Yes. Fair or not, that’s like the most important part of his job.
So all he does is build major league rosters, one year at a time?
He has a negative defensive war because they use a negative adjustment for his time at DH and 1b. That doesn't mean he's been a negative player in the field.
Sigh. Chaim has to do a couple of things at once. He has to build a good team for the next season while also preparing the franchise for the future. He should have a one, three and five-year plan.
This would solve the popularity issue. I think a large part of the Boston market would be happiest with a drunken, one-legged GM named Stumpy O'Halloran rather than a Yale grad from Philly with a very not-Irish name. They could even hire an actor to play Stumpy who they trot out twice a year, say they "demoted" Bloom to do the same job without the title, and it would go great probably.
Yeah. Everyone loved Bunker Hill Community College educated, not Irish at all, Terry O’Epstein. Boy, the amount of love that guy got was absolutely insane.
This is stupid. I care not one wick where the GM went to college or what his name is. I care if he can do his job really well. Jury is still out on Chaim but so far not so good. But sure please continue to insinuate I’m not a fan of Bloom because of where he went to school or what his name is and not because the Sox are in last place again and the prospect pipeline is still a work in progress.
The main reason this is true is that they guaranteed $10M and a rotation spot to Corey Kluber, who is terrible. The deal never made sense - he wasn’t good in 2022 and had zero margin for his stuff to degrade.
This is what he is paid to do.
2/3 of Turner’s plate appearances have been at DH
//Michael Scott// THANK YOU
You’re the Chaim Bloom of comedians. I look forward to you being funny in 2025.
I have a friend who swears that he once slept with Jessica Chastain. Or maybe that was me.
It’s not happening but my god this would be the best thing that happened to Boston sports since… I dunno, McDaniels returning to the Pats in 2018?
I could be wrong but I was always taught to ignore defensive WAR after only a third of the season due to sample size issues and also random variance. Defensive WAR should only be trusted at the end of the season.
Pretty sure you meant to reply to him and not me, but yeah if you look at all of Turner's innings in the field he's been roughly average, which certainly has value, especially compared to a guy who now 2 teams have decided can no longer play in the field at all.
Are you talking about prospect for prospect type trades? As logical as they are, they don’t really occur all that much.
It somewhat mirrors the social/political discourse in the US. People conflate general situations with persons, get entrenched in their biases, and latch onto anything that seems to confirm them. Bloom has done a very decent job with what he has, but I doubt anyone here thinks he's an historically good GM.
This is a truly amazing post. It's probably not amazing in the way you thought it was when you wrote it, but it's truly amazing nonetheless.
Yeah. Yorke needs to be the centerpiece of a deal. He’s blocked from above and has good talent below him to not stress about it.
RR has never been a Bloom loyalist. IMO he defends decisions that are worth defending and has fairly been critical when warranted. You, on the other hand, have done more drive-by posting criticism without a second of reflection beforehand.
Well, here’s the problem with that original post and why the Chaim threads always go off the rails. People who criticize Chaim are being called “pink hats” or trolls at worse, as if there are no valid criticisms of Chaim. There is a strong implication that they know less about baseball than those defending Chaim.
I think - I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, but this is what it seems like to me, the rare “person who’s somewhere in the middle” on Bloom - the disconnect is in evaluating process vs. evaluating results. It seems like a lot of people who defend Bloom would note that his process has been sound, and I’m inclined to agree that most of his moves have been defensible on some level. And he’s gotten some good results! 2021 as a whole, and some individual successes as well. And it’s maybe worthy noting that the same process that brought Kluber 2023 also brought in Wacha 2022. (And Perez, Richards, etc.)
Good points. If also I think about it more I love to have Martin Perez or Garret Richards right now in the rotation than Kluber. So, I guess Chaim Bloom's process can work. I don't think anybody knew Kluber would decline this much. He was actually a decent pitcher last year.
Good post. And I’m in your boat — I don’t care about Bloom, strictly speaking. I just want to watch good Baseball at the major league level. For 3 of his 4 seasons that hasn’t really happened.
I think this is exactly right.
I think one of the main reasons to sign Jansen is that he becomes a potentially very valuable trade chip. Hell, given what the Dodgers have been going through at the end of games, I'm not sure they wouldn't love to have him back. But closers always seem to be in demand at the deadline, and while he's a roller coaster, Kenley clearly still has some left in the tank.
Also a good post, but I’ll push back on your Kike point. Kike is a below average batter and plugging him in to be a regular starter for yet another season seemed suspect to me. As a utility guy/defensive replacement? Fine. Defensive abilities aside, he’s a tough guy to carry in a lineup for 130+ games a year, and that’s again a role Bloom and Cora have him in. It’s not good.
Honestly, I am also in the middle on Bloom. What’s pushed me more towards the negative side is the aforementioned mob of posters who shut down any whiff of criticism, as if the person suggesting Bloom isn’t perfect is some sort of moronic idiot who can’t possibly understand what he’s trying to do.
This is exactly what I was trying to say.
Unfortunately some folks think they’re better fans than others. Criticism is seen as some pre-teen lack of Patience (tm). That’s why we see the word “entitled” thrown around so often. It’s tedious.
That's fair, but I'm not sure what available options were better.
The parts that he highlighted are pretty ridiculous IMO. I thought there was a good point about trying not to be entrenched in your views but then the rest of the post is insults for people who don’t have those views
I agree with this, it happens in the Lombardis' forum too, anyone gets a whiff of Belichick criticism and you are hounded by defenders about how dumb you are, there's no discussion. But I also think as some others have said that unfortunately is the nature of discussions nowadays, I'm right and you're wrong. I think Bloom has been in the middle, really solid from an organizational standpoint but that hasn't manifested at the MLB level with the caveats of the covid year and the injury luck this year coupled with decisions that haven't turned out well hasn't helped his cause.
I suspect Hernandez was someone who checked off the "on board with the culture change" quota and they needed some holdover. 1 year 10 mill is relative peanuts if they were expecting something between the 4 fWAR from 2021 and last season's flop. If Duran hadn't seized the CF job, I'll bet he would have earned his contract on defense alone. Plugging him at short was something I was an advocate of that just backfired
