Potential Peaks, Pitfalls For 2015 Red Sox
BOSTON (CBS) -- Some folks love the Red Sox' annual St. Patrick's Day spring training game because they like to see their favorite team wearing green jerseys. Some of us like this tradition for another reason: It means the seemingly interminable spring training schedule is halfway done.
Real baseball is inching ever so close.
As for what will happen when the 2015 Red Sox season finally gets underway April 6 in Philadelphia, expectations might be as varied as ever. Not many are predicting a run through the AL and another World Series berth, but few believe back-to-back last-place finishes are in store. To be sure, there won't be any "Best Team Ever" headlines splattered on back pages throughout Boston this month.
Yet while the optimism may be more tempered than a typical spring, there are still reasons to believe in the Red Sox. They're in a division with no clear-cut favorite, they have an intimidating lineup, and they have enough guys with championship experience to make earning a postseason berth a realistic hope.
While most of the major areas have been covered (and covered again) by now, here's a look at three specific spots that provide reason for optimism, and three areas that could stand in the way of a first-place finish.
Peaks
Pedroia's Pop
If you were to chart the career of Dustin Pedroia in terms of offensive output, the word "optimism" may not immediately come to mind. His OPS and home run totals have gone down in each of the past three years, as his seven homers and .712 OPS last season were the lowest of his career (excluding his 31-game appearance in 2006).
That decline in performance, however, was not without reason. Ever the type to break a finger while diving into first base on opening day, Pedroia did just that in 2013. He played all season but saw a notable decline in power while playing Gold Glove defense. Hoping for a better 2014, Pedroia again jammed his hand in the first game of the year at Fenway Park while diving for a ball, and it bothered him all season until he eventually underwent surgery in September. His offensive output bottomed out.
Regardless of what you might be expecting from Pedroia at the plate this season, it would be hard to doubt that he will at least be better. And given that he's feeling fully healthy for the first time in a long time, and given that he's batting in front of the most stacked three-through-six in the majors, and given that it took him all of one spring training game to prove that he's as cocky as ever, it's fair to believe the .300/.375/.485 Pedroia could be belting 20 homers, driving in 90 runs and scoring more than 100 times this season.
Brock Holt
The 2014 season was, mostly, a terrible one for the Boston Red Sox. But that Brock Holt -- he was just a delight.
The 26-year-old Holt worked just about every single possible role for the Red Sox last year. He started out as a fill-in at third base, going 8-for-23 in seven games in April and alerting John Farrell to his potential usefulness. So Holt was called upon again to fill in at third base in May, when he hit .288 with five doubles, a home run and five RBIs in 15 games. When the calendar turned to June, Farrell needed a first baseman, and he turned to an unlikely source in the the 5-foot-10, 185-pounds Holt.
But Holt did the job admirably, managing to go 10-for-28 at the plate during those six games when he was playing first base for the first time of his life.
Considering that went so well, when the Red Sox needed an outfielder, they threw Holt out there. He did all right.
By the end of the year, Holt had played 39 games at third base, 35 games in right field, 12 games at his supposed "natural position" of shortstop, 11 games at second base, 10 games in center field, eight games in left field and eight more at first base, all while hitting .281 with a .331 on-base percentage.
Impressive stuff.
The bad news for Holt is that this year's starting lineup does not have the holes that last year's did, meaning the opportunities for regular playing time won't be quite so frequent. But the good news is that last year's experience provided the perfect training ground for Holt to assume his role as the ultimate utility man.
He may not be among the top 10 most important players on the Red Sox, but he should be the perfect player for Farrell to use to give starters rest without the lineup missing a beat.
Rick Porcello Is ... Pretty Good
The common refrain all winter has been "The Red Sox don't have an ace; they have five number threes."
Well, that's a little off.
Rick Porcello is most certainly not an "ace," and he may not be a prototypical No. 1 starter, but he's a pretty darn good pitcher.
