As far as spending money goes, I can think of a few prime extension candidates currently within the org, especially with the money coming off the books in 2025.
Not our Star Blazer: Yamamoto signs with the Dodgers for $325 million, 12 years
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Yes, thank you for spelling that out more effectively than I did.
I’m not trying to join any brigade or run down the prospects, just understand at a high level what is possible to exchange for pitching from our position only prospect pool. We aren’t helping ourselves much for the foreseeable future here, baring Breslow wizardry.
Dodge? Lol.
I didn’t realize the that object was to go from the 13th biggest payroll in baseball to the top five in one offseason. I thought it was to get better and to do so by making financial commitments to good players. You literally just outlined a scenario where the Red Sox would be fielding a very competitive ball club, then complained that the scenario would leave them without a top five payroll. Go ahead and swap out Montgomery in your scenario for Yamamoto. Still not a top five payroll. So no evidence of a commitment to winning, it seems.
The top five teams in baseball are all teams in their World Series competition window…and the Mets. Of course they have a higher payroll than a team coming out of a rebuild. Of course it will take the Sox a season or two to build to the point where they have enough high priced and talented players to be in the payroll stratosphere. It’s where they spent 18 straight seasons. Then they did the rebuild.
What signings or trade acquisitions would you like them to make this offseason so they can jump right into the top five?
She is just rubbing salt in the wound. She and the group she hangs with hate Henry and want him to sell the team. More than that, they view me as a fool for believing otherwise. That said, they will be watching the team none the less in April.
This! Exactly. The MFY are on the hot seat now. Jilted. How does it feel? What will they rebound with? Soto is going to FA and will get $500M + , from someone. The MFY are now obligated to be one of the last teams standing in pursuit of that guy. I feel not sorry for them. They must have been counting on getting YY when they traded for Soto.
*whispering at the negotiation table* "He doesn't speak English...see if we can pull the old DollHairs switcharoonie..."
If they put a team on the field that is good then I dont really care what they spend, but theyve been bad for most of the last five years and haven't been flexing their financial strength. Fans have a right to be annoyed - if Henry wants to run it as mid market team spending, he may want to look at what the typical mid market team charges for entry. Its also irrelevant to the initial post of yours I was responding, the implication of which was that somehow this dip in spending was an aberration that would reverse. I dont think that is at all clear - Henry has made comments that he does not like the MLB cost structure and he has been operating the team as a top cash flow team over the past few years.
To answer your direct question, I would have offered Yamamoto 10/350 or 11/375 as a minimum and made him turn it down. I'd also been happy to beat the deal ERod got from the Diamondbacks and lock up Turner on a single year deal. They have minimal long term financial commitments and they desperately need pitching talent.
The main reason they are not competing is that they are not spending money to fix their main problem that they dont have the starting pitching to compete. They either fix that with money or they wont be good for years. It's really that simple.
In the spirit of you can’t win if you don’t play (and apologies if this is rehashing old ground), is there a credible xitter post of a Red Sox offer for YY? I read $300m in the original thread title, but was that ever confirmed at all?
I agree it is the lack of will. If only they had forced Yamamoto to play in a city he had no interest in playing in. I say don't even chicken out at 11/375, but offer 12/500, spit in the man's face, and dare him, DARE HIM to accept it.
By God, what pansies these Red Sox are!
Marino Pepen reported six days ago that the Red Sox had made an offer exceeding $300 million:
View: https://twitter.com/Marino_Pepen/status/1736070999039254661
The story was picked up by CBS, but was not subsequently repeated, so 'credible' is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to Pepen. In this case he seems to have gotten it wrong.
Is this a serious post? Like what? They were so interested in him that they were 10-15% below market (and perhaps more).
We have no idea what would have happened if they made the top offer. They had nothing to lose (other than potentially some of Henry's precious operating margin). If he says no or the Dodgers match, they're no worse off than they are now. I guess under your theory, they should just give up any time they arent the favorite. Making it a potentially hard decision by offering more money and seeing how much he values his preferred city is a pretty valid tactic.
