St. Louis Cardinals v Boston Red Sox | Maddie Malhotra/Boston Red Sox/GettyImages
It’s been a frustrating start to the 2025 season for the Boston Red Sox, who enter this weekend’s series against the Chicago White Sox stuck in third place in the AL East at 10-10 — not bad, necessarily, but certainly not what fans were expecting after a wave-making offseason in which the team signed Alex Bregman, Walker Buehler and Aroldis Chapman after trading for ace Garrett Crochet.
Naturally, fans are looking for someone (or someones) to blame, or at least look to for improvement moving forward. And while Boston’s depleted rotation is any easy candidate, no single player sticks out more right now than Triston Casas. Big things were expected of the Red Sox first baseman in 2025, his first full season back after missing most of 2024 due to injury. But rather than build on his breakout 2023 campaign, he’s spent most of April mired in a miserable slump, with a .508 OPS and just one homer through his first 18 games.
The Red Sox need Casas to blossom into a middle-of-the-order thumper if they want to reach their championship ceiling; there’s a reason the team held on to him amid near-constant trade rumors over the winter, after all. And we won’t sugarcoat things: He’s been very, very bad to start the season, with his walk rate and contact metrics all cratering.
But despite all that bad news, Boston fans shouldn’t even consider sounding the alarm yet. Not only because we’re less than a month into this year, but because Casas has been down here before — and he’s proven that he knows how to dig himself out.
Triston Casas’ breakout season began with a miserable April
We mentioned Casas’ 2023 season above, and for good reason. It seemed to stamp the former first-round pick as a star in the making: He put up an .856 OPS with 24 homers in just 132 games, placing third in AL Rookie of the Year voting behind only Gunnar Henderson and Tanner Bibee. That production was backed up by elite batted-ball data, and the arrow seemed to be pointing straight up.
Of course, before Casas was busting out, he was … well, mired in a miserable slump in the month of April. The first baseman hit just .128 through his first 30 games that year, a stretch so bad that Alex Cora even decided to give him a couple of days off to clear his head. Once he came back, though, it was time for liftoff: Casas posted a .767 OPS in May, then an .851 mark in June and an eye-watering 1.200 in July. All of a sudden, he was a core part of Boston’s future.
All of which should offer Red Sox fans a bit of relief. Things are bad right now, but they’ve been bad before, and Casas has worked through it. It’s a long, long season, and there are going to be dry spells — it just feels particularly acute when those dry spells begin on Opening Day. There’s every reason to believe that he’ll find his stroke again; in fact, he might be already doing just that, as he’s hit the ball awfully hard over Boston’s last few games.
Triston Casas went 1-10 in the Rays series, but 6 of his 10 PAs produced exit velocities above 97 MPH.
I’m comfortably in the Casas will break out soon camp. If I have to hear “put Roman Anthony at 1B” one more time 🤣 pic.twitter.com/Jk11QUSYF6
— Gordo (@BOSSportsGordo) April 17, 2025
Fans won’t totally exhale until they see balls flying over the fence again, and that’s understandable enough. But better things are coming, and odds are all this panic will look awfully silly come summertime.
