Chaim Bloom’s Time as Boston’s Fall Guy Has Ended
Imagine trading Mookie Betts. Chaim Bloom must have done that, must have considered all of the angles and potential outcomes of such a move, including the possibility that he would be saddled with it as his legacy — then sold principal owner John Henry on a vision of the Red Sox without the superstar right fielder in order to be hired as the team’s chief baseball officer in October 2019. That trade has not worked out well for the Red Sox, who have made the playoffs just once since winning the 2018 World Series, behaving more like a mid-market franchise than the league’s third-most valuable one. And while Bloom had put something of a stamp on the post-Betts roster, the rest of his vision will not be realized. On Thursday, the Red Sox fired him, kicking off a search for new leadership of their baseball operations department for the fourth time since Theo Epstein departed for the Cubs in October 2011.
Unlike predecessors Ben Cherington (2011–15) and Dave Dombrowski (2015–19), Bloom didn’t win a championship during his run to offset the team’s disappointing seasons. On his watch, the Red Sox went just 267–262 from the start of the pandemic-shortened 2020 season to the point of his dismissal, becoming more notable for their belt-tightening than for their on-field success. They made the playoffs only in 2021, when they went 92–70, finishing second in the AL East, then beating the Yankees in the Wild Card Game and the Rays in the Division Series before losing to the Astros in the ALCS. They finished last in the division in both 2020 (24–36) and ’22 (78–84) and fired Bloom while tied for fourth with the Yankees at 73–72, with just a 0.3% chance of making the playoffs.
If the Bloom era needed to end with a whimper, Tuesday’s doubleheader sweep by the Yankees at Fenway Park will suffice. With the Red Sox trailing by a run in the opener and down to their final two outs, they drew three straight walks to load the bases against Yankees closer Clay Holmes. Up came Alex Verdugo, the centerpiece of the return from the Dodgers in the Betts deal. Holmes served up a 97-mph sinker in the middle of the zone on the first pitch, and Verdugo… hit a routine grounder to second for a game-ending double play. The 27-year-old outfielder didn’t play in the nightcap, because he doesn’t hit lefties very well and has slumped lately. Oy vey.
In a statement, Henry thanked Bloom for his efforts, praising “his professionalism, integrity, and an unwavering respect for our club and its legacy.” The team additionally announced that Brian O’Halloran, who has worked for the Red Sox since 2002 and served as the general manager under Bloom since October ’19, would no longer fill that role but “has been offered a new senior leadership position within the baseball operations department.” He has yet to accept the new title, but in the interim, he’ll direct the team’s day-to-day operations above assistant general managers Eddie Romero, Raquel Ferreira, and Michael Groopman.
During an afternoon press conference, CEO Sam Kennedy ruled out a return from Epstein, who left the Cubs after the 2020 season and currently works for Major League Baseball’s commissioner’s office as a consultant for on-field matters. Names such as former Astros GM James Click (like Bloom, an alumnus of Yale, Baseball Prospectus, and the Rays), Josh Byrnes, Mike Hazen, and Sam Fuld — all of whom have past Red Sox connections — and even manager Alex Cora have surfaced as candidates for either the GM role or the one above it, but all of this is initial industry speculation ahead of an upcoming search that Kennedy characterized as a broad one. Via the New England Sports Network, in response to a question asked by colleague David Laurila:
“It’s very early days to be talking about specifics when it comes to a candidate at the end of the day,” Kennedy said, as seen on NESN. “We need leadership. These are big operations. We need leadership that can help continue to build the organization from the bottom up, can continue to promote and expand processies, procedures, medical, analytics, keeping up with this ever-changing game. Leadership that is focused on winning at the big-league level. It’s something we’ve all been trying to do for the last several years, and that will be the mandate going forward.”
…“I think a lot gets made of individual baseball philosophy and how they think about the game,” Kennedy said. “I would just say we’re committed to bringing the next group of leadership to take us back where we belong.”
As for the outgoing head: Bloom joined the Red Sox as a 36-year-old who was considered one of the brightest up-and-coming executives in the industry. He’d spent 15 seasons with the Rays, working in a variety of capacities since joining the organization as an intern in 2005. He received a thorough education in their front office, first working in player development, and methodically climbed all the way to senior vice president of baseball operations, second in command under president of baseball operations Matthew Silverman. While he had interviewed for the general manager positions of the Phillies, Brewers, Twins, Giants, and Mets, he had never headed a baseball ops department.
Bloom’s experience in helping to build successful teams on shoestring budgets no doubt made him an attractive candidate to Henry and the Fenway Sports Group. The Red Sox carried the game’s highest payrolls in both 2018, when they won 108 games and their fourth World Series in 15 seasons, and ’19, when they sank to 84–78. They had paid the Competitive Balance Tax in four of the previous five seasons (all but 2017) when they parted ways with Dombrowski in September 2019 over what Henry characterized as differing opinions on building for the future.
By that point, the Red Sox had backed themselves into a corner, payroll-wise. In the wake of the championship, Dombrowski allowed closer Craig Kimbrel and setup man Joe Kelly to depart via free agency, then failed to retool the bullpen, which largely scuffled during the 2019 season. At the same time, long-term extensions for Xander Bogaerts and Chris Sale, signed in the spring of 2019, had pushed their payroll past $240 million for CBT purposes, just shy of the third tier of penalties. That figure didn’t even include a full-blown salary for Betts, who after winning MVP honors reportedly rebuffed an offer for a 10-year, $300 million extension during that offseason (he has since denied receiving such an offer).
Less than two weeks after Bloom was hired, slugger J.D. Martinez chose not to opt out of the three years and $62.5 million remaining on his five-year deal. Henry and his Fenway Sports Group partners, already perceived as being more engaged with Liverpool in the English Premier League than with their baseball team, became more concerned about cutting payroll than upgrading the roster. Thus the Red Sox committed less than $20 million to free agents that winter, with Martín Pérez, Mitch Moreland, and Kevin Pillar their “big-ticket” expenditures. Particularly once Betts was set to make $27 million, a record for an arbitration-eligible player, and then test free agency, ownership’s mandate to trade him for something more valuable than a compensation pick was clear, as was Bloom’s casting in the role of the organization’s fall guy.
On February 4, 2020, the Red Sox agreed to a three-team deal involving the Dodgers and Twins, though medical concerns over the health of Brusdar Graterol, who was supposed to move from the Twins to the Red Sox, scuttled that configuration and turned it into a pair of two-team trades pivoting around the Dodgers. The Red Sox sent Betts, David Price, and $48 million (half of Price’s remaining $96 million over three seasons) to Los Angeles in exchange for Verdugo, a former top-50 prospect who had just completed a solid rookie season with the Dodgers, as well as catcher Connor Wong and infielder Jeter Downs, both of whom had finished 2019 in Double-A; the latter placed 47th on our Top 100 Prospects list the following spring.
