The Red Seat Podcast: More Snacks

Welcome back to The Red Seat Podcast, episode number 294. This week, Jake Devereaux, Keaton DeRocher, and Bob Osgood discuss the years-long trend of bad defensive baseball in Boston, how Rafael Devers fits into this defensive puzzle going forward, Triston Casas’s Rookie of the Year push, and a few players showing late-season fatigue.

Red Sox president Sam Kennedy acknowledged on WEEI last week that the Red Sox were at a low point of the season and said the following, “We’ve got to be active in the free agent market as we go forward in the next five years. Because pitching and defense wins championships. We all know that. And so that’s got to be a big focus as we go forward.” If we all know that, then what are we watching this season?

The Red Sox entered play Wednesday with a league-worst negative-49 Outs Above Average, in 2023. This will be the fourth consecutive season that they’ve been 20th in MLB or worse in this defensive category. We tried to understand why this isn’t a focal point of this regime, with Rafael Devers being an important piece now, and in the future. Devers has taken a big step back from -2 OAA last year to -8 OAA this year and has not even begun year one of his ten-year extension. Is it too early in his career to consider a move off of the position entering his age-27 season and where would he even move?

Triston Casas has had an exceptional second half and is now in front of Gunnar Henderson in many offensive categories. Should Casas be closer to Gunnar in the Rookie of the Year odds or is Henderson’s defensive prowess, while playing on a first-place team, going to sway voters his way? Team record shouldn’t matter for the ROY voting but we know that not all voters will listen to that.

Down the stretch, we talked about Adam Duvall’s second “heater” of the season and whether a return to Boston is a possibility, whether eating more snacks in the dugout, like Triston Casas, could help the late-season fatigue of Masa Yoshida and James Paxton, the rust of Trevor Story, and whether The Kyle Barraclaugh Game needed to happen.

If you have a question for an upcoming Red Seat pod, you can email us at redseatpodcast@gmail.com or tweet us. On Twitter, Jake is @DevJake, Keaton is @TheSpokenKeats and Bob is @BobOsgood15. Thanks for listening!