SPRINGFIELD — The Red Sox’ 2023 path to last place was paved primarily by the shortcomings of their starters. The team acknowledged the need to upgrade the rotation at the beginning of the offseason and reiterated the notion for three months.
New chief baseball officer Craig Breslow continued to lean into the point at the Winter Weekend. Asked how the team might return to championship contention, Breslow was succinct.
“Improving the pitching,” he said.
And yet, while the Red Sox aren’t necessarily done with offseason moves, they sound surprisingly content if they make no further additions before spring training to their starting rotation. If so, the scorecard from 2023 to 2024 will read:
OUT: Chris Sale, James Paxton, Corey Kluber.
IN: Lucas Giolito.
That can’t possibly be it for a team that continues to insist it wants to contend in 2024. Can it?
Sox starters posted a 4.68 ERA (22nd in MLB), pitched 774⅓ innings (27th), and allowed 1.5 homers per nine innings (26th) in 2023. While Giolito stands a good chance of offering more innings than the pitchers who are gone, he also gave up 41 homers — second most in MLB, a total that even he admitted was astounding.
So, don’t the Red Sox need to add another starter?
“No,” Andrew Bailey said.
Bailey is the team’s new pitching coach, hired after he’d helped guide the Giants staff to one of the best performances in the big leagues over the past three seasons. He believes changes to pitch usage — how pitchers use the pitches already in their arsenal — represent “low-hanging fruit” that can result in significant improvement.
His basic premise: Pitchers should attack the strike zone with their best pitches and not emphasize pitches that tend to get crushed there. Use pitchers’ strengths — pitches and locations inside the zone — to allow them to excel. Don’t rely on weaknesses.
That philosophy yielded success with the Giants. San Francisco’s starters — aided, in fairness, by a ballpark and climate that is a joy for pitchers and maddening to hitters — posted a 3.73 ERA (fourth in MLB) with a 6.1 percent walk rate (best) while allowing 1.0 homers per nine innings (fewest) from 2021-23.
Bailey worked with Kevin Gausman in 2021 and Carlos Rodón in 2022 as they shed years of grumblings about “unfulfilled potential” to emerge as Cy Young candidates. He now exudes boundless optimism about the ability for Red Sox pitchers to achieve levels beyond anything they’ve accomplished before, something that will be necessary if the team is to land anywhere above last place in the AL East in 2024.
Bailey didn’t blink about whether he views a rotation of Giolito and holdovers Brayan Bello, Nick Pivetta, and Kutter Crawford — rounded out through a spring training competition between Garrett Whitlock, Tanner Houck, and Josh Winckowski — as capable of collective success.
“If our industry doesn’t view our pitching staff individually at higher tiers [by the end of 2024 than entering the year], I just didn’t do my job,” Bailey said. “I think that there’s talent in our rotation, opportunity. Helping them understand who they are and giving them identities and creating some accountability is going to be our name of the game. I’m totally happy. I’m excited about this group.”
In a vacuum, that outlook is understandable for each pitcher.
Giolito continued to get plenty of swings and misses in the strike zone in 2023; better command could limit his gopher vulnerability. Bello more than held his own over a full year in the rotation, and it’s not hard to imagine further progress — particularly if his offseason work on a slider balances his repertoire.
Pivetta has always been seen as having the potential to emerge as at least a mid-rotation starter, even if he’s never performed to that level over a full season. His introduction of a sweeper in the middle of last season allowed him to be one of the more effective pitchers in the AL over the last three months.
Crawford has one of the more effective four-seam fastballs in baseball. Whitlock and Houck showed enough flashes through their inconsistent 2023 campaigns — which, for both, followed significant offseason surgeries — to see potential for more with better health.
In other words, you can squint and see upside beyond the 2023 performances of that entire ensemble. That, at least, is how the Sox are approaching an offseason of surprisingly little change to their starters.
“I’m very confident in the group that we have,” Pivetta said. “I’m quite excited to see what this group has. I’m looking forward to it and just competing alongside these guys.”
Still, it’s one thing for a team to bank on the upside of one or two starters and quite another to require every member of a rotation to improve in order to make contention more than a Panglossian illusion. And it’s worth noting that Breslow acknowledged the Sox had identified offseason targets for upgrades but failed to secure them.
“We recognize the importance of bringing in additional star power,” Breslow said. “[But] it takes a lot for external acquisitions to line up. To this point, we haven’t been able to do that.”
What they have done is to bring in a pitching coach and other new voices — Breslow (formerly the Cubs director of pitching), new director of pitching Justin Willard from the Twins, and Driveline founder Kyle Boddy — who hope to get better results from the pitchers already on the staff.
“I want to be viewed in the upper echelon of the league as a pitching staff,” Bailey said. “I would also say that they weren’t too far off [from that] last year. There’s a lot of talent here already. You can set guys up in certain ways to succeed. [I’m] expecting the staff to take steps forward.”
But where will those steps lead, and do the Red Sox have the right pitchers to take them?
Spring training starts in three weeks, and with it, hopes and expectations will be measured against the reality of the rotation.
Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him @alexspeier.