It feels like his career is destined to go down one of two paths.
There were two things that the Red Sox fans sitting behind me at the Patriots Day game on Monday hated more than anything else in the world.
The first thing they hated was Chicago White Sox third baseman Miguel Vargas’s failure to get a hit, thus costing them their five-leg parlay. I’m pretty sure that two of their other legs failed to hit as well, but it was the inability of a career .170 quad-A infielder to put the bat on the ball against a two-time All-Star that really had their heads reeling. If you’re reading this, Miguel Vargas, now is a pretty good time to install a Ring security camera.
The other thing these dudes hated was Triton Casas.
“We should’ve bet on him to ground into three doublebplays today,” they said of Casas as he stepped up to the plate for the first time. Their view of Casas is both simple and strongly-rooted. They believe that he (1) sucks, (2) sucks ass, and (3) does nothing but ground into double plays. Unfortunately, he went 0-4 that day, thus affirming their core beliefs. Even worse, he grounded into a double play. It was his second GIDP of the season, placing him in a 89-way tie for the 39th-most GIDPs this year.
Triston Casas can’t really complain about jabronis like those guys. He asked for this. He asked for it by doing something that very, very few other baseball players do: by welcoming fame.
The dominant strain of American baseball culture says that baseball players should not act like star athletes. They should, instead, go to the ballpark every day like they’re heading down to the mines in Harlan County. Baseball is work, god damn it —the work of humble, god-fearing men who would sooner walk into traffic than show emotion. Or, to be more precise, to show any emotion other than anger. Anger is perfectly acceptable, especially if you’re angry at someone else for not being angry enough.
This cultural mode of ballplayer-as-emotionally-unavailable-1950s-dad is, thankfully, eroding. Players like Casas — players who are unafraid to celebrate, to look quirky or weird, and to talk openly and vulnerably with the press — are slowly changing the rules that traditionally dictate how baseball players are supposed to act. But displaying your individuality on and off the field still comes with plenty of risk. If Triston Casas reaches the potential that we all know he has (which is that of a multiple-time All-Star with 40-homer power) then he will be beloved precisely because of his quirks. But if he fails on the field — if he continues to struggle with injuries and can’t pull himself out of this extended slump — then he’ll be vilified precisely because of those quirks. He already has been (along with poor Miguel Vargas).
That’s why Casas’s clutch home run against the Mariners last night was met with a sigh of relief as much it was with celebration.
Let the record show that I am not worried about Triston Casas’s offensive production. Extended slumps happen to everyone. Casas had an OPS below .700 through the first 12 games of 2024 and ended up right at .800, despite a prolonged injury that disrupted his season. Things were even worse in 2023, when he found himself hitting under .200 well into June, only to hit .305/.406/.590 with 15 home runs for the remaining three months of the season. We know that Triston Casas can produce at an All-Star level because he already has.
But it’s also true that, considering his ability, Casas has underwhelmed in the aggregate over the first two-plus seasons of his big league career. Injuries have limited him to just 217 games since the start of 2023. His 39 homers during that time are just 18th amongst all primary first baseman; his 1.7 fWAR is good for 27th. His defense has been inconsistent.
Triston Casas remains young and bursting with potential. But it feels like there are two distinct career paths ahead of him. He either stays healthy and learns how to consistently produce, becoming one of the next great stars of the Boston sports scene and engendering adulation; or he struggles to stay on the field and battles extended slumps, becoming someone who frustrates the fanbase on the field while annoying many fans off of it, engendering outright hostility. A middle ground between these two poles — one where he’s treated merely as a pretty solid ballplayer who is celebrated when he does something good and ignored when he doesn’t — isn’t really possible for Casas. Not when he’s courted fame the way he has.
Which path will he go down? Last night’s home run doesn’t mean that he’s on his way to stardom, just as Monday’s double play didn’t mean that he was destined to bust. The homer told us nothing more than that Triston Casas can hit a home run, which we already knew. The real question is how many more home runs will he hit. For the sake of not only the Red Sox, but for the wider culture of baseball — which desperately needs people like Triston Casas — I hope the answer is somewhere around a bajillion. I hope he hits each one with painted fingernails, I hope he celebrates them with panache, and I hope he freely talks about how meditation and shirtless yoga helped him do it. And, moreover, I really, really hope the dudes sitting behind me bet the under.