The Red Sox's New Playbook: Why Depth is the Real Star.
We love the fireworks—the highlight-reel moves, the blockbuster trades, the record-breaking signings, the aggressive win-now gambits. They light up the sky, grab headlines, ignite fan bases, and change franchises overnight. But once the smoke clears and the dust settles from the first half of the season, smart organizations know there’s just as much value—maybe more—in the quieter moves. Offloading risk. Building depth. Maintaining flexibility. These aren’t flashy decisions, but they’re the ones that keep teams afloat when injuries pile up or the season doesn’t follow the script. The clubs that last aren’t built on explosive moments—they’re built on steady, calculated choices that hold up long after the show is over.
Recently, the Red Sox made one of those moves. As they continue to rework their roster without chasing splashy signings, they’ve started building a club that looks less like a stars-and-scrubs model and more like a flexible, injury-resistant network. They’re betting on positional versatility, depth over flash, and an infrastructure that can hold up even when key players go down.
This approach is supported by research like the study “Process Flexibility in Baseball: The Value of Positional Flexibility” (Chan & Fearing, 2019), which quantifies what many front offices have long intuited: teams that invest in flexibility gain not just optionality, but tangible wins. According to their analysis:
Top teams gain 1–2 wins per season from positional flexibility alone—often the margin between October baseball and an early offseason.
Teams overly reliant on a few stars are 4x more fragile than the most robust rosters—one injury away from collapse.
The real value lies in long subchains of capable, versatile players, particularly within the infield or outfield, who can absorb innings and shift roles without steep performance drop-offs.
Roster depth matters—flexibility is only as good as the next guy up. And when that guy is better than replacement level, the whole system becomes more resilient.
For the Red Sox, that’s the game: avoid building around a few irreplaceable stars, and instead create a roster with layers of contingency, versatility, and strategic depth. It may not light up the newspapers, but it just might keep them standing when other teams start to break—especially as the season moves into the August and September months.
Without diving too deep into the reasons behind the Red Sox trading Rafael Devers, one significant factor was certainly his hefty contract—but salary alone doesn't tell the full story. Devers also created structural rigidity on the roster. Locked in at DH, his presence limited how the Red Sox could deploy other players, particularly as they began building a system rooted in positional flexibility.
According to Chan and Fearing’s 2019 study on Process Flexibility in Baseball, the teams that extract the most value from flexibility often rely on “long subchains” of interchangeable players—especially within the infield or outfield. But critically, those chains only function if players can shift freely and if no single position is blocked by an immovable piece. Devers, for all his offensive value, became just that: a fixed point that prevented the Red Sox from fully realizing the benefits of their emerging flexibility model.
It’s the equivalent of outfitting an F1 car for the open track, only to realize you’re stuck in a 35 MPH zone. No matter how much flexibility or potential you’ve built into the system, you can’t unlock it if the path is blocked.
Obviously, the key decision here is balancing Devers’ offensive impact against the constraints of a less flexible roster. I’m confident the front office has a clear understanding of this trade-off, both short-term and long-term. The so-called “scrubs model” outlined in the study above might not be the flashiest or most glamorous way to build a roster, but it offers a pragmatic framework for managing personnel through the inevitable bumps and injuries during a season.
The real challenge for this model, however, lies in the postseason. While depth and flexibility can consistently put a team in contention for October, star players are disproportionately crucial for winning playoff rounds and ultimately, a World Series. Trading a generational hitter and franchise cornerstone like Devers, then, isn't merely about sacrificing fan appeal; it's a profound strategic choice that trades away the very kind of player most likely to elevate a team's performance when the stakes are highest, potentially limiting their championship ceiling.
The truth is, baseball history is littered with teams that bet everything on a superstar and fell apart when injuries or production drops off or injuries happen. The Red Sox's current gamble on depth and versatility isn't just an organizational philosophy; it's a reflection of how the game itself is being re-imagined across the league. No longer solely defined by the long ball, modern baseball increasingly rewards athleticism, defensive prowess, and flexibility across all three phases of the game. This shift has created an environment where well-rounded, adaptable players and meticulously constructed "subchains" are arguably more valuable than a few isolated stars.
It’s a strategy that may not always feel thrilling, but it's the kind of smart, pragmatic risk that positions a team for enduring competitiveness in the evolving landscape of professional baseball.