Lucas Giolito is ready to return to the Red Sox. The Red Sox aren’t ready for him.

If you like complex roster decisions and contract manipulation tactics, then the 2025 Red Sox are for you!

There’s a surprisingly long list of guys who will be playing their next baseball game in Worcester when they should probably already be on the big league roster.

Atop this list is the beloved and budding bromance of Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer, who consistently look like the coolest kids in class on graduation day waiting to take on the real world. They’re ready — there’s just no room for them on the roster without Craig Breslow and company having to make a hard decision. So instead, we’re all stuck waiting. Strike one!

Then there’s the almost inexplicable roster brain bender in Masataka Yoshida, who was healthy enough to hit in spring training, but can’t be a DH because the Sox moved Devers there and he’s blocked. He now has to wait until his shoulder is healthy enough for him to be able to throw from left field before he can start rehabbing with the WooSox, where he will then work his way up and play uh …. exactly where the hell is he going to play in the Fenway outfield? Oh, and all this is while the Red Sox still owe him $18.6 million per year through the 2027 season. Strike two!

Speaking of guys whom the Sox owe about $19 million to this year and haven’t been on the field yet, we also have Lucas Giolito. The big righty first signed with the Red Sox about 16 months ago to be an innings eater in a (at the time) very thin rotation, which is quite ironic because he still hasn’t thrown a single major league pitch for the Sox on what was supposed to be a one-year deal.

But baseball, like life, often doesn’t go the way we plan, and the devil tends to emerge in the details. After Giolito missed all of last season with an elbow injury that occurred in spring training of 2024, he took advantage of an option in the contract that landed him an extra season in Boston and a $19 million salary for 2025. However, that wasn’t the only option detail in the contract, and now, after Giolito suffered another, this time much more minor injury in spring training 2025, the Red Sox seem poised to take advantage of that one.

It goes like this: If Giolito pitches fewer than 140 innings for the Red Sox this season, the team will have a $14 million option on him for the 2026 season. However, if Giolito reaches the 140 inning threshold, the option becomes a $19 million mutual option with a $1.5 million buyout. In other words, the Red Sox have significantly more leverage here if Giolito doesn’t reach 140 innings. Just as they will have significantly more leverage if they keep waiting on Mayer and Anthony as opposed to making a tough trade on the current roster and graduating them.

But let’s stay focused on Giolito here because I want to paint a clear picture of what things looked like when he first tweaked his hamstring back in spring training. Ian Browne posted this piece on March 13th, just two days after the injury occurred, and it contains some quotes that now look borderline unbelievable given the fact that May is less than a week away and Giolito still hasn’t pitched in Boston.

Take a look at this one:

“The program we had in place had me making four outings leading into my first game of the regular season, so I don’t know if that pushes it back one five-day cycle,” Giolito said. “I hope for as little as possible. Considering how good I felt today I’d be like ‘Yo let’s just keep it going, we can manage.’ But I understand the caution so it is what it is.”

That was SIX WEEKS ago! And there have been zero notable setbacks since.

In the meantime, this front office has allowed Sean Newcomb to make five starts that have produced more traffic than the Cape on a holiday weekend and have taxed the bullpen like the Prince John and the Sherriff of Nottingham.

It gets even more frustrating when you look at more recent quotes. Here’s what Giolito had to say in Chris Cotillo’s piece on Mass Live on Monday:

“I feel ready to go,” Giolito said.

“I feel ready to help contribute in whatever way possible.”

“I accomplished what I set out to do. I wanted to throw my five innings and whatever pitches. I had to go finish up in the bullpen. I said, ‘Let me just go out and throw the sixth inning’ but we’re on those restrictions. Just doing what they tell me.”

Compare that to the message Cora then relayed:

“We’ll meet,“ Cora said. ”I just talked to him a little bit. Felt great, threw strikes and physically, he’s in a good spot. We’ll see what’s next for him, whether it’s one more or he’ll be back with us.”

Well guess what? It’s going to to be one more in the minor leagues in Worcester on Friday.

As one fan noted in the comments:

So now that we’ve established we’re pushing the first major league start of Giolito’s season and Red Sox career back to at least April 30th, let’s do some calendar math. The Red Sox play game 32 of the season that day, meaning Giolito will rejoin the club with about 130 games left.

If he stays healthy and pitches well enough to remain in the rotation, he’d be slated to make 26 starts (130 / 5 = 26), assuming he takes his turn every fifth game.

Knowing this, let’s take a look at his last three seasons of play in which he was remarkably reliable and made 94 starts from 2021 through 2023. In those games, he amassed 524.2 innings of work, which comes to about to about 17 and a half outs per game, or somewhere between 5.1 and 5.2 innings of work per start.

Plugging in 5.1 innings pitched per start over 26 starts would land Giolito at 138.2 innings on the season. Surgical!

Oh, and that assumes he’s working with 26 starts. With Giolito’s season delayed this long, the team could easily whittle it down to 25 or 24 starts if needed and blame it on circumstance, like with the reshuffling of the rotation around the All-Star break, or with sporadically adding a sixth man where needed when rain delays arrive.

And oh, speaking of rain delays, we may soon have one that further complicates this mess.

If Friday’s game gets washed out, you’re likely looking at a double header later in the weekend, and that opens Pandora’s box as to whether or not they Sox still stick with Tanner Houck, Walker Buehler, and Brayan Bello and lean on the Monday off day for their recovery or if they do something like call up Cooper Criswell for an outing and then just push everybody, including Giolito back further.

One thing’s for certain: This front office loves their leverage, and depending on how things go in Cleveland, Mother Nature might give them a chance to lean on it even harder this weekend.