Despite poor start, the Red Sox are still going to make the playoffs

Here’s a pair of conflicting thoughts I believe to my core:

As a baseball fan, I don’t know how to feel about this. Baseball’s a sport that’s supposed to be about measuring greatness over 162 games, and it’s becoming less and less about that with each passing year. Personally, I find the addition of the third wild spot to be an abomination, and scenarios like this are exactly why.

I shouldn’t feel this confident a team that’s looked as underwhelming as the 2026 Red Sox over the first third of the season is going to October, and yet, with each passing day, I find it harder and harder to see how they miss the target. With that, let’s dive into the four main reasons I think this group is still going to punch their ticket to the dance:

1) The American League absolutely STINKS!!!

I’ve never seen an American League this wretched in my lifetime. It’s a joke! As of Wednesday night, Fangraphs projects both the winner of the AL Central (Cleveland) and the NL West (Seattle) to get there with 83 wins. No other team in those divisions is modeled to finish over .500 with Texas coming the closest at 81-81.

This means that if those projections are correct, all the Red Sox need to do to make the playoffs is beat the Orioles and finish above .500. Could you possibly set the bar any lower? (Actually, don’t answer that. We might give these greedy owners more ideas.)

Here’s another insane, way too early thought while we’re down this rabbit hole: The team that finishes in fourth place in the AL East might actually end up with the easiest road in October. If this scenario plays out where the Rays, Yankees, Blue Jays and Red Sox all make it, the fourth place AL East team would be the No. 6 seed and play the No. 3 seed in the Wild Card round, which has to be a division winner from the AL West or the AL Central. The winner of that series would then be guaranteed to play the No. 2 seed, which if things keep going the way they are would be the other AL West or AL Central team.

Meanwhile, the second and third place finishers in the AL East would face each other as the No. 4 and No. 5 seeds in the Wild Card round, and then they would have to play the No. 1 seed. In other words, we could be headed for a fall where the fourth place finisher in the AL East gets an October path through the AL West and AL Central while the top three teams in the AL East all have to go through each other.

Do you see what’s happening here?

2) The upside of the rotation.

The continued emergence of Payton Tolle and Connelly Early has been one of the biggest positives on the 2026 Red Sox season, and that’s important to note because not only have they helped make the starting rotation the strongest aspect of this team, but they’ve also done it while Garrett Crochet, Ranger Suarez, and Sonny Gray have been unable to fire on all cylinders at the same time — and that’s probably going to change soon.

Sonny Gray, who usually posts, missed a couple of weeks with a hamstring injury. Ranger Suarez got off to a slow start and then missed an outing with a hamstring tweak of his own earlier this month. And Garrett Crochet has already been out for four weeks and counting.

And while we’re on Crochet, I can’t underscore enough how little the Red Sox have gotten from him so far. They’re 3-3 in his six games, in which he’s ranged from looking like vintage Crochet to the guy who gave up ten earned runs in Minnesota. Last year, the Red Sox were 14 games over .500 (23-9) in his starts. In other words, the 2025 Red Sox were a .500 team when you throw out the Crochet starts – and in fact, they were exactly a .500 team without him if you include playoff games.

Since Chad Tracy took over, the Red Sox are 12-10 and Garrett Crochet hasn’t started a single game. So while it’s far too late in the season to expect anything like the 14 games over .500 they got from Crochet last year, he’s still likely to elevate this rotation in a significant way when he comes back this summer. And it could be really significant if the other four guys stay healthy and the guy getting displaced is Brayan Bello.

3) Their defense is excellent

We dove into this two weeks ago her at Over The Monster, but the Red Sox are getting above average defense at just about every position, and the numbers under the hood suggest that’s going to continue.

Here’s a Defensive Runs Saved update from Thomas Nestico of TJ stats:

And a Fielding Run Value leaderboard:

There’s no reason to expect the Red Sox to fall very far from these numbers going forward. In fact, one of their weaker defenders all year has been Trevor Story, and if he does end up getting surgery and is out for a while, Marcelo Mayer might take over shortstop, which could further lift the team’s defensive ceiling.

The bottom line is this: The Red Sox can pitch and play defense, and in all my years of watching baseball, teams that do that pretty much never end up sucking over 162 games. They might suck for part of the season and miss the playoffs with a mediocre record, but eventually there’s a stretch where they rip off a pretty solid record because there are just too many games in the summer months where they have the pitching advantage.

Combine this with the historically weak American League and MLB’s new bloated playoff format, and it’s hard to see how this doesn’t pay dividends for Boston.

4) It will be almost impossible for the Red Sox offense to stay this unproductive.

The Red Sox currently rank last in the American League in home runs, runs scored, RBI, and wRC+ (and I feel the need to emphasize we’re talking about THIS American League). They’ve scored just 3.69 runs per game, which is not only last in the American League, but is also the lowest number they’ve posted as a team since 1943, when Ted Williams stepped away from the lineup to fight in World War II.

So yes, they stink, but they really can’t get any worse, and that’s a really important detail the more you unpack it. Their current offensive output to date hand landed them just two games out of a Wild Card spot thanks to their pitching and defense, and perhaps even more importantly, they’ve been ridiculously bad in situational spots until the last couple of games. Consider that, according to baseball refence, the Red Sox have:

In other words, all of the Red Sox suckage at the plate, which again lands them last in the AL and as bad as the franchise has seen in 83 years, has been packed specifically into their high leverage plate appearances. They’re basically right at league average in medium and low leverage spots, and then a whopping 143 points off the pace when it matters most.

Now, you might look at this and say this makes them losers who don’t know how to handle situational at bats, and you’re probably right. But then again, even if that’s true, they can’t possibly keep sequencing THIS poorly. The law of averages can only help them from this position.

Tie it all together and even a modest boost in offensive production coupled with this rotation, and this defense, in this American League, and the Red Sox will have to really, really screw things up not to make it to October. I have faith in them! (Take that last sentence however you want.)