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Much like Newman, the Sox are not “Ready to deliver”– The 2025 Offseason News (& rumors?) Thread
- Thread starter chawson
- Start date
Excuse my naïveté - are most teams ran for shareholders? Like are the Yankees?
I think they’ll stay in that 10-15 payroll. I’m sure that’s what they’re telling their investors on the quarterly earnings calls.
So this is what I don’t get. They gave 32 year old Nick Pivetta a qualifying offer, which some folks questioned at the time.
They KNEW the pitching market was going to be hot. There is just no way they could have gone into this thinking they could get Burnes or Fried on a 6 year deal, when two clearly inferior pitchers like Carlos Rodon with his multiple arm surgeries and Aaron Nola off a walk year with a 4.5 ERA got six and seven year guarantees the last couple offseasons.
The Steinbrenner Family owns the whole company as far as I know.
Eventually they’ll sell out to someone as well.
I would easily take Fried at 27M AAV over Blake Snell at 36M AAV but maybe that’s just me. I don’t know why that’s seen as such a bargain and Fried is an albatross.
I think it's 50/50 whether the pitching staff is in worse shape now.
Negative:
- Losing Pivetta, who, while not great, was a serviceable starter
- Losing Jansen, who, while no longer elite, was a solid closer
- Losing Martin, who was a solid setup guy
Positive:
- Getting Giolito healthy, who should be able to approximate Pivetta's production
- Getting Hendriks healthy, who should be able to approximate Jansen's production
- Getting Chapman, who, despite all his obvious baggage, is still a good relief pitcher with closing experience
- Getting Whitlock back healthy
- Bello having another year under his belt in terms of experience and maturity
I'm not sure where adding Wilson is - whether that's a positive or negative. LOL. But it seems to me that the positives are at least roughly equivalent to the negatives.
Are we becoming a pariah baseball club where we just aren’t a destination team anymore? Unless, Boston! Great idea I can take the one-year, reset my value contract. Harsh words for sure. Enjoying the drafting and development of some players but to compete you gotta be willing to offer some dollars and unfortunately most free agent signings are overpays. And if everyone else is overpaying and getting better and you’re not; then you’re not. But..,…2003 til 18 was amazing!!!!!’
The Snell contract contains deferrals so the present value is like $150M, so $30M AAV for competitive balance tax purposes.
This is a good take, but it's also not totally true that they haven't played at the top level of free agency. Maybe not the tippy top, but until recently they were near the top in payroll. There have typically been a few really big contracts on our world championship teams--maybe not the MOST expensive contracts in the game, but big ones. And we have a couple of big ones right now: the Devers contract is one of the 15 biggest in the game. And the Story contract isn't massive but it is over 100 million.
The bigger problem, IMO, recently has been that those mid-to-lower level contracts have not been hitting. Think about last year: Story, Masa, and Giolito, three of their big four contracts, all spent a huge amount of time on the shelf. Before that, the Sale extension was a disaster, the Story contract has been a disaster, Masa has been mediocre, Giolito hasn't been on the field. Go back a little further: Duvall worked out fine, but Kluber was a disaster, Paxton threw less than 100 innings, Whitlock has struggled to stay on the field.
Their prospect development machine, on the other hand, has done pretty well. Duran is a success story after a rough start, Casas has been really good when he's healthy, Abreu has been fantastic. Houck has been really good, Kutter has been better than could have been expected, and Bello has been reliable if middling.
They’re currently projected to be 14th. I just don’t understand how they can do that and not expect a ton of backlash when they have the second highest ticket in baseball and are signed on to one of the most expensive tv deals.
They one thing they really need is a ToR SP - one of Burnes, Crochet, Cease, or (less likely) one from Pittsburgh, Seattle or somewhere else (Gallen?).
I'd offer Burnes 8/250, and be prepared to go as high as 8/280. Once he is off the market the trade cost for Crochet is going to be astronomical.
