Red Sox option Franchy Cordero to Worcester

The Red Sox recently made the call to option Michael Chavis down to Worcester, which was certainly not a move without merit but also one that some people were upset about as they would have rather seen Franchy Cordero go down. Well, now they’re both down. The Red Sox announced on Thursday that they have optioned Cordero down to Triple-A. The corresponding move is not yet known.

We’ll start with the Cordero being optioned piece of this, which is fairly straight forward. The outfielder came to Boston as part of the Andrew Benintendi trade, but he has been a big disappointment. Even while swinging the bat a bit better of late, his overall numbers are still quite poor, slashing .179/.228/.274 for a wRC+ of 36. In other words, he has been 64 percent worse than the league-average hitter. That is León-ian territory right there. So in that sense, it makes all the sense in the world to let him go down and get his swing right against lesser competition with more frequent playing time.

The real question here is what they are planning to do as a corresponding move to put the active roster back at 26. There will certainly be loud cries for Jarren Duran, but I would slow your roll on that before you even get started. Duran has already left the Worcester team for a couple of weeks to play with Team USA in an Olympic qualifying tournament. It would be bizarre to then turn around and call him up a couple days later. Nothing is impossible, I suppose, but this is as close to impossible as it gets.

What makes the most sense just given how they’ve treated this season so far is that they call up another pitcher to go back to a three-man bench and 14-man pitching staff. We talked earlier this week about their lack of options in terms of pitching depth, but they do have some routes to take. They could go the easiest route and just call up either Colten Brewer or Brandon Brennan, both of whom are on the 40-man and would likely serve as mop up guys a la Austin Brice before he was designated.

They could also look off the 40-man at someone like Brandon Workman, who is pitching a bit better after a shaky first outing with Worcester, or Kevin McCarthy or a veteran of that ilk. They would have to make room on the 40-man to make that move, which they could do by putting Hudson Potts on the 60-day injured list.

My guess is that they’ll go with the latter and call up Workman, but that is purely a guess. I really have no idea where they are going with this, and it does come a bit out of nowhere.