Good morning!
Here we are seven weeks from when pitchers and catchers report to Fort Myers and the mood on Lansdowne Street is glum. The Red Sox and Colorado Rockies are the only two teams that haven’t signed a free agent. Thus far their only acquisitions have been 36-year-old pitcher Sonny Gray who’s projected to go 11-8 by baseball-reference, reliever Johan Oveido who’s walked 176 batters and hit 35 others in 361 career innings, and minor league southpaw Jake Bennett.
This week the Red Sox traded pitcher Hunter Dobbins to St. Louis for first baseman Willson Contreras, presumably to make up for their failure to land free agent Pete Alonso. Contreras turns 34 in May and has a career .258 batting average with 20 home runs a year.
At the winter meetings GM Craig Breslow was said to be interested in reacquiring catcher Kyle Teel who was Boston’s best homegrown catching prospect since Pudge Fisk. A year ago Breslow traded Teel to the White Sox to get Garrett Crochet. He was called up in June, hit eight home runs and slugged .408 in 78 games. His only weakness is said to be pitch framing, but that won’t matter this season when MLB implements the automated ball-and-strike challenge system.
The White Sox seem to be deciding between Teel and 22-year-old Edgar Quero who caught 72 games last season and whose pickoff move has been compared to Hall of Famer Ivan Rodriguez.
Boston’s over/under opened at 86.5 on bettingpros.com, lower than the Yankees (93.5) and Blue Jays (91.5). The cynics say owner John Henry’s business model isn’t about winning, it’s about entertainment. It’s about doing the wave and singing Sweet Caroline and paying a median price of $132 a ticket according to Google AI.
“Catastrophically embarrassing” is how co-host Charlie Smith described it on a recent Bastards of Boston Baseball podcast. “They’re praying you’re excited about going to Fenway Park. It’s an historic stadium, one of the oldest in professional sports, and you see a couple of home runs and you have a Fenway frank and a beer and you get to see a piece of history.”
Sports shows like Felger and Mazz have dubbed them the “Interest Kings” — interested in Pete Alonso, interested in Kyle Scwarber, interested in J.T. Realmuto. … Earlier this week Newsweek reported in a hard to miss clickbait headline: Red Sox Predicted to Trade for $116 Million Superstar to Replace Alex Bregman.
The clickbait superstar in question was Arizona’s 32-year-old infielder Ketel Marte, a career .281 hitter.
There’s still time for Breslow to pull off a deal for an impact player. He could sign free agent pitcher Framber Valdez, or trade Jarren Duran for a quality arm and replace Duran with free agent Kyle Tucker to take his spot in the outfield.
Breslow was a lefty relief specialist and a Yale graduate, and he might be trying to win games with arms not bats, but at Fenway Park that’s like putting the U.S. Navy on the Mississippi River. It simply does not compute.
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Stan Benjamin died 16 years ago on Christmas eve. “Stan” as everyone called him was revered at Greenfield High School where he coached baseball and football and mentored players like current baseball coach Tom Suchanek.
In 1965 the Astros hired him to be their New England scout. “The Astros general manager told me the best part of Stan’s scouting was he told us who NOT to sign,” says retired GHS teacher Skip Fotopoulos. “He warned them off a pitcher they were about to sign, said they’d have to hire a psychiatrist to live with him day and night.
“Stan was a great manager but Lou Bush was a better coach because he’d spend lots of time with us on fundamentals,” added Fotopoulos.
Benjamin’s best remembered in these parts for the 1990 trade Houston made with the Red Sox who wanted reliever Larry Andersen for the stretch run. Benjamin told them to get minor leaguer Jeff Bagwell and the rest is history on how that deal turned out.
Fotopoulos is an unofficial GHS historian. He remembers when a “very brief” superintendent tried changing the school colors to kelly green. “He even went so far as to buy the uniforms, but Danny Dyer blew his stack and refused to have his team wear them.
“A bit later someone tried to change the school song and suggested a new nickname — the Jolly Green Giants. Neither idea got much support.”
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UMass punter Keegan Andrews and Ball State’s Adam Saul tied for second in punts this season with 69, one behind Charlotte’s Bronson Long. Andrews wanted to play on a bad team because he’d have the opportunity to make more punts. Ohio State’s Joe McGuire had just 24 punts all season.
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Here’s wishing better success to coach Danielle Henderson and her UMass softball team now that they’re out of the southern A-10 and into the midwest MAC. Henderson’s added 6-foot-1 pitcher Kelsey Blanchette of Lincoln-Sudbury to the roster and grad transfer Eliana Raposo who was a two-time East Coast Conference player of the year at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill, N.Y., where she batted .408 and slugged .741.
Raposa played for EMass powerhouse Dighton-Rehoboth and once won a pitch-hit-and-run competition at Fenway Park.
SQUIBBERS: Since when did the boards on a hockey rink become the walls? The refs call it boarding, not walling. … There’s no explanation necessary about why Red Sox beat writers were happy to hear they’d traded minor leaguer Jhostynxon Garcia. … Doing what they’re known for, Tampa Bay got 21-year-old prospect Anderson Brito from the Astros last week. Brito is a 6-foot-3, 208-pound southpaw who’s fanned 157 batters in 103 minor league innings. … Tim Elko, who has relatives in Sunderland was re-upped by the White Sox this month. … The St. John Red Storm aka the Johnnies are in a freefall from their No. 5 preseason ranking. “Rick (Pitino) thought they had an incredible NIL recruiting haul. They were calling it the ‘Haul,’ said Mike Francesa. “They are not getting open jumpers. Nobody’s distributing and nobody’s running the offense with any efficiency and the lack of a quality point guard is telling.” … UMass linebacker Rashad Henry is reportedly set to enter the transfer portal. The 6-2, 225-pound Fort Lauderdale native was considered tops on the position’s depth chart. … Yankees fans missed hearing longtime radio voice John Sterling last season. His ability to cover up his on-air mistakes was likened to Yankee legend Phil Rizzuto who said, “I like radio better than television because if you make a mistake on radio, they don’t know. You can make up anything on the radio.”