I'd offer Burnes 8/250, and be prepared to go as high as 8/280. Once he is off the market the trade cost for Crochet is going to be astronomical.
There is, stop supporting the product. They’re is no way they aren’t worried aboutticket sales and subscribers at this point.
Good post. Agree except for Coco. He was at least tier 2. Also, that was a trade.
This.
Fair yes, but I will interject a few things things:
1) They were 17th in ERA, which is 9th in the AL and 4th in their own division. 2) When you look at runs allowed, they were 23rd in the league, only ahead of ChW, LAA and Oak in the AL. 3) This is in large part because - while I'm not smart enough to find analytics that back this up but it shouldn't be Earth-shattering, if you're pitching is average and your defense is horrific, then your runs allowed are going to be pretty damn bad and worse than "fielding independent metrics" ore "earned runs" say they should be. Individually their pitchers are roughly what I'll call two #2s (Houck and Bello) and a bunch of #5s (Crawford, Gio coming off injury, Criswell). Which doesn't mean that they suck, but it means they're average to below average.
Could Pedro, Schilling, Lester, Beckett, Lackey, Price, vintage Sale make up for that deficiency - sure. Can what they have in the organization - not a chance.
They've done nothing to address the pitching - and don't appear poised to do so. They've done nothing to address the infield defense - and don't appear poised to do so. But I suppose THIS could be the year Story is healthy. More likely he's going to be hurt for two more seasons, we'll trade him to Atlanta and he's going to be an MVP (though predictably he's going to get hurt in the last week of the season and miss the playoffs, so we've got that going for is. Which is nice).
Do they really give a shit what talk radio, or some random dudes on a message board say?
Ticket prices are a function of supply & demand, and the demand is obviously still there. Until they stop meeting the revenue end of those projections, nothing is going to change.
Other than not supporting the product. Which they know that most people on a Red Sox message board, or calling to bitch about them on talk radio, simply aren’t going to do.
They have added Wilson and Chapman. That may not excited anyone here, but they haven't done *nothing* to address the pitching. The IF defense is going to be improved a lot by Story playing (if he can only stay healthy, of course), and I'm sure this is one reason why they're considering adding Bregman.
And they're no longer able to sellout their games --Even against the Yankees. And you can now buy season tickets without a wait list for the first time ever. And they're actively trying to sell a $40 a month app. Yes it does matter what the fans think of their product. They benefit from the fact that a lot of their tickets are sold to tourists that don't care at all about the success of the team and just want to see Fenway but if you become irrelevant for a decade at a time it matters.
Because number of years matter.
There was also deferred money in the Snell deal that brought the AAV down to 31 mil.
The Red Sox play in an extreme hitters park. You're not going to be able to get an accurate comparison looking only at ERA or total runs allowed.
This may be a perfect storm of ownership not willing to extend big money AND a front office who cannot read the market.
Lugo or Flaherty last year would have made the 2024 team more competitive and allowed them so stay in a good financial situation. They were flat out wrong on Yoshida and their valuation of that player was way off.
With Chaim and Craig, we have 2 guys who were put in charge of a big league operation for the first time. If the team is going to be more frugal, the guys in charge better be able to see all the angles and beat other teams to the punch. That is not the case right now and we have an oddly constructed team with no frontline starters and lousy defense.
Lugo or Flaherty last year would have made the 2024 team more competitive and allowed them so stay in a good financial situation. They were flat out wrong on Yoshida and their valuation of that player was way off.
With Chaim and Craig, we have 2 guys who were put in charge of a big league operation for the first time. If the team is going to be more frugal, the guys in charge better be able to see all the angles and beat other teams to the punch. That is not the case right now and we have an oddly constructed team with no frontline starters and lousy defense.
They're never going to do that for a lot of reasons, one being the obvious at the end of the day, the Red Sox (and MLB) is an entertainment business. You wouldn't pay for a movie or TV show where the producers say, "Well, this is kind of a bridge movie between our last huge picture and our next big one", right? So the Sox have to come out and insult our intelligence year after year after year after year.
