The Red Sox have another pitcher forcing his way into the conversation.
On Monday, Tommy Cassell of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported that 25-year-old right-hander Blake Wehunt had been promoted from Double-A Portland to Triple-A Worcester, putting him one step away from the majors in the middle of his strongest minor league season.
Wehunt didn’t enter the year with much prospect buzz, and he still isn’t viewed as one of the arms Boston is clearly penciling into a future rotation. Even so, the way he’s thrown this season has at least pushed him onto the radar for a possible major league debut late this year or early next year.
He was not in MLB Pipeline’s top 30 Red Sox prospects as of Monday, while SoxProspects had him at No. 17 in the system.
There’s plenty to notice with Wehunt, starting with the frame: he’s 6-foot-7 and 240 pounds. Boston has shown a growing preference for size on the mound, and Wehunt, a ninth-round pick in 2023 during Chaim Bloom’s final draft as chief baseball officer, fit that mold in a way that stood out.
The real separator, though, has been command. Last year at Double-A, Wehunt walked 29 batters in 63 1/3 innings.
This season, in 53 2/3 innings at the same level, he cut that number to 16. That improvement, along with a modest bump in his strikeout rate, helped drop his ERA from 5.68 to 3.52.
He has worked as a starter throughout his minor league career, but there’s a reliever look to him as well. That could matter for Boston if the club needs right-handed bullpen help sometime over the next calendar year.
For now, the promotion gives Wehunt a bigger stage and a tougher test, one that should tell the Red Sox plenty about what his future might look like in the majors.
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For Boston, the appeal is obvious enough: a catcher who can help now and perhaps change the shape of the lineup. For Colorado, the question is whether a possible sell-off at the deadline could turn one premium bat into a wider return of pitching and position-player talent, including a mix of big league and upper-minors pieces. It is the familiar kind of debate that follows any aggressive deadline idea, where the fit makes sense on paper but the real challenge is deciding how much certainty a team is willing to give up for one player. [Read more 🡒]