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It’s a fun time to be a Red Sox fan. Although the 2024 season almost certainly didn’t go quite as well as you might have hoped, the team is bursting with prospects, young big-league talent, and potential. It’s a time for dreaming big, and those dreams should include offseason spending. The Red Sox have indicated that they’ll be making big moves over the winter, so you should absolutely be drooling over the list of pending free agents like it’s a dessert menu. Like many other outlets, we here at Talk Sox have written a lot of words about the team’s need for a right-handed hitter to balance out the overwhelmingly left-handed lineup. However, I’d like to point out something pretty simple: Boston’s need for left-handed pitching is more pressing than its need for right-handed hitting.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, when they were at the plate, the Red Sox found themselves with the platoon advantage 59% of the time in 2024, which ranked seventh in baseball. Having a lineup stacked with lefties will help toward that end, as most pitchers (and most people) are right-handed. But let’s look at the other side of the coin. In 2024, Boston pitchers faced 6,154 total batters, and they had the platoon advantage in 50.6% of those plate appearances. That was the absolute lowest percentage in baseball. The league average was 57.5%, 25 of the 30 teams were above 55%, and no other team was below 52.5%. The Red Sox were dead last – emphasis on dead.
The reason for this was simple: They had no lefties. Left-handed pitchers were on the mound for just 10.8% of their total plate appearances, which ranked 28th out of the 30 teams. When they faced left-handed hitters, the Red Sox had the platoon advantage just 7% of the time. 27 of the other 29 teams were above 24%. By FanGraphs WAR, here were Boston’s five most valuable left-handed pitchers in 2024:
- James Paxton, who made three starts with the Sox before injuring his calf.
- Cam Booser, who ran a solid 3.38 ERA and 3.80 FIP over 42.2 relief innings.
- Brennan Bernardino, who ran a serviceable 4.06 ERA and 4.15 ERA over 51 relief innings.
- Joe Jacques, who pitched 1.2 innings and allowed one earned run.
- Dominic Smith, who pitched three innings and is not a pitcher.
Booser put up a genuinely nice season, and Bernardino was solid, despite taking a step back from a great 2023 campaign. But that’s really it. Bernardino ranked 12th on the team in innings pitched and Booser ranked 14th. No lefty was in the top 10. No other lefty threw more than 18 innings for the Red Sox this season. Dom Smith – who again is a first baseman – was their fifth-most valuable left-handed pitcher.
At this point, I want to stop and make it clear that I’m not the world’s biggest worrier about platoon advantage. Generally speaking, I think it’s much more important to just go out and get the best players you can and deploy them wisely. The Mariners 52.5% of the time, which ranked them in 29th place, just ahead of the Red Sox, and the Mariners arguably had the best pitching staff in baseball. They had righties pitching 93.7% of the time, and because their righties were really good, it worked out just fine. Besides, these days, there’s a lot more to batter-hitter matchups than handedness. You can also look at how the hitter does against certain pitch types, or to get even more in the weeds, how their bat path lines up against the pitcher’s arm angle and pitch shapes. Every team in baseball is looking at this information while making matchup decisions. Pitching-savvy teams like the Rays work hard to keep a great deal of arm-angle diversity on their staff.
That said, this stuff does matter, and it matters all the when you’re talking about relievers. If you’ve got a great lefty, you can save them for a high-leverage moment where they can have an outsized effect on the outcome of the game. I’m not saying that the Red Sox need to go out and stock up on left-handed arms, but having one real left-handed weapon coming out of the bullpen would fill a real hole on the roster.
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