While Betts signed a $365 million extension with the Dodgers shortly before the 2020 season finally opened, then led the team to its first championship since 1988, Boston’s returns on the deal have been underwhelming. Downs played just 14 games for the Red Sox, all in 2022, but was lost to the Nationals via waivers after the season (he only briefly surfaced this year). Wong has emerged as a solid backstop this year, worth 0.9 WAR in his age-27 season. Verdugo has been inconsistent at best, totaling 7.4 WAR with a 107 wRC+ and playing regularly for four seasons. He played well enough to receive down-ballot MVP votes in 2020, producing 1.9 WAR, but it’s taken three years for him to surpass the 2.1 he posted with the Dodgers in 2019. He’s at 2.4 thus far this season, but has been benched twice, once for a lack of hustle running into a critical out and once for showing up late, apparently not for the first time.
On the one hand, you could argue that the Red Sox did adequately in exchange for one year of control over Betts, whom Bloom could not unilaterally sign to the megadeal he clearly merited. That ignores the possibility of the team finding a middle ground to keep the franchise face and future Hall of Famer by paying him market value as he hit free agency after his age-27 season. Nobody would have faulted the Red Sox for overpaying to keep such a dynamic and charismatic player, even if the back end of the deal wasn’t pretty. Ownership used Bloom as a shield to avoid that outcome.
The burden of trading Betts wasn’t the only thing Bloom inherited upon taking the Red Sox job. Soon after his hiring, Major League Baseball launched an investigation into allegations of illegal electronic sign-stealing by the 2018 team, tainting their championship. Though commissioner Rob Manfred’s investigation did not uncover the same level of sophisticated skullduggery as in the efforts of the Astros, Cora was suspended for the 2020 season; he resigned and was replaced by bench coach Ron Roenicke. Sale, who had already missed the last six weeks of 2019 due to injuries, lost all of ’20 due to Tommy John surgery and hasn’t been the same since, managing just 28 starts and 2.6 WAR in three seasons.
Between Sale’s decline, other injuries, a tightfisted approach to free agency, and unremarkable returns from the nearly-barren farm system Bloom inherited (the team was dead last on The Board in 2019, more on which below), the Red Sox have particularly lagged in the starting pitching department. For the 2020–23 period, their 42.2 WAR is 21st in the majors. Nathan Eovaldi’s 7.6 WAR leads the pack, with 5.7 of it coming in 2021, but he departed via free agency after last season. Nick Pivetta, acquired from the Phillies in August 2020, is second at 5.2, and homegrown Tanner Houck is third with 4.6 WAR; nobody else has reached 4.0, and nobody has reached 2.0 in either of the past two seasons. That’s not going to drive many playoff appearances.
Under Bloom, the Red Sox have fallen in payroll rankings, rarely venturing into the deep end of the free agent pool.
| Season | Actual | Rank | CBT | Rank | POBO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $230.4 | 1 | $239.5 | 1 | Dombrowski |
| 2019 | $228.4 | 1 | $243.7 | 1 | Dombrowski |
| 2020 | $64.3* | 13 | $184.9 | 8 | Bloom |
| 2021 | $187.4 | 6 | $207.6 | 6 | Bloom |
| 2022 | $217.1 | 6 | $236.1 | 6 | Bloom |
| 2023 | $198.8 | 11 | $223.9 | 11 | Bloom |
* = prorated. Yellow = exceeded Competitive Balance Tax threshold.
Their biggest expenditures following the 2020 disappointment were Enrique Hernández (two years and $14 million) and Garrett Richards (one year, $10 million). After the 2021 season, the Red Sox signed Trevor Story to a six-year, $140 million deal; he’s been beset by injuries since then, including a torn UCL, and has played just 124 games in two seasons. Their next-largest deals of that offseason went to James Paxton (two years, $10 million while rehabbing from April 2021 Tommy John surgery), Jake Diekman (two years, $8 million, but flipped at that year’s deadline for backup catcher Reese McGuire and relief prospect Taylor Broadway) and Michael Wacha (one year, $7 million).
The Sox were much more aggressive this past season, albeit mainly with short-term deals to grizzled players. They paid a $15.4 million posting fee to the NPB’s Orix Buffaloes for Masataka Yoshida, then signed him to a five-year, $90 million deal. Also inked were Kenley Jansen (two years, $32 million), Justin Turner (two years, $21.7 million), Chris Martin (two years, $17.5 million), Corey Kluber (one year, $10 million), and Adam Duvall (one year, $7 million). All but Yoshida are in their age-34 seasons or older, and none has delivered more than Duvall’s 2.0 WAR; Turner, Martin, and Paxton are in the 1–2 WAR range, Yoshida has produced just 0.7 WAR due to shaky defense (though B-Ref has him at 1.4 WAR), and Kluber is both on the injured list and below replacement level.
Those moves did not take the sting off losing Bogaerts to free agency after he opted out of the final three years and $60 million of his contract last fall. The Red Sox don’t appear to have made much effort to keep him by reportedly offering a four-year, $90 million deal last spring — as in, one additional year and $30 million — to forgo opting out. The team was said to have proposed six years and $160 million once he reached free agency, but the Padres blew that offer out of the water with their 11-year, $280 million deal. The team did finally complete a deal with a foundational homegrown player this past January by signing Rafael Devers to a 10-year, $313.5 million extension covering his ages 27–36 seasons, but from a goodwill standpoint, that’s at best a Band-Aid after losing Betts and Bogaerts.
If so much of the high profile stuff of Bloom’s tenure was often uninspiring, his rebuilding of the team’s farm system stands out as a significant positive, particularly considering its decrepit state when he took over. Prospect evaluation and valuation is of course an inexact science, but this picture is encouraging:
| Period | 2019 | 2019U | 2020 | 2020U | 2021 | 2021U | 2022 | 2022U | 2023 | 2023U |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Value | $56M | $96M | $114M | $152M | $204M | $242M | $259M | $245M | $282M | $242M |
| Rank | 30 | 30 | 29 | 23 | 18 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 5 | 3 |
| Top 100 List | 0 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
Triston Casas, the team’s 2018 first-round pick, and Downs were the organization’s only Top 100 prospects until mid-’21; the latter washed out, but the former has overcome a rocky start to deliver a pretty good rookie season (129 wRC+, 1.7 WAR). The returns from the drafts Bloom has overseen have yet to come to fruition; 2020 first-round pick Nick Yorke, a second baseman, fell from 29th on the ’22 Top 100 to 102nd this year, but ’21 first-round pick Marcelo Mayer, a shortstop, was 18th this spring. He, Casas (29th this spring), 2021 international signing Miguel Bleis (20th), and ’17 international signing Ceddanne Rafaela (49th) all cracked this year’s Top 100 and are now among the top 31 on The Board. None of the team’s 2022 or ’23 draftees has reached the Top 100 yet, though three of the former and two of the latter number among Boston’s eight prospects in the 45 or 45+ FV category on The Board.
