No matter how well-constructed and deep a team’s roster is, its fans still wait in anticipation of the Passan bomb. When it drops, your team has signed someone; your team is promoting a hot prospect; your team is, for the moment, relevant across the nation and world. Today, though, brought the other kind of Passan bomb, the kind no one likes. According to Jeff Passan, Lucas Giolito, the Boston Red Sox’s one major offseason signing, who was added for his 6 consistent years of innings-eating, “likely has a partially torn UCL and flexor strain and could miss the 2024 season.”
It’s hard to overstate how destabilizing this news is for an already-uncertain Red Sox rotation. Having traded away Chris Sale in December, the Sox were down to one out-and-out starter: Brayan Bello, who has been promising but raw in his season-and-a-half with the Red Sox. Rotation-adjacent figures like Kutter Crawford, who was stretched out last year into a starter; Nick Pivetta, who pings between bullpen and rotation more often than any Red Sox in recent memory; and Tanner Houck, who is an excellent multi-inning reliever when healthy, but a much less consistent starter, remained in the hunt for the other rotation spots.
It was obvious, then, that new GM Craig Breslow would have to get someone. The 2023 team had relied heavily on openers, spot starts from hybrid pitchers, and out-and-out bullpen games, leading most disastrously to August 28, when Kyle Barraclough entered a game against the Astros and gave up 10 earned runs, hit three batters, and turned a one-run lead into a 13-5 loss. “We had a lot of guys down,” Cora said after the game. “This is where we were.” GM Chaim Bloom was fired a little over two weeks later, on September 14, and the Red Sox officially entered limbo.
Giolito felt like a natural match for the formerly-great Red Sox. Over his six full major-league years, he had pitched just over 165 innings on average, posted a respectable 4.38 ERA, and shown long, consistent flashes of brilliance. 2019 had been fantastic: he’d pitched 176.2 innings, posted a 3.41 ERA, and struck out 228 batters. He was also sixth in AL Cy Young votes, and had been voted an All-Star. 2020 and 2021 fell along the same great lines, and there had been a slight dip in 2022.
That Giolito struggled mightily in 2023 shouldn’t have been a real surprise. In addition to some difficult off-field matters, he played for three different teams, made the most starts of his career (33), and pitched a colossal number of innings (184.1). He pitched to a 4.88 ERA, slightly lower than his 2022 4.90, but he began to give up what he himself described as “an astounding number” of home runs. Giolito had never been a homer-averse pitcher, but his total for 2023 was 41; for reference, he’d allowed 24 in a poor 2022 and 27 in his breakout 2019.
This meant that when Giolito hit free agency after the World Series, he didn’t get a high-paying, long-term deal; he’d have to sign something shorter, with opt-outs, that allowed him to improve and collect the cash later. The Red Sox, skittish about long-term deals for older starters, bit. The deal was player- and team-friendly: the Red Sox got a consistently healthy innings-eater with a high ceiling, plus no long-term commitment; and Lucas Giolito got $38.5 million dollars over two years, a chance to regroup, and an opt-out after 2024.
The rotation, too, seemed more manageable given Giolito’s high innings ceiling. Chris Sale, whom Giolito had more or less directly replaced, had peaked at 102.2 innings in 2023 after pitching 42.2 in 2021 and 5.2 in 2022, injury-plagued years that had left the Sox rotation in semi-permanent disarray. But if Giolito could provide 200 innings—a goal he sets for himself each year—and if Bello, Pivetta, Crawford, and Houck could all stay healthy and take some natural steps forward, then the Red Sox could be a wild-card contender, even if ownership hadn’t exactly gone “full throttle.”
Implications
But now everything is different. Assuming Giolito’s ligament is indeed damaged enough for surgery and a long rehab, as Passan and others have suggested it may be, the Red Sox are looking at naming all their rotation candidates as starters, not just the best ones. More devastatingly, they’ll lose what they thought was a very stable source of solid innings. It’s also an irreplaceable one, at least from within: Bello and Crawford, for example, cannot and should not be expected to jump from 129.1 and 157 innings in 2023, respectively, up toward Giolito’s aspirations of 190 or 200. If development is the goal, pitching either of them for 200 innings, or even 185, could be risky.
Hours after the Giolito news broke, Sox GM Craig Breslow suggested that Cooper Criswell, who is on a 1-year, $1 million deal for 2024, could also be a candidate to start, which technically brings the number of candidates to 5, if we’re also counting Bello, Crawford, Houck, and Garrett Whitlock. (Bizarrely, Breslow also agreed with a NESN commentator’s suggestion that a 6-man rotation could work; who the sixth man could be is a mystery. If it’s Josh Winckowski, that’s a serious stretch.) If the Sox were planning, even with Giolito, for 2024 to be a bridge year, it makes sense to start everyone and see who can handle a full season of work: who flourishes and who can be more effective in the bullpen.
The other, quicker way to improve the rotation would be to do the obvious and sign Jordan Montgomery. In Boston, at least, the idea is widely seen as obvious: Lou Merloni, the former Red Sox infielder and current radio broadcaster, even has his Twitter avatar set to Montgomery’s face. But Montgomery is a better pitcher than Giolito, or at least is in a better spot career-wise, and so he’d be more expensive and would arrive on a longer-term deal. Montgomery’s agent, Scott Boras, has always been comfortable pushing deals well into Spring Training to extract maximum value, and the injuries that naturally emerge as pitchers and other players ramp back up do offer some opportunity for expensive, unsigned players who are ready to go.
It seems to me, though, that if the Red Sox were unwilling to sign Montgomery before, and if the reason for the hesitation was that the team seems too young and raw to benefit much from established free agents over the age of 30, then the dead money on the Giolito deal will likely only make matters more uncertain and the owners more reticent. What had been a team- and player-friendly deal, and quite a good one, is now (through no fault of his own) extraordinarily Giolito-friendly: he will recieve $38.5 million over the next two years, assuming he opts into the second year of his deal. If he has Tommy John or a similar surgery, there is no guarantee of him pitching a full season before the contract runs out. If this was to be another bridge year in what is becoming quite the bridge journey for the Red Sox, and if Giolito was a bridge pitcher, then adding Montgomery will likely never be the preferred solution, since it takes up a developmental rotation spot, costs lots of money, and only helps to win games, which apparently isn’t the goal of whatever is happening in and around Fenway.
Last, and most importantly, spare a thought for Giolito himself, who, instead of posting and opting out into free agency, will instead be rehabbing under the supervision of his fourth team in a year. These things happen in baseball, and there is often no way to see them coming or prevent them. But there is always a place in baseball for pitchers like Giolito, and tens of millions of dollars won’t hurt. But everything else does and will.
For the rest of the Sox rotation, an open door just swung a little wider. Whoever gets through will get a chance to throw a lot. The one bright spot of optimism? If you were writing a story about a young, exciting pitching group, it might start like this.