Insurance for Papi

Well, that was quick, and also a surprise.. How would that play out since Carp is also a reserve outfielder. There would be a hole there.

Carp is the 5th outfielder (behind Victorino, Bradley, Nava, and Gomes). One injury means Nava goes to RF and Gomes to LF, meaning Carp can still fill in for Ortiz or Napoli.

But, yeah, there's also Hassan and Brentz in AAA.

While I agree with the logic cited above about how to handle an Ortiz injury, I clicked on this thread because I'm really worried about a future totally without Ortiz (which is obviously come one day fairly soon). His combination of power, OBP, just hitting "smarts" which he's developed over many years, will leave a crater in his wake when he retires. I'm not dismissing the problem of potential injury, but agree Carp is our obvious solution for the short term.

Could Carp be the longer-term solution as well?

My personal guess is the front office is hoping to remake the overall team into a younger more athletic one which is less dependent on a power DH like Ortiz, but that's easier said than done in a market like Boston.

matthew kemp

For this year a combination of Carp, Gomes and Nava would fill in for Ortiz. Who knows what could happen in the future, but in a positive Red Sox world, maybe Middlebrooks becomes a solid major leaguer this year and Cecchini is ready to be a solid major leaguer by next year. One of those guys could play DH and back up at 1st and 3rd adding some interesting roster flexibility to the team. Ortiz may be the last of the traditional DH. It could be a benefit to have a less established DH so players can be quasi-rested by rotating into DH now and again.

That's the direction many teams have gone in recent years, no question, but many players struggle to perform when they don't play the field. I remember thinking a few years ago that the ability to "mix and match" would be really nice, but now that a number of teams have tried it, I'm less than convinced. I'll try to research whether the numbers truly back up my impression, but my impression is that the "mix and match" model, at least as tried these last several years, has been dramatically less effective than Ortiz.

Realize we won't necessarily have to replace all of Ortiz's production from the DH spot, but his productivity in that spot currently makes up for some of the limitations in the production of other elements of the roster and we will not only have to replace the DH, we're unlikely to have the DH spot providing us with a "cushion" for some of the other roster spots.

I'm actually quite intrigued to see if Carp could be the long-term solution. He was astonishingly good off the bench (a key element for a DH) and has decent pop as well as OBP. He's no where near Ortiz at this point, but Ortiz himself likens Carp to Ortiz as a young player.link

No, not biting them in the ass.

There's a dearth of 1B prospects in baseball in general, so hard to fault them there. Off the top of my head, I can only think of, say, Singleton, Vogelbach, and then it drops to guys like Cron and Gallo.

Also, they've traded the likes of Rizzo, Reddick, Head, it's not like there haven't been any guys at those positions.

I do think the club has a bit of a hard-on for defense and pitching in amateur acquisition right now though. Not sure if that's an attempt to exploit a market inefficiency or not. Looking at this year's draft, I see one prospect whose best tool is his bat. Last year I see none.

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Anyway, getting back to the point of the thread, I don't see how a team has "insurance" for one of the best hitters of the last decade, who they also happen to have completely lucked into as a FA signing. As for general insurance at the DH position, I don't think that's really a thing - it's the one position that you literally can put anyone at from a "defensive" perspective, and I think we're seeing the slow death of the full-time DH. Just look at the AS ballot every year that the game is in an AL park.

This year, 20 players played at least half of their games at DH. Only seven played in more than 70 games: Dunn, Ortiz, Pujols (who was mainly DH'ing b/c of his feet), Scott, Hafner, Berkman, and Giambi. Ortiz was the only one who had an OPS over .770.

The DH is dead once Ortiz retires, folks. Long live the DH.

I don't see this as a problem. Speed and defense is a young man's game. There are very few free agents at the up-the-middle positions who play good defense and can hit a little bit, and even with those guys, the aging curve often means they'll have to move down the defensive spectrum (see Victorino, Beltran, etc). Meanwhile, there are good hitters pretty much every year who are available on short-term contracts to fill in at 1B/LF/RF/DH. The Red Sox drafting strategy thus reflects the dynamics of the free agent market.

There's also the fact that, as alluded to above, a large number of the elite hitters in the game at 1B/LF/RF/DH were initially drafted/signed at other positions. As a general rule, drafting amateur players who are already low on the defensive spectrum is a bad sign-- it means they lack the athleticism or skill to play a more valuable position and have less leeway if their defense can't hack it at their initial position. This would be a fair criticism if the Red Sox only drafted defensive-first guys. But they like guys who both play up-the-middle positions but who can also rake-- recent position player early-round draftees include Jon Denney, Blake Swihart, Jackie Bradley, Kolbrin Vitek (he was a bust, but he was supposed to be a Michael Young-type), and Bryce Brentz, while recent big bonus IFAs include Rafael Devers, Manuel Margot, and Wendell Rijo. Even Deven Marrero, the posterchild of the "why won't they draft sluggers" contingent, has good offensive tools (contact and patience, albeit little power).

I think it's more that they have eschewed drafting the traditional big slow bopper who hits moonshots but runs about as fast as a dog on ice skates.  They could have drafted Gallo for instance, and I thought at the time they might, but they passed.  Part of the reason is that these guys can be highly variable.  If it turns out you get an MVP candidate, but if they don't develop perfectly, you probably get nothing.  Plus a team with the Red Sox resources can always find guys like this as they did with Mike Napoli.

Yup, it reduces it from a 5:1 to a 2:1 ratio, which is much more reasonable.

Folks may note that I posed a question here rather than (as usual) stated my mere opinion as if it were an obvious and unalterable truth. And the answers make me feel much better.

I think the short version of the answer is, yeah, and when we need a RF/LF/1B/DH, we'll trade Mookie Betts and Jon Denny for a real good veteran approaching free agency. Or sign an undervalued FA.

With this strategy, though, it's hard to find elite players at that end of the spectrum, which is why at some point I want to see what Carp can do with regular PT. (Hey, I brought it back on topic!)

To look at it from the 180 degree opposite perspective, Ortiz, while incredibly valuable offensively, costs the team defensibly and in flexibility since he does not take the field except for certain interleague games. Probably the organization is thinking for the longer term, better to find N+1 boppers to play N defensive positions and put one of them at DH every day, rotating to give guys a rest once in awhile. Then you have a true 25-man roster rather than a 24+a-purely-designated-hitter roster.