Bloom won’t be around to reap the benefits of those prospects’ production, mainly because the big club’s sluggish performance didn’t buy him enough time. It’s yet another unfair aspect of the thankless job he was hired to do. Perhaps his tenure will receive some credit for its contributions to a future championship in Boston the way Cherington did for his additions to the 2018 team. And perhaps Bloom will find success at the helm of another organization; he’s too bright a baseball mind, and too well-regarded within the industry, not to get another shot. But until then, and for perhaps even longer, Bloom will be remembered as The Guy Who Traded Mookie Betts, and that’s a tough tag to wear.
Brooklyn-based Jay Jaffe is a senior writer for FanGraphs, the author of The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) and the creator of the JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) metric for Hall of Fame analysis. He founded the Futility Infielder website (2001), was a columnist for Baseball Prospectus (2005-2012) and a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated (2012-2018). He has been a recurring guest on MLB Network and a member of the BBWAA since 2011, and a Hall of Fame voter since 2021. Follow him on BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.
Yeah, kind of sucks for Bloom that he will likely be forever remembered as the guy who traded Mookie Betts. A lot of that blame should fall on the ownership, as they made the decision to cut payroll. But, the return for Betts has been really really underwhelming, which likely won’t help Bloom’s future reputation.
As a Red Sox fan and a frequent critic of Bloom, I agree that trading Mookie is 100% on the ownership. They were looking to move David Price before his 10-and-5 no-trade rights vested, and the Dodgers were more than happy to give Sox ownership that additional payroll relief to land Mookie.
And with that as the backdrop, I wasn’t surprised that the return was mediocre. Maybe you fault Bloom for not taking Graterol as part of the package, but even that’s just splitting hairs.
Maybe they never said he had to do it. But it is obvious they hired him specifically because he told them what they wanted to hear–that they could get below the tax line immediately and it was okay to trade Betts and they could win the world series and have a more consistent team without going above the tax line. So it is Bloom’s fault, sort of. But the Red Sox were going to keep looking for someone until they found a person willing to do it.
Trading Betts because the ownership wanted to cut payroll is an incredible and probably inaccurate oversimplification. The main issue was that by re-signing Sale and Eovaldi, as well as extending Bogaerts two years before Betts was due to become a FA, there was no way the team could also bid for Betts (with no guarantee of landing him) without incurring multiple years of stiff CBT penalties if they were successful. The timing (should BOS have put their payroll on hold for two years for only the opportunity to bid on Betts? they decided not to) and Betts’s insistence on waiting until FA (obviously his right) essentially signed his ticket out of town. The CBT system works! Parity prevails! LAD fans, rejoice!
I’m just not sure how much better they could have done if we assume that Price’s dead weight had to be tied to any deal. I don’t think a 60 FV prospect was ever going to be on the table
Trading a superstar with only one year left is a recipe for a crap sandwich. The fanbase expects you’re going to get every star prospect in the world (and that they’re all going to pan out) because you traded Mookie Freaking Betts. But the reality is that no one’s going to give you tons for one year, and even if they do the guys you traded for might not pan out.
Short version: a lot of things have to go right to make trading a guy with one year left worth it. Maybe it’s better to just play it out.
I think it’s really hard to measure what hurt Bloom’s reputation took (or _will_ take) with the Betts trade…
There is simply no way to trade a generational talent and get back a positive return and even keeping Graterol in the deal doesn’t change that much.
I was/am a Bloom supporter and think he did a fine job getting the Sox ship right. But to me, it isn’t the moves Bloom made, it’s the ones he didn’t make that were the problem. It has become very clear over the past 2 years that he is just too passive, too indecisive and too risk-averse to be running a team like the Red Sox. I think being patient and not doing something just for the sake of it is the correct move 9/10 times. But you need to be aggressive and take a risky bet sometimes, but it seems like Bloom was never willing to do that. For the last 2 years the feeling I have had is waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it never dropped. His big additions were Story and Yoshida, who have been fine at best. Other than that it was just sort of wait and see mode. You can do that for a few years but not 4.
Yep exactly. He also botched the tax situation last year by adding Pham and not moving Martinez or Eovaldi when the Sox clearly weren’t cut out for a deep run. He seems similar to Cherington – solid at building a farm but botched the big signings and was too risk averse to walk the fine line of rebuilding whilst putting forth a competitive product.
He lost me going forward with that incomprehensibly dumb sequence of events at that deadline. I couldn’t have dreamt up a move to piss off every FG reading sox fan more than trading for Hosmer.
I can’t fathom people remembering him as the “guy who traded Mookie.” I mean, they will, of course. But it seems so unfair as to be ridiculous. He pretty clearly had little to no choice in the matter and got a decent enough return for a year of him.
Well, you can’t expect mainstream Red Sox/baseball fans (whatever that would even mean) to be rational about it.
This is a real head scratcher from ownership that has seemed to understand how the game works in the past. The only way I could have seen them speed up a rebuild would be to “buy” prospects like the Mets just did with Gilbert and Acuna or somehow move the team to the AL Central.
The Original Sin really does come down to using Mookie freaking Betts to salary dump Price, rather than pursuing separate trades to maximize the return.
Even if they had to include a couple lottery tickets to move half of Price’s salary in a separate deal, you need to get more than Verdugo and Downs for a player (and person) of Betts’ caliber.
Amen to all that. Heck, if they added a lottery ticket to Price to dump him for another, slightly less pricey guy that would have been great. The concern with Price was probably his impending 10/5 no-trade status.
Heck, maybe THAT would have been the time for Boston to take Hosmer off the Padres’ hands 😉
And just kept Betts until FA. Verdugo was a fairly highly regarded prospect but not someone worth even a year of Betts to an aspiring contender
There’s no such thing as an original sin.
It’s a common expression.
Context clues should help you figure it out.
I’m not angry
Typical Red Sox fan – blaming the wrong guy. The real problem is still firmly entrenched in the organization and will be for many years to come. Chaim didn’t fail Mookie Betts. John Henry and company did. John Henry is responsible for trading for trading the best player the team has developed since Yaz. The ownership group deserves all the worst results in perpetuity
Some people can’t be bothered to realize they’re being fooled. Like a Rhino, they charge at whoever is in their way.
John Henry being a disengaged owner who’s more focused on the EPL than the Red Sox doesn’t actually make Bloom any less incompetent.
I mean…I’m a Yankees fan, haha!
Henry/FSG bear the brunt of the responsibility for the mandate to cut payroll in the first place.
Chaim Bloom fucked up the execution of that mandate by using Betts to salary dump Price, rather than pursing separate trades.
These statements are not in conflict.
And who put Chaim in that position? He took the role. He knew what he was facing down. You know, the whole, “trying” and “working” bits are on him I guess. Do you remember what the reception even was at the time of the trade? Look at it without the benefit of hindsight backing you.
The Red Sox received 2 prospects with real value at the time and a perceived solid everyday regular in that outfield. According to prospect reports and and ZiPS projections, that was fair value considering the situation. Chaim did a good job in securing the deal. It’s even more impressive considering he had to quash the Graterol after agreeing to it.
