There’s long been a chicken-and-egg conversation regarding the Red Sox’ attempts to help their top prospects take the final step in translating Triple A success to the big leagues.
The constant win-now state of affairs in Boston made it difficult to ride out transitional struggles of top prospects who required time to gain their footing at the highest level. Sox officials often would note that the player development environment was different in their city than in other baseball locales.
Elsewhere, multi-year rebuilding projects permitted teams to allow their young players to struggle over a prolonged period before finding success. In Boston, with the exception of the relatively brief struggles of someone like Dustin Pedroia in his 2007 rookie campaign, players rarely had a chance to work through their struggles at the big league level.
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Instead, they’d get banished to Triple A if they couldn’t find their way out of slumps that exceeded a month or so. The need for present production, and the inability to play prospects through their struggles, in turn created some player evaluation challenges.
Wednesday’s 13-8 loss to the Yankees offered a subtle reminder of the notion, with the entry of reliever Andrew Bailey into the game for New York, his first big league appearance in more than two years. Bailey, of course, had been acquired by the Sox along with outfielder Ryan Sweeney in exchange for Josh Reddick and two minor leaguers, at a time when there were doubts about Reddick’s ability to sustain the production needed to be an everyday big leaguer.
Reddick’s playing time in 2011 diminished over the season’s final month before he basically disappeared from the Sox lineup over the final days of that season. The Sox, desperate to regain their grip in a season that was slipping away, couldn’t afford to stay with the 24-year-old, and deemed him expendable in the winter.
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The result was perhaps the worst trade of Ben Cherington’s tenure, with Oakland benefiting from the services of a platoon player who damages righties and plays excellent defense, and the Sox getting almost no return from Bailey over his two injury-filled years. Perhaps with the benefit of more time to be patience, the Sox might have reached different conclusions about Reddick.
Now, however, the Sox are getting the player development opportunities that they’re rarely had but never wanted. In 2012, the team could play Jose Iglesias every day down the stretch even when he seemed overmatched at the plate; he came back as a better player and a World Series contributor in 2013. In 2014, the team could ride out Xander Bogaerts’ 10 weeks of struggles in a way that permitted him to turn a corner in September (.313/.317/.490) and carry that performance into a breakout 2015.
Had the Sox been in contention, it’s possible that Blake Swihart would have been sent back down to the minors – or that he would have gotten something less than an everyday role – when Ryan Hanigan returned from the DL. Instead, he got plugged back into the lineup quickly after a brief DL stint around the All-Star break, and the 23-year-old now leads all big league catchers in average (.348, along with a .412 OBP and .478 slugging mark) in the second half. His future value to the team has been redefined.
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The ability to commit every day to Jackie Bradley Jr. – even when he was 5-for-50 in early-August – and Rusney Castillo represented a product of the team’s plummet from contention. Now, both look like key parts of the Sox’ plans for 2016.
Henry Owens won’t be pulled out of the rotation after getting hammered by the Yankees on Wednesday. Instead, he’ll be given a chance to apply some of the on-field lessons he learned to his subsequent starts this year.
Losing is, of course, brutal. The 2015 season has already resulted in a shakeup at the top of the Red Sox organization, and there will be more consequences to it. But in terms of creating a foundation for a future Red Sox core that eventually may yield sustainable success, the dimensions of the recent Red Sox struggles have created player development and evaluation opportunities that almost never existed.
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