I compare it more to 2006 when Theo made no moves at the trade deadline and the Stanks got Abreu and others. They fell apart in mid to late August plus Lester getting cancer and being out for the year didn't help either. Plus in 2011 they were 12-6 against the Stankees but it didn't matter of course, and now our team is 9-2 against them. Weird omen?? I don't know.
Excellent take. It also reminded me of 2006. That was another year when they were in contention at the deadline with a good-but-probably-not-good-enough team. They could have traded Ellsbury, Lester or Buchholz to get marginally better, but elected not to.
We just don't know that, and based on the trades other teams made, in particular the Kris Bryant trade, I don't believe that to be true. No one expected Bloom to trade Casas or Mayer, and very few even were discussing Downs and Durran. But we got Schwarber for some dude named Aldo Ramirez, and it is not impossible to think they could have put a package together to compete with some of the other bids.
I've read and reread Speier's tweet and can't for the life of me read this the same way you have.
Ditto.
Bingo. This factor is not being given enough weight in the postmortem discussions. The Cubs should have been an ideal partner given the number of people on both sides who have worked together, but in the end they had to get the best players they could for Rizzo and Kimbrel and those weren't coming from the Boston system.
How exactly is the roster "better today than yesterday"? Right now it is exactly the same as it was a week ago but we have one extra player on the IL. Might be a different story in a week or two but the season may not matter very much by then.
RR already answered regarding the 2 relievers we acquired. They’re 1 game out of first. They will, at minimum, still be in the thick of the WC hunt when Schwarber joins them. For the seemingly 1,000th time in these threads, they did not have the assets to make the kind of moves in this market that the MFY and a few others did. Given those constraints, they added some potentially valuable pieces to their roster, including a legitimate upper tier slugger. If the players are somehow pouting about that, and have decided to pack it in, then they weren’t worth a shit to begin with. I don’t believe either to be the case.
The offensive drought for main cogs (Verdugo, Bogaerts, and Martinez) extends back well before the deadline.
Did they really do very little compared to Tampa, their chief rival? Has Nelson Cruz and his 7-38 been a game changer for them?
Well, he hit two homers in his first three games with Tampa. Boston's main acquisition hasn't even played. Of course we knew that would be the case. Which gets to my point - this is coincidental, but the Sox' slump has just come at exactly the worst time.
Tampa traded away their closer and their #2 starter (in terms of IP, anyway). It's debatable whether they really improved overall so much as just shuffled some deck chairs. Of course, they have a good deal of depth which is a big reason they're in contention in the first place.
And Danny Santana hit one in each of his first two games with the Sox. My point is that the statement that the Sox did very little at the deadline compared to their rivals--something thrown around a lot here, not just by you--is factually incorrect when it comes to their main rival. Hate on the Sox lack of moves all you want, but a better analysis includes the true picture.
I'm not hating on anything. I'm saying that the timing of their slump has coincided with the trade deadline, which makes it look and feel worse.
No ... you said "They did very little compared to their rivals at the deadline," which is what he was saying was incorrect
What also is a bad omen(Just being pessimistic not that way normally) is that the MLB Network blowhards are calling it the greatest trade deadline day in history. Ring a bell?? 2011, last day. "The greatest night in baseball history". That line and people that I know at work outside of work calling it that just made me want to puke. Yes it was a crazy and exiting night. If you weren't a Red Sox or Braves fan for that matter. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I swear Girardi tanked that 7 to 0 lead over the Rays. I was at the O's-Sox game the night before and a Yankee fan said to me, I'm actually rooting for the Yankees to lose to the Rays so you guys won't make it. I said be careful what you wish for.
That's fine, but a not even all that closer look reveals that key cogs in the offense have been slumping for weeks, as noted by @Harry Hooper , the team hadn't lost more than 3 games in a row all year, so were probably due for a little longer slump, and despite the frustrating stretch, they really haven't lost much ground. And Tampa only improved themselves marginally, if at all, more than the Red Sox did. Maybe they do fall out of the race. If they do, I don't think their approach to the trade deadline will have much to do with it, at least in terms of it sending some sort of negative message to the clubhouse.
Which perhaps supports the argument that the team needed an injection of quality players immediately, not in 3 weeks. Sox facing a crucial stretch of the schedule when they are clearly scuffling, and the organization adds a start to Sale's rehab, drops Houck down a start, doesn't trade for any starting pitching, and the one slugger they get can't play for 2-4 weeks (depending on your sources). To me, the totality of this seemed highly passive, almost fetishizing the maxim of "it's a marathon." Well, at a certain point in the marathon, the runners throttle it up a notch. Bloom did the opposite (albeit with the promise of throttling up in a bit).
I'm referring to the TEAM slump, not just the offensive slump. The losing streak is what I'm talking about.