Verdugo wasn’t as good as everyone thought, and the prospects didn’t work out. Baseball is not the most predictable game. These things happen. Chaim still got what he could. He made some mistakes in Boston, but the Mookie Betts deal is not one of them. The greater point is that the Red Sox, with all their riches and the makeup of the team, should never, ever, ever be trading a player as good and as young as Mookie Betts. It is almost entirely an error on the part of ownership. They’re the ones who tightened up. You could maybe say it’s on Dave Dombrowski too, but Dave is who he is. He comes in, spends big, and gets results. Ownership should have known what they were dealing with in him. If you’re bringing him in, be prepared to pay your best players, including a guy who is far and away the 2nd best player in baseball since he promoted to the majors.
Chaim put himself in that position, by accepting the job, knowing he would be asked to trade Betts and Price.
The assessments at the time were “This is a fine return, given that they decided to dump Price well.”
But, when executing this task, Bloom made the decision to trade them in a single deal, rather than separate ones.
They absolutely could have chosen to dump Price separately in order to maximize the return for Mookie.
Instead, Bloom chose quantity over quality.
Every single person put in that role would have been forced to make a similar deal, and if you can’t get that through your thick head, there’s no helping you
Hahahahaha.
Okay, champ.
I’m sure David Price’s contract is also why Bloom signed Story, then lowballed Bogaerts, then didn’t trade Bogaerts at the last deadline.
God forbid a 40 year old man be treated as an adult responsible for his own decisions 😂
You can hold him accountable for anything else. This deal though? That’s like blaming the laborer when the boss tells them to wrongly nuke a project.
You seem very confident things could have gone better in Chaim’s slot, so why don’t you apply for the new opening in Boston? I’m sure our esteemed FG commenter could have gotten a much better deal. Mookie Betts, David Price, and Chris Sale for Max Scherzer, Juan Soto, and Trea Turner, right? Who says no?
When you’ve devolved to the point of appeals to authority and inventing hypothetical trade suggestions in a desperate attempt to “win” an internet argument…it might be time for bed, sweetie.
When was this ever an argument? You’ve presented only a raging, girthy hate boner for the former Boston executive.
Betts made $27M in arbitration that year and Price was owed $64M/2, half of which the Red Sox ate.
Literally zero teams wanted Price at that price. There are plenty of cheap teams that wouldn’t have wanted Betts even on a short term deal that big.
So you would have needed 2 teams willing to take on that money and one of them had to be willing to take Price knowing they would get little or nothing out of him. That really whittles down the available trading partners. On top of that, whoever is taking Price can pretty much dictate terms on what pieces of value come with him, so you need someone who’s needs match what you have available. The market for Price was probably very few teams.
Even a three team deal with Price going to LA and Betts going somewhere else just results in LA getting all the prospects in that deal and the Red Sox getting very little.
Thank you for the article. FSG is at the heart of this. I grew up a Sox fan but the Betts trade was the end. I have been so angry at them from the moment they traded Mookie because they are lying to us and calling us stupid. They choose to increase profits and win less. This is the Boston Red Sox not Baltimore or Cincinnati. Sox fans should not stand for it.
Well, transfer fees in the EPL aren’t getting lower!
Fair or not, Bloom will always be remembered as that guy who traded Mookie. Seemed his fate from the moment he got there. We’ll probably never learn the true story of what led up to the trade. It has been well-chronicled, and often with conflicting details.
According to this ESPN story from last winter, it was Bloom’s decision to trade Mookie, as the best way to get under the luxury tax threshold and create better position to build an annual winner from. (And of course by packaging Price with him)
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/35265339/mlb-free-agency-red-sox-xander-bogaerts-rafael-devers
Problem is, the annual winner thing didn’t happen. Nice run in 2021 thanks to Hernandez impersonating Babe Ruth in the postseason
I said this somewhere else too, but there is a reason why Bloom was hired. It wasn’t because they knew he would listen to their mandates. It was because they didn’t have to mandate him to get under the tax. It was because they were on the same page about what to do. I don’t think anybody was eager to trade Mookie Betts, but everyone had the same view of the situation.
I have a lot of thoughts about this, and I am sure I will eventually get around to all of them in various comments.
But I keep thinking that this might be the worst fit between front office approach and a team’s fanbase that I’ve ever seen.
Bloom wasn’t exactly the best in the league. He wasn’t the worst either, but he definitely wasn’t the best. But even if he had managed to make the playoffs this year, the style of decision-making, where every player is fungible and you constantly switch out long-time players…that’s not how Red Sox fans work. Turning over the entire roster every year on short term contracts is jarring for any fan base much less ones that get this attached to their long-time players. It only worked for the Rays fans because (1) they were so horrible before and (2) because fans who wouldn’t tolerate the Rays’ approach are no longer Rays fans. Red Sox fans are on the opposite side of things. They have “their guys”, and while you can trade some of them or let some of them go in free agency this level of turnover was never going to go over well. Red Sox fans get more attached to their players than any fanbase I think I’ve seen.
Like, I know why someone might think Bloom might be a good fit as the top guy in an organization. But I can’t understand why the Red Sox ownership thought this was going to work. They would have had to reach the ALCS at least twice, maybe even three times for Red Sox fans to tolerate this.
I agree with your take. I’m a Red Sox fan, and it’s important to most of us to have regular star players we can cheer on and be our identity. Also its ok to do a teardown rebuild. I was all set for a rebuild after 2019, but Bloom tried too hard to compete just enough to keep Red Sox on the periphery of playoff conversations, while rebuilding just enough, to attempt progress in both current and long-term.
By doing so, he created a kinda dull team that lacked steady star power, except for Devers, and Bloom for some reason seemed to ignore real glaring issues with the pitching staff, that were fixable issues. That’s not an ownership didn’t spend situation, either. Bloom just chose to spend on other positions. I got why he signed Kluber, he had 3 WAR the prior season, but doing that and not adding anyone else to that rotation backfired, big-time. I think if he had signed say, Bassitt, and added a middle infielder in the wake of the Story injury in the winter, he’d probably still have a job today.
Cardinals fans, but you’re point is still 100% valid.
I agree the BFIB types do seem like the type to get annoyed by those moves. But we probably won’t know for sure. Maybe if the Cardinals fire Mozeliak and hire Bloom (or someone like him) we will get a chance to find out. That would be hilarious if Bloom landed with the Cardinals, although it does seem unlikely that he would get a chance to run another prestige franchise so soon.
The last superstar Cardinal to be traded was…I don’t know. Keith Hernandez? Pujols got so much money from the Angels, the fans seemed to blame him more than the organization. Then they won a pennant a year later
I still remember when he traded Vazquez at the deadline but then also traded for Pham. That was probably the moment that most Red Sox fans started seriously questioning what was going on. The funny thing was, that was actually a good move in the abstract. The outfield was terrible except for Verdugo.
So Bloom figured, if we are getting zero production out of a position, why does it have to be the outfield? Why can’t it be catcher? Let’s swap out the catcher and swap in the outfielder. The team won’t be any worse, and we will pick up some prospects along the way. That’s good business sense, but it’s a terrible signal to the fans. Vazquez had 2500 PAs for the team and who was playing well, so if you’re trading him and picking him some other guy, most fans aren’t going to like the actual reason why.
