The various anti-Bloom threads always get so quiet so quickly whenever the Sox put together a few wins.
In any case, as we near the halfway point of the season, the firmly-entrenched-in-last-place Red Sox are 1.5 games out of third in baseball’s toughest division, 1.5 games out of the final wild card spot, and on pace to win 85 games.
They have received significant contributions from rookies Brayan Bello, Tristan Casas, Connor Wong, Kutter Crawford, and Josh Winckowski, all of whom rate to be legitimate major league contributors going forward. By any measure, that is an outstanding contribution from the minor league system in the past half-season or so.
Devers and Whitlock are good young players who are locked up for several more years. I think the Sox will try to sign Bello and Casas to extensions this off-season, and perhaps Wong as well. There is also lots of money available to spend in the free agent market.
Meanwhile, down on the farm, this has been a very encouraging season to date. Bleis has been lost to injury for the season, and Mikey Romero has still yet to play. But Mayer continues his march up the system. Roman Anthony has cracked a national top 50 prospect list and is off to an excellent start as a 19 year old in high A ball. Rafaela has begun to improve the chase rate issues that have been his major problem. Yorke is playing well in a bounce back year. Shane Drohan has struggled since his promotion to Worcester, but scouts are said to really love his stuff. And lower down, where the real work of rebuilding the foundation of a system is done, we see this, among a number of other encouraging signs.
View: https://twitter.com/IanCundall/status/1670918083140018177?s=20
EDIT: I can't get the above tweet to format properly. Here are the names and levels in descending order:
Luis Perales, Salem
Wikelman Gonzalez, Greenville
Elmer Rodriguez-Cruz, Salem
Dalton Rogers, Salem/Greenville
Angel Bastardo, Greenville
Bradley Blalock, Salem
Isaac Coffee, Greenville (just promoted to Portland)
Hunter Dobbins, Greenville
I expect the Sox to slump here and there as this season progresses, and the calls for Bloom’s head to resume during these stretches from those who believe that the team should be going all in each year. But I think it’s very clear to anyone who has been paying attention over the past couple of seasons that Bloom is executing a plan for a stealth rebuild that requires fielding high-variance big league rosters, with few long term contracts, that have a chance to compete for the playoffs if things break right, all while restocking the minor league system. My assumption is that he was hired to implement this very plan, that it has the explicit backing of a very smart ownership group, and that the plan is going quite well. My sense is that most of the anti-Bloom sentiment is really a frustration with this plan. But it’s pretty clear that this is the approach the Sox want to take, and I see very little chance that Bloom is going anywhere.