The Red Sox haven’t had much recent success developing homegrown pitchers. Brayan Bello is arguably the first true starter developed in Boston’s system since Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz more than 15 years ago, and there aren’t many others waiting in the wings behind him.

This offseason the Red Sox have gone to great lengths to change that, first by hiring Craig Breslow — the architect of the Chicago Cubs impressive pitching infrastructure — as chief baseball officer, and then by surrounding him with respected voices like Andrew Bailey as pitching coach and Driveline Baseball founder Kyle Boddy as a special advisor.

Those three will play a huge role in shaping the Red Sox pitching program in the years to come, but the task of actually building a new pitching pipeline that stretches from the Dominican Republic all the way to Boston will largely fall to another.

Justin Willard, hired this winter as the Red Sox new director of pitching, might be among the club’s most intriguing and potentially impactful offseason additions. Formerly the Minnesota Twins’ pitching coordinator, Willard was brought on to serve in a much broader role that essentially puts him in charge of shaping the pitching program used by the major league club and at every step of the minor league ladder all the way down to Fort Myers and the Dominican Academy.

“If we want to build this development system it has to start at the ground level,” Willard told the Herald by phone this week. “Most fans are typically only seeing what happens at the top, which is super important, that drives all of our value, the goal is to win championships at the big league level, not D.R. championships, but if we want to build a development pipeline it has to start at the lowest levels so in two or three years we see the fruits of that pipeline.”

Born and raised in Toronto, the 33-year-old Willard played college baseball at Concord University in West Virginia and got his start coaching there before moving on to Division 1 Radford University. He then made the jump to the Twins and quickly rose though the ranks, eventually playing a key role in the development of impressive homegrown arms like Jhoan Duran and Bailey Ober.

Yet even before he joined the Red Sox or had any connection to the franchise, he had a strong affinity for the organization.

“It’s really crazy, five years ago me and my wife got a puppy, and we named him Fenway not knowing this was coming to fruition,” Willard said, explaining that they wanted something baseball-themed but that naming their dog after Minnesota’s Target Field, Toronto’s Rogers Centre or his Detroit-native wife’s hometown Comerica Park wouldn’t have sounded as good. “So it’s kind of crazy how it all works out.”

When the Red Sox opportunity presented itself, Willard said he was immediately intrigued, both because he’d get to work with and learn from great baseball minds like Breslow and Bailey and because he’d get to make his mark at all levels of the organization, not just in the majors or minors.

“What was enticing about this job specifically and the way Bres envisioned it was working in a collaborative fashion with Bales and the big league staff along with right through the minor league system to make sure we’re all pushing in the same direction and development’s not taking a break when they go from Triple-A to the big leagues,” Willard said.

Willard and his wife are in the process of relocating to Boston, and once the season begins he’ll be based out of Fenway Park and expects to spend much of his time with the big league club. He’ll also regularly travel to each of the organization’s minor league affiliates, and another perk of the job is that each stop is an easy drive or flight, and all are within the eastern time zone.

In the meantime, Willard has been in daily communication with Bailey, with the two speaking by phone so frequently that Bailey recently joked his wife Amanda now calls Willard his “work wife.”

“That’s a great way to put it,” Willard said with a laugh. “I met him for the first time in person last week but we were on the phone almost every day two, three, four, five times. We’ve gotten to know each other extremely quickly, we’re very aligned on the way we think about things, about development, about the big leagues, and in my mind it’s very much a collaboration.”

“Justin, man, he’s on a different level,” Bailey said last weekend in Springfield. “He’s exciting, inquisitive, smart, and I’m excited to have him around Boston for a lot of the season, especially at home games. The impact he’s already making on the organization is pretty wide.”

So what exactly is Willard’s plan for the Red Sox pitching program? In the simplest terms, Willard said the key to success is throwing nasty stuff in the strike zone, and if you look around the game all the best pitchers are able to do that consistently.

“You look at the elite of the elite, Jacob deGrom is a great example of this even though he’s been hurt his entire career, that guy is consistently throwing nasty stuff in the zone and that’s why he’s a premier starter when he’s on the field,” Willard said. “You look at any of those guys throughout baseball that are throwing nasty stuff in the zone.”

Obviously not everyone’s stuff is as nasty as deGrom’s, and a lot of pitchers who do have great stuff have trouble consistently locating it. The trick will be working with each individual pitcher and figuring out how to get the most out of them.

“We’re going to try and maximize every single guy’s abilities, we’re going to get them to their ceilings and hopefully push through their ceilings,” Willard said. “That’s the goal, that’s what we can control right now and really push the envelope to where we’re getting guys who are throwing nasty stuff in the zone, and that’s what big league starters do.”

