This Red Sox season has sucked, but Ceddanne Rafaela hasn’t

I feel like I’m been pretty negative over the last few weeks of Brushback articles. I need to change up my mentality a lil’ bit.

This 2026 Red Sox season, as we all know by now, has been tragic thus far. Not enough offense, the pitching isn’t enough to carry them to victory on most nights in spite of their best efforts, the front office seems completely aimless, yada yada yada. These are things that you haven’t already read before on OTM, be it from me or from any of my colleagues. Frankly, these are themes you’re likely gonna continue to see as the summer progresses as well. The Craig Breslow question isn’t going away anytime soon—well, unless FSG decides to give him a pink slip in the coming days—and even after a series win against the Texas Rangers at home (wait, we’re allowed to win multiple games at Fenway????), the dreams of seeing the Sox qualify for postseason ball seem to be just that at the moment: dreams.

But we’ve got nothing but precious time to complain about all the shit that’s going wrong for Boston. The organizational soap opera will continue, and I frankly don’t want to sit here and repeat the same talking points/complaints each and every week that I sit down to write about this stupid team. I’m sure you don’t want to read the same article over and over and over again, either. What’s the point of essentially copying and pasting the same Brushback article all the time at this point? We’ll have weeks—maybe even months—to perform an autopsy on this season, how poorly the roster was constructed, all that fun stuff. Our regularly scheduled bellyaching will continue long into the dog days, short of something astonishing happening in Boston over the next few months (I’m not holding my breath, but stranger things have happened; after all, the Knicks just won a championship).

So while I can’t sit here and tell you that my entire outlook on the Red Sox is positive—because it clearly isn’t—I at least wanted to shake up the mojo a little bit and shine a light on a guy who I haven’t given enough credit to here on the website: Ceddanne Rafaela.

It’s Monday Morning Brushback time, y’all.

What a year that Boston’s center fielder is having, folks. Through his first 66 games he’s logged a 2.2 fWAR; he’s on pace to smash the career high of 3.8 he set last season. The numbers leading into Saturday’s game don’t lie, as Jake Iggy of BoSox Talk pointed out on The Everything App:

A lil’ bit of traditional stats if you prefer the old school, a lil’ bit of nerdy stats if you don’t like Manny Machado. Either way you slice it: he’s been a productive hitter, as evidenced by the 127 OPS+ he’s notched leading up to Sunday’s finale against Texas.

Now if I told you I was gonna write 1,000-ish words about a guy with a .291/.346/.457 triple slash leading up to that Sunday night matchup at Fenway, you might scratch your head a little. “Sure, that’s a very solid output,” you may think to yourself, “but why are we focusing on him entirely here?”

Well, two things:

1. Again, I’m trying something positive here to distract myself from the rest of the dumpster fire that is this season, and
2. Not all 127 OPS+ outputs are created equally

We all knew that Ceddy had some juice in the bat, but the big question with him had been consistency; he’s got a bit of JBJ in him due to his defensive wizardry and his affinity to switch between hot and cold in a jiffy.

One word jumps out at me when looking under the hood when trying to figure out Rafaela’s progression in 2026: competitiveness.

The major issue I had with Ceddanne’s plate approach in the early stages of his career was that he gave up too many ABs too easily. Chasing after junk, not working counts, making bad swing decisions, etc. Even when you are making contact, an approach like that is going to throw you off-kilter when you’re stuck in between.

Now, even when you’re just watching him, Ceddy looks much more comfortable at the plate compared to where he was when he first started in the bigs. Of course, some of that comes with time, but it’s quite noticeable to me nowadays. If you don’t trust the good ol’ eye test: the simple fact that he’s cut his whiff rate by nearly 10 percentage points since the 2024 season, per Savant, should do a lot of the heavy lifting here. He’s not getting fooled as often and that’s allowed him to deal more damage at the dish.

To take it a step forward and to play with my keyword for Rafaela: as of Sunday morning, he ranked within the top 75 (just barely—he was number 75 exactly) of competitive swings across MLB this season. A fancy dancy Statcast metric, a competitive swing is defined as “the fastest 90% of a player’s swings, plus any 60+ MPH swings resulting in an exit velocity of 90+ MPH.” For reference: Ceddy had 1,080 and 1,104 competitive swings in 2024 and 2025 respectively. Rafaela put the ball in play through 31.6% of those competitive swings in 2024 and 36.3% in 2025.

This season, that rate is 38.3%. It’s a marginal improvement, yes, but it’s one that I think speaks to the improved plate approach. A better approach with improved plate discipline leads to fewer whiffs, which leads to more competitive ABs in general, which leads to more competitive swings, which leads to profit.

None of this even mentions the knack Rafaela has to deliver a clutch knock, by the way, which is a trait that he’s certainly shown during his big league tenure.

Now, granted, Rafaela might be the beneficiary of some BABIP luck thus far in 2026. His xwOBA and xSLG metrics are both below the 30th percentile leaguewide, and his expected batting average is only around .250 as I’m writing this Sunday morning. The signs of continued progression are there, however, so I’m not totally spooked by those analytics. Improvement isn’t always linear, and he’s still a relatively young guy. There’s more room for growth, and that starts with the game-to-game approach that Ceddy’s implementing in the better’s box.

All of this is to say that Ceddanne Rafaela has to be an All-Star. He probably doesn’t start the game over Byron Buxton, sure, but who else has an obvious claim to an outfield position over him this season? The only guy I can think of who would steal a spot over Ceddy is probably Julio Rodriguez of the Mariners due to his power numbers and his star status, but I’ll take the guy who’s OPS is 50 points higher and is a platinum glove type of fielder. Get Ceddanne to the Midsummer Classic, baby.

Is the team bad? Yes. Is this going to be a long summer in Boston? Probably. Is the future unclear? I’m too scared to answer that question in earnest. But do we have Ceddanne Rafaela patrolling center? Yes, yes we certainly do. So we got that going for us, which is nice.

Hey, these guys are pretty good.

Until next time, friends! Go Sox.