Reports last month from MLB.com’s John Denton indicated that the Red Sox, Mets, Phillies, Padres, Dodgers, and Angels were six of the teams (and perhaps the only six teams) Nolan Arenado was willing to waive his no-trade protection to join, should the Cardinals work out an acceptable swap with any of these clubs. Four weeks after that initial report, Boston remains “a preferred destination” for Arenado, according to MassLive.com’s Chris Cotillo and Sean McAdam. What isn’t known, however, is if the Red Sox and Cardinals are anywhere close on a deal, or if the Sox are particularly motivated to bring Arenado to Beantown.
Acquiring Arenado would check a couple of big needs off of Boston’s offseason shopping list. Chief baseball officer Craig Breslow reiterated earlier this week that the Sox were looking to add “a right-handed bat out of the middle of the lineup,” considering that the team is heavy with left-handed hitters. Bringing one of the best defensive third basemen of all time to Fenway Park would instantly help Boston’s subpar infield defense, and Arenado would even be reunited with his good friend and former Rockies teammate Trevor Story.
One initial roadblock, of course, is the fact that the Red Sox already have a star third baseman in Rafael Devers. Though Arenado has indicated that he is open to a position change in the right circumstance and Devers’ agent said in no uncertain terms in November that his client was staying at third base, it is hard to believe that Arenado would move off the hot corner in deference to a much weaker fielder in Devers. If a trade did happen, Devers would presumably become the new first baseman or DH, though this creates other conflicts with Triston Casas and Masataka Yoshida.
Both of those players, however, have been mentioned in trade talks this winter, and even in some of the same trade talks. Casas is the far more valuable trade asset of the two, and while Breslow said “we’re certainly not shopping him,” that naturally doesn’t mean Casas is off limits. Indeed, Cotillo and McAdam write that “there remains a belief in the industry that the Red Sox remain open to trading Casas, potentially for young pitching, to facilitate other roster maneuvering.”
It could be that the Sox are looking to first trade Casas before making any other moves, as their leverage in a Casas deal would be lessened if the Red Sox created a positional logjam beforehand. Trading Casas purely as a vehicle to clear payroll space surely isn’t Breslow’s preference, which is why that aforementioned attempt to link Yoshida and Casas together was still part of an attempt to bring Luis Castillo from Seattle to Boston.
Payroll is also a major aspect of any Arenado trade, as the third baseman is owed $74MM over the remaining three seasons of his contract. Between deferrals and the $10MM being covered by the Rockies, the present-day value of Arenado’s contract reportedly works out to $60MM. The Cardinals’ chief incentive in trading Arenado is naturally to move as much of this money as possible, and the proposed deal with the Astros that Arenado blocked would’ve seen Houston take on either $45MM (as per Katie Woo and Chandler Rome of the Athletic) or $59MM (as per ESPN’s Jeff Passan) of the $60MM figure.
Theoretically, the Red Sox could absorb the entire contract and still stay under the $241MM luxury tax threshold, as RosterResource estimates Boston’s current tax number at just under $212MM. It remains unclear exactly how much payroll capacity Breslow has been allotted this winter, as while the Sox have made overtures to several top free agents, their spending has been pretty modest to date. The Red Sox could perhaps convince the Cardinals to take on a bigger chunk of Arenado’s salary (or at least closer to the $45MM figure) if better prospects are offered in return. Chaim Bloom’s involvement in this speculative trade is an interesting wrinkle, as the incoming St. Louis president of baseball operations has plenty of knowledge of Boston’s farm system due to his past stint as the Red Sox CBO.
Trading for Arenado would come at a lesser overall cost than signing Alex Bregman, another top third baseman who remains on Boston’s radar. That said, the Red Sox are known to still be in the running for Bregman, who has some notable ties to the Sox in manager Alex Cora (from their days together in Houston) and his longtime friend Walker Buehler, who just signed with the Sox himself before Christmas. Buehler recently told Cotillo and other reporters that even in his brief time in a Sox uniform, “I have certainly made a pitch all over the place for [Bregman] to come to Boston.”
Turning to other Red Sox targets, it remains unknown if Boston is still one of the teams getting consideration from Roki Sasaki. Earlier this week, Sasaki’s agent Joel Wolfe updated reporters on his client’s search for a Major League team, and didn’t give any indication that the right-hander was finished with his in-person meetings with interested clubs.
The Red Sox weren’t one of the seven teams known to have spoken with Sasaki already, and word hasn’t broken if a meeting has been scheduled or perhaps it is has already taken place since Wolfe’s last presser. As of yesterday, WEEI.com’s Rob Bradford reported that the Sox hadn’t “been told they are out of” the running for Sasaki’s services, so the situation is still up in the air.
