If there’s any team that feels poised for a blockbuster trade this winter, it’s the Boston Red Sox.
Coming off a promising season that ultimately ended up mediocre, the Red Sox are all about capital.
They have a giant budget to work with before they hit the luxury tax, and they have a surplus of young position players. If any single player is available, it feels as though Boston could trade for them.
But what do the Red Sox need? Starting pitching, and lots of it.
Last year, the Red Sox ended up with the seventh-best starting pitching ERA in baseball, but that was inflated by a dominant April. As the season wore on, the entire rotation started giving up much more hard contact, while seemingly fatiguing at the exact same time.
So in short, the Red Sox need an ace, and the trade market could present the answer. Justin Leger of NBC Sports Boston proposed that the Red Sox could pull off a blockbuster deal by acquiring Miami Marlins Cy Young Award winner Sandy Alcantara.
“This one carries some risk. Alcantara didn’t play in 2024 after undergoing Tommy John surgery. But if the Red Sox believe he still has his 2022 Cy Young stuff, they should be ringing the Marlins’ phones off the hook,” Leger said.
“He’ll be costly, though it shouldn’t take a Crochet-like haul to acquire him. Before undergoing Tommy John, he posted a 4.14 ERA and 1.21 WHIP over 28 starts in 2023. Perhaps that will make the price tag low enough that the Red Sox wouldn’t have to part ways with one of their prized top-four prospects (Mayer, Campbell, Roman Anthony, Kyle Teel) to get him.”
Though Alcantara may not have been his Cy Young self in 2023, he still showed that he can do one thing better than anyone else in the game: eat innings. In fact, from 2021 to 2023, he amassed 619 innings pitched in 93 starts, the highest average per start of any qualified pitcher in the game.
Having a workhorse like Alcantara for the rest of the pitching staff to take cues from should be hugely appealing to this Red Sox front office. But trades are always tricky, so in an ideal world, the Marlins wouldn’t be asking for the world in return.
