Triston Casas fractures a rib with no timetable to return.
The bad news was coming eventually. At no point since Triston Casas abruptly left Saturday’s game against the Pirates had we heard anything remotely hopeful. There was no mention of precautionary measures, no “we’ll give him a few days to see how he feels,” no wishful talk of him grinding it out if it were the postseason. This was a bad one.
Yesterday we were put out of our misery: an MRI revealed that Triston Casas fractured a rib while taking a swing during his first at-bat in Pittsburgh. There is no timetable for his return, and anyone who has ever had a rib injury knows how annoyingly painful they can be and how long they can linger. There is no resting your rib cage, and even the tiniest movements can hurt— god help him if he suffers from spring allergies.
On an analytical level, this is a major blow to an already underperforming aspect of the team. Despite hitting plenty of homers, the Red Sox offense has not performed well thus far, as the team is just 20th in OPS+, 20th in OBP, 23rd in offensive bWAR, and has recorded the second-most strikeouts of any team in baseball, trailing only the failed state that is the Oakland A’s. Moreover, the offense is stuck in a disturbing boom or bust cycle, having scored just two or fewer runs in one-third of the team’s total games. Losing Casas who, at 24-years-old, was transforming into one of the league’s best hitters right in front of our eyes, will only exacerbate the offensive issues. Casas was instrumental in the few areas where the Sox lineup was excelling, mainly homers and walks (where the team sits second and 11th respectively) with Casas leading the team in walks and trailing only Tyler O’Neill in home runs.
Someone, hopefully, will be coming in from outside the organization to assume Casas’s position and nail polish — and to spare us all from the indignity of Bobby Dalbec’s nightly dance around the golden sombrero. Garrett Cooper could do a decent job of it against lefties, at least, while Brandon Belt is coming off a 136 OPS+ season for last year’s Blue Jays (the fact that he doesn’t have a team already is proof enough that MLB owners have decided that winning baseball games just isn’t as important as it used to be). But neither of them is a budding young star with the potential to garner down-ballot MVP votes.
To state the obvious: it is now much harder for the Boston Red Sox to win baseball games.
But the Triston Casas injury hits particularly hard, far beyond its impact on the Red Sox won-loss record. As I’ve grown older, it’s become increasingly obvious to me that winning and losing is not actually what being a sports fan is about. If people became sports fans merely because they liked winning, then the Red Sox would have abandoned a perpetually empty Fenway Park for Nashville long before 2004. Winning, rather, serves the same purpose as plot in a book or a movie: we need it to move us along, but it’s not ultimately what makes us fall in love with either a piece of art or a team.
What does make us fall in love with a sport and a team are the stories they give us. For six months we spend every day with these men. We see how they react to success or failure, we see them joke around in the dugout, we see them either grow and succeed under the bright lights, or shrink and fall into the shadows.
Triston Casas was not the only story the 2024 Red Sox had to tell, but he was the most compelling one. An eccentric young star only just starting to grow into his potential. How good would he get on the field? How famous would he become off of it? Would he make his first All-Star team? Would he cement his status as Boston’s next beloved star? Even if you came into this season expecting the Sox to finish under .500 and fail to compete (as I did) the story of Triston Casas was reason enough to watch.
There are still plenty of other stories to follow on this team. The incredible performance of the pitching staff means that we can now ask a lot of the above questions about guys like Tanner Houck, Kutter Crawford, and Garrett Whitlock. Wilyer Abreu is growing into a big leaguer. Vaughn Grissom will grace the stage soon enough. And we’ll be searching for an answer to the question of whether Ceddanne Rafaela can control the strike zone and reach his ceiling all season long.
But the guy who was poised to be the main character of the 2024 Red Sox is gone for at least the next few months. The show is not over, but it could start to drag a bit through the second act. Now would be a good time for a plot twist.