On Sunday, The Red Sox Might Draft The Final Piece of Something Special

The MLB draft is this Sunday evening and the Red Sox have the twelfth overall pick. This selection falls in that awkward sweet spot where there’s big value to be had here if they get it right, but it’s also still low enough that it’s virtually impossible to predict who they’re going to get, or if they’ll be any good.

Case in point: the Red Sox used the same 12th overall pick in 1994 to draft Nomar Garciaparra. However, the most recent time they picked there in 2016, they got a guy who never even made it to the Major Leagues (more on him in a moment). This stuff is about as unpredictable as the lottery numbers.

Jonathan Mayo of MLB pipeline did a mock draft of the entire league’s first round last week and has the Sox selecting Christian Moore, a second baseman out of Tennessee, but everything about the draft is highly unpredictable. Add in the fact that the Major League team is playing some of their most compelling baseball in years, and this potentially juicy addition to the franchise is a story that will ride mostly under the radar.

However, it’s also part of a larger ongoing story that’s already starting to unfold. In other words, what’s coming next might get even more interesting when you look back at it through the lens of what’s already happened, and how it all fits together. So with Sunday’s selection being the sixth first round pick coming as the byproduct of a last place finish in the last twelve years, this is actually a good time to look back at the process and where it’s evolving.

Breaking the six last place finishes down further, they came in pairs. First, the Sox finished in last place three times in four years from 2012 to 2015, and then they did it again from 2020 to 2023. Each instance also had a “magic carpet ride” season mixed in the middle with the 2013 version producing a World Series title, and the 2021 run coming up short in the ALCS.

But this is where the similarities end. Boston’s initial run of last place finishes produced the seventh overall pick in 2013, the seventh overall pick in 2015, and the aforementioned 12th overall pick in 2016. With those selections, the Red Sox added Trey Ball, Andrew Benintendi, and Jay Groome. In other words, they failed to get a group of building blocks, which is one of the reasons that team’s been so bad in recent years.

Staff Photo by Joel Page/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

Trey ball was the highest pick in the 2013 draft who never reached the Major Leagues, and Jay Groome was the highest pick in the 2016 draft who never reached the Major Leagues. (As it turned out, Groome bet on more MLB games than he’s pitched in.) So while Andrew Benintendi was undoubtedly a hit here, he was more of a single than a home run, and with whiffs on the other two, the Red Sox got relatively minimal production for multiple years of meaningless baseball.

This enormous failure helped sail them into the sea of despair they’ve been stuck in for most of the first half of this decade. Even the joyful 2021 season, while an escape from the monotony, was not an escape from its root cause. Virtually all the production from that team had to come from sources other than the June MLB draft.

For more detail, here’s the top ten players by rWAR (Baseball Reference WAR) from that 2021 team and how they were acquired:

Xander Bogaerts (International Signing: From 2009)

Kiké Hernández (Free Agency: February, 2021)

Nathan Eovaldi (Free Agency: December, 2018)

Rafael Devers (International Signing: From 2013)

JD Martinez (Free Agency: February, 2018)

Garrett Whitlock (Rule 5 selection: From the Yankees in December of 2020)

Nick Pivetta (Trade: 2020 from the Phillies)

Hunter Renfroe (Free Agency: December, 2020)

Alex Verdugo (Trade: 2020 from the Dodgers)

Eduardo Rodríguez (Trade: 2014 from the Orioles)

Not a single one of them are a guy they originally drafted. You can even take this one step further in noting that Kyle Schwarber was one of the biggest contributors to the September and October part of the run, and he was brought in during the middle of that summer.

This type of roster is incredibly difficult to maintain! There’s so many moving parts and holes to fill. You can do it if your owner is willing to blow through luxury tax stop signs to keep up with the maintenance, but if not .... well, see the 2022 and 2023 seasons.

You can even observe the foundation of this problem starting to develop if we go back and do the same exercise for the 2018 World Series roster (which was the most recent playoff team before 2021).