Porcello is coming off the best season of his six-year career, and at 26 years old, he's entering his prime. He went 15-13 last season while posting a 3.43 ERA, 1.231 WHIP and 3.15 strikeout-to-walk ratio. Compared with last year's Red Sox starters, Porcello would have ranked first in wins, second in ERA, second in WHIP and third in K/BB.
It stands to reason that Porcello is still trending upward in his baseball career, and it's reasonable to expect improvement out of the 6-foot-5 right-hander. Will he be Jon Lester? Well, no, but with an average of 30 starts and roughly 180 innings per year, he should be able to provide a high volume of quality pitching atop the Red Sox rotation.
Pitfalls
Koji Might Be No-Mo-ji
What Koji Uehara did in 2013 was utterly ridiculous, borderline unprecedented, and impossible to be replicated.
What he did in 2014 was ... just about what you might expect out of a 39-year-old with more than 1,600 innings on his arm.
It didn't matter much in the standings, because the Red Sox were miles out of a playoff spot by July, but Uehara was atrocious in the final three months of the season. In just 12 save opportunities, he blew four of them, surpassing his entire 2013 total (three blown saves in 37 opportunities). His ERA and WHIP in July were 2.45 and .818, respectively. In August, they were 5.56 and 1.588. In September, his ERA jumped to 6.23 with a 1.154 WHIP.
While it would have been wildly unrealistic to expect Uehara to repeat his absurd 2013 season, the steep drop-off in 2014 swung the pendulum a little bit too far.
The Red Sox then oddly went out and offered a two-year, $18 million contract to Uehara. Now, after getting just three innings of work this spring, he's on the shelf with a hamstring strain that he sustained while running before Wednesday's game. That's not all that encouraging, considering he's had issues with his hamstring in the past.
If Uehara picks up in 2015 where he left in 2014, the Red Sox will be losing games in April that they should be winning. You'll remember that the 2011 team went 11-15 in April, a hole from which they never fully recovered. And if Koji is ineffective or injured, there aren't too many experienced options not named Edward Mujica who could take his role.
The $72 Million Question Mark
Rusney Castillo might be great. He might be average. He might be terrible. Nobody really has any idea. And thus far through the spring, we know little else about the Cuban outfielder than we did when the Sox first signed him last year.
An oblique injury has kept him out of game action this spring, so the only real picture we have of Castillo as a player comes from the brief 10-game stint he spent with Boston last year. He played well enough, recording hits in eight of those 10 games and posting a .333 batting average with two homers, six RBIs and three stolen bases.
With Hanley Ramirez locked into left field, with Shane Victorino announced early as the owner of right field, and with Mookie Betts coming off a solid rookie campaign with a .291 average, an .812 OPS and 18 home runs in 213 plate appearances (and with a .462 spring training average and 1.231 OPS thus far in spring training), the Red Sox might not be able to justify a spot for the man that cost them $72 million last August.
Of course, there will be injuries and slumps and trades, but when you add Daniel Nava and Allen Craig into that mix, it becomes a very crowded outfield. If there are better options than Castillo, that's not a bad thing for Boston, but assuming he's healthy, there's got to be a fair amount of pressure on Farrell to make it all work. If that means sitting a surging Betts, or making Victorino unhappy with a spot on the bench, it could create some problems.
The Rest Of The Rotation
OK, this one's hardly an uncovered topic, but that's because it is a very real concern.
Clay Buchholz went 8-11 with a 5.43 ERA last year, when he pitched more innings than anyone else in a Boston uniform.
Joe Kelly has some nasty stuff, but in his eight starts against American League teams last year, he was touched for a 4.66 ERA.
Wade Miley's got a career 4.44 ERA against the American League.
Justin Masterson really hasn't put together a complete season since 2011; since then, he's 32-34 with a 4.62 ERA and 1.405 WHIP.
This is all a problem.
Granted, the Pedroia-Ortiz-Ramirez-Sandoval-Napoli quintet in the middle of the lineup should put up plenty of runs, but they might need to score six or seven every night if they want to come away with wins. In Major League Baseball, that's a tough way to live if you want to win with consistency from April through September.
Read more from Michael Hurley by clicking here. You can email him or find him on Twitter @michaelFhurley.