The thing I will always remember about Chaim Bloom and his run with the Red Sox was that he would seek out virtually every opportunity to bring in a player who had failed spectacularly or was hurt the prior year but had a longer track record before it. Luis Urias was the latest example, but Trevor Story, Hunter Renfroe, Jackie Bradley Jr, Nick Pivetta, Enrique Hernandez, Michael Wacha, Jose Peraza, James Paxton, Adalberto Mondesi…it was unbelievable the consistency of it. He was always looking to buy low.
Of all of these, the most iconic one was when he signed Hunter Renfroe coming off a terrible season with the Rays and let Jackie Bradley go. And then when Jackie Bradley collapsed and Hunter Renfroe turned in a decent year, he traded Renfroe for Bradley. And it’s not like all these deals were bad. Sometimes they turned out like Enrique Hernandez in 2021. And other times they turned out like Enrique Hernandez from 2022. But if I didn’t know any better I would think that bargain hunting was Bloom’s goal instead of winning games.
I think you did know better. That is exactly the way I saw it. The Tampa Bay way was deeply ingrained in his method of operation and he brought it to Boston. He had to sign Devers or he would have had to exit Fenway in a gorilla suit, (I hope everybody gets that, LOL) Bloom always wanted to look like a genius by pulling a couple of steals like he did in Tampa with Cardinals and the Pirates. Instead the JBJ trade destroyed his credibility and he never recovered.
I feel for Chain because he was essentially the “rebuild but we have to pretend we’re contenders” guy. Everyone was blasting him for not spending prospects/big money but the team just wasn’t in position to do so during his tenure.
He has layed an excellent foundation for whoever comes in next. The sox are pretty stacked in young and/or controllable position player. Reminds me a lot of Cherington (minus the title). Cherington layed the foundation for those Dombrowski teams that DD got all the credit for.
I think the new guy will have a much higher budget and will benefit from having Devers, Casas, Anthony, Mayer, Story, Rafaela, Yorke, Bello, Bleis, Teel already in the system
Of course…Casas, Bello, and Rafaela were all acquired by Dombrowski, and Devers was acquired by Cherington.
Was it really Dumbrowski? Or was the Front office heavily weighing over these calls because these guys look very similar to some prototypes we’ve seen in the past?
“Dumbrowski”?
Jesus Christ. The guy’s going to the Hall of Fame for a reason – clearly one of the best GMs of the last 30 years.
Anyway, they were acquired during Dombrowski’s tenure, so he gets the credit for acquiring them.
The buck stopped with him for his entire tenure.
I don’t think Bloom was restricted from spending money but that Bloom’s core beliefs were deeply rooted in the Tampa way of operating. Devers was forced upon him but he didn’t accept the way money was being spent on aging players. It will be interesting to see if the Red Sox try to sign Casas to a long term deal. Casas has said he would listen now.
Overall, I can’t disagree with Jay’s thesis. Someone is going to come in and in 2025 the Red Sox will have only something like $120M in contracts. Yoshida and Story will probably be playable, Devers will still be there alongside Casas, Casas, and Bello. Probably Teel, Rafaela, and Duran will be up and good. Mayer and Anthony have promise, even if nothing is guaranteed there. It will be a great foundation, and there’s a lot of position player depth in the system (even if a lot of it is at 1B and DH). It’s going to be great foundation, and they will have a lot of resources.
But this will be the third guy the team has fired after only a few years. It’s not going to be lost on whoever they try and hire that the reason why this is such a great situation is because the person who was thinking long-term and set it up to be good got canned. And it’s not like they can go for broke to win a world series either, because the guy who did that also got canned. And it’s not like Chaim Bloom doesn’t have friends; he was with James Click for a while and Click is going to hear all about it from Bloom (and Click just got out of a situation where he and ownership weren’t in alignment).
The only top tier person they’re going to be able to hire is someone who doesn’t have a family to uproot, who doesn’t care about uprooting their family, or who is arrogant enough to think they’re good enough that it won’t happen to them. And maybe they’ll be right on that last part but it seems like it might be a bit limiting.
Triston Casas counts as 2 guys??
He is a very large young man
Not yet, but maybe by 2025
I think he means the other Casas who calls himself Jarren Duran
I don’t think your headline writer understands the definition of a “fall guy.” And I’m not referring to Lee Majors. Regardless of the payroll mandate, Chaim Bloom did absolutely nothing to distinguish himself in his role while the Rays and Orioles blew past the Red Sox in terms of sustainable, multi-year success.
I like the prospects that he drafted or signed. As far as I can see though almost all of his trades were duds except taking Pivetta from Phillies. The trade for JBJ? Last year’s trade deadline was a head scratcher. This years was even more to effectively not do anything was baffling when everyone could see they should sell who knows what the Angels would have traded.
He had other good ones. But one of the hallmarks of Rays style management is making so many little moves that you can’t keep track of them all. That makes it tough to evaluate casually. It also confuses the fans.
Vazquez for Abreu and Valdez might turn out to be a good one.
I wonder whether he’d fit better in someplace like Milwaukee where fans don’t expect giant contracts. A constant turnover approach might be more palatable. Miami has been like that but should behave like a big market team
Brewers fan here. I think we’re doing just fine without him.
I hate this timing going into the offseason looking for a GM: teams in this state usually sit out FA / don’t make any interesting trades / mostly just waste an entire offseason getting the new regime in place to then watch the old regime’s roster do more or less what it was going to do anyhow in the subsequent season. Fire GM’s in-season, not at the end of the season.
As a dedicated, life long, Red Sox fan I see the situation a little bit differently than the fans here at Fangraphs and most of baseball. I have said so many times and hate to have to say it again but Mookie Betts was never going to sign an extension with the Red Sox and no reasonable amount of money, even $400,000,000 for 12, was going to be enough. There can be no question, however, that the Red Sox cut back on competing for the top free agents. That pool is a treacherous one and many GM’s have been embarrassingly wrong. I must defend Bloom because only a fool can think that staying away from the Xander Bogaerts sweepstakes was a mistake. He is beginning to slide already and there are 10 more years of lesser value still awaiting the Padres. Chris Sales’ breakdown was a disaster but even that pales next to the Nationals catastrophe with Strasburg. Pitchers breakdown and that is nothing but bad luck. Bloom brought his Tampa Bay mentality with him but, instead of getting Tyler Glasnow and Randy Arozarena in trades, he got David Hamilton and Alex Binelas. That deal really turned Red Sox Nation against Bloom. Trading Renfroe, and his 30 HR’s for the corpse of Jackie Bradley, Jr. and the 2 very low end prospects just mentioned made a lot of fans doubt if Bloom could judge talent. Bloom continued to try to find the type of player that Tampa kept finding but none have blossomed yet. It is still very early but it is almost cruel justice that Wilyer Abreu is showing a surprising amount of potential. The fan base was rising up and the way the team was run this season did nothing to quell the flood. Every day, it seemed, another retread or complete unknown, was showing up on the mound at Fenway and, while a few have clicked, most have come and gone. I felt Bloom had a strong aversion to long term deals but, as the Braves have shown that is the game today. He must have had to swallow five times when he was forced to ink Devers. My personal view wasn’t as negative as the comments in the Boston Globe but the way he ran the franchise didn’t excite me either, but then again, I remember being at games in the early 60’s with a few, and I mean very few others, so this doesn’t bother me yet Hope springs eternal and I will be there cheering as long as I am here.