Again, we’re looking at the top ten players by rWAR (Baseball Reference WAR) from that 2018 team and how they were acquired:

Mookie Betts (Draft: 5th round pick in 2011)

Chris Sale (Trade: 2016 from the White Sox)

JD Martinez (Free Agency: February, 2018)

Xander Bogaerts (International Signing: From 2009)

Andrew Benintendi (Draft: First round pick in 2015)

David Price (Free Agency: December, 2015)

Rick Porcello (Trade: 2014 from the Tigers)

Jackie Bradley Jr. (Draft: First round pick 2011)

Eduardo Rodríguez (Trade: 2014 from the Orioles)

Craig Kimbrel (Trade: 2015 from the Padres)

Here, three players were originally drafted by the Sox, but two of them (Betts and Bradley Jr.) were picked all the way back in 2011, and none of them were signed to long-term deals. So we were reaching a point where the Sox either had to pay or have more prospects ready, and as it turns out, neither of those things happened. We all know the ensuing result. Total disaster!

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Fast forward to today, and things look like they’re about to evolve radically different. So far, the Red Sox have selected Marcelo Mayer (2021) and Kyle Teel (2023) with the first round picks from their recent run of last place finishes, and they of course will add a third name to this list on Sunday.

But it goes even deeper, because if we start stringing the last several drafts together, including two that happened while the Sox were winning at the Major League level, the amount of hits are on the verge of rising dramatically. Their first round pick in 2017 was Tanner Houck, and he’s just blossoming this year. Their first round pick in 2018 was Triston Casas, and he’s come into his own as a productive Major Leaguer in the last twelve months.

The Sox didn’t have a first round pick in 2019 after exceeding the luxury tax penalties in 2018, but thanks to deep round hits in Jarren Duran (7th round pick in 2018 and the top Sox player by Baseball Reference WAR this year) and Kutter Crawford (16th round pick in 2017 and the fourth ranked Sox player by Baseball Reference WAR this year) the talent from the system has started to consistently flow.

These four draft hits are a huge reason why the Sox are having such a productive year in 2024. Their top four guys in rWAR right now are Jarren Duran (4.7), Rafael Devers (3.2), Tanner Houck (2.5) and Kutter Crawford (2.2). (And Triston Casas would also probably be in the top five here if he weren’t injured.) In other words, we’ve been waiting for the draft pick guys from the recent last place finishes to arrive with major league production to get the next contention window open, but that production came both early and in an unexpected place; from other guys who were picked earlier and took longer to develop.

Now, as Alex Cora would say, it’s time to get greedy! The Sox are in a position where if they end up hitting on these high first round picks and then throw them on top of what they’ve already got cooking, they could have something really, really special. A long-term, highly productive, home grown core.

As it stands today, the Red Sox have had six last place finishes in the last twelve years, and just a single guy (Andrew Benintendi) has ever played in a Major League game for them after being selected in the first round in the wake of that series of disasters. But what if this time they end up hitting on all three of these high first round, last place finish picks? If that’s the case, over 90 percent of the production they’re going to recoup from all those lost seasons sits in front of them.

Throw in Roman Anthony, who feels like a first round pick and was taken in 2022 (the year between Mayer and Teel), and if everything goes perfectly (it never all goes perfectly) you could have four straight years where you strike gold! I’m not here to tell you this is likely to happen (it’s not), but I am here to point out that it’s July of 2024, and it hasn’t been removed from the list of reasonable possible outcomes.

We don’t yet know the name of the Red Sox 2024 first round pick; but when you combine everything that’s happened with Houck, Duran, Casas and Crawford at the major league level, and what Mayer, Anthony and Teel are doing in Portland, whoever it is has the potential to put an exclamation point on whatever you want to call all of this.

I don’t know exactly where the ceiling is here, but I do know that if Red Sox come anywhere close to it, they won’t be picking as high as they’re slated to go this Sunday for a long, long time. That has me more excited than I’ve been about this team in years.