LEE COUNTY, FLA—The penny may be gone but there is still plenty of change around, especially with the Worcester Red Sox.
These days, the definition of “familiar face” in Triple-A baseball is someone who stays with a team for an entire homestand. That is the main reason WooSox manager Chad Tracy is reluctant to say what his expectations are for his team this season or even exactly who will be on it.
“It’s hard to have expectations,” he said. “You can look at a roster on opening day and think, ‘This is a good ballclub; we should do X,Y and Z’ and by April 15 six guys on that paper are gone and two of them could be very impactful pieces for you.”
The sixth season of Worcester Red Sox baseball is scheduled to open March 27 at Polar Park with a 4:05 p.m. game versus Syracuse. The team will leave here for home Saturday and hold an optional workout on Tuesday.
The WooSox then hold formal workouts both Wednesday and Thursday.
Their roster is shaping up, but is not fully shaped and won’t be until the last minutes, or even seconds, before the first pitch.
“I have a sense of what it will look like,” Tracy said. “There are spots I feel pretty confident of and there are still some battles going on for bullpen spots, for the last couple of spots on the bench, and they can involve two or three guys each.”
Five of the 10 players in last year’s opening day lineup are gone from the organization. That list includes the battery, pitcher Robert Stock and catcher Blake Sabor, as well as Abraham Toro, Vaughn Grissom and Trayce Thompson.
Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer will be in Boston. Nick Sogard, Nathan Hickey and Nate Eaton are still in major league camp. The Red Sox were unusually active in the trade market during the winter and many of those deals involved important players from last year and before.
The Sox dealt Hunter Dobbins, Shane Drohan, Richard Fitts, Vaughn Grissom, David Hamilton, Kyle Harrison, Jordan Hicks, Chris Murphy and David Sandlin among others.
“I think there will be a lot of new faces based on the acquisitions, between the 40-man acquisitions and the trade we made with Milwaukee,” Tracy said, “especially on the position player side. On the pitching side there will be a few more familiar ones but mostly I think it’s gonna be a new group. We made a lot of moves.”
The Worcester Red Sox have posted a winning record in all five of their seasons at Polar Park. They are first Sox’ Triple-A affiliate to do that in the same city. Overall, Boston’s Triple-A teams have only had six straight winning seasons once before and that involved three different cities.
Those years were 1957 through 1962. The cities were San Francisco of the Pacific Coast League in ’57, Minneapolis of the American Assn. from 1958-60, and Seattle of the PCL in 1961 and ’62.
The WooSox have seen a bunch of highly rated prospects come to town through the years starting with the very first player to see game action in a Worcester uniform, Jarren Duran.
Anthony and Mayer are in that category. Kristian Campbell is on that list as are Kyle Teel, Payton Tolle, Connelly Early, Ceddanne Rafaela, Brayan Bello and Jhostynxon Garcia.
Some of them arrived during the season. This year’s WooSox may not have a similar assortment to start the season.
“We don’t have many of those (impact players) believe it or not,” Tracy said. We traded some, like Garcia, that have left the building. Mikey (Romero) is a guy that jumps out. And there’s (outfielder) Allan Castro, but we don’t have a ton of guys like that, 22 years old and in Triple-A.”
One interesting sleeper prospect is pitcher Noah Song, who appeared briefly in Worcester late last season. A graduate of the Naval Academy, he has a great arm but his development has been detoured by military duty and injury.
Tracy thinks this year’s edition of the WooSox will be younger.
“We’ll still have our veterans,” he said, “guys who have played in the big leagues, especially on the position side. Things are contingent on health in the big leagues. I feel like on the position side we’ll have more depth. We’ll be better able to withstand losing a player.”
March weather can be all-or-nothing. This will be the third time the WooSox have opened the season with a March game at Polar Park, and the earliest home opener ever. They are starting the season in a frosty atmosphere, period.
The coldest New England winter in years is winding down. The WooSox’ opponent in the opening series is Syracuse, the snowiest city anywhere without a ski lift, and after the homestand they go to St. Paul where some of the fans will come to the ballpark after a day of ice fishing.
The 2026 team will feature a lot of new faces, and the Sox are hoping they help lead their Triple-A team to a sixth straight season in the black.
Bill Ballou can be reached at vetgoalie@aol.com
