For the first time in five years, the Boston Red Sox organization is packed with talent from the big club all the way through the minor league ranks. Chaim Bloom’s vision for a sustainable, home-grown future, for better or worse, is being carried out. Plenty of pundits will happily illustrate their lack of belief in the talent evaluation skills of Bloom’s regime, but talent is usually not the differentiator between who excels and who flops in Major League Baseball.
Let’s face it: there’s not a single player in baseball history to reach the MLB level who wasn’t a supremely talented athlete. Even the worst MLB players of all time were legendary heroes at the local, college, and amateur levels. Every single MLB player can either hit, run, throw, or field with a level of talent that 99% of the population could never imagine possessing. It’s not until they reach the level of professional baseball at the MLB affiliate level that these players learn just how crowded it truly is at the top of the food chain.
The minor leagues are packed with apex predators, each looking to knock the other contenders out of their path to reach the ultimate prize: a Major League Baseball contract.
At that top level, the level where every player in every lineup is among the five greatest athletes their home town has ever seen, these former big fish in small ponds realize just how razor thin the difference between the best and the rest truly is. The elite players don’t get to fly first class and stay in five-star hotels because they have so much more physical ability than the countless also-rans who toil endlessly on long bus rides to the Durham, North Carolina Red Roof Inn.
As that blithering dolt Yogi Berra famously said, “Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.”
Confidence
The biggest differentiator between the good players who kick butt at UCLA and the great ones who perform at a high level in the big leagues is confidence. Great players not only possess elite athletic tools that are handed out at birth to only a select few. Great players not only work obsessively at honing those gifts.
Great players know exactly how great they are.
They step up to the dish or toe the rubber each day knowing damn well that barely anybody else on the planet can do what they do on a baseball field. They approach each game as yet another opportunity to dominate the competition and prove just how good they are.
The guys that don’t quite make it or wash out after a quick cup of coffee in the bigs have a much more flawed approach; an approach wrought with complexity and an abundance of thought that typically leads to nothing but frustration.
Confidence breeds succeeds. Excessive thought, however, usually just breeds more thought.
In Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, Billy Beane discusses the chief difference between himself, a superior athlete with all the physical tools needed to excel, and Lenny Dykstra, a short, aloof twit who always seemed to care way less about that night’s ballgame than he did about where he’d be partying afterward.
“Lenny was so perfectly designed, emotionally, to play the game of baseball … He was able to instantly forget any failure and draw strength from every success. He had no concept of failure. And he had no idea where he was. And I was the opposite.”
Of course, Major League Baseball players need to continuously work on their game. But once you reach that level, you can’t be questioning your ability to hang with the best in the world. Once you’ve reached The Show, you can’t have any doubt that you belong there. That type of approach is tantamount to throwing in the towel. You can’t be the guy that’s just be happy to be there.
You have to know that you belong there.
The tale of the 2023 Boston Red Sox will not be written based on how much talent Chaim Bloom has assembled on the big league team. That’s the incidental, surface-level banter of message boards and social media accounts. We’ve seen the tools that are possessed by the players that have taken the field for Alex Cora’s squad this year. There’s no question that there is enough talent on the Red Sox to compete for a playoff spot.
The only question is one of confidence.
The confidence of a handful of talented young guys who are getting their first real shot at being productive Major League Baseball players. Can these unestablished talents prove to themselves that they deserve to be key pieces of a big market team with a fanbase that harbors huge expectations?
There’s no question that the Red Sox organization has confidence in these players. If Chaim Bloom didn’t believe in them, he wouldn’t be staking his job, his reputation, and possibly his own personal safety on their performance. But it’s not the trust of the fans, the coaches, or even the President of Baseball Operations that each of these players needs.
They need to have unshakable trust in their own abilities to compete with the best in the world.
Masataka Yoshida
It’s a bit of a stretch to call Yoshida a rookie. After all, he spent seven years as one of the best players in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball League, the best pro baseball league in the world outside of MLB. However, the adjustments he will have to make in order to adapt to playing at the highest of all levels are very much like the adjustments a minor leaguer has to make when making the initial jump from AAA to MLB. Luckily for Red Sox fans, Yoshida came to Boston pre-packaged with the kind of confidence that you can only get from dominating world class competition for seven years.
NPBL pitchers rely more on east-west movement and splitters in the dirt than MLB hurlers, all of whom seem to be able to climb the ladder with 97-mph heat these days. The increase in velocity stifled Yoshida for the first few weeks of his MLB rookie season, causing a lot of weak contact and unproductive at bats. He never strayed from his game though, and the best way to acclimate yourself to a different style of pitching is to see as many pitches as you can. That’s what he’s always done; seen a lot of pitches, drawn a lot of walks, and waited for his pitch to hit.
After less than a month, Yoshida seems to have found his stroke. He always knew he’d find it though, as we all should have known.