I agree! If the Chris Sale extension has taught us anything, it's that one should not hesitate to sink massive resources into a single pitcher. There can never be any downside into doing so. There is literally nothing to lose. Just ask David Price.
And so yes, they should have consulted their crystal balls and blown the market away! I would have called up that guy and said, "We'll pay you $10 million right now to come and look at Fenway Park! Or just cruise by in an Uber."
Doubtless, he would have fallen deeply in love with the place and it would then have CUT HIS VERY HEART to refuse the 12/500 offer (or whatever your weaker idea was mikcou, but I think you were totally on track for how they should have played this.)
This is nothing but a fucking failure on the part of the front office. A tamned Dravesty. YY was right there for the taking, like an extra donut hole just waiting to be dropped into the bag of a dozen. It was that fucking easy, and they just fucked it up.
I mean, why didn't they listen to you?
Do you have any idea?
Dude. No need for this snark.
@mikcou raises a pretty valid negotiating point. Personally it would have made for great theatre to have the Sox offer something over the top, and sit back and watch both the Dodgers and the player squirm. YY clearly wanted to play in LA . They Dodgers lined up these two signings two years ago as evidenced by their lack of aggressiveness last off season. It really appears that they structured SOs agreement such that they could better afford YY and one other FA pitcher. YY finds his best non-Dodger deal and asks LA to match it.
it would have been fantastic to offer $50M over the MFY offer and watch to see if LA would match. They wouldn’t, but YY would go there anyway, always remembering that he left money in the table. Maybe it matters when the Sox play the Dodgers at Fenway. I’d watch those games for sure.
Hmm, I dunno, 86 years sounds about right. Worked out okay last time.
(I know, I know, you said “contending” not winning, but seeing *that* exact wording on *this* specific message board was just too rich to let slide. It’s like we’ve forgotten who we are. Thanks, John Henry.)
Huh? Source? Do you know something we don’t?
Oh, wait, you don’t. You have no earthly clue what you’re talking about.
Indeed, it is so obvious. Why not offer $100M over the MFY offer and watch to see if LA would totally shit their pants? That would have been so totally fucking awesome. Like ROAR chest-beating awesome! "Ha! HA! Fuck you LA and YY!"
(Why didn't the MFY's offer $50M over their own offer? Must be incompetent I guess.)
But not as incompetent as the Red Sox. How royally they have fucked this up. That's the point we all need to agree on here.
If you want to dial it back to like the Sox should have offered $45M more than NY, perhaps with a gift basket or two thrown in. . .eh. . .I mean, I guess that might be OK. But that's a concession I'm making so we're both on the same page that the Sox totally misplayed this.
No. I don’t think the Sox misplayed this. I just think that there are more than one approach.
Approach #1: Here is our offer. It’s a large and generous offer, yet sensible from our prospective. It’s not as much as you will get from other teams, but we have intangibles that would make playing in Boston better than other places
Approach #2: Here is our offer. It’s way more than the next best offer. We really want you here, if you turn this down, at least we will for sure know your intentions. Turning us down will still be a positive for us , because it will create some positive buzz for our franchise which is sagging in local popularity. Our fans will be angry at you but happy with us and will rally behind us and be more willing to pay $12.50 for a beer at our park. If you accept it, great! That’ll make us better and fans will be willing to pay $13.50 for a beer at our park
At least that’s how I see his argument. Plus you get to eff with the Dodgers best laid plans. Which , since they clearly intend on moving their payroll needle waaay to the right, and I am not entirely sure that’s really best for the game, would be fun to watch.
This reminds me of the famous Andrew Friedman statement from probably a decade ago:
Andrew Friedman: "If you're always rational about every free agent, you will finish third on every free agent."
