Yesterday’s Hall of Shame baseball article was by Daniel Fox of the Sporting News.
It includes this lie:
“the Red Sox’s overflow of left-handed hitters and the eventual need to move Devers down the defensive spectrum has led the team to shop their first baseman.”
What a doozy. Let’s break this down.
No shopping
The Red Sox have not shopped Triston Casas. That’s a myth that got started early after the 2024 season with a Ken Rosenthal speculated trade possibility. It was not based on any information about what the Red Sox were actually doing; it was just a guess at something they might try to do. But it got reported a lot. Then other prognosticators gave their dreamt-up trade scenarios involving Casas. And those got re-reported. Before long, a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” mentality that developed among reporters, who started saying that they must be shopping Casas, given all this buzz about it.
But the Red Sox stated that no such thing was happening. They had to tell Casas that they had no idea where all these rumors were coming from, and that they intended to keep him.
At one point we did learn that Seattle had asked for Casas as part of a return for a pitcher that the Red Sox wanted, but the Red Sox essentially shut that down by saying Masataka Yoshida would have to be part of any trade involving Casas. That’s it. That’s not shopping Casas, but for some reporters it was enough to convince them.
So the latter part of Daniel Fox’s sentence is a lie.
No moving Devers
There is no plan to move Devers to first base. Most people think that if Devers is moved, he would actually move to DH. There’s no reason to think he would be an improvement defensively over Casas at first, so this idea makes little sense.
Also, Devers has clearly been promised by the team that he can stay a third baseman. He is highly opposed to playing anywhere else. They’ll likely need to keep him where he is.
No overflow of lefties
There is no overflow of left-handed hitters. The roster the Red Sox are most likely to open the season with would have more right-handed hitters than left-handed ones. For much of last year that was not true, because their two injured right-handed-hitting middle infielders (Story, Grissom) were replaced by left-handed hitters (Hamilton, Valdez). This helped cement their reputation as being to left-handed. But after Story and Grissom returned, all it took was one added right-handed bat to make them more right-handed than left. That happened when they signed Alex Bregman.
But the real issue isn’t the number of right-handed hitters, it’s the number of players who hit left-handed pitching well. And when it comes to that, it turns out that Triston Casas has been the second-best on the current team at hitting lefties over the past two years, behind only Rob Refsnyder. And the best among regular starters. The idea of making the team better against lefties by removing Casas is absurd. A much better way would be to remove Masataka Yoshida or Wilyer Abreu.
Daniel Fox managed to pack a lot of wrong ideas into that sentence quoted above. It’s bad enough to add to the Hall of Shame.
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