Who is he and where does he come from?
He’s Abraham Toro — THE BULL! — and he comes from Canada. Specificially, he comes from French Canada — Sacrebleu! Il est LE TAUREAU! — and the city of Longeuil, which sits directly across the St. Lawrence from central Montreal. From Montreal, Toro went on to play baseball at Seminole Junior College in Oklahoma, which seems like a weird move for a French-Canadian ballplayer to make, except that it’s also the exact same path fellow Quebecois Eric Gagne took. In fact, Toro, Gagne, and Russell Martin all attended the same high school, Polyvalente Édouard-Montpetit, Montreal’s amateur baseball powerhouse.
The Red Sox just signed him to a minor league contract with a non-roster invite to Spring Training.
What position does he play?
In the big leagues he’s mostly divided his time between second and third, with a little first base thrown in there and some spare appearances in the outfield. Throughout his entire 882-game professional career across the minors and majors, he’s only played 10 innings at shortstop, so don’t expect him to get thrown into the mix there. C’est ne pas un shortstop.
Is he any good?
Umm, he’s a pretty decent little baserunner, I guess? With above-average sprint speed and a knack for taking extra bases? But it’s hard to get excited about decent little baserunners — especially ones who, despite their above-average speed, aren’t real base-stealing threats.
Toro, unfortunately, just hasn’t shown the world anything to get too excited about on a baseball diamond. After 365 big league games with four different teams, his career line sits at just .220/.285/.353 with 34 homers and 14 stolen bases. Defensively, he isn’t any kind of wizard, and the Astros even briefly tried to move him to catcher as he worked his way up through the minors.
What Toro is good at is putting the ball in play. He’s a switch hitter who makes a lot of contact, controls the strike zone, and is hard to strike out. Unfortunately, the ball just doesn’t do much when he does make contact. Maybe the Red Sox think they can unlock something in his swing. It certainly looks like there should be some power in his 223lb frame.
Show me a cool highlight.
One of the great things about baseball is that, because there’s so much of it, even players who’ve had otherwise forgettable careers can still get to experience some special moments on the field. For Le Taureau, his special moment came on June 27, 2021. Toro woke up that day as a member of the Houston Astros and was probably feeling pretty good about things, having homered in back-to-back games. But, while he was warming up to play against the Mariners, the Astros traded him to the Mariners. Toro switched uniforms and then entered that night’s game as a pinch-hitter in the ninth, whereupon he homered for the third day in a row. Toro became the first player in MLB history to homer for a team and then against that team in consecutive games, and then he topped it all off by hitting another sockdolager the next day.
What’s he doing in his picture up there?
Celebrating with teammates after winning the Seattle Mariners Annual Poutine Cook-Off in 2022.
What’s his role on the 2025 Red Sox?
Well, here’s what the third base/second base depth chart currently looks like for the Red Sox:
- Rafael Devers
- Vaughn Grissom
- David Hamilton
- Romy Gonzalez
- Ceddanne Rafaela
- Nick Sogard
- Kristian Campbell
- Marcelo Mayer
Campbell and Mayer are not yet on the 40-man roster and they likely won’t be put on the 40-man until the Red Sox decide it’s time for them to play every day in the big leagues. So we can slot Toro in there with Nick Sogard. What this means is that, if you see Toro in a Red Sox uniform at any point in 2025, either he’s completely turned himself into a different hitter, or something has gone seriously wrong.
