There’s a contingent of posters who think that anything perceived as negative about the team, no matter the writer, is some devious plan to get clicks or something. I guess they got Speier and McAdam now too.
It’s not really a devious plan, it’s a well documented business strategy for digital publishing today. Newsrooms track engagement and conversions differently in the last few years, and high engagement pieces like these really help reporters. Clearly it works.
Speier is a much better one than McAdam, and his piece is a lot more sober. He reports that there are questions throughout the industry about the team’s willingness to spend at the top of the market, and certainly there are. But also, some context: The “top of the market” has been redefined by the Mets (new owner Steve Cohen’s money), the Padres (a dying owner going for it, now shedding payroll), the Phillies (who spent next to nothing for 4-5 years while they tanked, and then hired to spend wildly), and the Rangers (same as Phillies, plus they have no income tax).
That all happened while the Red Sox were rebuilding. (There was also a pandemic, and a year where we made a deep postseason run).
Speier is wholly correct when he writes that “(t)he 2023 season marked the third straight year and 10th time in 17 seasons that Sox spending was within 5 percent (either above or below) of the luxury tax threshold.” But it doesn’t seem like something to get riled up about. They needed to reset the tax for draft purposes one of those years.
There was a conscious effort to build the team’s assets, either by
letting the kids play (Dalbec, Duran, Crawford, Houck, Whitlock) or by recuperating distressed assets from other teams that might later be traded or easily supplanted by prospects (Renfroe, Kiké, Pivetta, Wacha, Cordero, Hill, Pérez, Hosmer, Paxton, JBJ, Duvall). The plan didn’t work, not just because we didn’t sneak into the playoffs, but because we were unable to flip so many of those guys for prospects (due to injury or, reportedly, “indecisiveness”).
If the Sox FO doesn’t spend over the tax 2 out of 3 years going forward, I’ll be pretty annoyed. But after the pandemic, the protracted CBA, and the mandatory reset in either 2022 or 2023 (they chose 2023), the way they played it doesn’t seem like a big deal.