No blame for Mookie’s departure or even the light return. I do think Bloom could have made a better extension offer to Bogaerts than what he allegedly did, if only for the message that it would send to fans (totally agree he shouldn’t have gotten anything more than Dansby Swanson).
Bottom line, though, is that if Bloom had done all that high speed roster churning for just the fringe players on the roster (like the Dodgers) instead of for the whole roster (like the Rays), he probably would be viewed a lot better by the Red Sox faithful.
Adding on to the Bogaerts point – we can’t know how Mookie would have responded to a competitive offer…because the Red Sox never made one.
Bloom was making Braves-esque offers to grown men with tens of millions in the bank.
No wonder they said no !
Yeah, the time to make the cheap offer is in year 1 or 2 when the player hasn’t any $$ yet…not when they’re 1 year from free agency & have made $50+M in arbitration. At that point, the player can afford to hold out for the best offer.
With that in mind, the fact they didn’t do that with Betts falls on DD, not Bloom.
Mookie put up 8 WAR in Dombrowski’s first full season with the team, haha – guessing he wasn’t particularly willing to take a discount, at that point.
One way or another: When Bloom joined the Sox, Mookie’s floor was the Harper deal.
Even if the 10/$300m offer did happen (and I trust Mookie more than FSG, who are notorious snakes)…it was an insult.
I am just glad there was some kind of change. Ownership, Bloom, Cora, Sale, Verdugo… one or all needed to hit the road after these past few seasons. The team is boring and probably aren’t a deep playoff team in the next few years if they just stood pat. Maybe this Bloom wake up call will get us Sox fans still left to look forward to next year instead of dread it.
From 2020 to 2023, Verdugo ranks 91st in hitter fwar, 45th by WPA.
This might be very disappointing as ‘the main return for Betts’, but it is way too harsh to characterize it as ‘inconsistent at best.’
If anything, Verdugo’s problem is that he has been consistently average-ish after showing some real promise in 2020.
Verdugo’s “real promise in 2020” was just one of his regular 50 game hot streaks, without the before and after we see in a typical season.
He had a .353 wOBA through the first 53 games this year.
Speaking of fall guy and Red Sox, let us take a moment to remember JT Watkins, the regular guy who got caught up in the Red Sox cheating scandal. Watkins was the fall guy for Cora’s cheating operation in Boston and received a ban from baseball as a result. He was later re-instated, and is now working in hitting gameplanning for the Dodgers. He was just a normal person working a job with a normal salary, who ended up caught up in one of the biggest cheating scandals and subsequent coverups of all time.
I don’t understand the Bloom apologists. Sure he was forced to trade Betts, but that doesn’t justify the pitiful return. Many of his biggest dollar expenditures – Story, Yoshida, Richards, Kluber, Paxton, etc have been at best marginal and at worst busts. His handling of the trade deadline last year is inexplicable – either sell or don’t. The bullpen has been atrocious for several years and wouldn’t have cost millions to address. He didn’t draft Casas; chose Nick Yorke just ahead of Jordan Walker and Soderstrom; Mayer at 1.4 was drafted ahead of several guys who are ranked as high or higher (Merrill, Cowser, Montgomery, Lawler). Other than a couple of reclamation projects like Wacha, I fail to see anything the least bit remarkable.
Bingo. Agreed. But if someone is predisposed to dislike John Henry, then Chaim Bloom’s firing looks like a nail.
The trade of Betts would look a lot better if the very highly rated Jeter Downs hadn’t turned into a complete bust. As a Sox fan I viewed Downs, not Verdugo, as the top return. Wong has surprised as a top level defender and more than a cipher with the stick. Viewing the deal in the rearview mirror is simply unfair. All of Red Sox Nation understood that losing Mookie was going to cause irreparable damage and the return, at the time, looked reasonable. Comparing the deal to what the Orioles got for Machado makes the Red Sox return look like Varitek and Lowe for Slocumb.
Downs was highly rated relative to All MiLB players…but was never viewed as a bona fide Top Prospect.
Also…Mookie is a LOT better than Machado – 8 more WAR in 300 fewer games!
As such, a year of Mookie should have netted a hell of a lot more than a couple months of Machado.
Anyone downvoting:
Do you think that Jordan Westburg and Joey Ortiz would be enough for Juan Soto?
Bloom’s greatest mistake was never selling enough, once ownership decided Mookie was to be traded. When you trade that guy, the championship window is CLOSED.
But instead they kept insisting, “No, we value Xander(even though we’ll pay way too much money for his replacement)”, “No, we value JD(even though we will neither commit to him hoping he will get healthy nor trade him to replenish the roster)”, “No, we value Raffy(even though we low-balled him for two years and only extended him once literally everyone else the fans cared about was gone and retaining him at any cost was the only way we could ensure that the fans would not be burning Fenway down)”, instead they committed to pretending to invest in a supporting cast, and then never knowing when to admit defeat during the season. And they really never cared to focus on pitching: Since the Sale extension, have they spent OVER $32M, total contract value, on anyone but Eovaldi?
Instead of giving us a total reset from 2020-2022, restocking the farm, and eating maybe 2.5 years of negativity from the fan base, they kept pushing this fake-contention slow rebuild on us, and now, 3.5 years after the Mookie trade, we STILL don’t have a coherent plan, and we’re going to take too long to establish a front office leader, and the off-season is going to be another one of these recent ones, where we leak our alleged interest in every FA under the sun to the media, but only ever negotiate with about 4 players before February, and wind up with the unwanted short-term leftovers and long-regressed and oft-injured castoffs.
And when we don’t fire Alex Cora, we’re going to still be left with a guy who has not, in the last 3 years, managed to establish a remotely average level of defense or base running or approach at the plate. This team cannot excel at even the technical basics of the game, and it starts with him. If we’re truly rebuilding, we need a real leader to work with our next core, not the guy who has seen every single long-term (third year or later) player he’s had regress over time, and who has seen many of his former established MLB players improve since leaving.
Agreed. A total teardown would’ve made the most sense after trading Mookie, and I think fans could at least see the logic in that better than Bloom’s gambling on potential upsides of post-injury or formerly-good-but-now-bargain players, while hanging on to injury comeback hopefuls. Its hard to discern the direction of the team amid all the weird moves. One of the weirder ones I remember was Bloom trading an 18-yr old pitcher for Hoy Park and then trading Park less than a week later for a worse return. Still don’t know what that was about, and everytime someone was cut by another team, like Dinelson Lamet, Bloom always was waiting with open arms to scoop him up, and immediately plug him into the rotation for a look-see. The regular season rotation felt a lot like an extended spring training experiment.
