Three weeks ago I posted charts comparing the 2025 seasons of players that, at least in the press, were being considered as options for the Red Sox to play at second base and/or third base in 2025. Most of these players not currently being part of the organization. Much has changed these past 3 weeks, and so an update was called for. Below find the updated chart with new players added, some utility players removed, and a couple of extra stats added to make the picture a bit more complete. I’ve kept Alex Bregman, Bo Bichette, and Ketel Marte on the list even though they are no longer options, just to serve as reference points. I’ve also highlighted names of players currently on the Red Sox in red.

As before, the order was chosen based on number of plate appearances in 2025. Most on the left, least on the right.

Note in the top section I added a WAR per 600 plate appearances line. This WAR is the average of the Baseball Reference WAR, the FanGraphs WAR, and Baseball Prospectus’ WARP. I then scale it to what it would have been had the player accumulated WAR at the same rate through the season, and had 600 plate appearances. This makes it more like a rate stat, and I feel it makes for a better comparison for players with varying amounts of playing time.

I also added a line in the Running section for Baserunning Run Value per 600 plate appearances. This starts with the Statcast Baserunning Run Value numbers, which combines the run value of extra bases attempted and the run values of stolen base attempts. I then scale to 600 plate appearances so that players with less playing time don’t get shoved to the middle of the pack. Trevor Story, Nico Hoerner, and Jeremy Pena all excelled here, and they’re all fast runners. Seven players were duds at baserunning; six of those are slow runners; the other one, Romy Gonzalez, is actually a fast runner. He needs to work on his baserunning game.

Despite that, I honestly think that Romy Gonzalez is the best overall infielder the Red Sox have right now. I would have expected to tell you it was Trevor Story, but I am surprised how poorly his numbers show here. He did have a big early-season slump with the bat, so maybe I should assume better 2026 numbers at the plate for him. The biggest surprise was defense – not a lot of errors, but very poor metrics for runs prevented. Perhaps he was less daring after all the injuries over the previous 3 years. Absolutely great on the basepaths, which was nice.

Romy, though poor on the basepaths, and average on defense, blossomed at the plate to produce the second best results on the team there, behind only Roman Anthony. It was the payoff for some intense offseason work with a good hitting coach. What really stands out is the elite hard-hit rate (5th best in the MLB, behind Anthony, Schwarber, Judge, Ohtani). This was tempered by a very low launch angle and very high ground ball rate. There is potential here for a breakout season in 2026.

Marcelo Mayer similarly had a very good hard-hit rate tempered by a low launch angle (well Roman Anthony did, too, actually), but in terms of overall results at the plate, besides a good rate of doubles (Fenway can do that for you), in every other way his results at the plate were poor. Good-not-great defense, okay baserunning. Right now I consider him “unproven” as a major leaguer. Most fans seem to assume he’ll be a regular and Romy Gonzalez should be the bench/utility guy, but I want to see more from Mayer before I’d consider him “regular starter” material.

So what about the possible imports? Jeremy Pena is a name I heard mentioned – he definitely tops the list in terms of overall value. I don’t know how realistic it would be to acquire him, but he looks like a real solid 5-tool guy in his prime. He’d knock Trevor Story out of the shortstop position.

Nico Hoerner, a second baseman, is the top defender on this list, just outstanding, and one of the best baserunners, too. He puts the ball in play and gets a lot of singles, but has no power. The least of anyone on this list.

Brett Baty, who plays 2B and 3B, is perhaps the most balanced of the rest, good at everything, great at nothing. Average bat and baserunning, above average defense.

Eugenio Suarez is perhaps the most imbalanced of the rest. He does one thing well: mash home runs. But he does that exceptionally well. Worst at singles, okay at doubles, lots of strikeouts. Poor baserunner, very poor fielder. Yet still valuable for the home runs. How will his bat play in Fenway, though?

Isaac Paredes has a strong bat; lots of home runs, good numbers for walks and strikeouts, though his low expected wOBA says he may have been lucky in 2025. And his bat is tempered by poor baserunning and poor defense at 3B.

Brendan Donovan, a second baseman, has a very good overall bat that lacks power. Good/okay baserunning, substandard fielding.

Alec Bohm, a third baseman, is similar. Average or slightly above average bat with no power. Poor baserunning, okay fielding.

Matt Shaw is young – was just 23 last year, a rookie. He’s fast, and provided excellent third base defense. His bat didn’t live up to expectations, but that happens in rookie years. He showed some power, was average with strikeouts and walks, but a low batting average, slug, and OBP. His value comes in whatever faith there is that his bat will develop. He could become very good.

The last one on the list is Mark Vientos. I’m not sure why he’s considered an option. Oh, I see, he had one good season in 2024. But going by 2025, he’s got some pop to his bat, but brings nothing else to the table. Low OBP, low overall bat value, slow, poor defense at third base. He doesn’t bring an improvement over any of the existing Story-Mayer-Gonzalez trio. There’s no point in acquiring this guy.

In the end, here would be my reaction to the Red Sox acquiring one of these guys:

Jeremy Pena: Enthusiastic yes.

Nico Hoerner: Good with this.

Matt Shaw: Probably good with this.

Baty, Suarez: Maybe good with these.

Paredes, Donovan, Bohm, Vientos: No thank you.

Here are the same stats for hitting and running presented in terms of standard deviations from the mean.

