Adam Duvall injury highlights a massive failure of Red Sox roster construction
Tomase: Duvall injury puts Red Sox' poor team-building in spotlight originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston
For a team so obsessed with stockpiling depth, it's amazing that the Red Sox really don't have any.
The tenuousness of Boston's situation was made clear on Sunday afternoon in Detroit, when scorching-hot center fielder Adam Duvall cast a pall over the 4-1 victory by injuring his surgically repaired left wrist while diving for a fly ball in the ninth.
Before Monday's series opener vs. the Tampa Bay Rays, Alex Cora revealed Duvall sustained a distal radius fracture in his wrist. There is no timetable for his return as the club weighs whether he should undergo surgery.
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A club with depth would've recalled an outfielder to replace Duvall, or perhaps a shortstop to allow Kiké Hernández to slide back to his best defensive position, especially after he made yet another throwing error on Sunday.
But where did the Red Sox turn? Per MassLive and The Boston Globe, the call went out to ... Bobby Dalbec.
The slugger has had his moments in a Red Sox uniform, but they're neither plentiful nor recent. A corner infielder by trade, Dalbec recently added shortstop to his resume, but that's really just an in-case-of-emergency-break-glass situation. The dude is a solid 6-foot-4 and 230 pounds. He's no shortstop.
But because the Red Sox are already too left-handed in the outfield between Masataka Yoshida, Alex Verdugo, and Raimel Tapia, they couldn't call up center fielder Jarren Duran. And because they possess zero middle infield depth, at least until the rehabbing Adalberto Mondesi exits the 60-day disabled list no sooner than late May, they actually had few places to turn.
So Dalbec, but virtue of his right-handed bat and kinda, sorta ability to play in the middle infield, is the pick.
It's an indictment of the roster construction that the Red Sox lack capable alternatives at second, short, and center after placing such a priority on versatility and depth practically since the first day of Chaim Bloom's stewardship.
It's not like we didn't see this coming. Duvall is a big man being asked to play a demanding position just nine months after undergoing season-ending wrist surgery, Hernández and second baseman Christian Arroyo are notoriously brittle, and DH/backup corner infielder Justin Turner is 38.
In other words, durability was never going to be this roster's strength, and that's before we even mention superstar third baseman Rafael Devers, who took a pitch off the wrist in the ninth on Sunday before shooing the trainers and staying in the game. The involuntary gasp we all expelled at that moment reflects the razor-thin margin for error confronting this roster. If Devers goes down, the season is over.
Contrast that with this week's opponent, the undefeated Rays. Tampa has rampaged through its first nine games with a record plus-57 run differential behind superstar Wander Franco, former ALCS MVP Randy Arozarena, and a mostly anonymous pitching staff fronted by Red Sox castoff Jeffrey Springs, who hasn't allowed a run in 13 innings.
The Rays annually churn their roster like the world's most aggressive butter, and they always compete. Last year, they lost Franco for half the season and ace Tyler Glasnow for virtually all of it, and they reached the playoffs anyway. It's what they do.
With their consistent bleeding of top-end talent, most recently All-Star shortstop Xander Bogaerts, the Red Sox at least were supposed to be reinforced at key positions, but instead their depth is distressingly thin. That's no recipe for succeeding in the American League East, and it certainly shouldn't leave them facing a crisis because a free agent they signed to a one-year deal in late January goes down after a week.
Nothing against Dalbec, but his arrival spotlights a failure of roster construction. You'd like a better answer to the first question they face.
