Photo by Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

When you combine a neglectful owner, an inconsistent front office, and some rotten luck, you get the 2024 Red Sox defense.

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” - Warren Buffet

Well, as the tide continues to recede in Boston Harbor, it’s very apparent that everybody who put this roster together wasn’t wearing any clothes. Through a dreadful combination of neglect, stupidity, aloof ownership, inconsistency in implementing ideas, and some plain old rotten luck, you end up with the complete underfunded disaster that is the backbone of the Boston Red Sox.

Now, when I say backbone, I’m specifically talking about the positions up the middle of the diamond. So defensively, we’re looking at shortstop, second base, centerfield, and catcher. This is the group of everyday players you mainly use to prevent your opponent from scoring runs, and not surprisingly, most great baseball teams are built up the middle.

When it comes to the 2024 Red Sox, they’re already below average defensively at all of these positions except centerfield, which should be no surprise to anybody who’s watched these games. Going into the season, second base always looked like a big problem here, and with catcher, the hope was to tread water. Not great, but perhaps manageable with above average play elsewhere. Then, the Trevor Story injury completely destroyed any chance of this happening! In one night, the Red Sox went from arguably the best team in the league defensively at shortstop, to arguably the worst. They got completely exposed the moment he went down. Now, the only answer they seem to have to stop the flood of errors suddenly emanating from this position is to take the guy who has been good at the only other defensive position up the middle (Ceddanne Rafaela in centerfield) and move him to shortstop. Yikes!

Then you also have the ultimate weapon in preventing runs up the middle of the diamond: The pitching. And so far, this element of the 2024 Red Sox has actually been a pleasant delight. But unfortunately, it can’t last. In an almost perfect encapsulation of how things have gone so far, the Red Sox have both allowed the fewest earned runs of any team in baseball (46), and the most unearned runs of any team in baseball (20).

In this case, both stats and the eye test tell the same story: The pitching has been good enough to get the Red Sox off to a scalding hot start (something like 12-5 should’ve very much been on the table), but the defense has just been so putrid in so many critical moments, they’re only 9-8.

It’s such a shame too, because the internal improvement we’ve seen from the arms in the rotation was one of the big ingredients needed going into the season for the Red Sox to surprise and punch above their weight. Unfortunately, this ray of sunshine has little chance of fueling a run of prosperity in 2024 the way everything else has blown up in their face. Virtually every other factor remaining on the board is coming into focus, and all of it is set to break this pitching staff under the crushing weight of inevitability.

Between the injuries, the lack of depth across multiple key spaces on this roster (thanks ownership!), the extra outs the defense forces the arms to get on a nightly basis, the amount of season left for the arms to endure, the lack of help they’re getting from a depressingly underwhelming bottom of the lineup, and the amount of innings the rotation is forcing the bullpen to clean up night after night, that regression from literally being the best pitching staff in baseball out of the gate is going to hit like a hangover after a half dozen whiskeys.

And yes, the arms will crack. Not because they stink, but because water flows downhill and the sun rises in the east. No young, unproven, undermanned (lack of depth behind them), overtaxed rotation forced to get extra outs on a nightly basis can survive the grueling grind of a 162 game season without hitting a sour note. It’s basically one of the laws of the baseball universe. The story might be different if their defense was better, or if they had capitalized on the chance to get several games over .500 out of the gate here, or if ownership had actually invested in some depth anywhere up the middle. But instead, these guys pitching their butts off have been left hung out to dry by the rest of the organization; including everybody from ownership, to the front office, to their own teammates who just can’t make the plays for them in critical spots.

Switch out to the wide view of how this team is constructed and take into account two massive season ending injuries, and it really becomes clear how much weight is riding on the overperforming pitching to prevent a total collapse in the run prevention system. Just take the five highest payroll commitments on the 2024 roster and look at what they’re doing to prevent runs:

1) Rafael Devers: $29.5M

Devers got his contract strictly to mash. That’s it! He’s never posted a positive season glove wise per the main defensive metrics, and he’s already negative this year as well. Add in the fact he doesn’t play a position up the middle, and the Red Sox are paying him almost exclusively to rake.

2) Trevor Story: $22.5M

Terrible luck here! Story was supposed to be the linchpin of the defense that gave them a chance this year, but now the sea of suck at shortstop has been unearthed. Despite Story being one of the best gloves in baseball, he won’t be doing anything else to help the Sox keep opposing runs off the board for the rest of the season.

3) Masataka Yoshida $18.6M

After an ugly showing defensively in 2023, he’s become the DH. So again, no help in preventing runs here.

4) Lucas Giolito $18M

Like Story, terrible luck. But with no hope of him pitching again this year, he also won’t be doing anything to help the club up the middle in 2024.

5) Chris Sale $17M

This is the amount of money the Sox had to eat on the Sale contract for 2024, so while he may be helping Atlanta keep runs off the board, the Red Sox won’t get any of that assistance.

Add this all up, and you get a little over $105 million worth of payroll that won’t be going to keeping the opponents from scoring runs for the rest of year.

And, if we want to fully flesh out how poorly constructed this roster is along with the lousy accounting they’re doing at Fenway and the cheap ownership, we can dig even deeper. The Red Sox payroll in real dollars is somewhere around $179 million. Some sites have it a touch higher, others have it tad lower, but $179 million gets you within a couple million dollars of what most books say they’re spending in real money and is what I have calculated.

This, as many fans will quickly note, is woefully short of the luxury tax payroll threshold of $237 million (let alone the $270 threshold, where more meaningful penalties kick in). A large reason and a public excuse they would probably give for being so far below this number in 2024 is because the luxury tax number is counted differently than the real dollar figure, and instead relates to the average annual value of contracts on the books. So without going into too much detail here, several shortsighted deals over the years left the Red Sox in a position where the luxury tax hit number is actually up at $218 million. They are getting significantly less bang for their buck until a couple of contracts bleed out. And while this still should have left just shy of $20 million to go out and improve the team further, ownership decided to use it as an opportunity to pocket the money and direct the funds to other projects.

This means that, of the $237 million payroll teams are allotted up to the luxury tax threshold — a number the Red Sox should never be more than a few percentage points below even in years they’re trying to get under it — this group is underspending it by approximately $58 million in real money through a combination of average annual value snafus and ownership cheaping out on the baseball side of the empire.

When you mix in the $58 million they could not and would not spend up to the luxury tax with the five highest payroll commits discussed above, you get upwards of $163 million that will be doing NOTHING to prevent opponents from scoring runs for the rest of this year! Again, these are the Boston Red Sox, and they should never be appreciatively below the luxury tax threshold set by MLB. And yet somehow this year, only $74 million was left (just 31 percent of the tax threshold given by MLB) to build an entire roster worth of run prevention guys. (In case you were wondering, only the Oakland A’s have a payroll lower than that $74 million figure.)

Why does it feel like the Red Sox are trying to prevent runs like a small market operation? Because from a payroll perspective, that’s pretty much exactly what they’ve ended up doing.

It’s all so infuriating! The pitching really deserves so much better with they way they’ve improved and battled, but they’ve been sent on a suicide mission. The calvary is not coming to save them. They’re not getting run preventers like Giolito and Story back this year to help out. Ownership has already proven they will not invest in this year’s squad, and any help in the minors is still too far away. The arms are alone on an island being asked to shoulder it all, and while they’ve shown enough moxie to be able to hold out for a while, the baseball season is unrelenting, and the mileage will add up. Combine all this with the staff being forced to get about 29 outs a night, and it’s only a matter of time before this entire apparatus collapses in spectacular fashion.