This isn’t exactly true; the bulk of innings at SS, CF, and 2B were not from these guys. Hernandez (who was considered excellent defensively at this time a year ago, IIRC) and Duvall each played less than 500 innings at SS and CF, respectively. Valdez played 357 innings at 2B.
That being said, guys will get injured and I don’t see how this team has the depth currently to withstand any kind of disruption to the starting lineup.
I'll accept the correction, but Hernandez did have the most SS innings played on the team, in the midst of his 86-game, -1.5 fWAR season — worse on a rate basis than Pablo Sandoval's time in Boston — even if Valdez was second to Arroyo in 2B innings played and Duvall second to Duran in CF innings played.
(I also thought that Hernandez would be playable this time last year; I don't know what happened to him. Was it playing CF for Puerto Rico instead of SS in Ft. Myers, as Cora surmised?)
The fact of the matter is that the Story injury derailed the 2023 team before January. Bloom did what he did under the roster constraints he had, adding Duvall, Mondesi and Chang, but (as we endlessly litigated at the time and since) there weren't a ton of appealing possibilities. If Hernandez had been even close to average and Mondesi had made it back by June (as was hoped), it might have worked, but that didn't materialize.
If we again face the level of injuries we saw in 2023 at up-the-middle positions, we'll be in trouble: most teams would if they lost their starting SS, brought in a CF (who promptly got hurt) to move their CF (whose performance imploded) to SS, and two veteran SS, one injured (who never recovered) and another (who got hurt). They promoted a CF prospect who was great, until he got hurt. Also, their best 2B got hurt, and was bad when he played. That's a lot.
But as I look at things, we have a lot more depth in the high minors than we did to begin last season, with probably four of the Abreu/Rafaela/Yorke/Dalbec/Valdez/Nick Sogard group in AAA offering pretty good positional coverage and our higher upside guys probably starting in AA. Remember that both Grissom and Rafaela are SS by background.
The 2023 team defense mattered a ton, I think. I'm not trying to argue that we had a *good* pitching staff in a fielding-independent vacuum, but we had an okay pitching staff: they were middle of the pack by ERA-, FIP-, SIERA, barrels and EV allowed, etc. and flat-out terrible (like, bottom five in a few stats) by anything that incorporates defense. Fangraphs thinks our elevated BABIP (i.e. bad team defense) cost us 3.5 wins. Only Oakland, St. Louis, and Colorado were worse.
So the bull case for the 2024 Red Sox leans pretty hard on some combination of Story, O'Neill, Duran, Grissom, and Rafaela snapping our up-the-middle defense into place in a way that yields an acceptable overall team defense. Especially the infielders: we need a revamped defense to allow *our staff of groundball pitchers* like Houck (2023: 53% GB percentage, .297 BABIP), Bello (56%, .306), Winckowski (51%, .331), Whitlock (44%, .340), Bernardino (50%, .338), and Jacques (65%, .357) to actually have a chance to succeed. Again: I'm not saying things would have been amazing on the pitching front with average infield defense, but I think it's fair to say that Hernandez throwing 12 groundballs into the stands while compiling his 151 assists from SS didn't exactly help.