And some people buy it and rationalize it ("I've been a Sox fan since I was five", "Ownership gave me four World Series championships", "Fenway Park is magical, no matter who's playing") and that's fine and good. Sometimes it's hard to realize that the thing you like the most is unequivocally lying directly to your face so that they can separate you from your money.
Honestly, I'm not even angry any more. I stopped being angry about a year or so ago because it's obvious that they just don't give a shit any more. Or, more specifically, the Boston Red Sox are obsessed with winning their way. And that way involves not being underwater on any contract at all.
They have 300 people in their front office all supposedly working towards the goal of keeping ownership happy and not straying from the Red Sox way. The amount of people in the FO is fucking insane to me, I don't know how you make any decisions -- never mind at the speed it takes to run a professional sports team -- with that amount of people weighing in on transactions. And I get that it's not 300 people chirping about whether to sign Fried or Soto, but their managers and their manager's managers are presumably giving Breslow report after report about players' worth and I'm sure some of those slide decks contradict one another, so I'm sure there's all sorts of FO jockeying for position, etc.
The point is Breslow probably has too much information which seems to be handicapping his ability to read the market, make a decision and make a decision quickly. I'm waiting for the point where he's just so frustrated and just says, "Fuck it" and trades Roman Anthony to the Rangers for Jacob DeGrom.
The problem with the Red Sox way is that this isn't how big market MLB teams think any more, it's the opposite actually. The Dodgers, the Yanks, the Padres, the Mets, the Rangers, the Phillies (among others) know that pretty much all MLB contracts are dumb. The money is dumb. The production that you're going to get five to seven years down the line is dumb. But it's the price of doing business today. If you want to win now you have to spend today and not worry about tomorrow. Is that a good financial philosophy? Yes and no. It seems to work for most of the teams that I listed (they've made the playoffs more times and have had more success than the Sox have since they adopted this philosophy) but as a person who has a mortgage and kids going to college, it wouldn't work for me. But John Henry and the Sox are different, they don't have to really worry about the future since owning the Red Sox is akin to printing money.
Until they do so, the Red Sox aren't going to change. They aren't getting Burnes, I doubt that they'll get Flaherty and I think that trading one of the big five for Crochet or anyone else scares them to death. It's going to be another winter of bargain bin shopping and the Sox asking you to squint and maybe you'll see a pitching staff that won't break down in July and August. By that time the Celts and Bruins seasons will be over and the Pats will be starting up (maybe with the number one pick in the draft), so no one will give a shit about another lost Red Sox season.
Yes, I agree this is kind of a loathsome way to run the organization and treat the fans. I mean, there IS still time to sign some guys. But I think by the end of this off season we will finally have our answer. Is sitting 10-15 in payroll the new permanent Henry paradigm? Or was that simply an interstitial phase as the team rebuilt the farm? I think we see that for the very rare elite still in their 20s FA, they might get in there ...only to inevitably lose to NYC or LA. So ...maybe this is it. If this is it ....if we are going to be rooting for young promising players (which is fun), and me a middlin' payroll organization that only every now and then competes for the postseason: then lower the fucking prices.
There is only one thing we can do and that's no longer buy the product. But baseball, the Red Sox, are too in my DNA for me to do that. Lord, I know it ain't like, life and death, but baseball is part of New England culture. If you're gonna own the team, I hope you'd feel some public responsibility to care for that team, for the fan experience, for how the people in this culture are devoted to the game, the team, to the team winning, and competing.
The end of that great SI article about Red Sox fans after the Red Sox won in 2004, is a quote from one of the fans profiled (I'm paraphrasing): "If you want to know who I am, you have to understand three things about me: I love my family. I love the blues. And I love baseball."
If Henry, and FSG, are treating the Red Sox simply as an investment to generate maximum profit, well, I hope he'd have the decency to understand that that's an affront to a regional culture. And so then sell the team to someone who wants a winner as much if not more than profit; to someone who respects the significance of the Red Sox to the culture they are part of.
