*NEWS* Red Sox Leaning Towards HUGE DECISION With Top Prospects!!

0:00This is where the Red Sox head is at right now, and I gotta tell you, I'm not sure I love it. What is going on, everybody? Welcome back to Red Sea Radio. My name is Corbin, and thank you very much for clicking on this video. So far this off season, we have spent a ton of time talking about the Red Sox rotation battle, right? I mean, just yesterday we talked about how the WBC could end up highlighting said battle, and could end up really kind of changing the landscape of said battle, right? Again, a ton of time on this kind of stuff, but what if I told you it may not really be a true open competition after all? What if I told you there were some caveats to some of the people that are fighting for this role, and specifically some things that the Red Sox are planning on doing that may even end up being just simply the way they go despite how different guys do this spring training, and that's exactly what may end up be happening here with the boss and Red Sox. So I'm gonna be

1:02breaking down what the latest news is on said competition, specifically with their top prospects, and why the Red Sox may end up having a set plan. Put forward for them already, despite having this open competition. This is all kind of according to an article or report by Chris Catilla. I'll put that in the description of this video, but that's what we're gonna be referring to a lot in this video. The conversation we're having today is the idea of barring any sort of shocking either setbacks from other guys or really big improvements from some of these two people. It appears to so the Red Sox are a little bit hell-bent on starting both of their top prospects in Tripoli. I'm talking about Conley Early and Peyton Toley. Now in this article by Chris Catilla, the big thing that we're focusing on this video is this quote right here. The organization feels that both, despite flashes of brilliance in the big leagues down the stretch, could use more minor league seasoning too. Toley has one professional season under his belt. While early, despite having been drafted a year earlier, Pitch just 28 and 2-3 innings for Worcester before being called up. Honestly, to some degree that this kind of statement makes a little bit of sense.

2:05I think especially when you're talking about Peyton Toley. I mean, the dude pitched a total of 91 innings in minor league baseball period before coming up towards the end of the season. There were clear things last year at the big league level that really kind of stood out at things as things he needed to work on to cement his place, really retuning his off-speed approach, getting more balls in the zone, both of which would allow his fastball, maybe the best individual pitching weapon the Red Sox prospect has had in a very long time to play as intended. Overall, I mean, you take a look at it and despite the potential that Peyton Toley has, despite the personality that I love and I think everyone loves it. Yeah, it didn't go incredibly smoothly for Peyton Toley the major leagues last year, right? It was a 6.06 ERA. It was a 1.5892 whip, and it was a 6.265, right? He just simply wasn't getting effective outs when it mattered in the big leagues last season. Yes, it was only 16 and 1.3 innings, so it's a small sample size here, so I'm not going to make any grand declarations that Peyton Toley's never going to be a good major league pitcher because of his first season at the big league level, but there were clear and

3:09obvious things that he needs to work on, and despite the fact that the Red Sox understood that, and despite the fact that they communicated that with Toley, and despite the fact that Toley has made legitimate strides in trying to make those adjustments necessary to be effective at the major league level, there's only so much you can do in one off season, right? It's really difficult to kind of retune how you approach pitchers using your off-speed stuff over the course of winter months here. You really need to start getting into in-game experience, you really need to start tuning game to game to really make those adjustments, so from Peyton Toley's perspective, yeah, this kind of does make sense, but I don't think this is really a surprise to anybody that they're sitting there saying he might need just a little bit more seasoning in Miner League Baseball for he's ready to go. In my opinion, Conley Early, though, is a little bit of a different story, and there are a couple of reasons why Conley Early is a little bit different when we're talking about this kind of comment from the boss and Red Sox. For starters, he has much more experience in Miner League Baseball. He was drafted a year earlier than Peyton Toley was and has over 200 innings in Miner League Baseball. Not to mention what we saw throughout his Miner League career are

4:14him legitimately making actual improvement from a game-to-game basis, right? His first season, he went from almost a 4-ER to this last year having a 260-ER throughout a couple of different levels in Miner League Baseball. Like Toley, he also had a fairly small sample size in the big leagues with just four starts, but I think in everyone's opinion here, the difference between the two is that Early looked a lot more polished. He looked closer to that sort of everyday major league starter that we're expecting both of these guys to be. It was at 2.33 ERA in 19 and a third innings with just a 0.915. His whip was down near 1.086. I mean, to be honest with you, he was a demon. Honestly, he even looked pretty good in the postseason despite the loss. It was mostly his defense that kind of fell apart with him. If he had better defense behind him, I think he ends up putting together a little bit better start against the New York Yankees. Unlike Toley, the Red Sucks didn't really task calmly early with retuning his arsenal or differentiating the way he approached batters down a game-to-game level here. I'm sure they're making tweaks, right, as