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. The offensive slump, which has been underway for a few weeks, has absolutely played a role in the team slump. They're not separate entities. The larger point is, the offensive struggles, combined with regression by some of the SP's finally resulted in the team scuffling this past week. I don't think it had much of anything to do with the trade deadline. And I don't really care about the optics of the timing of the slump.
What quality players should they have "injected' immediately? The ones that other teams acquired with better prospects than the Red Sox could have offered? Or the ones that didn't get traded because their teams weren't interested in parting with them (Santana, Schoop, Cron, etc)? This wasn't as simple as Chaim Bloom deciding not to acquire a new slate of players to "energize" the roster.
Good point. We have been spoiled as Boston sports fans the past 19 years so I guess we expect more. A division title plus more. My real criticism is not getting good pitching. But like you said most had us 4th place so if they win the wild card I will be happy with that. The Div. title would be even better obviously, but all year I've been happy with being a top playoff contender. They're not the 2013 lightning in a bottle team because they don't have the starting pitching of that team but future looks better on this team then it did in 2013.
Well. It is so that the only possibility for trades were the ones Bloom made? Looking at what SF gave for Bryant, was that impossible? It's all on a continuum, no? It's not like either Bloom gives up the farm or can only get an injured guy. There surely must have been a half way point between, and a quarter point, and a three quarter point, etc. Extend a bit more and they may have gotten Bryant, or Gibson, or Rizzo ...I do understand they didn't have enough to get two of those kinda guys, or do what the Dodgers did. Is it possible though - along that continuum - that Bloom couldn't have extended a bit more? Or is it black and white? So, Bryant, Rizzo, one of the second tier starting pitchers if what I was thinking of ...Mind you, I like Schwarb, he will help ... just needed help now.
We can't exactly ignore the context that the trade was made for Schwarber before Bryant or Rizzo were moved. In other words, having acquired Schwarber, "extending" for another 1B isn't really a great use of resources. Also, they were less than a week into the Cordero at 1B experiment, which isn't going that terribly so far (.333/.412/.333 in 17 PA so far). Not saying he's the answer, but it wouldn't shock me if Bloom was operating on the thought that the 1B situation wasn't so urgent that Dalbec and Franchy (and Gonzalez now that he's back) couldn't bridge the gap to a healthy Schwarber. They had won 60% of their games with Dalbec getting the majority of playing time, it's not hard to see that two more weeks of the status quo is survivable.
2 of the yankees 3 acquisitions have been terrible, and Cruz has been terrible as stated by others above. It probably won't stay this way, but to date those teams would have been better off not making the trades they did.
I'll try this one more time... The Cubs were willing to buy better prospects from the Yankees for Rizzo than the Sox were comfortable offering. Gibson went in a package with Kennedy to The Phillies. Evidently moving that package was preferable to Texas than moving Gibson individually. Bryant was a deal made just before the deadline closed. Hoyer's ask before that may have been too high and SF may have been the last chance Hoyer had and settle for less under the wire. Chaim also may have been trying to do another deal as the clock ran out. Now I don't know that to be true, but I also don't know it not to be true. What I'm trying to say is that none of us know what offers or efforts were made in an attempt to acquire any of these players, but we repeatedly hear from members here stating that not enough was done.
I wonder if they considered moving Richardson to the pen for mop up duty, keeping Houck in the rotation, and bumping down Valdez or Rios to Worcester. Maybe slightly unorthodox, but with the rotation being really incredibly awful, and the games head to head against division rivals, maybe an unorthodox choice shoulda been in the cards to keep the best players playing...I totally appreciate maximizing guys on 40, and not burning too many options, and spreading around innings to keep folks healthy and fresh. But at a certain point, you gotta just start playing your best guys ....
Taken in sum, your posts regarding Bloom and the Red Sox seem to indicate that you believe he simply didn’t try hard enough to fix problems that you find to be glaringly obvious. To wit:
I really only wanted to comment on the part about 1st base. You gave it a B. How is picking up an injured, very streaky, player who has never played a game at the position given a B. He could end up fielding the position even worse than Dalbec. Given that Rizzo was available, and we did not get him, I think this particular portion of the equation earns an F.
Wait, I thought there were no trades of any kind this year after the July trade deadline, so how did they trade for DeShields?
So's your post. Not sure if you're just trolling here, but you (and a few others) post your POVs as if the Sox where dealing with exact same talent pool as other teams, the same financial freedom and an expendable excess at the positions that trade partners are looking for.
He was “available” in the sense that the Cubs traded him. There’s not a ton of evidence that he was “available” in the sense that he would have been worth getting into a bidding war with the Yankees for.
No sense that he was available? Every baseball man in America knew Rizzo was available. Numerous baseball experts were touting him as a logical fit for the Sox, so clearly, he was available.
That is a sad fact about true baseball fandom. It is a sport followed most closely by "boomers" and older.
