Getting sent off is just part of the business of sports. If you want to work in this industry, you have to come to terms with the idea that you could be fired at almost any time, sometimes due to circumstances beyond your control — a key player gets hurt, a promising rebuilding venture outside doesn’t pan out, your owner is an egomaniac. Ordinary things.
Chaim Bloom’s tenure as president of baseball operations for the Red Sox ended Thursday after four years, with one playoff appearance, two last-place finishes and a 73-72 record this year that left them well behind the three AL East contenders. Bloom’s major league moves have been a mixed bag, but the team’s offense is a strength and they have a very strong group of prospects at the upper secondary positions. If he is fired for on-field reasons, it has to do with pitching, and much of the reason for poor pitching goes back to the system before Bloom took over, and to the Red Sox owners’ sudden conversion to poor crying Dean. .
It seems fairly easy to diagnose what went wrong with Boston this year: They gave up too many runs. They’re sitting at 4.88 points allowed per game on Bloom’s dismissal day, which ranks 12th in the American League, well below average and average, and they’re surrounded by non-contenders, even behind the Tigers, who have lost two key games. I have been injured since I started reading this article. Even with Brian Bellew’s success, their starters still rank 12th in ERA and 13th in fWAR in the American League, while their relief corps is 10th in ERA but fifth in fWAR because they have thrown more innings than any other bullpen except Oakland – So far, 596, over four innings per game.
The team entered the year planning to contend, or at least they say they planned to do so, with a rotation that included a couple of players who went from relief to starter (Cooter Crawford, who was very good, and Garrett Whitlock, who returned in relief), two guys who wouldn’t Lloyd’s of London secures two arms at all costs (Chris Sale, who started the year on the injured list, and James Paxton, who will end it there), and a pitcher who has never been able to get lefties out (Tanner Houck). They brought Nick Pivetta back on a one-year deal for some depth, but had to demote him to a comfortable level in mid-May. Bellew and Crawford have been bright spots, but those two guys are not a contending rotation, and I don’t think it was reasonable for the Red Sox to think this group of seven starters would produce above-average work for them.
How did they get to this point? Bloom’s predecessor, Dave Dombrowski, brought the team a World Series in 2018, but that process stripped away a lot of long-term wideouts and saddled the club with some bad contracts. The Chris Sale trade worked in the short term, but the decision to sign him to a five-year extension in March 2019 was a fiasco, as he blew out his elbow that same year and has thrown just 135 innings since the extension began in 2020, with one year and 27.5 million remaining. dollar. That same deal also cost the team Michael Kopech, who also had Tommy John after the trade but has pitched more and more effectively than Sale since both returned to the mound in 2021.
Bloom inherited a roster that included a healthy and effective starter under contract in 2020, Nate Eovaldi, who was actually pretty bad in 2019 but gave the team 7 WAR over the next three years of his contract before leaving as a free agent. He traded two replacement level relievers for Nick Pivetta in the pandemic summer, and since the deal got 7 wars of right-handers between the rotation and the bullpen, it’s probably Bloom’s best move in terms of results, despite whoever was responsible for nabbing Garrett Whitlock The 2020 draft Article 5 deserves a significant increase. He signed Michael Wacha to a year and $7 million, getting a 3+ WAR for it, signed Martin Perez to two one-year deals, and had two reliable seasons of innings.
These are all great moves on the sidelines, signing or trading for starting back-end types to flesh out the rotation or provide bulk for the bullpen, but in no time has Bloom — or ownership — gone out and gotten a big free agent start. , or trade for one, and the farm system has not produced pitching either, although it has continued to produce position players and will continue to do so. Over the past three years, combined, only three Boston pitchers have produced 3+ rWAR in a season: Eovaldi in 2021 (4.3), Wacha in 2022 (3.3), and Bello this year (3.8 so far). Pivetta is the only other player in Boston in that era to have a 2-WAR season. The Sox have lacked quality starters, and it’s hard to deal with that kind of run-prevention problem even if you score a lot of runs.
The farm system has taken a sharp turn for the better this year, with a strong draft in July of this year, a big step forward for second-round pick Roman Anthony last year, and some smaller breakthroughs or returns to form from other players in the system. However, they didn’t have any pitchers in the system who they projected would be more than a fifth baseman in the major leagues when I ranked their projections in February, and that remains true.
It seems like an obvious strategic choice from the top, as they took only one pitcher in the first three rounds with Bloom overseeing baseball operations and gave no pitchers more than $600,000 in bonuses, while in international free agency, they followed the same philosophy, at $450,000. This is the largest amount they have given to any pitcher in the past three seasons. Pitchers are more dangerous as a class, of course, with elbow injury rates at or near all-time highs, but you can’t just send Iron Mike out there and hope for the best.
However, many of Bloom’s high-profile decisions did not pan out. The $105 million commitment to Masataka Yoshida produced 0.7 fWAR, as he was one of the worst outfielders in baseball this year and did not stop his offensive performance after a hitting streak early in the season; He hit just .251/.281/.396 in the second half and the Red Sox were increasingly giving him days off, pitting him against lefties like Framber Valdez and Julio Urias. Stories last winter and spring of Boston outbidding other teams by $20 million or more can’t help Bloom’s cause.
Allowing Xander Bogaerts to walk seems to have been a smart decision so far as Bogaerts had his worst year since 2017, but signing Trevor Story has also been a disaster between injuries and poor performance at the plate, and he is under contract for four more years. It’s fair to say that ownership may have restricted Bloom’s ability to go out and improve the team’s pitching while also saying that his biggest moves as a free agent didn’t pan out. (The Mookie Betts deal is a deal in itself, and I think Bloom should have taken a huge discount on the return because everyone knew he had to deal with Betts.)
But that’s the way it is for major free agents, which is in contrast to the way John Henry and Co. have run the Red Sox since they first acquired the team twenty years ago. There are only two players on Boston’s roster this year who were signed as free agents to two-year deals, Yoshida and Story. They haven’t been swimming as deep in the free agent pool since Bloom got the job, and have been more eager to shed salary — trading Mookie Betts rather than signing him to an extension, which I’d say didn’t work out for Boston — than maintaining a payroll that matches Their revenue or spending history. To blame Bloom or O’Halloran for the sudden asceticism of the very well-off ownership group seems to miss the point. This Red Sox team could have been a lot better if they had just gone out and spent some money on some pitching.
Where they go from here will tell us a lot about ownership’s commitment to winning. They could stay internal with a candidate like Vice President of Scouting Mike Ricard, who was the director of scouting when the team drafted Triston Casas, Jaren Duran, Cotter Crawford, Andrew Benintendi, and Tanner Hauck; Or Executive Vice President/Assistant General Manager Eddie Romero, who was the team’s international director when they signed or agreed to sign Rafael Devers, Yoan Moncada, Brian Mata, Siddan Rafaela and Brian Bello. Both are longtime Red Sox executives with strong track records in evaluation and leadership, with each overseeing a major department for several years during their tenures.
They could look to someone like James Click, who was once Bloom’s teammate in Tampa, but had meanwhile been the general manager of the Astros and led them to a World Series win just a year earlier. Or they could try to recycle a famous name to get headlines and win the offseason, so to speak, which might work if it also meant loosening the purse strings so they could start promoting, but it would also mean to me that they’re less serious about… In dispute over the long term, which is where this team sat in the Theo Epstein era and a few years later.
They’re the Boston Bleeping Red Sox, and it’s time for them to start acting like one again.
(Photo: Billy Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images)
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