In the short-term and long-term, the Red Sox are counting on improvement from their young pitchers. Rather than invest significant money in outside reinforcements, the club has instead opted to roll with its emerging stable of young arms, betting that guys like Garrett Whitlock, Tanner Houck, Kutter Crawford and Josh Winckowski can take a step forward as starters, and that Bello can make the leap as an ace.

Red Sox pitcher Garrett Whitlock, shown during a June 1, 2022 game at Fenway Park, should be an important part of Boston’s pitching staff in 2024. (Staff Photo/Stuart Cahill/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)

Over the long haul, the Red Sox hope a bunch of others will soon emerge to join them in the big leagues, and ensuring that happens will largely fall on Willard, who despite the dour mood permeating the fanbase believes the future is bright and can’t wait to get started.

“I think this is an exciting time for the Boston Red Sox,” Willard said. “I think there are a lot of really cool pieces not only at the big league level but in the minor league system where if we’re doing our job right, we’re winning more big league baseball games.”

Wagner’s time will come

As joyful as Tuesday night was for newly elected Hall of Famers Adrian Beltre, Todd Helton and Joe Mauer, it was equally disappointing for longtime closer Billy Wagner, who fell five votes short of achieving immortality in Cooperstown.

The good news for Wagner is he shouldn’t have to wait much longer.

New York Mets closer Billy Wagner, left, and catcher Mike DiFelice celebrate the Mets’ 2-0 shutout of the Colorado Rockies, Sunday, Aug. 20, 2006 at Shea Stadium in New York. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

The overpowering left-hander will be on the ballot for the 10th and final time next winter, and after consistently gaining support these past few years and coming so close now, Wagner should be a safe bet to finally clear the 75% threshold. If and when that happens, it will be a long overdue and well deserved honor, as Wagner ranks among the best closers in history by virtually every metric.

A seven-time All-Star, Wagner recorded 422 saves over 16 seasons and posted a 2.31 ERA with 1,196 strikeouts over 903 career innings. He’s baseball’s all-time leader in strikeout rate (33.2%) and strikeouts per nine innings (11.9), and he also boasts a 187 career ERA+, which means he was 87% better than the league-average pitcher over that stretch. The only pitcher in modern history with better career ERA and ERA+ marks, not just relievers, was Mariano Rivera.

Overall there are eight relievers in the Hall of Fame, those being Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, Lee Smith, Dennis Eckersley, Rollie Fingers, Hoyt Wilhelm, Goose Gossage and Bruce Sutter. Wagner’s body of work measures up to all of them, and next year he should finally take his place alongside them in Cooperstown.

K-Rod have a case?

Interestingly, there is another longtime closer on the Hall of Fame ballot who hasn’t garnered nearly as much attention as Wagner. That fact was pointed out this past week by New Haven Register sportswriter Dave Borges, who asked why Wagner was getting 73.8% of the vote but Francisco Rodriguez only 7.8%?

Milwaukee Brewers relief pitcher Francisco Rodriguez looks down at his hand after Cincinnati Reds’ Billy Hamilton scored from third on a wild pitch during the ninth inning of a game Wednesday, April 22, 2015. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

The notion of closers being qualified for Cooperstown has always been somewhat polarizing, and Borges said he didn’t vote for either candidate, but it is curious that Rodriguez hasn’t gotten more support. His resume stacks up well against Wagner’s and he certainly belongs on the short list of the greatest closers of the 21st century after Rivera.

Over 16 seasons, Rodriguez recorded a 2.86 ERA with 1,142 strikeouts over 976 innings, and his 437 saves ranks fourth all-time. He is also a six-time All-Star, two-time Reliever of the Year and he owns MLB’s single-season record of 62 saves in a season, which he set in 2008.

Rodriguez also checks the postseason box, helping lead the Angels to their first and only World Series title as a rookie in 2002. That October he burst onto the scene as a 20-year-old wunderkind, earning himself one of the best nicknames (K-Rod) in recent baseball memory.

So why wouldn’t voters who aren’t altogether dismissive of closers in Cooperstown vote for Rodriguez? Though he had impressive production throughout his big league run, the second half of his career was notably more erratic than the first. He was also arrested twice following ugly incidents, one after he assaulted his girlfriend’s father in 2010 and the other after he was charged with domestic assault and battery on his fiancé in 2012. He plead guilty to third-degree assault in the first case, and the charges were dropped in the second.

Given how Wagner started at 10% his first year and polled at 17.9% as recently as 2019, it’s not impossible Rodriguez could enjoy a similar surge as time goes on. Hopefully once Wagner’s fate is decided, voters can give Rodriguez’s candidacy the full accounting it deserves, which should hopefully help clarify what exactly constitutes a Hall of Fame closer and whether current guys like Kenley Jansen and Craig Kimbrel measure up when their time on the ballot comes.