Amidst the questions about the causes of the Red Sox’ slide from contention this year, here’s one line of inquiry that has been easy to ignore: What if the Jeremy Hermida lottery ticket had hit the jackpot? What if he had been Jose Bautista?
It seems odd to ask, but it is worth remembering that the Sox acquired Hermida with the belief that the 26-year-old harbored significant offensive potential that they hoped to unleash on their behalf. If the stars somehow aligned and the team hit on a best-case scenario, one team source posited last offseason, he could become a Brian Giles type, a legitimate corner outfielder with power and patience.
That sort of Hermida would have helped the Sox to withstand the production lost by the injuries that sidelined Jacoby Ellsbury and Mike Cameron for most of the year. That sort of Hermida would have given the Sox above-average production in left field.
But the Hermida they got was not even a shadow of that possibility. In his four months (almost one-third of which was spent on the disabled list with four fractured ribs) with the Sox, he hit .203 with a .257 OBP, .348 slugging mark and .605 OPS. His struggles contributed to a position that has been an albatross for the Sox lineup. Boston’s left fielders entered last night hitting .231 (13th in the AL) with a .297 OBP (last in the AL) and a .690 OPS (11th).
That said, even at a cost of $3.345 million, it’s not hard to figure out what the Sox were searching for when they acquired Hermida. He had flashed incredible talent en route to a first-round selection, through a dominant minor league career and in a standout big league season (.296 average, .870 OPS, 18 homers) at the age of 23 in 2007.
That sort of promise was the same thing that had intrigued the Sox for years about Jose Bautista.
The team never anticipated the incredible emergence of the Toronto slugger this year. Indeed, it is unlikely that anyone in the Bautista family, including Jose himself, anticipated that he would have circled the bases 49 times with a dozen games to go.
All the same, the Sox had eyed Bautista from afar as a potential buy-low candidate. One team source thought he might have 30-homer potential if given an everyday chance.
Even as a part-timer, another source viewed him as a potential complementary player who could play solid defense at several positions and offer some thump against lefties. (Prior to this year, Bautista had a .265 average and .838 OPS against lefties in his career, and a .227 mark and .682 OPS against right-handers.) Certainly, one can imagine that had the team acquired him, Bautista could have emerged as the team's left-fielder, and that he could have made a mark in that capacity.
The Sox had expressed interest in him in the past. In Aug. 2009, according to a baseball source, they were one of several teams to place a waiver claim on Bautista when the Blue Jays put him on trade waivers (though the source noted that the Sox were not awarded said claim). But the team had never come close to acquiring him, a task that had been made more difficult in the past couple seasons by the fact that he was with one of the Sox’ divisional rivals.
So, the Sox have been left to marvel from afar as Bautista has emerged as the latest example of a player who, plucked off the baseball scrap heap, became one of the game's top sluggers. His stunning ascent as the leading home run hitter in the majors in 2010 has parallels to the rises of fellow AL East sluggers David Ortiz (signed by the Sox after the Twins released him in Dec. 2002) and Carlos Pena (signed to a minor league deal by the Rays in 2003).
Hermida did not pan out for the Sox, but players like Hermida often feature prominently on championship-caliber clubs. It typically takes not just big-name acquisitions, but also successful buy-low moves, to build a championship-caliber club.

• For the 2009 season, the Yankees picked up Nick Swisher for three players (Wilson Betemit, Jeff Marquez, Jhonny Nunez), none of whom has impacted Chicago.
• The 2008 Phillies featured Jayson Werth, a player whom they had plucked off the scrap heap after the 2006 season, after a wrist injury had nearly ruined his career. He was signed as a free agent for $850,000.
• The 2007 Red Sox featured Hideki Okajima, an obscure reliever from Japan who became a linchpin of the best bullpen in the game, forging an All-Star resume in the regular season and following that up with a dominant postseason.

There are other examples from the past decade, prominently including the 2004 Red Sox, who featured players like Ortiz, Bill Mueller, Kevin Millar and Bronson Arroyo who represented ridiculous payoffs for relatively minimal investments. Such contributors suggest that hitting on a buy-low target can impact a franchise for years, and play a huge role in assisting with the creation of a championship-caliber roster.

This year, the Sox enjoyed the fruits of an amazing bounceback year from Adrian Beltre, yet while they have gotten solid returns from the likes of Darnell McDonald, Scott Atchison and Bill Hall, they haven’t had a player emerge from obscurity to stardom.
Of course, such a development is anything but the norm. A team cannot expect to win the lottery just because it buys some scratch tickets.
All the same, while it is an easy-to-overlook element to the season, the fact that Hermida yielded little – that he did not blossom into a fraction of the player that Bautista has become – played some role, however marginal, in the Sox’ inability to withstand their rash of injuries.