We have an Opening Day roster, and three catchers and a Rule 5 pick are on it.
With the Red Sox' opener kicking off Friday night at Fenway Park against the Orioles, the team released its list of 30 players who will be participating. Among the group are catcher Jonathan Lucroy and infielder Jonathan Arauz, who becomes the first Rule 5 player to make the Sox roster since Josh Rutledge in 2016.
"So, I talked about the last two days and how it’s a difficult time for players and staff to try to come up with the pieces that we feel make the most sense for our club and will help us to win the most ballgames," Red Sox manager Ron Roenicke relayed Thursday. "The pitching staff was probably the toughest. I think the position players, I think was a little easier knowing that Arauz was probably the one with being a Rule 5 and do you carry him and he has shown not only progress from the first spring training, but a really good player. He’s got, his tools are to what we see, good hands, good footwork, good arm, accurate, a switch hitter, being able to show us a little more power than we thought. That was probably the biggest decision there as far as who made it from the position-players.
"But the pitching staff obviously was tough. We know pretty much that we have the three guys with Nate and Martin followed with Weber that we feel good about. Now, what do we do with the starter for four and five. With the players that we had decisions on, whether we try to think about an opener, whether we try to think about a traditional starter for one of those games is how we came up with really the rest of the roster. That, we haven’t decided for sure how we’re going to do it because it depends on the matchups and who’s being used so I can’t tell you that a certain name is going to be the opener, a certain name is going to be the guy that comes in for him. It really depends on what happens these first three games. We know what we would like to do and we have a plan for that but if the games don’t go so well in the first three, we may have to use players that we had planned to go four and five so that’s going to continue to change all the time. But we’re confident. We’re confident with the group that we put together and that’s, unfortunately, some hard decisions with some of the players."