FORT MYERS, Fla. \u2013 The release of veteran outfielder Nick Castellanos by the Philadelphia Phillies Thursday afternoon was both shocking and a long time coming.<\/p>\n
Castellanos, who turns 34 on March 4, is officially on the market. And according to New York Post\u2019s Jon Heyman, \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of interest\u201d in the brand-new free agent.<\/p>\n
Are the Red Sox a fit?<\/p>\n
Mostly no. Almost certainly no.<\/p>\n
Though Castellanos is a righty bat with exactly 250 career home runs and the Red Sox just spent the offseason trying to add a righty bat and home run power to their lineup \u2013 ZiPS projects Boston won\u2019t have a single 20-homer hitter this season \u2013 there\u2019s no room for him anywhere on the depth chart.\u00a0The Red Sox currently have five outfielders, if you include Masataka Yoshida, and several players, again including Yoshida, to rotate through the designated hitter role.<\/p>\n
Castellanos also hit .252 with a .719 OPS and 40 home runs in the last two years (309 games), a significant dip from the .281 average, .806 OPS, and 76 homers he put up over the preceding three seasons (431 games). His isolated power (ISO) fell from .200 in 2021-23 to .164 over the last two seasons.<\/p>\n
It speaks volumes that the Phillies were willing to pay Castellanos the $20 million remaining on his five-year, $100 million contract in order to sever ties season early. The Red Sox famously took the same, but more expensive route in July 2017, when they extricated themselves from the final year and half of Pablo Sandoval\u2019s five-year, $95 million contract by eating the $48.3 million they owed him.<\/p>\n
Above all, the Red Sox are at a crossroads leadership-wise after losing Alex Bregman and Rob Refsnyder in free agency. Castellanos\u2019 behavior, particularly the story that surfaced Thursday, and which he confirmed, about his decision to bring a beer into the dugout during a game last season because he took issue with a late-inning defensive substitution, indicate a personality that would do more harm than good for a young Red Sox team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FORT MYERS, Fla. \u2013 The release of veteran outfielder Nick Castellanos by the Philadelphia Phillies Thursday afternoon was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":569122,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2375],"tags":[5,141,48,2542,4,8639,25,89,2543,151],"class_list":{"0":"post-569121","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boston-red-sox","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-boston","10":"tag-boston-red-sox","11":"tag-bostonredsox","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-nick-castellanos","14":"tag-philadelphia-phillies","15":"tag-red-sox","16":"tag-redsox","17":"tag-spring-training"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116060535616862877","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/569122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}