Why Losing Willson Contreras Would Expose Boston's Thin First Base Depth
Contreras isn't hurt, but a look at the numbers shows he's Boston's second-most valuable bat and the team's only first baseman all season -- a gap no one else on the roster can fill.
Published: · Figures as of September 2, 2026
Asked: How much does losing Willson Contreras hurt Boston?
No injury on record — but Boston has no internal backup at first base
Willson Contreras isn't on Boston's current injury report, so this reads as a hypothetical rather than an actual absence. Answering it anyway: he's Boston's second-most valuable position player by Wins Above Replacement (4.32, behind only Wilyer Abreu's 5.37), and — this is the bigger issue — he is the only Red Sox player who has logged a single game at first base all season. There is no ready-made in-house replacement at his position.
What he's produced
Over 125 games this season, Contreras is hitting .274 with a .356 on-base percentage, 26 home runs and 79 RBI, and his 4.32 WAR trails only Abreu on the roster. Defensively at first, he's been clean — a .995 fielding percentage and 7.73 range factor — though his -0.56 dWAR looks worse than that suggests; Baseball-Reference's dWAR bakes in a below-average positional adjustment for first base, so a sure-handed first baseman can still post a negative number there. It isn't evidence he's a liability in the field.
He's been cold, but not alarmingly so
His OPS over his last 20 games is .720, down from 1.030 over the 20 games before that (a 0.31 drop) and below his .900 season mark (-0.18). That's a real cooldown, but it lands almost exactly at the league average of .710 over the same stretch — he's a league-average hitter right now, not a sinking one, and there's nothing here that reads as an underlying health issue.
The empirical split says less than it looks like
Boston has actually played 13 games without Contreras this season and gone 10-3, outscoring opponents 5.8 to 3.5 a game — better on both sides of the ball than the 65-60 record and 4.3-to-3.9 scoring split in the 125 games he played. That's a real number, but 13 games is a thin sample, almost certainly skewed by opponent quality and other players' hot stretches rather than proof the offense is better off without him. It cuts directly against the idea that losing him would hurt, and it's worth reporting alongside the case for his value rather than being explained away.
The real exposure: no depth at his position
No other Red Sox player has taken a single game at first base this season — not Curtis Mead (mostly third), not Masataka Yoshida (DH), not Mickey Gasper. A real absence would force a positional reshuffle rather than plug in a like-for-like replacement, and that's the part of "losing him" that current usage patterns can't paper over.
Bottom line (medium confidence): on the numbers, Contreras is a top-two Boston bat who's cooled to roughly league-average form lately, and the team has no first baseman waiting in the wings if he were out. The one thing pulling against the "this would hurt" case is that Boston's small sample without him this year has actually been better, which is more likely schedule noise than a signal, but it belongs in the picture rather than being ignored.