoff format was agreed to by the players, but not put in place because MLB failed to make them an overall offer they wanted to accept).
We can guess what Alex Cora would do.
“You look at Nate Eovaldi, what he’s done so far, he’ll probably be ready for a season in a week,” Roenicke said. “Everybody is a little different, so we’ll see exactly where they are.”
Eovaldi wants to be a workhorse, we know that. We saw it in the 2018 postseason. But he hasn’t stayed healthy much in his career.
The reality is, Bloom is right: we don’t know what a 60-game season will look like.
The Nationals didn’t look like a playoff team for most of last season, but turned it on in the second half and never cooled off.
So the Red Sox are playing this safe. They didn’t even include most of their top prospects in their original 60-man roster for the season. They only included 47 players overall, leaving 13 spots open to add players later.
A team looking to make a splash might have their prospects training at a nearby facility and ready to jump in at a moment’s notice.
The Red Sox are still weighing their options.
“We had a lot of conversations about this and the right way to do it,” Roenicke said. “Do you bring in some of your top prospects that you really don’t want to miss a season? Then you talk about, what happens if we get five or six guys all of a sudden come in and test positive for the virus? How do we best fill these 60 spots with what will help us not just this year but next year also?”
It sounds like Roenicke is making the case for the prospects to join the club, but the front office hasn’t pulled the trigger.
“We thought about bringing (47 guys) and we think the testing part is critical,” he said. “If we get through the testing part clean and don’t have some cases, or at least not many, then we feel like we can proceed with how we’ll go with the next spots that are open on the 60-man list. I thought it was a really smart way to do this.
“I know there are a couple guys I talk about that I got to see in spring training that I thought were great looking players. They aren’t ready for our team yet. But those are guys that I really would like to be able to play and get experience this year so they’re not set back for next year and we don’t lose them for really a year.”
Roenicke wants his prospects there, that much is clear.
He doesn’t want to risk his players’ health for one weird, 60-game season.
He’s got his eyes on the future, not just 2020.
The Red Sox aren’t going nuts for one season. They just want to get through it safely.
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Red Sox sound like a team playing for the future, not going all-in for 2020 - Boston Herald
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