Fansided

3 prospects the Red Sox can afford to trade for Major League talent

By Gabrielle Starr

BOSTON, MA - JULY 03: Chief Baseball Officer for the Boston Red Sox Chaim Bloom talks by the phone during Summer Workouts at Fenway Park on July 3, 2020 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Adam Glanzman/Getty Images)
BOSTON, MA - JULY 03: Chief Baseball Officer for the Boston Red Sox Chaim Bloom talks by the phone during Summer Workouts at Fenway Park on July 3, 2020 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Adam Glanzman/Getty Images) /
facebooktwitterreddit
Prev
1 of 4
Next

Which prospects can the Boston Red Sox trade to upgrade their major-league roster?

The Boston Red Sox are coming off a stunning and very unexpected 2021 season, which included 92 regular-season wins, a Wild Card berth, and a postseason run that went all the way to Game 6 of the ALCS.

Pretty impressive for a team the experts projected to win 79 games last year.

The success of last season has seriously accelerated the mini rebuild the Sox have been undergoing over the last couple of seasons, and with the state of the rest of the American League East, they should be in win-now mode going into 2022. The Sox easily dispatched the New York Yankees – who were projected to be a pennant team – in the Wild Card, and the Tampa Bay Rays in the ALDS, and even gave the Houston Astros a hard time in the ALCS.

Just imagine what they can do if the front office really tries to build a postseason team.

The current active payroll heading into 2022 is pretty low, by Sox standards: $164.6M, including the $16M retained salary they owe David Price. However, the total amount allocated towards the luxury tax is $203.7M, which only gives them $6.275M under the luxury tax threshold. That’s not a lot of wiggle room to make the upgrades they need.

The solution to this problem is to make trades, rather than purchases. So, here are three prospects the Sox can trade to acquire big-league talent now…