It’s pitching preview time, ladies and gentlemen. Over the next several days, I’ll be writing 10,000 words or so about everyone you might see pitching for the Red Sox to start the season. I’ve put the team’s starting options into tiers because that’s how my brain works. Don’t think of them as rankings, but rather buckets based on some similarities I see.
After starting with a look at Garrett Crochet, one of the best pitchers in baseball, we moved onto the two big offseason acquisitions, and then covered
four veterans with questions competing for innings at the back of the rotation. Today we move onto…
Tier Five: The Young Guns
This is where I remind you that these tiers aren’t rankings, but groupings of similar players. Payton Tolle or Connelly Early could end up starting game two or three of a playoff series for the Red Sox and I wouldn’t be overly surprised. With too many options for too few spots, at least one of these two likely starts the season in Worcester.
Payton Tolle
2025 in a sentence: Tolle’s debut set the world on fire, but the rest of his season failed to live up to those heights.
Unless you’re brand new to Red Sox baseball and are truly using this piece to get up to speed on the roster, you probably already have thoughts about Payton Tolle. Everyone who’s followed the offseason knows that Tolle has a great fastball, and nothing else. In his second start, the Arizona Diamondbacks knew that he had nothing else, waited for fastballs, and hit the snot out of them.
Two things can be true at the same time: Tolle has an excellent fastball, and Tolle can’t throw his fastball 65% of the time. While the pitch is outstanding – 97 mph with a flat approach angle and 7.5 feet of extension – it was hit because opponents knew he had to throw it.
In 2024, Garrett Crochet put together a solid season using 54% four-seams and 28% cutters. He mixed in other pitches as well, but the two fastballs accounted for most of his arsenal. You can succeed with just two pitches, but you have to be able to locate them. Crochet spotted his cutter inside to righties and away from lefties consistently. Tolle’s cutter heatmap looked more like a Rorschach test than a game plan. Against righties in particular, Tolle’s cutters found the middle of the plate far too often. If he wants to live with two pitches, he has to locate them well.
Based on Tolle’s quotes this offseason, he doesn’t seem content trying to live with two pitches. He’s mentioned improving his changeup on more than one occasion and said he was throwing a curveball as well. I’ve told everyone willing to listen that he should add a sinker to his mix, and he appeared to be toying with that based on some Trackman live batting practice outputs.
Tolle set the bar for himself impossibly high with his debut against the Pirates. He rose to the majors so quickly that it’s easy to forget that 2025 was his first professional season. He didn’t even have a Wikipedia page at the time he was called up. If Oviedo is a sculpture waiting on the finishing touches, Tolle is a ball of clay that was just harvested from a riverbank or wherever they get clay. Do you harvest clay? Collect it? Is clay even the most common sculpting material? I don’t know. I’m a baseball nerd, not an art geek. Regardless, Tolle can go a million different directions with his arsenal and still has plenty of time to figure it out. The sky’s the limit for the rookie.
More Tolle: One tweak that can help Red Sox pitcher Payton Tolle hit his ceiling
Connelly Early
2025 in a sentence: Early came out of nowhere and really impressed in a short cameo down the stretch.
Connelly Early started a do-or-die playoff game for the Red Sox last season. I didn’t even include him in last year’s starting pitching preview. I was a nervous wreck before the game, but prime Pedro could have been on the mound, and I still would have been nervous because there’s something wrong with me. The point is, Early was far from the source of my stress, which speaks to how rapid his ascent was.
Early’s debut was equally as impressive as Tolle’s, but it took place in Sacramento at 10 pm EST on a Tuesday, so responsible people were in bed. I was watching and went to bed with my expectations for Early shattered as he struck out 11 over five innings. A week later, he faced the same lineup in Fenway Park and allowed one run over 5.1 innings with a different plan of attack. In his first start, he didn’t throw a single sinker to a right-handed hitter. In the rematch, it accounted for 25% of his arsenal. That level of pitchability from a 23-year-old was surprising, to say the least.
Early faced 22 lefties over his four regular-season starts, surrendering hits to three, walking one, and striking out 13. He also hit one batter. He used a pretty standard approach, throwing sinkers inside and breaking balls away. His sweeper was particularly devastating to lefties, generating ten whiffs on 20 pitches. If there’s a knock on Early against lefties, it’s that he left his four-seam fastball over the plate too frequently. At 94 mph with seven feet of extension and a flat approach angle, he has some room for error, but good hitters will punish these mistakes should they persist.
Righties had more success, hitting .259 and striking out 28.1% of the time as opposed to the 59.1% lefties did, but they still only managed one extra-base hit against the lefty. Early used his four-seam against righties 33% of the time, and it was effective. The 61% strike rate was on the low side for a primary offering, but the 12.5% swinging strike rate and 25% ideal contact rate were each excellent. He was also able to spot first-pitch sliders on the glove side for early strikes. Ahead of righties, he turned to his curveball and changeup. Each pitch generated chases at a high rate, but it was the curveball that got more whiffs. His changeup was the pitch evaluators were most impressed by, but the out-of-zone contact rate was high at 76.5%. The pitch shows great velocity and movement separation from his fastball, so I’d expect that number to fall in a larger sample. A lefty with big extension, a good changeup, and multiple breaking balls he can throw in and out of the zone is basically the ideal pitcher. It’s only a four-game sample, with two games against the A’s, but it’s hard to be anything but excited about Early.
While all of the numbers are impressive, and Early passed the eye test, I do want to pump the brakes a little bit. The lefty has struck out hitters at every level, but he’s also walked them. He walked only four of the 79 hitters he faced in the majors (5.1%), but his much longer minor league career walk rate is 9.1%. The stuff is there, and his command looked refined in his late-season cameo, but don’t be surprised if there are some growing pains in year two.
More Early: What is Red Sox pitcher Connelly Early’s ceiling?