Sure. Snell is also a year older. And how much of an impact will $27M have on the payroll five to eight years from now when they’re already more than $100M under before any baseball penalties and have no one under contract besides Devers, Rafaela, and Bello?
To your point, this past April, before the Sox got off to a good start, I was able to get seats down the third base line for a game for $14 apiece.
I started following the Sox in the early 90s. They weren't good. Then things picked up, especially with '95 team generating some excitement, and obviously things started to get wild once the Sox managed to get Pedro. All that came after that (with some bumps along the way) was a heck of a lot of winning. This team has just been wildly successful relative to the league over that time period though. I'm quite happy with how things have gone with the team, which isn't wildly off what I see from friends who still follow the Sox, so I don't think it's an older vs. younger fan thing.
But there is absolutely an angry, beligerent, toxic portion of the fan base that will not shut up about the front office, FSG, John Henry's wealth, and of course Mookie. I'm probably missing some of their repetative sports talk radio talking points but it's the same soul sucking negative nonsense over and over and over and over. I've seen a few threats to stop following the team. I wish those folks would finally follow through.
I've got to push back on some of this. Papi yes - they struck oil when they were trying to plant tomatoes in their back yard. Will never happen again and to hold anyone to that standard is wildly unfair. Mueller and Millar were absolutely 3rd tier. Maybe Salty.
Shane Victorino and Mike Napoli were both priorities for the Red Sox. They were signed early and signed to multi year deals that filled obvious holes. It'd have been like if they'd gone out and signed Jack Flaherty and Teoscar Hernandez immediately. Coco Crisp was acquired for a very highly thought of prospect at the time (Andy Marte was the 14th rated prospect by BA heading into the 2006 season). It would be roughly equivalent to if the Red Sox traded Marcelo Mayer for Spencer Steer (which I would do in one second). These are the type of deals I've been begging (and thought) Boston would make this offseason, and they're not.
I should have said "starting" pitching, totally fair. In reading my own post, I think that seems somewhat obvious, but you're right that I should have said "starting."
If they add Bregman, I'll be thrilled. I've been begging for it all off-season (though I want him to replace Devers at 3b and to get rid of Yoshida). I think Bregman is another version of Fried and Burnes - they'll make an offer. It will be for a lot of money. They also won't be close to getting him.
When they end up eventually adding Walker Buehler/Patrick Corbin/Mike Lorenzen/whomever they eventually get to take their 1yr / $15m contract and end up signing Harrison Bader/Justin Turner/Mark Canha to a similar 1yr/$15m contract they will have technically removed them from "doing nothing" I suppose. In the future I'll try and make that "doing nothing that will actually fix the problem", which is something I admittedly should have said also, I suppose.
@chawson - I know. I'm using it to show the discrepancy between ERA and runs allowed. They allowed a lot of unearned runs. Because their infield defense blows. When you have around average to below average pitching and couple that with horrid infield defense, it's going to make the pitching "worse." Or - put another way - when you play in an extreme hitters park - like Fenway - and you choose to couple average pitchers and bad defense, you have chosen ... poorly.
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The only thing that gives me hope re: Burnes is that it doesn't feel like there are that many teams reasonably left in on him. SF & TOR, presumably, but has there been noise about anyone else?
Not that that means he goes cheaply-- I imagine he looks at Cole's 9/324 (36m AAV), wheeler's shorter 42m AAV, and Fried getting 8 years, and reasonably expects 8 years at or above 40m AAV. But having both NY teams out presumably might help keep it to that range rather than escalating beyond the comps, unlike Soto. I'm still not sure I can imagine the Sox going that many years and 300m+ for a 30yo pitcher, though.
Not that that means he goes cheaply-- I imagine he looks at Cole's 9/324 (36m AAV), wheeler's shorter 42m AAV, and Fried getting 8 years, and reasonably expects 8 years at or above 40m AAV. But having both NY teams out presumably might help keep it to that range rather than escalating beyond the comps, unlike Soto. I'm still not sure I can imagine the Sox going that many years and 300m+ for a 30yo pitcher, though.
