Red Sox Trade Deadline: Nine targets you might hear in rumors

The 2018 MLB trade deadline isn’t far off. With questions in the pen and at second, what will the Boston Red Sox do to plug the holes in their roster?

With the trade deadline a little more than a month away and warts starting to show for the Boston Red Sox, it’s time to start speculating. We’ve already touched on one of the obvious ones in Brad Hand. So we will skip him below, but there are plenty of other possibilities. The team has had disappointing production out of the bullpen, second base and third. Mitch Moreland has cooled at first. Even the rotation has some questions. Despite that, the team has third best record in baseball and may decide this is a GFIN year.

The mitigating factors that might convince Dave Dombrowski to stand pat mostly revolve around the latest CBA and its competitive balance measures. Namely, the luxury tax threshold. The team is well past the $197M soft cap. At $40M over that, or $237M, they see their tax go up to 42.5% and their top draft pick next year drop 10 slots. That’s a very harsh penalty. But given the window in front of them, it might be one worth paying.

Currently, Cot’s Baseball Contracts has the Red Sox at $235,325,600.00 for the year. That means they can add up to just under $1.75M more in salary before triggering the harshest tier of penalties.