Could the Red Sox Have the Best Lineup in the American League?

On Tuesday, MLB.com’s Anthony Castrovince published an article breaking down what he considered the top 10 lineups in baseball. Rankings like these are a staple of preseason coverage. They’re fun and they give people something to talk – or more accurately, to shout – about. Castrovince is well aware that sharing his opinions means opening himself up to criticism, leading off his article, “It’s been a minute since strangers have yelled at me on the internet, so it must be time to post my top 10 lineups for 2025!” To be clear, our goal today is not to roast Castrovince, both because we’re not that kind of website and because, in large part, there’s not too much to quibble with. He starts with the Dodgers, Mets, and Braves, and while you could make a pretty strong argument that the Braves deserve the number two spot, that's clearly the cream of the league. He ranks the Phillies fourth, which also seems like an extremely reasonable spot for them, but that also means that his top four consists entirely of National League teams.

Our topic today comes next, and here’s how Castrovince introduced it: “WARNING! I’m about to list three AL East teams in a certain order. Quite frankly, you can shuffle them in any order for all I care. The point is all three belong somewhere right around here, but putting down a ‘tie’ is lame and doesn’t read as well as an actual 1-10 list, so here we are. Flame away.”

Castrovince put the Red Sox, Orioles, and Yankees, at four, five, and six, in that order. As you may have noticed, that means he thinks the Red Sox have the best lineup in the American League – though once again, he thinks they’re pretty much tied with the Yankees and Orioles for that honor. That idea certainly caught the Talk Sox Slack channel by surprise. Nicolas Cage GIFs were exchanged. Lots of them. I wanted to dig a little deeper. Is it possible that the Red Sox have the best lineup in the AL? Last year, the team’s 104 wRC+ was tied for fifth with the Mariners. What have they done to get better? Well, they added Alex Bregman, but they also lost Tyler O’Neill, who was their second-best hitter and even put up a better 2024 season than Bregman. That's not necessarily a slam dunk.

What about the other teams at the top? Have they gotten worse? The Yankees lost Juan Soto and essentially replaced him with Cody Bellinger, which represents a very steep drop-off. However, they also replaced Alex Verdugo and Anthony Rizzo with Jasson Dominguez and Paul Goldschmidt, and they’ll get a full season of Jazz Chisholm Jr. That should help offset the huge loss of Soto to some degree. The Orioles replaced Anthony Santander with O’Neill, but the main change in their lineup should just be from Adley Rutschman bouncing back to full health and young stars like Gunnar Henderson , Jordan Westburg, Colton Cowser, and Jackson Holliday – my God, this list is long – continuing to improve. It doesn't necessarily seem like either team took a big step back to make room for the Red Sox. Let’s take a look at the lineups Castrovince laid out.

First of all, I love this Red Sox lineup – I absolutely think it’s their best option – but at this point, it’s clear that we won’t see it regularly, if at all. Bregman has not played second base at all during spring training. He’s going to play third. And with Kristian Campbell getting more and more time in the outfield, second base is pretty clearly a competition between Vaughn Grissom and David Hamilton at this point. I think Hamilton is an interesting player, but I think that the lineup Castrovince runs with here is the best option. Yes, Devers hurts you on defense, but playing him there keeps all the big bats in the lineup, and that matters more.

In the table below, I went spot by spot to compare the three lineups. I just did a quick gut-check ranking, so yours may differ slightly, but the color-coding tells the story. The Red Sox are much stronger at the top and weaker at the bottom. The Orioles are much deeper throughout, while the mighty Aaron Judge does a whole lot of heavy lifting for the Yankees.

Even if we grant Castrovince this ideal lineup, if I’m being totally honest, I think he’s overrating the Red Sox slightly. I could be wrong, but I just don’t expect to get much offensively from Ceddanne Rafaela, Connor Wong, or Trevor Story. Maybe Story has a bounce-back season, but I just don’t think you can expect it from him at this point. Devers and Masataka Yoshida are both recovering from shoulder injuries and might not be fully themselves, at least at the start of the season. I don’t think it’s fair to expect Jarren Duran and Wilyer Abreu to repeat what they did last season, and Abreu is starting in a hole thanks to the illness that sapped his strength and cost him weeks of spring training. He’ll also need a platoon partner, which means expecting Rob Refsnyder to maintain his torrid pace from 2024. I do expect big things from Triston Casas, but he’s now suffered enough injuries that I worry about his ability to stay in the lineup too.

I know that sounds extremely pessimistic. I’ve just expressed concern about everyone in the lineup but Bregman. However, I really do think this is a good lineup. Every team has players who overperform and underperform, so not all of my concerns will become reality. Moreover, the cavalry is coming. In Roman Anthony, Kristian Campbell, and Marcelo Mayer, the Red Sox have three of the best prospects in baseball ready to jump in for anyone who underperforms or gets injured – except for Wong; the team is pretty much stuck when it comes to the catcher position. This is a good lineup and the Big Three have the potential to make it really deep, but it’s also one with a lot of questions.

Before I go, I pulled some numbers from FanGraphs to see what the projection systems see as the best offenses in baseballI pulled every depth chart projection from ZiPS and Steamer, then combined each team’s numbers to see which offenses are supposed to be the best. To be clear, this particular exercise seeks to answer a slightly different question. This isn’t about the best lineup, but about which team is projected to hit the best as a whole over the course of the season. The numbers in the table are each team’s total weighted runs created, which essentially means how many runs they would be expected to score while stripping away things like park factors.

ZiPS sees the Orioles with the best offense in the AL and the Red Sox just one spot (and one run) ahead of the Yankees in sixth place. Steamer has the Red Sox all the way down at ninth, but once again, all three teams are grouped together, and they’re all within three runs of each other. Essentially, both projection systems are saying what Castrovince did: these offenses are extremely similar in terms of overall quality. Interestingly, even after losing Bregman and Kyle Tucker, Steamer sees the Astros as the best offense in the AL. So do the Red Sox have the best lineup (or the best offense) in the AL? They’ve at least got a shot at the crown, but it’s a whole lot closer than you might realize.