Bought on the secondary market, right? I mean the team's not slashing ticket price as games near.
This is a really important point. MLB isnt the NFL (hard cap that can be massaged to spend big on a certain window) or NBA (want to align to one or two start players), you need time a large number of really good players together to be a good team and it becomes really hard to do that if you dont spend until you have the perfect window.
Theres a good amount of talent in their absolute primes now (Devers, Duran, Houck, Crawford, etc.). Those guys are likely either not on the team in three years or are about to start to decline. Aligning everyone's club control timeline, primes, and spending on key targets is a venn diagram where the center can approach zero. You're incredibly unlikely to time it perfectly.
Where I am. A SF reporter yesterday suggested SF is probably out on Burnes. NYY/NYM/LA are almost certainly out. Boston may be bidding against themselves in the end.
This exactly. They're going to have to "overpay", or move beyond their perceived, correct valuations if they genuinely want to land one of these guys, and move back into playoff contention this year. I don't think it's a misunderstanding of the market, as some have suggested, as much as it seem like a stubborn refusal to accept/participate fully in the current reality(Meaning the pitching market. Not referring to Soto here).
Yeah I was sympathetic to the "time isn't quite right" conversations of the past couple years regarding big FA acquisitions but at this point I think it is pretty much BS to suggest that it's even remotely worth waiting around to see how the kids produce before making some splashes. With little help from the FO, the team has been surprisingly competitive for extended stretches only to crap out for lack of depth and top-end talent (with a side of terrible defense and fundamentals).
Imagine if Duke and ownership decided it wasn't worth adding a top of the line starter to a 78 win team in the fall of '97?
If they are going to keep waiting for the perfect player on the perfect contract at the perfect time, we will never sign another FA of significance under this ownership. They are operating out of fear while they try to convince us it is something else closer to caution or sound team-building practices.
Maybe they can be shamed into Burnes since they now only ever dish out big money to be reactive rather than proactive.
I posted this earlier this year - years ago when I lived in a NYC suburb it became clear the Mets were putting seats on stubhub. You could tell because you could buy the same seat directly from the Mets as was available on stubhub.
I wondered last summer if the Sox were doing the same thing. Very good seats last year were way under the ticket price even for Season Ticket Holders - and I thought I saw the same ticket on the Sox site as I did on Seatgeek.
No doubt, have been doing similar for a couple of years now as well as the 4 ticket family pack with drink and hot dogs for $99. My point was that while that seat was a great deal for BJ, the discount on that and others like it that were previously sold don't hurt the team. As BJ alluded, the availability of the seat does make a statement.
This is 100% the case, and it's really ridiculous for fans of teams to think they belong to them... they don't. They're not regionally beholden. They're not beholden to anything but making money. And the Sox are doing a great job at that. For the people that have an actual stake in the business, Henry is doing a great job. It's almost as ridiculous as rooting for Apple Computers to beat out some other brands.
Of course they'll never come out and say that... because that would truly alienate people that like to think otherwise... and I include myself. I'm buying into the bullshit that they have some sort of obligation. We can just not buy Apple. We can just not buy into the Red Sox. I wish that the teams would lose the regional/city part of their name. They should just be the Henry/Red Bird Capital Sox.
There's a new wave of spending that really just started 2-3 years ago (the Rangers bonanza, then the wild shortstop winter, then the billion dollar Dodgers) and I don't think we have the full picture because the back ends of these deals haven't kicked in yet. Maybe those teams will collectively be able to change the next CBA and never have to pay the piper, I dunno.
"And that way involves not being underwater on any contract at all."
Yet they self-owned themselves on Yoshida (mainly the international scouting department).
Yet they self-owned themselves on Yoshida (mainly the international scouting department).
I’m just trying to be a realist. I love baseball. This unfortunately isn’t about baseball. It’s business to these guys.
