In some ways, it feels like the Boston Red Sox have been trapped in a vicious cycle since the end of 2019.

Largely of their own making.

Step 1: Push a proven star out the door, struggle to fill the subsequent void.

Step 2: Enter the offseason with clear needs, have team brass make and reiterate a pie-crust promise. (Easily made, easily broken, as Mary Poppins said.)

Step 3: Don’t follow through on said promise, infuriate and alienate fans.

From “Win, Dance, Repeat” to lather, rinse, repeat.

The Red Sox enter the 2026 season after a calendar year that included Alex Bregman taking the position Rafael Devers thought was his, the subsequent midseason trade of Devers to the San Francisco Giants, and after months of purportedly making Bregman their top offseason priority, his signing with the Chicago Cubs.

Devers, Xander Bogaerts and Mookie Betts are playing against each other in the National League West for the better part of the next decade. Quite a Red Sox three-peat.

According to precedent, the Red Sox should currently be in the stretch between completing Step 3 and looping back around to Step 1.

Only, there are no 2018 World Series champions left to jettison. Like it or not, the Red Sox have officially cleaned house, so there’s nowhere to go but forward. Maybe last year’s Bregman/Devers saga was the finale of the post-2019 rebuild. Perhaps the cycle is broken and the Red Sox can truly, as manager Alex Cora has said so many times, turn the page.

Heck, start a whole new chapter. This team could merit one, with a roster unlike any other Red Sox squad of the last two decades at least, in a mix of better, questionable and intriguing ways.

On paper, the pitching talent and depth are stronger than ever. Long known to struggle with pitching development and maintenance, the Red Sox have transformed into an armada, pun intended, under chief baseball officer Craig Breslow. The major league marquee boasts 2025 AL Cy Young runner-up and MLB strikeouts leader Garrett Crochet, and free-agent addition Ranger Suárez, who owns the fifth-best ERA in postseason history (minimum 40 innings), and the 40-man roster has enough starters to construct two MLB-caliber rotations and still have leftovers.

“The identity of our team, the strength of our team, is going to be our pitching,” Breslow said at Suárez’s introductory press conference in January.

So much so that it may be an overcorrection. FanGraphs’ ZiPS and Steamer models both project the club’s least-powerful offense in over half a century, that they’ll be the only team this season, and the first Red Sox squad since 1974 without a player who reaches 20 home runs.

It’s a bleak projection, to say the least. Fenway Park turns plenty of home runs into doubles each year, but it rarely stops its team from going yard; the Red Sox had at least one 20-homer hitter in 82 of the last 90 seasons. Since 2000, five teams have finished with a winning percentage under .300: the 2003 Detroit Tigers (43-119), 2018 Baltimore Orioles (47-115), 2019 Detroit Tigers (47-114), 2024 Chicago White Sox (41-121) and 2025 Colorado Rockies (43-119). Each of them had at least one 20-homer hitter.

Breslow pinpointed power as a top priority at the team’s end-of-year press conference last October, and reiterated as much as he filled the transactions log with pitching trades while top free-agent bats came off the market throughout the winter. The pivot from adding run creation to run prevention via pitching and defense was solidified when, after failed bids for Bregman and Pete Alonso, the Red Sox signed Suárez and acquired Caleb Durbin from the Milwaukee Brewers.

“We pursued opportunities to bring in slug and when those didn’t play out we looked at other opportunities to improve the team,” Breslow said early in spring training.

‘A team can never have too much starting pitching’ is one of Breslow’s and team president Sam Kennedy’s oft-repeated mantras, and most executives around the league would agree. The same goes for productive hitters, though. As Pedro Martinez famously said after Game 2 of the 2004 ALCS, “I can’t do anything if we don’t score runs. I can only pitch, do whatever possible to keep my team in the game. From there on, it’s up to them.”

The 2026 Red Sox will almost certainly pitch enough to keep the team in the game. It’s unclear if they can hit enough to win; they played 50 one-run games last year and were 23-27 in them. The pressure is on young sluggers like Wilyer Abreu and Roman Anthony to tap into their power potential.

And if the Red Sox make it past the first round of the postseason, they’ll be in uncharted territory.

This will be the club’s first Opening Day roster without a single Red Sox World Series champion since 2004. In the past, Martinez and David Ortiz were among Red Sox champions who were vocal about how much incoming players benefitted from having World Series winners in the clubhouse year after year; a player who’d climbed the mountain before knew how to guide – or pull – first-timers up the peak. These players will need to figure out how to get to, and through October together.

So yes, the Red Sox are different this year. Stronger arms, weaker bats. Or maybe not.

But because baseball is about impossibility and inevitability, the Red Sox are also just like every other team. They’re unproven on Opening Day, because nothing from last year counts. They’re unknown, because we can guess and project all we want, but we can’t tell the future.

A lot of what goes right, or wrong, is at least partially beyond a team’s control. The Red Sox will sustain injuries and recover from them. Some players will underperform, others will outperform expectations (ideally, the ‘no 20-homer hitter’ one). They’ll slump at times, just as surely as they will soar at others. They’ll suffer bitterly disappointing losses and celebrate thrilling victories. They will be overcome, and they will overcome.

Such things are, to borrow from “Beauty and the Beast,” certain as the sun rising in the (AL) East.

This talented, but somewhat unbalanced Red Sox roster will be whatever they’re going to be. The only guarantee is that at some point we’ll end up being surprised by them. Hopefully in a good way.

But if not this year, there’s always next year.

Then again, with the collective bargaining agreement set to expire on Dec. 1 and the presumptive lockout expected to be even worse than the previous one, which lasted 99 days and almost delayed the 2022 season, perhaps winning it all this year wouldn’t be such a bad thing.