5:15everyone can always kind of make tweaks, especially in your first year of Miner League Baseball, but his big kind of thing was, hey, we need you to get stronger and we need you to add more velocity. What this allows him to do is simply go deeper into games and keep that Velo up, which was his biggest problem in both Miner League Baseball and Major League Baseball last year. Well, coming into spring training, he's visibly made those improvements. He looks stronger, and if you take a look at his first couple of starts in spring training, it's clear that his velocity has taken some sort of jump. In his first appearance, he was almost about a mile an hour faster on his fastball, it was 0.8 miles an hour, and in his second appearance out of the bullpen, it was legitimately faster. It was 1.5 miles an hour up on average to what he was doing last year. Now, I get it. It's extremely small sample size, and maybe it's the fact that he came out of the bullpen. Maybe it's just spring training, so he's a little bit better at airing it out than he would be during a regular season, but that's the kind of step forward you were looking for with calmly early. You were asking him to do this. He did it, and now while the sudden you're sitting there saying, well, it's not really a

6:17true competition anymore, despite the fact that you've made these adjustments, despite the fact that you've shown us in professional major league baseball here, that you can be an affected pitcher in big moments as well. We're going to start you in AAA because we think you need a little bit more season. So you may be sitting there to yourself saying, why? I understand, Peyton Tully, but why calmly early? What does this mean for the Red Sox and why would they prefer that despite these changes and despite the fact that he's been successful at the Major League level, are they hellbent on starting him in AAA? Well, that's where the whole service level thing comes into effect. I'm going to put this out here right now. I am a little bit biased when it comes to service time. I'm one of those people who doesn't really like this idea. At the end of the day, I'm a fan first, right? That's why I made this channel. And at the end of the day, being a fan, you want the best players on your team at all times. And so manipulating your best players here in order to get more service time out of them always to kind of rub me the wrong way. But, again, we go back to this article from Chris Cattillo in order for a player to accumulate one year of service time and kind of start their arbitration clock here. They need to get 172 total

7:21days on the roster specifically of the 187 total days in a baseball season. This is pertinent because if the Red Sox are able to hold or stash or whatever you want to call it, calmly early and triple A for just 35 days to begin the year, he won't be a free agent in 2031. He'll be a free agent in 2032. So instead of starting him on the roster, they kind of delay him a month. They get an entire year's worth of service time out of them on the back end of his service time contract. I don't know what you really want to call that here. His arbitration before he hits free agency. We could say the exact same thing about Peyton Toley. If you're able to hold him down here for 46 total days here before you bring him up, he will also be in free agent in 2032 instead of 2031, mostly because he spent what about an extra week we can have with the Red Sox before calmly early made his way up. This may not actually end up having anything to do with the idea of the Red Sox, you know, believing that they need more seasoning. I'm sure that there is some part of them that both these guys need more seasoning. Again, especially with Peyton Toley, which we just broke down,

8:24but ultimately this may end up coming down to the idea that the Red Sox is sitting there saying, hey man, if we just start off the 2026 season, we both these guys in triple A and let him pitch for about a month here. Maybe we do work on some specific things with both of these guys. Again, especially when it comes to Peyton Toley, all of a sudden we get two of these top 100 prospects and one of these prospects, who's one of the top prospects in baseball when it comes to pitching for another entire year. So from their perspective, it makes a lot of sense to, you know, hey guys, you got something to work on in triple A, why don't we put you down there a little bit? And, you know, yeah, it's understandable. It does make some sense from at least my point of view to some degree here, right? You sit there and it's like, okay, you built up a lot of this depth this off season. You've brought in Oviedo, you brought in Sunny Gray, you got in Ranger Suarez, Patrick Sandiball, kind of Crawford. Those are two guys who are going to be healthy this season that weren't last season. This is where you are affording yourself the ability to do this, right? You're not forcing yourself to have to make a major decision about a player's playing time and arbitration and service time manipulation stuff. You can kind of easily make this decision because

