Under-the-Radar Hopes and Fears

Greinke is a year younger than Price will be, so you can probably knock a year off of what he got.  That would also probably knock the AAV down also because you're taking his predictably best year off (youngest).  Not including any inflation of course...

I just don't know that going from 4/127 to 5/160 while having to change cities and teams and while adding some new unrealistic expectations is worth it for someone who will have made $140 million at that point in his career.

If changing cities/teams prevents you from accepting an extra $33M for 1 additional year of service, you are a crazy person.

UTR hope: Williams Jerez gets used as a SP and flourishes. He had a lot of longer outings last year, and I wonder if the team has maybe considered stretching him out. Regardless, I'm hoping (and believe) that he can/will contribute this year.

UTR fear: that the Sox really have become the anti-Yankees as far as minor league pitching goes. NY has done very well creating successful MLBers from marginal- and non-prospects both in the rotation, and especially the bullpen. The Sox have developed (some of) their highest picks, but guys like Barnes, Light, Martin, Haley, etc (remember Austin Maddox?) have struggled with any semblance of consistency. Kimbrel/Smith helps, but at some point the team needs to learn to draft and develop guys who aren't clear-cut talents, especially to round out the bullpen and provide depth for deadline trades, and (less so, given the rise of Owens/Johnson and acquisition/development of Rodriguez) cost control for the rotation in the future.

The top 4 are not going in any deal for a rental, so this is essentially a fear that they'll deal Kopech and Johnson at the deadline. The one sort of deal that seems possible is for a LF because Castillo isn't cutting it and Benintendi is not yet ready, and it's not going to take both Kopech and Johnson to get two months of Josh Reddick.

However, I think a perfectly reasonable and perceptive UTR fear would be shipping out Johnson or Kopech (or Travis or Basabe if they're the big emerging star) on a deadline deal ... which would still be a wild overpay (just like Iglesias and Montas for 1 1/3 years of Peavy was a wild overpay).

UTR hope: Roniel Raudes (yeah, I'm cheating a bit here, but he's been my favorite deep sleeper for a while)

UTR fear: Dave Dombrowski will make another Margot/Guerra for Kimbrel type deal at the deadline.

I had the same fear. But at least Barnes looks like he's stepping up.

No doubt that this Red Sox team is one of the higher-variance teams in the league. A pretty large proportion of their starting-level players have significant question marks either as young players without an established track record (Swihart, Vazquez, Shaw, Castillo, Bradley, Kelly, and, to a lesser (but still meaningful) extent, Betts, Bogaerts and Rodriguez) or veterans who have had both really good and really bad seasons in their recent past (Ramirez, Sandoval, Porcello, Buchholz). That covers either five or seven (depending on how you feel about Betts/Bogaerts) of their nine starting position players and either three or four (depending on how you feel about Rodriguez) of their five rotation spots.

But remember that just about all of the above players (except maybe Shaw, Castillo and Kelly, and even then...) have legitimate All-Star-level upsides, either because they're young players who clearly have that upside or veterans who have had seasons at that level in the last three years. As such, I think this team has easy 95+ upside if everything breaks right, just like it has 75 win downside if nothing does. When you average it all out, you get somewhere in the mid/high-eighties (which is where most of the projection systems have them-- Fangraphs says 88, PECOTA says 85), but it could easily be much higher or much lower than that-- which is, after all, why they play the games.

By the way, the culprit for that uncertainty? The player development gap that happened between 2008 and 2014 or so (basically, between Ellsbury/Buchholz and Bogaerts, they didn't develop any starting-caliber players that they kept around (though they traded guys like Rizzo, Reddick and Iglesias)) and a bunch of free agent signings that have looked pretty bad. There's a reason Epstein and Cherington got fired, after all.

FWIW, this team does have good depth, if not a ton of sure-fire above-avg players. Hanley Ramirez is a big wildcard...he looks pretty good at 1b, and if he hits like 2013, watch out. Shaw seems to be capable of pulling off a full season's continuation of last year. But with Sandoval, Ortiz (simply by virtue of his age), JBJ, Castillo, and most of the pitching staff between Price and Kimbrel, yeah, who knows? I'm genuinely hopeful that Barnes has figured things out, and that one of Light/Jerez/Hembree/Martin will provide a big arm addition to the 'pen by July. Very broad spread of potential outcomes...

PECOTA's saying 87 now. They had 210% of the Mariners' 1B PT apportioned (by listing Dae-Ho Lee's 10% twelve times) and when they fixed that, everything else shifted.