The MLB Draft is this Sunday night and the Red Sox have the 12th overall pick. This selection falls into that tricky zone where there is great value to be had here if they do things right, but it is also low enough that it is virtually impossible to predict who they will get, or if they will be any good.
Case in point: The Red Sox used the same 12th overall pick in 1994 to draft Nomar Garciaparra. However, the last time they made that pick in 2016, they got a player who never made it to the big leagues (more on that in a moment). This stuff is as unpredictable as lottery numbers.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25524722/document_20210224_0044.jpg)
MLB Pipeline’s Jonathan Mayo ran a mock draft of the league’s first round last week and saw the Sox select Tennessee second baseman Christian Moore, but everything about the draft is highly unpredictable. Add in the fact that the major league team is playing one of its most interesting games in years, and this potentially juicy addition to the franchise is a story that will go largely unnoticed.
But it’s also part of a larger story that’s already starting to unfold. In other words, what comes next might get even more interesting if you look back through the prism of what’s already happened and how it all fits together. So, with Sunday’s pick being the sixth last-place first-round pick in the last dozen years, it’s actually a good time to look back at the process and how it’s evolved.
Looking at the last six finishes, they came in pairs. First, the Sox finished last three times in four years, from 2012 to 2015, and then they did it again from 2020 to 2023. Each time, the Sox also had a “magic carpet” season interspersed with a season, with the 2013 version producing a World Series title, and the 2021 version failing to make the ALCS.
But that’s where the similarities end. Boston’s initial run of last-place picks produced the seventh overall pick in 2013, the seventh overall pick in 2015 and the 12th overall pick in 2016. With those selections, the Red Sox added Trey Ball, Andrew Benintendi and Jay Groome. In other words, they failed to get a group of building blocks, which is one of the reasons this team has been so bad in recent years.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25524720/802140802.jpg)
Staff photo by Joel Page/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
Trey Ball was the first overall pick in the 2013 draft who never made it to the big leagues, and Jay Groome was the first overall pick in the 2016 draft who never made it to the big leagues. (Groome, as it turned out, bet on more MLB games than he pitched.) So while Andrew Benintendi was undoubtedly a hitter here, he was more of a single than a homer, and with whiffs on the other two, the Red Sox had relatively minimal production for several years of unimportant baseball.
That massive failure helped send them into the sea of despair they’ve been stuck in for most of the first half of this decade. Even the joyous 2021 season, while an escape from the monotony, wasn’t an escape from its root cause. Virtually all of this team’s production had to come from sources other than the June MLB draft.
For more details, here are the top ten players by rWAR (Baseball Reference WAR) on this 2021 team and how they were acquired:
Xander Bogaerts (International recruitment: from 2009)
Kiké Hernández (Free Agency: February 2021)
Nathan Eovaldi (Free Agency: December 2018)
Rafael Devers (International recruitment: from 2013)
JD Martinez (Free Agency: February 2018)
Garrett Whitlock (Rule 5 pick: Yankees in December 2020)
Nick Pivetta (Transaction: 2020 from Phillies)
Hunter Renfroe (Free Agency: December 2020)
Alex Verdugo (Transaction: 2020 from Dodgers)
Eduardo Rodriguez (Transaction: 2014 from the Orioles)
None of them are players they originally drafted. We can even go further and note that Kyle Schwarber was one of the biggest contributors in the September and October portion of the season, and he was drafted midway through that summer.
This type of list is incredibly difficult to maintain! There are so many moving parts and holes to fill. You can do it if your landlord is willing to push past the luxury tax stop signs to keep up with maintenance, but if not… well, look to the 2022 and 2023 seasons.
You can even see the basis of this problem starting to develop if we go back and do the same exercise for the 2018 World Series roster (which was the most recent playoff team before 2021).
Once again, we look at the top ten players by rWAR (Baseball Reference WAR) from this 2018 team and how they were acquired:
Mookie Betts (Draft: 5th round pick in 2011)
Chris Sale (Transaction: 2016 from White Sox)
JD Martinez (Free Agency: February 2018)
Xander Bogaerts (International recruitment: from 2009)
Andrew Benintendi (Draft: 2015 first-round pick)
David Price (Free Agency: December 2015)
Rick Porcello (Transaction: 2014 from Tigers)
Jackie Bradley Jr. (Draft: 2011 first-round pick)
Eduardo Rodriguez (Transaction: 2014 from Orioles)
Craig Kimbrel (Transaction: 2015 from Padres)
Here, three players were originally drafted by the Sox, but two of them (Betts and Bradley Jr.) were drafted in 2011, and neither of them signed long-term contracts. So we reached a point where the Sox either had to pay up or have more prospects ready, and it turns out neither of those things happened. We all know the outcome that followed. A total disaster!
Today, things appear to be about to change dramatically. So far, the Red Sox have selected Marcelo Mayer (2021) and Kyle Teel (2023) with the first-round picks in their recent run of last-place picks, and they’ll of course add a third name to that list on Sunday.
But it goes even further, because if we start stringing together the last few drafts, including two that took place while the Sox were winning at the major league level, the hit count is about to increase dramatically. Their first-round pick in 2017 was Tanner Houck, and he’s blossoming this year. Their first-round pick in 2018 was Triston Casas, and he’s become a productive major league player over the last twelve months.
The Sox didn’t have a first-round pick in 2019 after going through the luxury tax penalty in 2018, but with the help of Jarren Duran (a seventh-round pick in 2018 and the Sox’s top player by Baseball Reference WAR this year) and Kutter Crawford (a 16th-round pick in 2017 and the Sox’s fourth-ranked player by Baseball Reference WAR this year), talent in the system began to flow steadily.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25524724/56a6e55b45fec.image.jpg)
Those four draft picks are a big reason the Sox are having such a productive year in 2024. Their top four players in rWAR right now are Jarren Duran (4.7), Rafael Devers (3.2), Tanner Houck (2.5), and Kutter Crawford (2.2). (And Triston Casas would probably be in the top five here too if he weren’t injured.) In other words, we were expecting the late-round draft picks to come in with major league production to open up the next competitive window, but that production came both early and in an unexpected place; from other players who were picked earlier and took longer to develop.
Now, as Alex Cora would say, it’s time to get greedy! The Sox are in a position where if they can finally find those high-end first-round picks and add them to what they already have in reserve, they could have something really, really special. A very productive, long-term homegrown core.
Today, the Red Sox have finished last in six of the last dozen years, and only one player (Andrew Benintendi) has played a major league game for them after being selected in the first round following that string of disasters. But what if this time they ended up getting all three of those first-round, last-place picks? If so, over 90% of the production they’re going to get back from all those lost seasons is right in front of them.
Add in Roman Anthony, who looks like a first-round pick and was drafted in 2022 (the year between Mayer and Teel), and if everything goes perfectly (it never does), you could have four straight years where you strike gold! I’m not here to tell you that’s likely to happen (it’s not), but I am here to point out that it’s July 2024 and this hasn’t been taken off the list of reasonable outcomes.
We don’t know the name of the Red Sox’s 2024 first-round pick yet, but when you combine everything that’s happened with Houck, Duran, Casas and Crawford at the major league level, and what Mayer, Anthony and Teel are doing in Portland, this one has the potential to put an exclamation point on whatever you want to call it all.
I don’t know exactly where the ceiling is here, but I do know that if the Red Sox get close to it, they won’t be betting as high as they expected next Sunday for a very, very long time. That makes me more excited about this team than I’ve been in years.