9:28it won't affect your team all that much. You still have that depth in order to fill those roster spots. Again, though, you know, part of me is a little bit frustrated as a fan when you hear this kind of manipulation stuff. As a fan, you watch this team, you live and die by the wins and losses, and to be honest with you, I don't care about service time manipulation over players, right? Again, I go back to the idea of just simply wanting the best players on your team at all times. Now, if Oviedo is that best player and the Red Sox want to at least at the bare minimum, give him a shot to prove that he's that best player and don't really want to waste, you know, a couple of days on early or totally because of that, then okay, I can understand that. But if it's just strictly based on service time manipulation, yeah, it frustrates me a little bit. It means that ultimately this whole big battle for what the Red Sox rotation is going to look like really isn't all that much of a battle at all. At least when it comes to these top prospects, right? No matter how they do, there's a really big likelihood that despite, you know, making the adjustments of the Red Sox wanted them to make or, you know, proving that they can do that

10:28at a major league level, they're still gonna end up in AAA. And while there's still a bit of a competition, it's between Oviedo, Sandeval and Cutter, it feels like at this point, if Cutter can make some really big strides that, you know, that maybe aren't expected out of him before opening day, it just, I don't know, it just feels like a little bit of a disservice to the team and to us as fans. And again, I don't want this to feel like I'm just sitting here and use this as an excuse to crap all over ownership and make a big mountain out of a mole hill. It's ultimately what it is, is it's a system that was set up essentially by the owners of this league to be taken advantage of by these teams, right? And the Red Sox aren't doing anything wrong, they're just simply using the system that's forced into their advantage for their advantage. And again, you've got the depth in order to do this. So it's not like it's a major issue or anything like that. It's just one of those things that drives me absolutely crazy. The Red Sox over the last couple of years here have become really, really great at being able to lock up young, inexpensive town. I mean, it started with Beyo, say Don, you moved into Christian Campbell

11:33and then Roman Anthony, you got Whitlock in there at some point, right? You've been able to do this over the last couple of years. So, shying away from that and saying, hey man, we're actually going to start your clock early in order to get some extra service time. If you believe that this guy is, you know, a different maker on your team, whether it's early in my opinion, more likely early or whether that's totally, you have the ability to kind of let them lose and then work on locking them up later, either down the road this season or maybe over the next couple of season. We've seen it in different phases of this arbitration process for the Red Sox. So that's kind of what drives me a little bit crazy about this too. The other thing that kind of frustrates me about this is the idea that over last season, I think specifically what we saw as the Red Sox take a little bit to take off, right? They were kind of this middleing team for a first few months of the season and then by June or July, I think it was June. They really kind of put themselves together. Big part of putting themselves together was of course the promotion of Roman Anthony to a smaller degree, the promotions of early and totally and to another small degree, the promotion of Marcel Amaya, right? The additions you made via your My League system were big reason why you were in

12:37the postseason to begin with and the difference between having called them up a little bit later could have potentially been the difference of you playing your games at home at Fenway in a wildcard situation. And if you had done that, maybe the situation ends up a little bit differently, right? So I don't know, I sit here with all this and it just drives me a little bit crazy. Again, I'm not going to sit here and kind of blow the roof off of the Red Sox for, you know, manipulating service time in order to get these guys for another year because again, I do think that there is a legitimate case to be made for Peyton Toley and the conversation surrounding him and not being ready for majorly baseball. And I think you can kind of have a similar conversation commonly early, although that one feels a bit more like blatant service time manipulation in my opinion. But again, this is a system set up by the owners to favor the teams and the Red Sox has simply taken advantage of that. But that's just my opinion. So let me know in the comment section down below. What do you guys think? What do you think about this kind of major update when it comes to the Red Sox rotation? Do you like it? Do not like it? And ultimately, do you think that the Red Sox are using this as service time manipulation in order to get an extra year of control over these

13:41guys? Let me know all your thoughts in the comments as always. If you made it to the end of this video, do me a favor. Make sure you guys have hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. If you're new here, we talk Red Sox content almost every single day. Also, make sure you guys hit the like button on this video as well. Just simply upset at ton and it's the best way to let me know you aren't enjoying the content. Thank you all very much. You're clicking on this one and I will see you in the Red Seats.