I read something earlier today on Boston.com that some people are spilling the beans on some of the crazier things that went on in the Bloom era. The wildest, is that allegedly, Bloom was approached by a team at the 2022 deadline, offering to take Chris Sale off his hands and was willing to pay all of the remaining contract. The interested team was offering a weak package of players, but the main win would be to unload that bad contract. Bloom said no. Teams also called about JD Martinez, and reportedly Bloom asked for the moon. In 2022. When the ballclub was quite bad, worse than it is now, and he wouldn’t move those guys. And they exceeded the tax at the end of the year.
That’s hard to digest after the reasoning that the Sox had to trade Mookie was as a way to get under the tax and win more efficiently, and more consistently. *That* was Bloom’s downfall. Too indecisive in trade deadline situations, or maybe just blinded a bit by the hope that the current roster would get it done. And more than once, he explained that the Mookie deal had to happen so the Sox could “win championships sustainably” and “win the right way.” That kind of horse-manure babbling falls on deaf ears when the audience is like, “well, we won 4 championships in a 14-year stretch, isn’t that sustainable winning?”
Sox fans might be annoying to non-Sox fans, and yes they tend to wallow in their own misery a bit much, but they are not dumb. They follow all the transactions. They have educated baseball opinions about most things that happen on and off the field. They watch the WooSox. They know who’s hot and cold in Salem. They go to Cape Cod League games, too. Its a baseball haven here, when the sun’s out and the Lord Hobo* is cold (*a really good beer from Cambridge).
I watch just about every game, and it is truly remarkable how unprepared the entire team seems defensively, and in common baserunning situations. There had to have been a half dozen games lost because of mental mistakes alone this season. Something is definitely amiss, but not sure if it’s necessarily on one person. Probably more of a culture thing, of nobody appreciating the value of daily drills and practice to take it seriously enough.
Once the new front office leader is in place, I’m hoping they go after Counsell to be manager.
Hey now – Lord Hobo is from Woburn!
(Everything else in this comment is objectively correct.)
The system that has been followed by many teams in regards to player management is undergoing a seismic shift and some teams have been slow to realize that signing established players to huge contracts only after they have shown their outstanding ability is a road to disaster. Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera should have given the GM’s of the game that maybe long term contracts to aging players was probably not the best way to go but comically absurd deals continue to be consummated every off-season. Strasburg, Sale and Stanton are already total losses and I wouldn’t want to be a Padres fan at this time. Bogaerts deal was crazy, Machado’s not much better and paying Darvish until he is 42 strikes me as foolish. The deals that make sense are the ones that Julio Rodriguez, Wander Franco, Bryan Reynolds, Ke’Bryan Hayes as well as most of the Braves stars negotiated. Teams have to trust their eyes, with maybe a little analytics thrown in, and offer life changing money at half its value to young potential stars. Players between the ages of 24 to 32 look a lot more than guys who need Grecian Formula. All this leads me to say that Bloom clearly did not believe in huge long term deals and was forced to sign Devers or the stampede to drive him out of Boston would have been impossible to survive. How the Red Sox operate next will be fascinating. Will they be the Braves or the Mets and Padres?.
Counsell would definitely be on my short list for developing a young team.
It’s crazy how much less successful Cora and Hinch have been when their players don’t know what pitch is coming.
They have the 3rd ranked farm system without doing a full tear down, how much better would they realistically have been? Now they have a great system and some talent still kicking around as opposed to a great system and a 60 win MLB team. They clearly didn’t need to rip it to the studs given the farm they have now.
Considering that the difference between 3rd or 4th best and best is one top tier pitching prospect, they could have made a pretty big difference.
At the end of the day, the thing that derailed the RS is that we failed to keep up with the big spenders. For many centuries, it was us and the Yankees. If they got Mussina, we’d get Manny. Even as recently as 2019, we had the #1 payroll.
Now, we are #12. From 2000-2019, we ranged from #1 to #6 in payroll, and maybe on average we were #3 on average. If we don’t get back to the top 6-7 (minimum), then we aren’t signing Yamamoto, Monty, Lee or anyone else of any significance.
Much of this is because the ownership wants to get under the CBT every 3 years – hard to go WAY over and still get under.
That said, they are perfectly positioned to go way over the next 2 years and then back under, thanks to Bloom.
I guess I don’t understand Boston ownership expectations at this point, as they have increasingly shown limited patience with very different GMs; win now ones like Dombrowski who did win now, and patient farm builders like Bloom who did develop a great farm. It seems like ownership expects to perform like the Dodgers of the east, but you can’t be the Dodgers of the east if you trade your best player to the actual Dodgers and watch them sign him to an extension lol.
This is absolutely right. They brought in Dombrowski because Cherington wasn’t getting results. Dombrowski took the foundation and pushed them over the top, only to become a scapegoat for the Sale contract (which they okayed!). So then they brought in a guy who they hoped would get them to sustainable success but right as the young guys started showing up they canned him. This all reads like an ownership group that is layering one bad decision on top of another, refusing to commit to a course of action. And that’s even after considering that Bloom wasn’t especially good at his job (although he wasn’t especially bad either).
In fairness…”the young guys showing up” are all Dombrowski’s.
Bloom’s pride and joy are the ones who couldn’t hit a curveball before being shut down with shoulder injuries.
Yes, that’s typically how it goes when you keep changing GMs. You typically win or lose with the previous boss’s amateur acquisitions, unless you trade all of them. The player development system in Boston was solid under Bloom but it was the same way under Dombrowski and Cherington and Epstein.
I’m not known for being a particularly big fan of Bloom, but it did seem that at least he didn’t break the parts of the organization that were working and were not things he had to make a ton of new decisions about. You could say the same thing about Dombrowski too. (It’s even possible that one or both of Dombrowski / Bloom made those parts better, although evidence for that is scant.)
But it’s not like he was unusually bad at getting value. In 2020 he got Yorke, Jordan, and Drohan, none of whom are elite prospects but great value for where they were picked. In 2022 he whiffed on Mikey Romero and Cutter Coffey but hit big-time with Roman Anthony and did very well by getting Alex Hoppe and Chase Meidroth later. In 2023 he picked a catcher who is likely to stick there and is already in AA. The much-maligned Vazquez trade brought back Wilyer Abreu.
All in all, this is a guy who often got the details right but missed completely on the big picture. He got a surprisingly good return for one year of Mookie Betts and dumping Price’s contract, but the whole idea of doing a deal like that was a bad one. He got great value for Vazquez but in the context of dealing for Pham it just pissed everyone off. A person with good tactics and bad strategy is seriously miscast as the main decision-maker. He needs to go work for someone who gets the big picture like Anthopolous or Stearns (I would say Friedman, but if he didn’t get it the first time with Friedman maybe he won’t the second time either). Or even Scott Harris or Farhan Zaidi or Thad Levine–someone who realizes that tactical brilliance is wasted without a coherent strategy.