For what it’s worth, I was on the record multiple times in this very thread advocating for $1.2 billion. I even suggested at one point that Henry commit to moving the franchise within three years to a more desirable city. I couldn’t get any momentum going here. The failure to land Yamamoto is an indictment of both ownership AND SOSH.
Ha! Probably true. Of course he didn’t need to flex financial muscles until lately because he’s had such a good pipeline of talent. They have not had an albatross contract yet. They just signed 2 , IMO. Now the pressure will be to win before Mookie and Freeman decline (which I think were both fantastic signings) and Ohtani can’t pitch any more.
Wait. . .you said:
Don't sell yourself short. I mean, it's one thing if Breslow wanted to behave like a normal GM one could trade with and take at his word and all that boring shit. But the time for half measures is past. We haven't been to an ALCS in two fucking years man. And we haven't won a world series in 5. That's unacceptable!!!
So I think your plan is just fantastic. Offering YY $50M over the Yankees offer would have TOTALY FUCKED WITH YY's HEAD. That's some next-level shit right there. And yeah, I mean, I don't watch any Red Sox games with any regularity, but I'd turn into the three games the Dodgers are going to play the Sox in next year in hopes that YY would pitch one of them and be TOTALY FUCKED IN THE HEAD because we offered him $50M more than the Yankees. Who fucking does that? I mean like, beyond LAD.
But whatever. Man, you can't come up with a better plan than that.
Why - why didn't the Sox see it like you do?
There are a ton of straw men here. Someone asked me who I'd be spending money on and I said I would have offered 10/350 or 11/375 to Yamamoto. You then said he was going to the Dodgers no matter what and made some snarky post about forcing him to come here. I never thought they could force him to come here, thats an asinine thought, but being the top offer typically makes someone rethink what their priorities are and you know, sometimes sway preferences.
I then responded that they wouldnt be any worse off he went to LA anyway. It's clear they didnt value him at that so fine, but as Jon Abbey points out if the team only signs free agents that they can be rational about, you tend to never sign free agents.
Sports are entertainment. I want to be entertained. I don’t need to have the team I root for be the best, but I want them to try, put a compelling product on the field that interests me and , yes this extends to the way the team is managed and operated. I want the team I root for to be wise and bold, because that’s entertaining , to me. Sometimes even do extraordinary things just to screw with the establishment. I don’t care that they end it last place (that much), as long as they give me more of stories and performance like Casas.
In most auctions/free agent scenarios, by definition the "winner" is above the prevailing market and is effectively operating somewhat irrationally. Obviously, you have your outliers (e.g., Judge taking 10% less to stay in NY). The more typical case is that 29 other teams werent willing to go where the winner was.
If Boston had offered $325M (or honestly even $310), we'd have heard about it like we heard about the Mets offer and the Yankees offer. These things leak; its a pretty reasonable inference that they werent within 10% here.
ROAR!!! That's what I'm talking about. I want to be entertained and I have feelings about that.
Why not just totally fuck with other players heads by offering them more money than the Yankees? Fuck the establishment man!!!! If push comes to shove I'd also be fine with a last place team with a weekly Casas Podcast where YY could be a weekly guest looking all hang-dog and shit because he passed on the Benjamins like a fool.
Confirmation that he’d signed with the Dodgers happened less than 24 hours ago.
Why is it so hard to admit we know nothing about what the Sox offered other than that one tweet suggesting it was over $300M - which may or may not be true, of course?
Let’s just breathe. The notion that *everything* leaks is absurd.
I agree! Being 27.453% below the top offer is certainly a chicken-shit position for the front office to take.
And like I said, I completely agree there's just no fucking downside to blowing the top offer out of the water! It totally could sway preferences. You are so right. Just ask Chris Sale and David Price. Sway-fucking-City man! Price didn't know what hit him he was swayed so much. And Sale swayed more than a drunken sailor on a spavined three legged horse caught in a piggly-wiggly.
So why didn't those fuckers do it, do you think?
