:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/68896528/1211154764.jpg.0.jpg)
Welcome back to the beginning of baseball. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, the skies are clear blue, and baseball has started. Well, at least all of that is true in Ft. Myers, here in Massachusetts its still an 18-degree hellscape as I put this post together, but I digress.
The Red Sox have opened the spring with two consecutive losses, but that hardly matters. What matters is the work that these players are getting in as Alex Cora looks to right the many things that went wrong with this roster in 2020. As sweet as 2018 was, 2019 and 2020 taken together were bitter in very different ways. The team in 2019 so vastly underperformed their capabilities while the 2020 team played sloppy defense, had historically bad pitching, and seemed as though they were in and out of a coma as they slogged through the strange COVID shortened year.
Keaton and I spend this episode making some observations about the performances of individual players so far this spring and let me tell you, the word that kept coming up was depth. Depth, depth, and more depth. This team is way deeper than it was in 2020 and that's most certainly a great thing. Will they win the division? Probably not. Will they finish last with historically bad pitching, also very unlikely. This my friends is progress.
Nathan Eovaldi has shown that he is healthy. Connor Seabold, who was acquired last season looked great in his first stint. The future second baseman Jeter Downs already hit a dinger, flashing his massive potential. Thad Ward looked great after we didn’t see him in 2020. Depth in the bullpen in the form of Eduard Bazardo, Stephen Gonsalves, and Seth Blair look like much improved, break glass in case of emergency options, certainly far better than what we were dealing with last season.
Optimism abounds on this pod and both Keaton and I make some really stupid predictions about Bobby Dalbec. We hope you have some fun with it.
We hope you enjoyed the show and if you did, make sure you subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcast, Spotify, or Stitcher. Also give the show a review. Five star reviews help us get in more ears and grow the show. Be sure to also follow us on Twitter. You can find Keaton @TheSpokenKeats, and you can find me @DevJake. Thanks for listening!