The Red Sox have a real problem: they can barely score. Boston's offense has been sitting near the bottom of MLB in runs all season, a stunning gap for a team whose pitching staff carried it through a 15-game winning streak earlier this month. So on Saturday, front office brass decided the fix was worth giving up a controllable young arm. Boston sent left-hander Connelly Early to the Washington Nationals in exchange for infielder Curtis Mead, a swap that instantly became the first domino of deadline season.
Barstool Baseball's first read on the deal framed it as Boston trying to patch a power outage with an unfamiliar name.
Early is only 24, and through his first 21 big league starts he'd shown a five-pitch mix that made scouts believe he'd stick in a rotation for years. He's currently on the injured list with an elbow issue, though doctors reportedly don't believe there's structural damage, and he's already progressed to throwing off a mound again. Still, dealing a young starter with that kind of ceiling — hurt or not — is the type of move that splits a fan base right down the middle.
Eric Hubbs, for one, wasn't sorry to see him go. Early had looked like exactly the kind of pitcher who'd frustrate the Sox for the next half-decade, and getting him off Boston's schedule felt like a personal win.
Eric Hubbs admitted he's thrilled to never have to face Early as a Red Sox killer again.
Connelly Early felt destined to be a solid thorn in my side as a Sox starter for the foreseeable future. Glad to have that out of the picture.
What Boston gets back is a 25-year-old who's quietly having a breakout year. Mead, who bounced from Tampa Bay to a White Sox DFA before landing in Washington, has hit.254/.352/.500 with 17 home runs across 87 games while holding down the Nationals' everyday third-base job. The appeal for Boston reportedly goes beyond raw numbers — his pull-heavy swing profiles as a good fit for the Green Monster, exactly the kind of ballpark-specific upside a stat-starved lineup needs.
None of that stopped the second-guessing from starting almost immediately. Giving up a 24-year-old starter for a role player at another organization's infield is the kind of trade that reads fine on paper and terrible if Mead doesn't hit enough to justify it — which is exactly the bet Barstool's baseball crew is needling him to prove wrong.
The baseball account put Mead on notice, betting he'll have to back up the hype that came with the trade.
The real verdict won't be clear for months. If Mead's bat plays at Fenway the way it did in Washington, this is a shrewd, buy-low pickup at the exact spot Boston was hurting. If Early comes back healthy and turns into the front-line starter his first 21 outings hinted at, this trade gets rewritten as a panic move by a team that flinched at its own power outage. Either way, both teams just made the loudest bet of deadline week.