{"id":309205,"date":"2025-11-26T04:46:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T04:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/309205\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T04:46:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T04:46:08","slug":"red-sox-now-focused-on-adding-impact-bat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/309205\/","title":{"rendered":"Red Sox Now Focused On Adding Impact Bat"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Red Sox made their needed addition to the upper half of the rotation<\/a> with this morning\u2019s Sonny Gray<\/a> trade. The veteran righty slots between\u00a0Garrett Crochet<\/a> and\u00a0Brayan Bello<\/a> in an impressive top three. The Sox have a handful of talented younger arms (e.g.\u00a0Payton Tolle<\/a>,\u00a0Connelly Early<\/a>,\u00a0Kyle Harrison<\/a>, Tyler Uberstine<\/a>) who can compete with injury returnees\u00a0Kutter Crawford<\/a> and\u00a0Patrick Sandoval<\/a> at the back of the rotation.<\/p>\n

That appears to free up the Sox to focus their attention on adding an impact hitter. Chris Cotillo of MassLive<\/a> and Jen McCaffrey of The Athletic<\/a> each write that while further starting pitching adds are possible, the Red Sox are now likely to prioritize bringing in a power bat. Chief baseball officer Craig Breslow left the door open to making another significant rotation move but reiterated the Sox\u2019s interest in bolstering the lineup.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had been pretty transparent about our desire to add to the rotation and our desire to add a bat on the position player side,\u201d Breslow told reporters this evening. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to know exactly what the order of operations will be. So we\u2019ll continue to look for opportunities to improve the team, but I wouldn\u2019t say we\u2019re going to exclusively focus on one thing at the expense of the other. \u2026 And so I don\u2019t think this is a close off all opportunities and look exclusively at position players, but I also think that there\u2019s a chance that that comes into focus now over the next couple of weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Sox aren\u2019t expected to be players for\u00a0Kyle Tucker<\/a> given their stockpile of left-handed hitting outfielders. They\u2019ve been either directly tied to or listed as speculative fits for essentially all the other top free agent bats. Bo Bichette<\/a>,\u00a0Pete Alonso<\/a>,\u00a0Munetaka Murakami<\/a> and\u00a0Kyle Schwarber<\/a> are all possibilities, as is a reunion with\u00a0Alex Bregman<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Boston has just over $154MM in guaranteed commitments for next season. Arbitration salaries for Crawford,\u00a0Tanner Houck<\/a>,\u00a0Triston Casas<\/a> and\u00a0Romy Gonzalez<\/a> should add another $10-12MM. They\u2019d spend another $10MM or so to round out the roster with minimum salary players. The Sox opened the 2025 campaign with a payroll in the $194MM range, so they should have around $20MM before matching this year\u2019s spending level. They\u2019re around $223MM in luxury tax obligations, according to RosterResource<\/a>. That puts them approximately $21MM below the base threshold. The Red Sox typically spend around the CBT line and have gone beyond it in the past, so there should be room for another significant addition.<\/p>\n

The corner infield is the obvious place to add a bat. Casas is coming off a significant knee injury and shouldn\u2019t enter camp as the clear starting first baseman. Marcelo Mayer<\/a> could play third base if the Red Sox don\u2019t re-sign Bregman or add one of Murakami or\u00a0Eugenio Su\u00e1rez<\/a> at the hot corner. The Sox could slide Mayer over to second if they make a bigger acquisition at third.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Red Sox made their needed addition to the upper half of the rotation with this morning\u2019s Sonny…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-309205","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}