Boston's best offseason pitching acquisition might be its coach

This story was excerpted from Ian Browne's Red Sox Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

When the offseason started, the Red Sox sounded like a team ready to make multiple significant additions to a rotation that struggled with performance and durability last season.

The way it has played out so far, free agent Lucas Giolito has been the club’s only acquisition, while Chris Sale was subtracted in a trade with the Braves for promising infielder Vaughn Grissom.

The way the Red Sox put it, they haven’t been able to “line up” with top targets, none bigger than Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who signed a $325 million deal with the Dodgers.

Now the club is talking about a season in which the individual and collective improvement from its younger core of pitchers will be key to the team’s overall success.

“At the end of the day, the [Garrett] Whitlocks, the [Kutter] Crawfords, the [Tanner] Houcks, the [Brayan] Bellos, they have to take a step forward,” said manager Alex Cora. “Regardless of if you signed the best pitcher in the world, they need to take a step forward.”

You can also add Josh Winckowski to the group Cora mentioned.

What this means is that the team’s biggest pitching acquisition over the winter might end up being its new pitching coach, Andrew Bailey, who drew rave reviews for his performance in that role with the Giants the last four seasons.

One thing that became clear when the energetic Bailey spoke at Red Sox Winter Weekend a few days ago is that he has a clear vision of how to get the most out of Boston’s pitching staff.

“I think my goal is to set expectations, hold players accountable to those expectations as a group, and I want us to be viewed industry-wide as, ‘Come to the Boston Red Sox, they know how to pitch,’” said Bailey. “I think if you look at the Giants and the Twins and Seattle and Tampa [Bay], that’s where we're gonna get to. When you come to Boston or when you're gonna go play the Red Sox, these guys are gonna come at you, throw strikes with really nasty stuff and throw hard in the zone.”

In recent years, the Red Sox lost their way as a pitching program. Bailey plans on restoring order. He has no issues expressing his mission statement or how he plans to execute it.

“Obviously, for us, outs are made in zone. We want to help educate our pitchers on what makes them unique relative to other pitchers around the league,” said Bailey. “I think that there's specific qualities amongst pitchers and understanding what makes them a Major Leaguer from a pitch-quality standpoint -- it could be execution -- then also just creating accountability and some structure around strike-throwing in general, using your best pitches as often as possible, understanding that outs are made in the zone, and just looking at some of the low-hanging fruit on each individual, and then kind of going from there.”

The 39-year-old Bailey, who was a reliever for the Red Sox in 2012 and 2013, is the type of guy who could talk about pitching all day. Pitch usage is a topic that really gets his juices flowing.

“Yeah, totally. There's also addition by subtraction as well,” he said. “So [it’s] understanding that one of your pitches may play better than another and understanding that spin in zone generally produces better outcomes, understanding for the history of baseball that fastballs are hit the hardest and generate the most slug over a long period of time.

“So, leveraging your strengths, knowing your strengths, knowing your routines, dialing in specific skill acquisition, development, and understanding of how the body moves, structure and routines, plyo programs, and all of that stuff -- blending it together to create an understanding of what the athlete’s identity is, that’s really big.”

Heading into the season, the Red Sox aren’t likely to make anyone’s Top 10 list for best pitching staff on paper.

But Bailey won’t use that as an excuse. Instead his plan is to defy the prognostications of the “experts.”

“I'm excited about our group,” he said. “If our industry doesn't [end up viewing] our pitching staff individually at higher tiers, or certain guys going into free agency or going into arbitration [don’t view us that way], I just didn't do my job.

“I think that there's talent in our rotation, there’s opportunity, and helping them understand who they are and giving them identities and creating some accountability is going to be kind of our name of the game. I'm excited about this group. We want to get to a place where we don't have to supplement our Major League roster with large investments. Hopefully, we can do that. That’s the goal.”