You hit the nail on the head – Bloom’s tenure is defined by good execution of terrible decisions.
Robb Stark winning every battle and losing the war.
It wasn’t the Sale contract that doomed Dombrowski, it was the Ian Kinsler trade.
The Red Sox needed a defensive 2nd baseman, and although Kinsler was well past his prime with the bat, he was still good defensively. They traded Ty Buttrey (would quickly become the Angels’ closer) and Williams Jerez (a talented long-shot pitcher) – that was too much for Kinsler BUT the Angels agreed to throw in money. This was important because the Red Sox were barely under the CBT.
But Dombrowki and the accountants messed up and the Red Sox still went over the CBT by a paltry amount, which is not the way you want to do it. John Henry, given his background, isn’t willing to accept mistakes in this vein. Also, the farm system was trashed from all of Dombrowski’s overpay trades (on the upside, he seemed to always get his guy).
The Sale extension, which was completely unnecessary (but was a good deal at the time) didn’t kick in until 2020. He was already hurt, but it wouldn’t be shown as a brutal deal until long after dombrowski was gone.
Also…how many of Dombrowski’s trades ended up actually being “overpays,” haha?
The man had a habit of trading Jeter Downs types
If that is why Dombrowski was fired then it reflects even worse on ownership.
I don’t think so – he gave away good prospects for a marginal player, all so that they could get a useful reserve player and remain under the CBT, but he failed to do that.
So they lost both the reliever who would almost immediately become the Angels’ closer AND they went over the CBT. One or the other is understandable, but not both.
The Red Sox ownership spends up-to the CBT 1 in 3 years and over 2 in 3 years (at least that’s the normal plan) and Dombrowski failed to do that. If a GM goes over budget due to choice or incompetence, any ownership would be pissed off.
The thing about Buttres and Jerez, of course…is that neither of them actually turned out to be any good at Major League-level baseball.
Buttrey was actually one of the top relievers in baseball for 1.5 years – then he fell apart due to ineffectiveness, injury and a retirement hiatus.
Regardless, he was one of the best relievers in MLB when Dombrowski was fired.
Of course I don’t know what went on behind the scenes, but it seemed that Dombrowski wanted to keep spending and they didn’t so they parted ways. That doesn’t seem like impatience.
For Bloom, I again don’t think it was impatience. He was hired to cut payroll and build the farm while remaining competitive. He was not hired to do a 5-year tear down and rebuild. That’s why they hired someone from Tampa.
He did the first two but the team has not competed in the past two years due to some pretty obvious holes in the roster.
And the Dodgers comp is instructive. Friedman came in and cut payroll back but kept winning.
As a Sox fan I’m elated Bloom is gone but scared that Henry doesn’t care enough about what happens next. I flew my family of five from Canada to pay ridiculous prices to watch games at Fenway last month and had the dubious honour of watching them self combust twice. The first game was Mookie’s return when they got our to a 3-0 lead and let the bullpen and defence blow that then the aforementioned base running turn a bases loaded opportunity with the winning run on base into out number 3. The other joy was the Kyle Barraclough game where the Sox brass went into a key game and series with the Astros with no middle relief available and we had to watch a 4-3 lead turn into a 11-4 deficit in less time than it took to buy and eat an $11 hot dog. No matter how you cut it, Bloom built that turd sandwich of a pitching staff and how do I explain that to my 12 year old who was hanging on every pitch and falling for the magic that is Fenway?
Went to Game 1 of the Thursday doubleheader – paid more on fees than the ticket.
In the pitching staff’s defense…they didn’t decide to build a team that had one DH playing LF, one playing 3B, and one playing 1B…and a decent 3B playing DH.
It looks to me (as a Yankee’s fan, so I’m neither unbiased, nor do my guys have a competent front office) like the Red Sox ownership decided that Betts wasn’t going to be their franchise guy. Once that was clear to the well-heeled enough segment of possible trading partners, Betts’ return was going to go down. You can only sell for the amount your customer is willing to pay–or withdraw the product from the market. Part of Boston’s problems over the last few years have arisen from circumstances similar to the Yankees–they spent big on players who either underperformed or were injured. Part of that is foresight, but luck also plays a role. Bloom will get another job.
It really doesn’t help that Mookie Betts is fairly literally what we thought he was the entire time with the Dodgers. And he’s still only 30.
I’m fine with Bloom; his path and work were necessary. However, the Red Sox fans have likely pressured Henry and Kennedy to return to the win now mentality. The farm system and financial limitations aren’t issues yet going forward, so Bloom’s specialty isn’t needed. It’s a clear pivot to find someone to win now and maximize the potential Bloom has developed. Very similar to how they removed Cherington for Dombrowski.
Someone that I would prefer them to fire is Cora. These teams had patches multiple times that ruined seasons, and I understand injuries were major contributors to the lulls. But what was unacceptable was how undisciplined the team looked when everything was falling apart. I lay that fault on Cora. Otherwise, I think the last two seasons could’ve been more competitive with an eye toward sneaking into the wild card.
What the fuck?
Fangraphs is really starting to turn into a Facebook comment section
Just hoping we can keep it at Facebook and not go all the way to Stormfront.
Thanks for the reply, Adolf!
Your ilk really loves saying the quiet part out loud ever since it got one of you into power.
Firing Chaim Bloom on the first day of the High Holidays is very On Brand for the Red Sox.
Dumbasses.
It’s a new year for everyone in Red Sox nation, apparently.
I think it was the day before?
What the apologetics this article performs for one of their nerd wunderkinds fails to emphasize is that Chaim Bloom volunteered for the role of hatchet man and that is in fact why he was hired. I recall this because in other jobs he was a finalist for it was noted he wanted to do a tear down and trade the vets.
Imagine Lebron and Bosh decided to go to New York with Carmelo and Sam Hinkie got a job with Miami in the fallout by telling their management “We aren’t going to win the East anyway, we need to trade Wade and rebuild.” Even if that logic makes sense, if you come back 4 years later, the team still sucks and none of the resources you got seem to be paying off while Wade won a title where you traded him I’m going to guess the evaluation of the GM there is not going to be very good, especially in the context of Miami’s long term success as an organization.
Like, when you as a medical professional say we need to rip off a bandaid for a wound to heal and then the guy waits the normal amount of time for that injury to heal and the gash is still the same size…he probably should get a second reference, even if the advice may have been correct at the time.
What a poorly written article – please walk in the middle of the road so you can get squished like a dead skunk
Wow, it’s impressive that this isn’t your most hateful comment on this article, though that’s quite the bar to meet as it at least is not screaming your antisemitism into a bullhorn.
The “fall guy”? He was .500 with payrolls of 8,6,6,11.
I think the single worst act of Bloom’s tenure was signing Trevor Story. Is there not a Fangraphs page where one could learn that Story was a below-average hitter away from mile-high Coors Field, and another website somewhere establishing that Boston is located at sea level?