Red Sox
Who doesn’t love, dare I say it, a booster of genuine springtime hope?
COMMENTARY
Five years ago Monday was Mookie Betts. Alex Bregman is many good things. They all exist in the context of that, and they always will.
Ugh, does that feel reductive and heelish, but what can I do? If we’re going to get cigar pictures for what used to feel like just another offseason Wednesday, do we not need to take a minute and reorient ourselves?
Bregman changes our short-term reality, and we should all have spent these last 24 hours beaming about that as we have. Who doesn’t love when a plan comes together? Who doesn’t love, dare I say it, a booster of genuine springtime hope?
Even the pedant who rewarded your click with an immediate detour down the darkest possible road. (For you emailers who read this far, “difficult” and “annoying” are less vulgar alternatives to your first instinct.) The one who, even if Bregman’s here for years two and three, did not just see a fork in the franchise road. Who does not feel like we just saw something that’ll get its own chapter in the history books.
If I may pass the buck the mildest bit, blame it on the person who mentioned The Trade to me Monday, agog simply at the passage of time. (And we’re barely into feeling like a week passes every three hours.)
Context still matters in this space. I hope it still matters in yours. And two things can still be true.
Alex Bregman takes the Red Sox from the lazy, half-hearted approach to contention they’ve practiced the last few years to a genuine declaration of purpose. It is real service, not lip service. It takes what began with Garrett Crochet — that addition feels more Padrón worthy, but maybe we wait for the extension — and compounds it.
And it is still staggering, all these years on, that it feels impressive that the Red Sox actually did the thing.
We will get to the baseball discussion, I promise, but the owner’s cigar photo gets one more tangent. My mind almost immediately went to 2007, when in the afterglow of the title that made the Red Sox a modern dynasty, the braintrust floated around Coors Field with cigars the size of souvenir bats.
Theo Epstein’s is the one I really remember, but John Henry — owner of Boston Globe Media Partners, including Boston.com — had one as well. As well earned as any ever, his champions that year the most expensive Red Sox team in franchise history.
That winter of 2006-07 was the one of $51 million just to negotiate with Daisuke Matsuzaka. Hole at shortstop? Four years for Julio Lugo. Hole in right? Five years to J.D. Drew. All manner of bit parts, from Hideki Okajima to Alex Cora to Bobby Kielty to Kevin Cash. (Good winter for future managers.) Good bullpen with a strong closer? Add Éric Gagné for three guys at the trade deadline anyway. (It’s the thought that counts.)
“It never gets old,” Henry said that spring of owning the Red Sox. “You just see it every day — how much what we do matters to people. That can never get old, when you feel like you’re doing something that matters. . . . Look at the team we have this year. This is as excited as I’ve ever been about a spring.”
He should’ve been. It delivered, and he delivered. And our context well established, he did again late Wednesday.
Bregman, the longtime Houston antagonist, is the Red Sox prioritizing 2025 without sacrificing 2026 and onward. In fact, there’s a fair chance it’s supplementing that future given what the right veteran can impart on a roster with this many key young pieces.
“As a person, he’s a kid that I really respect. I really like. We went through a lot for a while there,” manager Alex Cora told reporters Thursday, harkening to their time together with the Astros. “He’s very similar to Dustin [Pedroia], as far as the baseball rat that he is.”
For all the talk of the Red Sox going back to the way they used to do business, though, let’s not lose they signed a guy who wanted seven years from someone for three. Who had, according to MLB.com, $171.5 million on the table in Detroit, who turned down $156 million from his old team months ago, and took a deferral-laden $120 million with multiple opt-outs hours before the start of spring training.
They got a deal, thanks to Houston dampening Bregman’s free-agent market with a qualifying offer, forcing draft-pick compensation. (It’s no coincidence the Bregman deal happened right after Nick Pivetta, qualifying offered by the Red Sox, signed in San Diego.) The Sox also got a deal thanks to Bregman’s 2024 being his worst full season since an injury-marred 2021.
Unlike Nolan Arenado, though, Bregman’s tank doesn’t come off empty. His batting eye remained elite last season at age 30, among the league’s top 10 percent for chase rate and square-up rate — a measure, essentially, of doing the most possible with each swing.
His lows remain league average, and as plenty have pointed out, he was a .288/.338/.524 (.862 OPS) hitter from the start of a 16-game hitting streak on May 28 through the end of the year. That, plus his Gold Glove defense at third, meant 3.9 fWAR in that span — 17th in the majors, and well better than every Red Sox not named Jarren Duran.
Bregman is a righthanded answer in a ballpark that rewards righthanded hitters like no other anywhere in the league. Bregman is a downright menace at Fenway — his 1.240 OPS (30 for 80, 9 doubles, 7 HRs) in the regular season is the best in the history of the park among those with his 98 plate appearances.
More than anything, he is options. A high-level choice for Cora, whose head may still be spinning after he used 146 batting orders and 124 defensive starting lineups just to finish 81-81.
There will still be shuffling. Kristian Campbell. Ceddanne Rafaela. Rafael Devers — a negative defensive third baseman by runs saved all eight years of his Red Sox career, but signed for a far longer haul than Bregman. Trevor Story. Vaughn Grissom and Masataka Yoshida, who in the most optimistic 2025 scenarios are entirely expendable. (Craig Breslow can at least pin the latter on his predecessor.)
These, however, are baseball discussions for teams with the talent to, no fooling, play past the end of the regular season. It doesn’t take a ton to humor that idea in baseball these days, but for the first time in a while, the Red Sox made an active effort to clear the bar.
Why they did it, how they did it, how much praise they’ll want for doing it, and that it doesn’t obscure the years that led us here? Mercifully secondary discussions.
Hey, it’s 2025 in America. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
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