The Boston Red Sox pitching staff isn’t where it wants to be yet, but it’s getting closer.
In 2024, the Red Sox came out of the gates shockingly hot on the mound. No one was scoring against the starters, most of whom didn’t have a full season of starting experience under their belts, and the bullpen was holding its own to boot.
As the season wore along, though, it seemed as if some of the magic ran out. The Red Sox bullpen was the worst in baseball in the second half, and though the starters finished the season with the seventh-best ERA among all teams, there were some ugly periods mixed in for them as well.
First-year pitching coach Andrew Bailey got a lot of praise for the improvements of the Red Sox pitchers, and a lot of the credit was due to the pitching philosophy he helped ingrain. Boston eschewed the four-seam fastball for much of the season when it was deemed not to be effective for individual hurlers, finding success in the process.
Though the strategy worked somewhat, Bailey appears ready to take the next step in Boston’s pitching evolution. In an interview with Jen McCaffrey of The Athletic, Bailey discussed what he believes to be the next evolution of the Red Sox’s pitching philosophy in 2025.
“We know that stuff and velocity play, we understand that there’s a mix component, arsenal development to that. I think we’ve set a pretty good foundation here of an ability to be in-zone. I think we were No. 1 in the league in-zone rate. So generating swing and miss in-zone is an area of improvement for us,” Bailey said.
“It’s maintaining higher echelons of velocity, you take our guys and they’ve touched those upper echelons, but how do we maintain that… How do we shave off the lower reps to create a higher average? All of that is going to be really, really key. To be able to sustain that for 162 (games) and build a bigger engine and kind of understand the body a little bit more.”
The overall takeaway here seems to be that the Red Sox will look to use more traditional fastballs in 2025–as long as they feel confident that those pitches won’t get hammered. The team’s off-speed heavy approach helped them through most of the first half of the season, but eventually, opponents caught on.
The Red Sox have also heavily involved Driveline founder Kyle Boddy the last two seasons, making him the interim director of baseball sciences this fall after bringing him on in a special advisor role in January. If anyone knows how to squeeze a little more velocity out of a pitcher through movements and sequencing, it’s Boddy.
Last season was a strong start to the Bailey tenure, but it sounds like bigger things are on the way. With a proper plan, the pitching staff can reach new heights in 2025–and hopefully, there will be some new faces involved in the plan.
