Red Sox Update

The Red Sox have their CF in Coco Crisp. Reports say they are signing Sea Bass Gonzalez to play SS as well. Willie Harris is in as a utilityman. I've updated my projection, replacing Brandon Moss and Chris Durbin (replacement level outfielders) and Dustin Pedroia (a pretty good middle infielder. Dustin may spend the year in AAA with a late season callup. I don't think they'll use him as a backup if it will accelerate his service time. His future is probably at 2B, and if Mark Loretta gets hurt he could easily step in without the big league team losing anything, but that probably won't happen either. Graffanino, Cora, and Harris are all around.

Fans of Pedroia will have to be content with calculating some really cool MLE's this summer.

Gonzalez is a hacker, but he improves the defense. The combined moves knock 10 points off each pitcher's ERA. Crisp was a great defensive LF. His defense in CF in the past, though, wasn't so great. He's played about an equal amount in each spot.

By zone rating, he was -8 career in CF, + 13 career in left. That's a much bigger split than normal, and Coco is fast, there's no reason to think his specific skill set prevents him from playing CF. I applied an adjustement to his left field stats from looking at all players who've played both positions in the last decade or so, combined it with his CF stats, and regressed to the mean.

Coco projects as a +1 centerfielder. The Red Sox score almost 20 more runs than I had them before, and allow 15 fewer. Total RS = 852 RA = 793, record = 87-75.

Now one game behind the Yankees, and they've probably sentenced the Jays to another 3rd place finish, AJ, BJ, and Troy notwithstanding.