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According to Chris Cotillo of MassLive, the Red Sox have made Jarren Duran, Roman Anthony, and Kristian Campbell ‘untouchable.' On the surface, this makes perfect sense. Duran was the breakout star of 2024, Anthony is the top prospect in all of baseball, and after storming through the farm system, Campbell looks poised to take over second base at some point during 2025. The other two members of the Big Four, Marcelo Mayer and Kyle Teel, have been touted as untouchable by fans across social media because of the potential they show.
But we’d be kidding ourselves if we believed that all four prospects are going to be contributors at the big league, let alone reach the All-Star potential. There’s a chance they very well could be All-Star caliber players and the Red Sox will be flush with homegrown talent to build around for years to come, but statistically speaking, the far more likely scenario is that one or two of them will pan out as every day big leaguers and only one of them will reach their full potential in Boston. If the biggest return to make the team competitive for the next few seasons comes from dealing members of the Big Four, then why not deal from your biggest strength and turn some of these blue-chip prospects into pitchers you'd like to see starting a playoff game?
It's no secret that the Red Sox need top-of-the-rotation help and could specifically use a left-handed starter. Sure, there are names like Max Fried, Corbin Burnes, and Sean Manaea on the free agent market (not to mention the right-handed Walker Buehler, to whom the Sox have recently been linked), but deals for those first two names are expected to get larger and larger with each passing day. That doesn’t mean the Red Sox shouldn’t be at the forefront of those conversations, but it does mean that they likely will need to turn to the trade market if they want to add more than one high-leverage arm to the starting rotation. Seattle is reportedly listening to offers for members of their starting rotation, Luis Castillo and Bryan Woo being the two most talked about names. But should Seattle tell the Red Sox that Logan Gilbert or Bryce Miller could be had in a deal that revolved around Kristian Campbell, then the Red Sox would be crazy to not entertain a deal of that magnitude. Losing Campbell would sting, but there’s no doubt that the return is worth the sting, especially if Campbell doesn’t pan out at the big league level, which is a very real possibility.
Trading any of the Big Fourwill bring the critics out en masse, and that’s understandable, to a point. However, to upgrade the roster in meaningful ways means making some difficult decisions. Juan Soto picking the Mets means that the American League is wide open for the next few years and the Red Sox are on the cusp of being able to put their best roster on the field since 2018. However, the price for doing so will be high. If the return is a top-of-the-rotation, playoff-proven starter who can bring the next Commissioner’s Trophy to Boston, then the Red Sox need to consider every avenue available to them, even if that means trading some of the best prospects in baseball.
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