What 2024 Red Sox Season Means For Future Of Boston

Baseball season is officially back as the Boston Red Sox, following a long offseason of additions, departures and a new front-office head honcho hiring, will open their 2024 run against the Seattle Mariners on Thursday night.

At the surface, redemption seems to be the inherited theme following three last-place American League East finishes in the previous four years, however, 2024 means much more to the Red Sox. Having now moved on from Chris Sale, the teams ex-ace, Justin Turner, last season’s lead-by-example veteran, and Chaim Bloom, Boston’s former chief baseball officer, the Red Sox have a whole new chapter ahead of them that’ll set their foundation moving forward — and that means well beyond just 2024.

Entrusting the new young regime headlined by Brayan Bello and Triston Casas, the Red Sox will officially get a first-hand look of what to look forward to in the future. No longer is Boston skipper Alex Cora leaning on a rookie-filled core like last season. Casas underwent the necessary dog days of mid-April struggles to break out into an AL Rookie of the Year candidate. Bello lead the staff in total innings (157) and was rewarded a six-year contract extension in February and Jarren Duran’s debut jitters of 2022 into an encouraging 102-game run in 2023, turning speed into extra-bases routinely.

There were a handful of limelights to point toward in 2023 despite the team’s 78-84 finish, but in Boston’s latest clean slate, the expectations rise a notch. It’ll be up to the same core that Cora and the organization stuck with through an 8-19 September last season, to step up and take on a collective leadership role in a still-competitive division.

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“Garrett (Whitlock) has to be better, Tanner (Houck) has to be better, Bello has to be better, Kutter (Crawford) needs to be better,” Cora told WEEI’s Rob Bradford on Audacy’s “Baseball Isn’t Boring” podcast in December. “Our guys have to improve. And we’ve been talking about these kids for two or three years. They’re not kids anymore. They got two full seasons at the big league level. … They’re getting to that point that, ‘Hey, we have to start performing.’ It’s not about upside or projections, whatever. We have to perform.”

Boston’s pitching staff ranked 21st among all MLB organizations, recording a 4.52 ERA which granted, resulted from a heavily unstable rotation hampered by injuries to Sale, Whitlock, Houck, Bello, and James Paxton.

But that isn’t the only spot to cover in terms of Boston’s strive for improvement for its next 162 games.

Experimenting at shortstop with Trevor Story limited to 43 games, the Red Sox weren’t reliable defensively either. The team committed an AL-leading 102 errors, giving opponents an inadvertent advantage on a night-to-night basis, which could be credited to a handful of losses. The front office addressed said void by adding Vaughn Grissom — the potential future second baseman — and Tyler O’Neil — Boston’s Game 1 starting right fielder.

First-year chief baseball officer Craig Breslow is tasked with being the man behind the scenes, carrying the torch amid the franchise’s rebuild toward playoff contention. Ultimately, Breslow will determine where else to add and when to pull the necessary triggers to upgrade the supporting cast.

On the flip side, minor leaguers Marcelo Mayer, Kyle Teel and Roman Anthony (among others) remain on the rise. Should one or several see their big-league debuts in 2024? The Red Sox will need to make that call and implement those soon-to-be-rookies to get them acclimated and establish a full core, and eventually, a repaired winning culture.