So It’s Come To This: Rich Hill Close To Signing With Red Sox

The Sox need pitchers, and beggars can’t be choosers.

In two of his first moves as Red Sox CBO, Craig Breslow acquired Cooper Criswell (off the waiver wire) and Richard Fitts (via the Alex Verdugo trade). The fact that Breslow started his tenure by bringing in two cheap, low-ceilinged pitchers (one of whom came from the Rays, at that!) had many people wondering if he was Chaim Bloom by another name. I never viewed it that way, though. I viewed those acquisitions as more of an indictment of the previous regime than a continuation of it: Breslow immediately saw that the Red Sox lacked any upper minors pitching depth whatsoever. He sought to fix it right away because (1) you need upper minors pitching depth in modern baseball, and (2) it was low-hanging fruit that he could pick without waiting for the rest of the harvest.

At this exact same time last year, the Red Sox season was falling apart due to pitching attrition. The Sox lost five of their first seven games after the somnambulant 2023 trade deadline. John Schreiber, Brennan Bernardino, and Josh Winckowski were all called on to start baseball games in the first half of August 2023. The Kyle Barraclough Game wouldn’t happen until the end of the month, but we could sense it coming.

But at least last year we could, as Bloom did, trick ourselves into thinking that Tanner Houck and Chris Sale would return from injury and steady the ship. This year, we don’t even have that.

Cooper Criswell has done about as good of a job as you can reasonably expect out of a depth starter, putting up a 110 ERA+ in 13 starts scattered throughout the calendar. The problem is that, thanks to the season-ending injuries to Lucas Giolito and Garrett Whitlock, the Sox first needed him back in April and have needed him almost constantly ever since — if you’re fifth on the team in games started, you’re not really a depth starter anymore are you? You’re just a starter. Meanwhile, Richard Fitts has not developed as hoped. His strikeout numbers dropped precipitously going from AA to AAA. The amount of contact he’s giving up in Worcester suggests he isn’t ready to help the big league team.

And. . . that’s it. There’s no one else. James Paxton is done for the year. Nick Pivetta is skipping starts to rest his arm. And Josh Winclowski is again starting big games in August. The calvary is not coming and, if it did, it would probably get lost and turn the wrong way at the top of the hill.

So the 2024 Red Sox, just like the 2023 edition, find themselves on the fringes of postseason contention with a serious need for arms.

Enter. . . Rich Hill

That’s right. The Red Sox season is circling the drain and Rich Hill is back on his old commute from Milton to Fenway.

Rich Hill isn’t going to be good. He’s more of a suburban Boston dad than a big leaguer at this point, and he’s probably spent most the summer doing what those guys do: coaching little league, cutting the grass, and griping about Cape traffic. But he’s here and his arm is still attached to his body.

The sad reality of modern baseball is that the Rich Hills of the world are more important than ever. Every team must now go into the season expecting to lose at least two of their starting pitchers for the year and plan accordingly. A team’s sixth, seventh, and eighth starting pitching options are now more important than the bench and much of the bullpen.

What we’re seeing now (again, for the third year in a row) is the natural byproduct of “The Great Pause” that was the era of Red Sox team-building from 2020-2024. For four years the Red Sox were too spooked by the Chris Sale and David Price experiences to engage with the free agent starting pitching market, opting instead to exclusively pursue short-term deals for projects like Michael Wacha and James Paxton. At the same time, Bloom’s drafts almost entirely avoided using top picks on pitchers.

At this point, we all understand that spending big on pitchers (whether the cost comes via cash or draft capital) is risky. Human bodies are just not supposed to do what pitching in Major League Baseball demands of them. But someone needs to take the ball every night at 7:10. If you want to win, you have no choice but to take a walk down to the pitching store. Maybe next season the Red Sox will get their shopping done early, before Rich Hill is the only thing left on the shelf.