The Red Sox were expected to contend in a wide-open AL East in 2015, in large part due to the performances of free agent acquisitions Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval. Instead, they finished in the basement for the third time in four years…in large part due to the performances of Ramirez and Sandoval. The veteran imports were almost unfathomably awful, as they combined for nearly four wins below replacement after being worth about three wins each in 2014. Their struggles, plus a pitching staff that could charitably be described as “patchwork,” torpedoed the season and cost GM Ben Cherington his job.

It wasn’t all bad in Beantown, however. In fact, new team president Dave Dombrowski has a nice foundation to work with, starting with a pair of 23-year-olds who established themselves as rising stars: Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts.

Betts attracted plenty of attention in fantasy circles after his excellent rookie season in 2014, wherein he hit .291/.368/.444 with five homers and seven steals in just 52 games. Across four levels of the minors, he’d hit 27 home runs and stolen 79 bases to pair with a .325 batting average and double-digit walk rate in a little under 1,100 plate appearances. This across-the-board excellence had many owners (including yours truly) pegging Betts for a big year in 2015. He delivered, posting a .291/.341/.479 line with 18 homers, 21 steals, and 169 R+RBI as Boston’s primary leadoff hitter and center fielder (he was also 2B eligible, though he’s lost that for 2016).

Betts has said in interviews that he adjusted his approach to be more aggressive in his first full major-league season. As a rookie, his 19% O-Swing was the lowest mark in baseball. In 2015 that figure spiked to 27%, or roughly league average. Betts’ heat maps show a concerted effort to attack more pitches away, while his swing rate at pitches in the zone increased only slightly. As a result, Betts cut down on both his walks and his strikeouts, as each rate fell by a couple of percentage points. The uptick in power mainly came on pitches in the middle of the plate. Betts has surprising pop for a guy his size (5’9”, 160), as he smacked 42 doubles and eight triples in addition to his 18 bombs.

Steamer expects another excellent effort in 2016, forecasting similar numbers across the board with a slightly higher average and OBP and a few more stolen bases. Given his profile, it’s within the realm of possible that Betts could recover some of the lost walks without sacrificing the gains he made in power. And while he’s already great, the following comparison hints at even greater upside:

Bogaerts doesn’t offer quite the same combo of power and speed that Betts does, but he rebounded nicely from a disappointing rookie season to hit .320/.355/.421 with seven homers, 10 steals, and 165 R+RBI. Coupled with above-average defense at shortstop, that production made Bogie the best shortstop in baseball outside of Brandon Crawford. What’s remarkable is how he accomplished it. Like Betts, he adopted a more aggressive approach. As a consequence, Bogaerts posted easily the worst walk rate of his professional career, at just under five percent. That’s where the similarities end. Bogaerts’ adjustments were significant enough to justify calling them a complete overhaul.

As a rookie, Bogaerts was an extreme pull hitter – only 14 others posted a higher Pull% and just three posted a lower Oppo%, per FanGraphs (min. 550 PA). Last season, however, he hit to all fields almost equally. He also more than doubled his GB/FB ratio and chopped nearly eight points off of his K%. These massive shifts led to a jump in BABIP from .296 to .372, which neatly correlated with his 80-point increase in batting average. The tradeoff, naturally, was less power; Bogaerts’ home run total was nearly cut in half and his ISO dropped from .123 to .101. There wasn’t much change in his flyball distance from the previous year – he simply hit a lot fewer balls in the air.

What’s important to remember is that Bogaerts is not a finished product by any stretch of the imagination. Neither is Betts, really, but he feels closer to one given that he’s not coming off a drastic makeover of his batting profile like Bogie. Both players are wonderful assets in real and fake baseball alike, and they’ve still got room to grow.

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