This year’s Hot Stove season has been an unusual one, with the Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto pursuits – both eventually won by the Dodgers – sucking all the air out of the room, and all of the attention of most of the game’s big spenders for an inordinate period of time.

By the time those two deals were inked, Christmas and the relative quiet it brings on the transaction front was upon us. The Boston Red Sox, however, who were ostensibly on the fringes of the Ohtani/Yamamoto sweepstakes, did manage to get a couple of deals done in the last week.

First, they signed righty starter Lucas Giolito to a two-year, $38.5 million deal that includes a player opt-out clause after the first season. That very temporarily left their rotation slightly overpopulated, a situation remedied when they sent oft-injured lefty Chris Sale (and $17 million in cash) to the Braves for infielder Vaughn Grissom, whom they are likely to install at second base.

Let’s first take a look at this deal from a bird’s eye view for both clubs. The Sox swap out Sale’s upside for Giolito’s innings bulk, while still hoping the latter can regain the top form he showed as recently as 2021. They also get a young infielder with six years of control who they hope can be a fixture for the foreseeable future.

The Braves give up Grissom, who was beaten out for their shortstop job by the eminently replaceable Orlando Arcia, and get a pitcher who when healthy is one of the game’s best, for – get this – $500,ooo in 2024 salary.

Only a half-million dollars, below the MLB minimum? How, you say? Well, on top of the $17 million of Sale’s $27.5 million salary being paid by the Sox, another $10 million is deferred. A $20 million team option remains for 2025, but the Braves will be happy to pay that if the lefty is healthy and effective this season.

So, it’s pretty easy to see why Atlanta would do this. The best-case scenario is an exceptional one, and the worst case is Sale gets hurt again, the club walks away after a season, and all they lose is Grissom, a player they had already moved past.

The Red Sox? Obviously, there is a best-case, winning scenario here. Grissom proves to be a viable, low-priced MLB regular and Giolito locates his peak form. The chances of that happening, in my opinion, are very low, and are offset to an extent by the likelihood that Giolito would re-enter free agency after the 2024 season.

Let’s deal with Giolito first. From 2019-21, he was one of the best pitchers in the game. He excelled two of the key facets of pitching, missing bats and managing contact, while being average to slightly above average at the third, minimizing walks. He did all of this while carrying a heavy innings load. At ages 24-26, he was one of the most valuable pitching commodities in the game.

What’s happened since then? Well, he’s lost a little velocity on his four-seam fastball, from a peak of 94.3 mph in 2019 to a trough of 92.6 mph in 2022, though it did bounce back a bit last season. It’s lost a whole lot more in effectiveness than it has in velocity, however, and his changeup has also suffered in tandem with his heater. He’s begun to throw his slider, never one of his better offerings, more often to compensate. He’s also been a fairly extreme fly ball pitcher with a high average launch angle allowed, and the price paid by such pitchers for even a slight loss of stuff can be steep.

Then there’s the effects of the pitch clock, first instituted last season. Arguably the three most central poster children for the negative impacts of the clock were fairly large men – Lance Lynn, Alek Manoah and Giolito – who no longer had the ability to slow down between pitches with men on base to conserve energy. All saw their performance decline markedly last season, particularly with men on base.

Can Giolito elevate his game back to 2019-21 levels this season? He can, but I’m not betting on it, and the Sox don’t win on this pair of transactions combined unless he does.

I also believe that the Sox are overrating Grissom. His biggest issue is a lack of batted ball authority. His average exit speed at the MLB level is 85.2 mph, which would rank among the weakest MLB regulars. Others at that level, like Diamondbacks’ SS Geraldo Perdomo, are often elite defenders at premium positions. Grissom is almost certainly not capable of playing shortstop with any regularity at the MLB level, and projects as an average 2B defender at best. He has below average sprint speed and arm strength. Sure, he has six years of team control remaining, but if he isn’t a viable MLB regular, exactly how much is that worth?

Lastly, there’s Sale. Sure, he’s been limited to all of 31 starts over the last four seasons, but 20 of them occurred in 2023, when he was dominant at times. He’s not the Cy Young candidate he once was, but he still possesses an elite K/BB profile – better than Giolito’s – and manages contact quite well. His reliability is iffy at best – he had shoulder issues last season, and also has Tommy John surgery, a rib stress fracture, and a broken left pinky finger and right wrist in his recent injury history.

But the Braves aren’t looking for innings bulk from Sale. They’ll settle for late-career Clayton Kershaw innings totals and comparably high-end per inning quality – as well as a few dominant postseason starts. They are risking little but potentially gaining very much.

The Sox? They are spending more money ($35 vs. $17.5 million) in cash in 2024 for a lesser pitcher, albeit with a bit more durability, plus a middling infield prospect. There’s also talk that new chief baseball officer Craig Breslow is under pressure to reduce team payroll this season. This would suggest that they had very few bullets to improve the club in a deep AL East, and that THIS how they chose to do so.

The Red Sox do have some promising starting pitchers in Brayan Bello, Nick Pivetta, Kutter Crawford and Tanner Houck, but really needed a guy with upside at the top. I would argue that retaining Sale and spending additional funds elsewhere would have been a better approach. The club’s road to truly contending in 2024 may have already been a narrow one, but these two moves likely made it even more difficult to navigate.