A lot of names have been mentioned as possible second basemen or third basemen for the Boston Red Sox in 2026. Some are already on the roster (Marcelo Mayer); some could be added by trade (Ketel Marte, Brendan Donovan); some could be picked up as free agents (Bo Bichette, Alex Bregman).

There are other names on the current Red Sox roster that have played significant time at second and/or third base, but are not mentioned in articles about who will get regular playing time in the Red Sox infield. And I have issues with this. Specifically, I have issues every time I read that Marcelo Mayer is presumed to be the player who will round out the infield after they acquire a second or third baseman. Because when I look at what Romy Gonzalez did in 2025, I see a guy who is no longer a platoon player, he’s a guy that deserves to play every day. In addition to that, his elite hard-hit rate makes him a breakout candidate, and I’m saying that despite the fact that he was already the second-best hitter on the Red Sox in 2025. His defense is not bad, it’s good enough, and his baserunning is a plus. He’s proven at the major league level, in ways that Marcelo Mayer isn’t. He can be relied on to produce good results in ways that Marcelo Mayer can’t yet.

The thing that will allow him to break out? If he just stops hitting the ball into the ground so much. Of all the guys I’m comparing in this article, he does that the most. His average launch angle is the lowest. The result is that he’s one of the best in baseball at hitting doubles and triples, but his rate of home runs is a little below average.

He could also stand to chase less, and correspondingly increase his walk rate while decreasing his strikeout rate.

If you care about home runs, stikeouts, and walks, any of the 5 potential acquisitions (Bichette, Marte, Donovan, Bregman, Paredes) will be an improvement over Romy Gonzalez. But if you care about overall results at the plate, only Ketel Marte is looking like an improvement over Gonzalez. And when you factor in fielding and baserunning, there are some even bigger advantages for Gonzalez over most of these 5.

I’d hoped to discuss more specifics about comparisons of individual players, but I am finding it hard to find time to write this article. So I’ll just show you the tables I created to make these comparisons easy.

Here are the comparisons I’ve created for these players. The players are ordered left to right by most plate appearances in 2025.

Red means the number is above MLB average; blue means it’s below MLB average. White is MLB average. I set the deepest red to 2.8 standard deviations better than the mean (usually above, but sometimes below), and the deepest blue to 2.8 standard deviations worse than the mean. For hitting and baserunning, a table showing the numerical values of these standard deviations follows.

These same statistics expressed as standard deviations better (red) or worse (blue) than MLB average is below. In some cases, the data was more log-normal than normal, so I used standard deviations of the logarithm of the stat. These are labeled as such.

Here are the numbers supporting my previously mentioned statement that Romy Gonzalez can unlock a lot more power if he learns to elevate the ball. He hits it into the ground too much.

I hated the trade of Willson Contreras to my team, the Boston Red Sox, for RHP Hunter Dobbins, RHP Yhoiker Fajardo and RHP Blake Aita. The Red Sox got a good player who doesn’t improve the team, while giving a player who was a personal favorite.

Hunter Dobbins was my favorite pitcher on the Sox, not for how he pitched, but for the things he said. For the competitive fire. For the anti-Yankees fervor. He seemed promising as a #5 starter.

When I say that Willson Contreras doesn’t improve the Red Sox, that hinges on something that I get the feeling that nobody agrees with me on: that Romy Gonzalez has evolved into one of the top bats on the team, whose elite hard-hit rate could turn him into one of the top bats in the game if he could learn to elevate the ball a bit (he hits it into the ground too much). If you go by multi-year track record, people are right about Gonzalez and Contreras; but if you go just by 2025, as I do in my comments to follow, they’ve got Romy all wrong.

I’ve stated elsewhere, when you analyze it carefully, you see that Contreras is no better than Romy Gonzalez at first base. He’s a good player that the Red Sox didn’t need.

A key part of that statement is “at first base”. Romy’s best position defensively has always been first base, where he rates as average by all the different rating systems (he’s a below average fielder everywhere else). Contreras is effectively the same as Romy at 1B in Total Zone, Defensive Runs Saved, and Deserved Runs prevented. Only Statcast’s Fielding Run Value has him significantly higher, where he is a substantially above-average 4.

At the plate? They’re very similar in wOBA, Expected wOBA, and OBP. Contreras gets more walks and home runs, but not a ton more. Romy gets more singles, doubles, triples, and strikes out slightly less. They both chase too much.

Playing in Fenway, Contreras will probably see his doubles numbers catch up to Romy’s, but their home run numbers may get closer too. But Romy is just a slight adjustment away from unlocking a ton more power, as I mentioned above, with his elite hard-hit rate, but tendency to hit the ball into the ground.

Baserunning? Romy is clearly the better one here.

Positional versatility? Slight advantage to Contreras because it’s great to have an emergency backup catcher, but Romy is strong in this category too.

I figured, put Romy at first until Casas is ready, then work things out from there. Get one other infielder, preferably a third baseman, or a Ketel Marte. That would have been best. Anthony, Gonzalez, and Casas could all be giving the Red Sox power in spades if they can all be healthy.

Now instead, Romy plays second base where he’s worse defensively (I hope he gets better), and Casas is kind of blocked. Contreras may be a power hitter, but the Red Sox may not end up with any more power production for his acquisition.

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.