Do you know the last time the Red Sox finished a season without a single player hitting at least 20 home runs? If we’re not counting 2020 — which we shouldn’t, pretty much ever, for pretty much anything — then the answer is a loooooong time ago: 1945, to be exact. But, frankly, we shouldn’t even count the World War II years, either. Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio and the rest of the actual Red Sox were fighting overseas, leaving the lineup to be filled with 34-year-old infielders named Skeeter. Everyone knows that it’s impossible to be a power hitter if your name is Skeeter.
Discounting the war years, we have to go all the way back to 1935 — the year before Jimmie Foxx joined the team — to find a season in which no Red Sox player hit at least 20 homers. Suffice it to say, the game was very, very different 91 years ago. Only 14 players across the entire sport hit 20 or more homers. Only 5 hit more than 30. The only thing that the baseball players of 1935 were better at than the players of 2026 was having cool, old timey names (and not just Skeeter, either; let’s hear it for Ripper Collins, Pinky Higgins, Dolph Camili, and Zeke Bonura, all of whom did hit 20 or more homers that year).
Could 2026 be the season that the Red Sox break their 91-year 20-homer streak? It’s not a totally ridiculous question to ask, as FanGraphs currently doesn’t project a single Red Sox player to hit 20 bombs, the only MLB team with that dishonorable distinction. But, nevertheless, the answer is no. Someone on the Red Sox (likely multiple someones) will hit 20 homers in 2026.
This isn’t to say that the FanGraphs’ projections are “wrong.” Rather, this is an acknowledgment that projections are not predictions. Projections are conservative by nature, favoring mean outcomes rather than outlier outcomes because, well, outlier outcomes are outliers for a reason. The projections also don’t take into account the real-world human factors that influence statistical outcomes. E.g., the projections only know that Trevor Story hit 16, 2, and 3 home runs from 2022-2024; they do not know that he his home runs totals were that low because he was injured for most of that time.
So, starting with the assumption that someone will hit 20 homers, our question of the day is: how many will do so and who will they be?
There’s one easy answer on this roster:
Roman Anthony is a generationally talented player with monster power. It didn’t always show up in his partial rookie year in 2025, but it’s there, and it’s going to be unleashed sooner rather than later. If he plays at least 130 games, it’s hard for me to see him not getting to at least 20, if not 30.
But, admittedly, it’s hard to say with any certainty that anyone else on the roster will likely hit 20 homers. Trevor Story blasted 25 last year. But no one would be shocked if he has yet another injury set-back this year, and he’s a 33-year-old with a rapidly slowing bat who struggles to make contact. Jarren Duran and Ceddanne Rafaela both hit 16 last year, but both have obvious flaws in their offensive profiles (for Druan, it’s hitting against lefties, for Rafaela, it’s his swing decisions) and both of them find themselves in a crowded outfield rotation that will almost certainly result in them playing fewer than the 157 and 156 games they played in last year. Like Rafaela, Wilyer Abreu is also a young player with some offensive flaws who has yet to totally establish himself in the bigs. And while Willson Contreras hit exactly 20 last year, like Trevor Story, he is battling not just opposing pitchers but the relentless march of time.
For me, I’ll set the over/under on Red Sox players who hit 20 or more home runs at 3. I believe Anthony and Abreu are likely to get there, and someone from that Duran/Ceddy/Contreras/Story group will join them. Hell, we can’t even rule out Triston Casas.
What say you? Talk about home runs and whatever else you want and, as always, be good to one another.
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