Not everything leaks. Offers that are consistent or above the offer accepted generally do though. Both parties would want that info out (Yamamato to say look how many similar offers i turned down and the other teams to show their fans they were trying).
I dont even know what you are trying to say here. Price took the Sox high offer. Isnt that my entire point? Sale wasn't even a free agent.
If you're trying to say those deals didnt work well; well thats sometimes what happens with any deals. Its a pretty terrible argument to never sign any star level talent. Teams dont win without talent (and the Sox dont win in 2018 without Price/Sale).
Yeah, well that operative word "contending" is relevant - let's not be reductive with other people's arguments. From 1967 (the beginning of new era for the Sox after a long long lull) through 2011 the Red Sox had 7 losing seasons and one last place divisional finish. That's 7 losing seasons and 1 last place finish in 45 years. From 2012 to 2023 the Red Sox have had 6 losing seasons and 6 last place divisional finishes. That's 6 losing seasons and 6 last place finishes in 10 years.
Yes, they also won 2 World Series in those 10 years. That does have enormous meaning, and mitigates all that losing.
But the organization has nearly matched the number of losing seasons in the last ten years, as the team had in the 45 before that. Surely that can't just be because they are in a rebuild. There have been many rebuilds in those 45 years. And the team didn't lose that much. To not see a paradigm shift, certainly at least in the last five years - a shift that has not boded well for the organization, seems to be a bit of an act of denial.
But maybe another shift is coming. I mean, eventually it will. But who knows when, and what Henry's current modus operandi really is anymore.
EDIT: Of course Theo left after 2011, and maybe we shouldn't underestimate the impact; the organizational philosophy has been kinda manic-depressive and/or reactive/compensatory since.
I don't see what the negative would have been in keeping Dombrowski. We had an identity with him-we were always playing to win. The narrative that he could not build a farm system isn't really accurate. The Red Sox are suffering from a revolving door of baseball ops leadership. No stability and this is exactly what you get. It's like the Star Wars reboots... several different visions lead to no direction and the result is rubbish and confusion. The Red Sox have lost their identity and that is John Henry's fault, I thank him for the WS wins but I blame him for the mess he has created otherwise. I want the team to be competitive year in and year out.
An underrated aspect of the team's approach for the last decade-plus.
Another change is that Tampa Bay was a clown car franchise for the first ten years of its existence and has since been one of the best franchises in baseball.
Devil Rays (1998-2007) 645-972 (0.399 W-L%)
Rays (2008-2023) 1366-1125 (0.548 W-L%)
Because the cupboard was empty in 2019. There was no cost-controlled young talent in the high minors and what they had left at the major league level was about to get really expensive. The only way to build at that point, to keep that team together, was to begin signing free agents everywhere. The problems with that approach is that the ensuing draft and IFA penalties make it harder to build a system. Add in the attrition at the minor league instructional level under Dombrowski and you had an unsustainable model.
In the 17 seasons from 1977 to 1993, when the AL East had seven teams, the Sox finished 5th, 6th, or 7th seven times. Is that all that different than finishing 5th in a five team division?
The pre-FSG days were not exactly all roses and show ponies, and there have been plenty of 3-4 year stretches of casting about for something resembling a plan.
Edited to remove some of the histrionics, but I do want to push against the narrative that L.A. was the only place YY really wanted to play; that is only supposition based on his taking the Cohen's offer back to the Dodgers to meet. That only tells us that he would rather play for the Dodgers than the Mets at the same price.
If you want to make a supposition, I think it's much more fair to assume that he wanted to set the record for the largest pitching contract, which he did. There you at least have the evidence that the Yankees were willing to go to a higher AAV, but still feel $24M short of trumping Cole's deal (which I'll leave to @jon abbey to weigh in on if that would cause clubhouse friction).
