MLB trade deadline 2022: Three reasons Red Sox should be sellers

By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer

For a few weeks at the start of this summer, the Boston Red Sox looked like a playoff team.

A surprise semifinal team a year ago, they disappointed to begin this season. Then, in May, their offense demonstrated its potential. In June, it proclaimed it. The Sox’s stars carried them to 20 wins, while their piecemeal pitching staff held opponents to barely more than three runs per game.

Now, as August nears, the 49-49 Red Sox are back to looking nothing like a playoff team and much more like potential sellers over the next week. 

Let’s consider three reasons they look increasingly out of the postseason mix.

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1. They lack top-of-the-rotation arms.

Red Sox general manager Chaim Bloom, the longtime Rays executive, has assembled plenty of competent pitchers in Boston. Bloom knows how to do this on a budget better than most. Those pitchers — Nick Pivetta, Rich Hill and Michael Wacha — have helped keep the team afloat, but they don’t inspire much confidence in a potential pennant race.

Nathan Eovaldi has, at times, done that. But he has been too homer-susceptible in 2022 to be the ace of a contending club. Chris Sale, of course, could’ve been that ace, but he fractured his finger on a comebacker and might miss the rest of the season. The Red Sox tried to turn elite reliever Garrett Whitlock into a starter, but a hip injury halted that effort. He has returned to their bullpen, where he can team with Tanner Houck and breakout star John Schreiber to form an elite trio. 

Houck, too, has flirted with starting this season, but Boston elected to move him back to the bullpen once he missed a start in Toronto because he was not vaccinated. Their bullpen can be a force, but it won’t matter without the starters to hand them leads.

2. Their ex-Dodgers weren’t (and aren’t) hitting.

In 2021, the Red Sox received more than 7 WAR, as calculated by baseball-reference.com, from outfielders Kiké Hernández and Alex Verdugo, two men who first proved themselves with the Dodgers.

Hernández, in particular, was by some measures Boston’s best player and certainly so in the postseason. In fact, he was the best player in baseball during the 2021 postseason. Leading off all year, he found, for the first time in his career, a consistent defensive home in center field. As a free agent after this season, Hernández stood to earn himself generational wealth if he could repeat his 2021 efforts in 2022.

But this season, Hernández and Verdugo have together been worth less than replacement players. That has sapped the impact of Rafael Devers‘ career year. Verdugo has been healthy but mediocre on offense and in the field. Hernández has still been elite defensively but awful at the plate, and he will end up missing at least two months because of a hip flexor strain. And that injury complicates Boston’s ability to trade him as a rental player.

Verdugo’s struggles don’t make a lot of sense. Offense is down across the sport, but he is the sort of player who should be relatively immune to a lower-power environment. Contact ability has always been his strength. In 2022, his strikeout rate ranks in the 98th percentile, his expected batting average in the 96th — both career-bests. To some extent, he has just been unlucky.

3. Their competition is too stiff.

This is significantly less of a surprise than Hernández and Verdugo not performing. We knew entering this season that the Red Sox faced more competition than most MLB teams to advance out of their division. The American League East has not played out exactly to script, but it’s in no way weird that the Yankees, Blue Jays and Rays are all ahead of the Sox through nearly four months.

This team, in either central division, would look much more like a contender. Look at it this way: Except for the upstart Orioles, the four teams nearest the Red Sox in the standings all stand a superior chance of qualifying for the postseason. 

But that fact supplies all the more reason for Bloom to consider selling this week. Right now, all of Boston’s division peers look like possible 2023 contenders. For the Red Sox’s own 2023 chances, it might make the most sense for them to part with impending free agents Xander Bogaerts and J.D. Martinez now in exchange for someone who could help them then. Martinez, at least, is reportedly available.

Trading Bogaerts would be a bigger step, one that would be tough to stomach for the Red Sox’s fan base. But Bloom made a similar choice before when he traded Mookie Betts. 

More than most of their peers, the Red Sox’s choices in the coming days promise to be intriguing.

Pedro Moura is the national baseball writer for FOX Sports. He previously covered the Dodgers for three seasons for The Athletic and, before that, the Angels and Dodgers for five seasons for the Orange County Register and L.A. Times. More previously, he covered his alma mater, USC, for ESPNLosAngeles.com. The son of Brazilian immigrants, he grew up in the Southern California suburbs. His first book, “How to Beat a Broken Game,” came out this spring. Follow him on Twitter @pedromoura.