Article: These Are Your 2025 Boston Red Sox

[Davy Andrews]

It didn't get much play in the news, but last week, Craig Breslow confirmed that the Red Sox are no longer looking to add. Do they have enough to win?

On Thursday, at the end of an article about Wilyer Abreu’s recovery from his mystery gastrointestinal virus, Alex Speier and Peter Abraham of the Boston Globe emptied their notebooks, in the process burying a small but important detail: “With the caveat that an unexpected opportunity could present itself, chief baseball officer Craig Breslow said he’s not looking to make further additions to the roster after bringing [Adam] Ottavino , outfielder Trayce Thompson, and lefthander Matt Moore into camp on minor league contracts.” So that’s it. Over the coming months, plenty of injury news will develop and plenty of roster decisions will need to be made, but we now know what the 2025 Red Sox will look like. Their team is on the field.

That wasn’t necessarily a foregone conclusion. As Sam Kennedy has confirmed, signing Alex Bregman put the team just past the first luxury tax threshold. That’s generally not the best place to be. Once a team is over the cap, they’re guaranteed to face an increased penalty in any following seasons. Now, when the penalty isn’t so severe, is the time to go for it. And it’s certainly not as if there aren’t any free agents worth spending on. Even after adding Ottavino, the bullpen could absolutely use a dependable arm. The perennially excellent David Robertson is still available, as is Hector Neris, who struggled in 2024 but ran a 3.03 ERA and 3.45 FIP over the previous three.

The catcher position is also iffy. It’s not thin, necessarily, with Connor Wong entrenched as the starter and Carlos Narváez, Blake Sabol, and Seby Zavala all in the mix. But of those four players, Wong is the only one with any track record of even modest big-league success. None of the four project to be even league-average with the bat. As such, Yasmani Grandal, whose 1.4 fWAR in 2024 outpaced Wong’s 1.1 even though Wong got into 54 more games, would make a lot sense. The 36-year-old Grandal isn’t a sure thing, but for a Red Sox team that loves nothing more than handing out one-year contracts, he would raise both the floor and the ceiling at catcher. With Masataka Yoshida likely to start the season on the IL, it wouldn’t be out of line to explore DH options like JD Martinez and Adam Duval, whose game was designed in a lab to excel at Fenway Park.

I haven’t yet mentioned the trade market yet. Unless Yoshida (or another player) does start season on the IL, the Red Sox won’t have to break camp with all of Vaughn Grissom, David Hamilton, Rob Refsnyder, and Romy Gonzalez on the 26-man roster, and that’s before they even think of calling up one of the Big Three. With a roster crunch both in the infield and the outfield, it would make a lot of sense for the Red Sox to consolidate value by trading multiple depth pieces or prospects for one productive regular.

However, as Breslow said, none of that will be happening. The Red Sox are done adding. I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. Yes, the team has real flaws and real question marks: the starting rotation is much improved from last year, but it’s full of players with injury concerns, and as you can see from the last couple paragraphs, I’m particularly worried about catcher, middle infield, and the bullpen. However, this is a much-improved team from last season. It’s got genuine stars in Garrett Crochet, Rafael Devers, Alex Bregman, and Jarren Duran. This could absolutely be the year that Triston Casas joins that star tier as well, and it wouldn’t be shocking to see Abreu and Rafaela ride excellent defense to productive seasons. There are a lot of things to look forward to, but right now it’s time to look at what’s in hand.

Plenty of things will need to go right for this season to be a success. No team achieves all its goals without injury luck and breakout seasons from unexpected places. Although there are still places where the roster could be improved, this team has enough pieces in place to do big things. The job now is to fit them into place.

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[Malcolm White]

"Plenty of things" don't necessarily have to go right.

They've already lost a starter; they have five more, two more who have flashed so far in ST games.  They could lose TWO 2B to injury and still be OK.  If Story goes down, Mayer certainly has the glove for SS and his bat looks pretty good, too.  If casas sustains a long-term injury it will hurt, but it hurts ANY team when one of their best hitters goes down.

Breslow has built a lot of redundancy into this team, to the point where perhaps none of the Big 3 will come North. That's a lot of good roster-builing in less than 18 months.