From late March to early October, the American League East is a slog.
In 2023, four teams posted winning records and three qualified for the postseason. The division champion Baltimore Orioles won the second-most games in all of baseball. Collectively, the division posted a .554 winning percentage, best in the game. And as Alex Speier of the Boston Globe noted ,the East had a .652 winning percentage outside the division.
Think about that: the division was so good that when it came to playing the other 25 teams in the game, the East won almost two-thirds of the time.
The year before, it was much the same: four teams with winning records and three playoff entrants.
There can be no debate: the AL East is the toughest, most talented and most competitive division of the six in MLB. And that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. Ranking season doesn’t start until after the first of the year, but when it comes, it’s assumed that as many as three teams — Baltimore, Tampa Bay and Boston — will rank in the Top half of all player development systems, if not in the Top 10.
The pipeline of young talent across the division will continue for years to come.
“It’s not going to get any easier,” acknowledged one official from an AL team of the division dogfight.
And now that the offseason is here, the competition doesn’t stop. Indeed, it seems like a continuation of the regular season, with many of the teams bunched together, eager to find separation from one another with an eye toward 2024 and beyond.
Already, Juan Soto, a generational talent, has joined the division, at least for next season. It’s unlikely the Yankees would have given up the handful of prospects to San Diego without being fully committed to working out an extension with him beyond 2024.
Then there’s Shohei Ohtani, who is said to be winnowing down his potential destinations to a few, with Toronto very much still in the mix. It’s no guarantee that Ohtani signs with the Blue Jays, but the fact that they’ve made it this far in the Ohtani sweepstakes stays something about the team’s commitment.
Imagine, if you’re the Orioles, Rays and Red Sox, the prospect of facing Ohtani and Soto a combined 26 times next season. Good luck to those pitching staffs.
Tampa Bay and Baltimore lack the resources to compete for the upper tier of free agents. But Baltimore turned a handful of bottom-feeding seasons into the best farm system in the game, giving them a tsunami of top prospects to populate their roster for years to come, or alternately, a boat-load of trade chips. Meanwhile, Tampa Bay remains the master of efficiency, expertly constructing playoff-caliber rosters capable of keeping up with its well-heeled rivals through a combination of player development and deft dumpster-diving for castoffs.
And where does that leave the Red Sox?
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For now, the Sox seem hopelessly mired in the middle: spending enough to place them in the top third of payrolls, but seemingly unwilling to go to the limit for the game’s top free agents. Consider: Since the end of the 2018 season, the Red Sox have given out just one nine-figure contract to a free agent (Trevor Story).
In that same time frame, the Yankees made Aaron Judge the highest-paid position player in the game and Gerrit Cole the third-highest paid pitcher. If they succeed in extending Soto sometime in the next 12 months, it will be at a figure that tops that of Judge.
Should the Blue Jays emerge as the winner of the Ohtani Swepstakes, then they will lay claim to having the highest-paid player in the history of the game.
Boston’s minor league system has improved by leaps and bounds in the last five years, and the organization will likely sport three Top 30 prospects after the first of the year — Marcelo Mayer, Roman Anthony and Kyle Teel — assuming, that is, that one or more isn’t sacrificed in the coming weeks to land some much-needed starting pitching.
But the Red Sox’s system is not yet the equal of Baltimore and Tampa Bay.
There was a time, and not that long ago, when the Red Sox were viewed as legitimate threats for every star player on the market: Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Carl Crawford, David Price, Chris Sale….
Some were successful acquisitions. Some weren’t. Some eluded their grasp. But the Red Sox were factors, a team for which other clubs had to account.
It’s been a while since that was the case.
Numerous reports have the Sox among the teams pursuing Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and if those are accurate — Craig Breslow has steadfastly refused to confirm or deny the Red Sox’s interest — it’s a welcome sign that perhaps the Red Sox are back in the business of chasing after stars and that the years of retrenchment, having delivered nothing more than three last-place finishes in the last four seasons, are mercifully over.
Even when the team stumbled in the past, it came as the result of misguided judgement — they allocated their resources to the wrong players. They lavished big contracts on the likes of Crawford and Price, who were poor fits for Boston. But those missteps were at least forgivable. After all, they had at least tried.
Lately, that same commitment appears to be lacking and the fan base is understandably restless, bordering on hostile.
In the end, it will depend on the results. Are the Red Sox serious enough about improving the roster, becoming legitimate contenders again, and making good on chairman Tom Werner’s vow to approach the winter “full-throttle?”
If not, the Red Sox risk not only further irrelevancy, but the added indignity of following their in-season last-place finish with a equally humbling thrashing in the offseason, too.
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Earlier this week, the Red Sox hired Justin Willard as their director of pitching. He’ll oversee the organization’s pitchers in a macro sense, working out of Boston and in conjunction with both Breslow and pitching coach Andrew Bailey, with input into the major league staff as well as those in the minor league system.
Willard had held the title of minor league pitching coordinator with the Minnesota Twins, and had helped oversee the development of a number of pitching prospect who made their way to the parent club, including 12th-round pick Bailey Ober (13-12, 3.63 over three years), Louie Varland, who graduated to the big leagues three years after being chosen in the 15th round out of a Division 2 school and has made 15 starts over the last two seasons.
