Remember when Garrett Crochet stewarded the Boston Red Sox to an Opening Day shutout of the Cincinnati Reds? Doesn't that feel like it happened last season?
To say it's been a brutal week for the Red Sox would be putting it mildly. Carlos Narváez was held out of the team's fifth straight loss in the series finale against the Houston Astros, the entire rotation besides Crochet and Connelly Early looks lost, and Johan Oviedo's velocity is trending downward.
Oh, and Trevor Story looks absolutely toast at the plate, calling into question the repeatability of his 2025 comeback. Just in case you thought a veteran leader would be immune from the team-wide struggles.
In the grand scheme of things, a five-game losing streak on the road against two respectable teams isn't the end of the world. It might feel that way because the season is barely two weeks old, but there's still six months for the Red Sox to sort themselves out.
At least, that's what we should all be telling ourselves. This team was built with a World Series ceiling in mind, but their floor is starting to look a little cavernous.
Red Sox's early season struggles raise concerns about this roster's ceiling
ESPN put out their annual rankings of the most polarizing teams in MLB shortly after Opening Day, and you shouldn't be surprised to learn the Red Sox were the first team featured. Their high ranking (out of all 30 teams) was third, whereas their lowest ranking came in at thirteenth.
On the whole, that's actually not too bad of a floor, though the scribes over at ESPN may want to revise those rankings if given another chance. What the Red Sox have shown thus far in 2026 is certainly lower-half-of-the-league material.
But perhaps it's better to focus on that perceived ceiling, which Jorge Castillo attributed to the team having "[what might be] the best starting rotation in baseball." There's genuine concern to be had with Oviedo's diminished stuff and Ranger Suárez's subpar debut, but we know that both are capable of more than they showed in their first appearances with the Red Sox.
Likewise, both Brayan Bello and Sonny Gray have positive processes to build off of, even if the results they got the first time out weren't worth writing home about.
The offense is the bigger concern, as the team navigates impossibly slow stars from Story and Caleb Durbin on the left side of the infield. Still, this early in the season, all it takes is one good game (or in some cases, one or two good at-bats) to change the narrative. The talent was never in question for this team, but they do need to keep the train from completely derailing in order to realize the full potential of this roster.