A couple of weeks ago we highlighted all of the players Boston has moved on from since last summer’s trade deadline, and most haven’t gone on to do much with their new teams. Xander Bogaerts was an obvious outlier, but at the time you couldn’t make a strong case the Red Sox missed many of the others, starting pitcher Nathan Eovaldi among them.
That may have been a tad premature.
Eovaldi didn’t get off to the greatest start, posting a 5.20 ERA over his first five starts with the Texas Rangers, but over the past two weeks has settled down and become absolutely dominant. The 33-year-old has now put together a run of 28.2 consecutive scoreless innings, including three straight scoreless outings in which he threw eight innings or more.
That includes a complete game shutout on April 29 against the Yankees, and this past Thursday he came within one out of throwing another against Oakland, recording a career-high 12 strikeouts over 8.2 innings in the 4-0 win.
Overall Eovaldi is now 5-2 with a 2.70 ERA and 56 strikeouts over 53.1 innings for the first-place Rangers, who have exceeded preseason expectations and held a 2.5 game lead over the Los Angeles Angels in the AL West entering Saturday.
Though Eovaldi wasn’t Texas’ marquee offseason addition — the Rangers also signed two-time Cy Young winner Jacob deGrom — he’s been a huge difference-maker and has been worth every penny of the two-year, $34 million contract he signed this past winter.
Naturally, Eovaldi’s performance raises the question of whether the Red Sox made a mistake not re-signing him.
Looking at this year exclusively, there isn’t any question the Red Sox would be better if they’d kept Eovaldi around. The Red Sox rotation is statistically among the worst in the majors and Eovaldi would rank as the club’s best starter had he posted identical numbers in Boston instead of Texas.
It doesn’t help that Corey Kluber, who was signed to fill Eovaldi’s spot atop the rotation, has so far not lived up to expectations.
The two-time Cy Young winner is 2-4 with a 6.29 ERA, but most troubling is the 37-year-old has seen his walk rate more than double, going from a pristine 3.1% — the best of any starter in baseball last year — to a barely above average 7.8%. He’s also given up a lot of home runs, though he has been better recently, posting a 3.86 ERA over his past three starts.
That’s not ideal, but over the long haul the decision of whether or not to bring back Eovaldi isn’t clear cut.
Eovaldi has a long history of injury and is coming off a 2022 in which he missed more than a third of the season over multiple trips to the IL. While the contract he got from Texas wasn’t prohibitively expensive, it still would have been a significant commitment to give someone with that kind of track record.
Instead, by signing Kluber to a one-year deal with a club option, the Red Sox theoretically have the ability to go back to the well next offseason to try to land a premier starter through a trade or free agency. Had Eovaldi stuck around that probably wouldn’t be possible, if not because of the money then because the club is already struggling to find space for all the young starters it has knocking on the door.
If moving on from Eovaldi ultimately leads to the acquisition of someone like Julio Urias, Aaron Nola or — could you imagine? — Shohei Ohtani, that would certainly be worthwhile. The problem is this year’s Red Sox team might just be better than anyone expected, and if starting pitching proves the club’s downfall then letting Eovaldi go could go down as a costly misstep.
Some guys are just built different.
Take one look at someone like Aaron Judge or Giancarlo Stanton and you’ll know they possess a combination of power and athleticism you don’t see every day on a baseball diamond. The same is true for Pittsburgh’s Oneil Cruz, a 6-foot-7 shortstop who can hit the ball harder than just about anyone.
Even they might not have anything on Elly de la Cruz.
The top Cincinnati Reds prospect might rank among the most freakishly talented athletes the sport has ever seen, and this week he accomplished a series of jaw-dropping feats unprecedented in baseball history. On Tuesday the 6-foot-6 shortstop recorded three hits with exit velocities of over 116 mph for the Triple-A Louisville Bats, including a 118.8 mph double that ranks as the hardest hit ball at any level of professional baseball so far this year.
To put that into perspective, no MLB team has ever had three balls hit that hard in a single game. De La Cruz just did it all by himself.
Outstanding as that performance was, it wasn’t exactly an outlier either, which is among the reasons why De La Cruz now ranks as baseball’s No. 3 prospect according to Baseball America.
J.J. Cooper, Baseball America’s editor-in-chief, recently highlighted De La Cruz and noted that in addition to the record-setting exit velocities, the 21-year-old also boasts one of the fastest sprint speeds in the game and recently recorded the hardest thrown ball ever recorded from an infielder (99.2 mph) since throws started being measured accurately in 2016.
Will those amazing tools ultimately translate to big league success? It’s too early to tell — De La Cruz still only has 20 Triple-A games under his belt and tends to strike out a lot — but when he does eventually reach the show his games will be appointment viewing.
It’s not every day you can go to the park and reasonably expect to see something nobody’s ever done before.
At this point last year Chase Meidroth was midway through his junior season at the University of San Diego, a breakout campaign in which he’d bat .329 with 10 home runs, 47 RBI and significantly more walks (40) than strikeouts (25).
Since then he’s been drafted and twice promoted, and now Meidroth stands as one of the most intriguing new prospects in the Red Sox system.
The 21-year-old infielder, who was taken in the fourth round (No. 129 overall) of the 2022 MLB Draft, has done nothing but rake since joining the Red Sox organization. He joined the Low-A Salem Red Sox in August just weeks after being drafted and batted .309 with four home runs in 19 games down the stretch. Upon earning a promotion to High-A Greenville out of spring training needed only a month to prove he was ready for another call-up to Double-A Portland.
Meidroth batted .338 with a .954 OPS in 20 games at Greenville, and as he did his last year at San Diego, in both the Cape Cod and Northwoods summer leagues and in his first season of pro ball, once again walked (21) more than he struck out (20). The early returns in Portland have been good so far too, in his Double-A debut Wednesday night Meidroth went 3 for 6 and delivered the walk-off RBI single in the 10th inning to lead the Sea Dogs past the Somerset Patriots 6-5.
Though Meidroth isn’t as highly regarded as some of Boston’s other young infield prospects — like former first rounders Nick Yorke, Marcelo Mayer and Mikey Romero — he’s quickly proven he belongs in the conversation. His development at Double-A in the coming months will warrant close attention.
Nick Raposo, a Johnston, Rhode Island native and a former Division 3 college baseball star at Wheaton College in Norton, was promoted to Triple-A by the St. Louis Cardinals organization earlier this week.
A two-time first-team All-NEWMAC selection, the talented catcher’s college career was cut short in 2020 by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and he signed with St. Louis after going undrafted in that summer’s pandemic-shortened five-round MLB Draft. Raposo was then assigned immediately to Double-A upon making his minor league debut in 2021 and had spent the first two-plus years of his professional career with the Springfield Cardinals.
So far Raposo has posted a .268 average with nine home runs and 51 RBI in 114 career Double-A games. He’s now one of three catchers on Memphis’ roster and had not yet made his Triple-A debut entering the weekend.