We don't even know how the negotiations were structured, but it appears that they were very highly formalized, with team meetings in L.A. without contract figures being exchanged (and despite breathless media reports telling us how much teams were offering). For all we know, it was meetings with the understanding that the team would present its best offer, without an auction element. Sure, YY took that back to the Dodgers, but for the Sox that leaves them on the outside looking in and we haven't yet seen a corroborated leak as to what their offer was from a reporter in Boston...
... and this brings us to suppositions about the Sox and YY's feelings about playing in Boston. The team met with him in L.A. and we're mostly assuming that he didn't come to Boston it's because he didn't want to play here for whatever reason. (Cora's wry "read between the lines" comments and smile seemed to be designed to give the "I want to believe (in the FO)" crowd something to hang on to, but other than dinner with Steve Cohen I don't know how much we really know about YY's trip the the East Coast.) But it could simply be that the Sox weren't going to make a competitive bid that topped the market for a pitcher, and that really does seem a lot more like JWH's style. $300M spread over 12 years wouldn't warrant a trip to look at Fenway in December amid the other bids he was receiving. The lack of leaks is striking here as it's neither in the player,'s agent's, or team's interest to have a lowball offer come out, and the only leaks to final offers were seeing are ones that are comparable to what he signed in some way. IMO those are the teams that can say "YY didn't want to play here." I don't think the Sox FO even met this criteria.
This attempt to land YY looks a lot like the negotiations with X, in that the team is willing to spend a lot, but they probably only want the player on a deal that is "rational", if not downright team friendly.
Fuck. it should have been obvious. Devils are what color? Red! So our Sox are associated with the Devil, and purging that reference from the team should fix everything!
I’ve got all this gear that says “Red Sox” on it, and now I’ll have to buy new stuff that just says “Sox“ on it. I’ll make the sacrifice.
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This is exactly what I read from the situation. The only thing we really know about Yamamoto’s preferences was that he went to LA over the Mets, but only after they matched the Mets higher bid. That doesn’t strike me as “he was always going to LA no matter what” type preference.
The Sox FO have a pretty clear recent history of being consistently below prevailing market on elite players. The simplest explanation for all available facts is exactly what you said: they were interested, but only at their price, which was a decent bit lower than the other serious bidders.
Edit: I think we may be overly formalistic with the meaning of offer here; Yamamoto and his team almost certainly had some idea of the ballpark the teams were in before making any of his second visits, even if there was not an a specific or formal offer exchanged. This method would be pretty typical in many multiple round auction style negotiations.
I have gone from reading to skimming to skipping this thread, but some of the comments above make we wonder:
if the Sox should be desperate since they've not gone to the WS since 2018, which they won, then the Yankees should be twice as miserable and desperate, since they haven't won since 2009? Or not, b/c they've spent some big money lately on Judge and Soto? I am having trouble following the "reasoning" behind our desperation. The Sox really need pitching. They are going to get some. Wait.
if the Sox should be desperate since they've not gone to the WS since 2018, which they won, then the Yankees should be twice as miserable and desperate, since they haven't won since 2009? Or not, b/c they've spent some big money lately on Judge and Soto? I am having trouble following the "reasoning" behind our desperation. The Sox really need pitching. They are going to get some. Wait.
We're going in circles with no end in sight, it's time to put this to bed and turn this forum's focus back toward what the Red Sox will look like come April. Any YY specific conversation is welcome in the MLB forum thread.
If someone wants to start a thread about the current ownership's commitment to winning, or lack thereof, have at it. And I will remind everyone as well that spirited debate and argument are always welcome and encouraged, but much of the discourse around here lately has been simply beyond unacceptable. Just an FYI that we have taken notice of this and it needs to stop.
If someone wants to start a thread about the current ownership's commitment to winning, or lack thereof, have at it. And I will remind everyone as well that spirited debate and argument are always welcome and encouraged, but much of the discourse around here lately has been simply beyond unacceptable. Just an FYI that we have taken notice of this and it needs to stop.
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