Triston Casas
Casas feels like a prime candidate to have his confidence shaken 24 games into the season. He is literally not hitting his weight, and as I wrote last week, his abundance of check swings leads me to believe that his struggles have led him to question his pitch recognition skills. The walks have come at a better clip the past week or so, and the bomb he hit Monday night is just the kind of stroke that could help him get on track.
Honestly though, Casas seems to be the type of guy that doesn’t get down on himself easily. This dude was sunbathing shirtless and barefoot in the outfield of Fenway Park a couple hours before his Major League debut. He bellowed a guttural scream upon drawing a 14-pitch walk in Tampa. Rookies usually tend to shut up and keep a low profile to avoid any hazing or grief from the veterans. Casas, however, seems to have no problem walking to the beat of his own drum. I take that as an encouraging sign regarding his ability to stay true to his own approach on the field.
We know he has the talent. The patience. The power. We saw it in the month he spent with the Red Sox last season (.358 OBP, 5 HR and 12 RBI in 76 at bats). With the tools he possesses and the confidence he exudes, I think it’s just a matter of time before he becomes the middle-of-the-order bat we need him to be.
By the All-Star break, we will all see that Triston Casas is no Bobby Dalbec.
Garrett Whitlock
If anyone has an excuse to lack confidence, it’s Garrett Whitlock. Between the Tommy John surgery, the pectoral strain, the hip impingement, and the bouncing back-and-forth from starter to reliever and back again, who could blame him for having no sense of himself as a player. Is he a starting pitcher? A long reliever? A closer? Or is he just another talented guy whose body can’t take the strain of a Major League career? We have no idea what Whitlock is capable of yet. And the scary part is that he has no idea either.
All signs indicate that Whitlock truly wants to be a starting pitcher. The Red Sox have made a firm commitment to him as a part of the team’s future by locking him up for four years last April, then grooming him as a key member of the rotation. While he has not yet dazzled us as a starting pitcher the way he did as a closer in 2021, he has a four-pitch mix that could translate to success as a starter if he can stay healthy — both physically and mentally.
Garrett Whitlock knows he is a good Major League pitcher, but how can he be confident in his ability as a starting pitcher when he has never performed that role for a full Major League season? He’s started three games this year, bookending a gem against the Angels with two turns being knocked around by the Rays and the Brewers. It fesls dangerous to get excited about Whitlock due to all the uncertainty that surrounds him. If he feels the same way, he may be an experiment that is doomed for failure.
Brayan Bello
Bello has only had two stints with the Red Sox, so why does he feel like such a start-and-stop case? His numbers were not great last year, but they were not bad either for a rookie making his first foray into the big leagues. A deeper look inside the numbers will also tell you that he had some very poor luck, giving up a lot of weak hits that found holes and accumulating an astronomical BABIP (batting average on balls in play) against. Either way, a player can only take so much solace in the sabermetrics of it all. A player wants to see positive results, and Bello’s career 2-9 record and 5.29 ERA is surely not going to make him sleep well at night.
All the scouts claim that Bello has the stuff to be an ace. For an organization that hasn’t developed an ace since Jon Lester, Bello is the kind of commodity that has to be nurtured like a baby Yoda. It’s not enough to make sure his arm stays healthy. You also have to make absolutely sure that he is in a good head space. Starting pitchers are odd and temperamental creatures of nuance and routine, and teams will move mountains to preserve the delicate and monumentally important confidence of their starting pitcher prospects.
Bello has a 9.82 ERA in two starts this season. He was trounced by Anaheim in his first start, and he was far less than stellar in his next appearance against Milwaukee. Despite trending upwards (from bad to not-so-bad) and generating a 9.8 K/9 ratio in those two starts, he was sent back down to Worcester on Monday to make room for lefty reliever Brennan Bernardino.
Was this move made so Bello can restore his confidence with a couple starts in AAA before rejoining the team?
Was it made to ease the burden of a bullpen that hasn’t had a day off in over two weeks?
Was it made because Bello’s forearm is bothering him again?
What affect will this demotion have on his confidence?
Much like Whitlock, Brayan Bello does not know where he stands in the world of Major League starting pitchers. He has the velocity, the secondary pitches, and the youth to be the most intriguing (and potentially infuriating) arm this organization has seen since Clay Buchholz. He will be used with caution by the organization, who will give him every chance to succeed. However, given the current state of the Red Sox starting rotation, the fanbase is not liable to stay patient for long. If there’s a potential savior waiting in the wings, Red Sox fans will soon want to stop hearing tall tales of this prodigy that’s been getting private lessons from Pedro Martinez. They’ll want to see the goods in action on the mound at Fenway Park. Soon.
Which of these four players have the confidence to match their skillsets? Which of them have the talent and the mental fortitude to live up to the hype and be the kind of foundational players that can help forge the identity of the next generation of this team?
We should know by the end of the 2023 season. And while I can’t say which players will meet that criteria as of April 25th, I can tell you one thing for sure.
It won’t come down to a question of talent.
Well done. ❤️