“Justin’s great,” said Twins president of baseball operations Derek Falvey. “He’s really very humble, and is really a kind of a steady, quiet presence in the pitching space. But when he speaks and when he’s processing the information that he has and he decides on a plan, you usually know it’s really well thought out. And I think what he brings is, he’s been a coach, he’s been on the field, he’s been hands-on, he’s done some work in our front office, and he’s helped us with some of those acquisition conversations we’ve had.”
Willard’s role was different with the Twins than it will be with the Red Sox, in that he was mostly dealing with pitchers in Minnesota’s minor league system. But he worked closely enough with Minnesota’s pitching coaches and coordinators that he was exposed to the challenges that he’ll face having his hands in the major league pitching program with the Red Sox.
“He’s seen that transition (from the minors to the majors), and because he had relationships with those guys at the big league level,” said Falvey, “he was able to come up to our big league environment and be around it. I know in his role in Boston, as I understand it from Craig, he’ll be involved in the major league and the minor league side of things. He’s already been around our major league group some, so it’s not like he was just a minor league coordinator who’s never spent time around major league pitchers.
“I think, based on what I know about (Andrew) Bailey and that group, I’m guessing there’s going to be a lot of synergy there.”
The Red Sox were able to hire Willard away from the Twins since it constituted a promotion — going from minor league pitching coordinator to a director of pitching, with oversight over the big league pitching program. The latter was not part of Willard’s job description in Minnesota.
In essence, Willard will be doing the job that Breslow himself once had when he began his tenure with the Cubs.
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As recently as two years ago, the Baltimore Orioles lost 110 games, marking three straight full-length seasons in which they lost in triple figures.
Attendance had dipped below a million, and there was little interest in the team.
But in 2022, the team got to .500, and last year, the Orioles won the division for the first time since 2014.
A month ago at the GM Meetings, GM Mike Elias expressed hope that the O’s on-field turnaround would result in the team becoming more of a possible destination point for free agents. And although the Orioles haven’t made any big signings yet — few teams have — he’s already noticing more interest in players choosing Baltimore.
“It’s been really refreshing,’’ noted Elias, and it’s been such an easy conversation for (manager) Brandon Hyde and I to explain why this is a good place to come play, particularly on the pitching side.”
The latter, Elias offered, is likely partially related to the team’s decision several years ago to push the left field wall back, making it far less of a homer haven for hitters and more a good pitching environment.
“I know we haven’t gone bonkers with pitching free agent acquisitions since we moved the wall back,” conceded Elias, “but even just bringing Jordan Lyles and Kyle Gibson in on short-term contracts and having them have some of the better years of their careers and then going back out onto the market and being able to parlay that into better dollars — that’s a first for the Orioles franchise.
“Historically, you look and it was tough place to sign pitchers. It would often offer involve over-pays, or waiting for guys to not have jobs in spring training. It was really uphill sledding. It’s obviously a very pleasant, exciting clubhouse vibe. It’s all positive. So in terms of intangibles, I think we have a lot going for us. Now, it’s really now just competing on a contract that remains something that’s very competitive and not easy to do. But I do feel like we’ve got a really attractive destination from a baseball sense now, which is really nice to have under our belts.”
EXTRA INNINGS
1) It’s wise to not overreact to what takes place in the Rule 5 draft. Last year, Red Sox Twitter was apoplectic when the Red Sox lost three players in the major league portion of the draft. Two of those (Noah Song and Andrew Politi) were eventually offered back to the Red Sox, so: no harm, no foul. The other, Thad Ward, had a 6.37 ERA and a 1.613 WHIP with Washington. This year, the Red Sox lost two players in the major league portion and another seven in the minor league portion, giving them nine players lost in total, the most of any franchise. It remains to be seen what becomes of those who were drafted, but at the very least it signals an improvement in the organization’s talent base. “That’s a consequence of greater depth of players that other organizations deem desirable,” said Breslow. “We’re raising our replacement level (talent).”
2) There’s little doubt that Alex Verdugo underachieved in his time with the Red Sox. It seems inconceivable that he never hit as many as 14 homers in a single season at Fenway Park, and his commitment could sometimes be questioned. But to suggest, as Keith Law did in The Athletic, that Verdugo is nothing more than a platoon player seems to be an extreme evaluation. Even if there are times when Verdugo was a perfectly average offensive performer (career OPS+: 105, meaning he’s five percent better than average), he was, at least part of the time, a better-than-average defender while playing one of the more challenging positions (right field in Fenway) in the game. That doesn’t sound like a part-time player, even if his splits (.655 OPS vs. LHP) suggest a flawed one.
3) Wonder if, Padres GM AJ Preller had to do it all over again, he might not have signed Xander Bogaerts last offseason? Not only did Bogaerts have a disappointing season in his first year with San Diego, but the size of the contract ($280 million) was one more factor that made it virtually impossible to work out an extension with Soto, leading to Wednesday’s trade with the Yankees. Now, the Padres are out the prospect haul it took to get Soto from the Nationals, Soto himself and have Bogaerts for 10 more seasons when they could have potentially kept Fernando Tatis Jr. at short, and in the process, maybe kept Soto, too.