That they've been out on these mega contracts doesn't seem super indicative of anything to me. The Sox have pretty consistently, when they've been a high-spending team, tried to spread their money out over a lot of mid-tier contracts to minimize risk, while avoiding a ton of the megacontracts of the kind the Yankees and Mets sign. They haven't avoided big contracts altogether -- the Devers contract is massive, of course, and so was the Price contract and Sale extension.
As recently as 2022 they were a borderline top-5 payroll team. That team is a good example. There were no "mega" contracts on that team, but there were 4 contracts totalling more than 20 million (Story, Sale, Bogaerts, JD Martinez).
Right now it's basically the same as 2022, actually, in terms of top flight expenditures, with Giolito and Yoshida close behind at around 18-19 million. And Devers is by far the biggest contract/commitment they've ever made, and that happened just about a year ago.
The payroll is not lower right now not because of a lack of top-flight expenditures but because 1) so much of the roster is so cheap right now.
Does that excuse the losing? No, not at all. But the problem, IMO, hasn't been the payroll, it's been that the talent they've acquired has sucked or hasn't been able to stay on the field. They had like a third of the payroll, 50 million dollars or more, on the shelf last year, between Giolito, Story, and Masa.
As recently as 2022 they were a borderline top-5 payroll team. That team is a good example. There were no "mega" contracts on that team, but there were 4 contracts totalling more than 20 million (Story, Sale, Bogaerts, JD Martinez).
Right now it's basically the same as 2022, actually, in terms of top flight expenditures, with Giolito and Yoshida close behind at around 18-19 million. And Devers is by far the biggest contract/commitment they've ever made, and that happened just about a year ago.
The payroll is not lower right now not because of a lack of top-flight expenditures but because 1) so much of the roster is so cheap right now.
Does that excuse the losing? No, not at all. But the problem, IMO, hasn't been the payroll, it's been that the talent they've acquired has sucked or hasn't been able to stay on the field. They had like a third of the payroll, 50 million dollars or more, on the shelf last year, between Giolito, Story, and Masa.
They came into the off-season saying they’re ready to deliver, get one or even two big name pitchers, and they must have at least three guys in the front office whose sole job is texting reporters every time they lose out on somebody that they were “in on” them. Pick one:
-They’ve shifted their philosophy but have no idea how to execute the plan
-Breslow’s team isn’t on the same page as the money guys
-They’re lying
I'm not sure what you mean by "new wave of spending"? Unless I'm missing something, it looks to me that it's the same old way of spending that has been going on since free agency began: sign players for a lot of money and a bunch of years to keep the YAA down. If you're lucky, maybe you can defer the money to a bunch of years after the player has retired.
We have a ton of data on that, usually the first two or three years are pretty good and the back half suck. Players get old, they don't perform anywhere close to their contract and owners feel bamboozled. I am 1000% sure that is what the 300 are "proving"* to Breslow and ownership.
* I only put proving in quotes because it's pretty fucking obvious that the guy you get at 31 isn't going to pitch/hit as well as he will at 36, 37 or 38-years-old.
Breslow and Henry, being strict numbers guys, are like "fuck that we're not paying Max Fried all that money when he's 36 and his ERA is 4.00+". That future financial prudence makes sense if you're scraping nickels together or don't care about winning today. The Sox aren't doing the former and should definitely care about the latter.
It's true that every team will need to go through a reset period at some point. Even the Yankees and Dodgers are bound to have a couple of consecutive seasons where they don't make the playoffs.
The problem is that the Sox should be past their "reset period". And it appears (at this point) they are unable or unwilling to get past that.
The problem is that the Sox should be past their "reset period". And it appears (at this point) they are unable or unwilling to get past that.
The team does need to account for injuries to the pitching staff. Happens to pitchers on every team.
I spent a summer as an intern for a local minor league team which shall remain nameless. I was in college (20+ years ago) and had every young baseball fan's desire to be a GM someday. I wrote letters to all the GMs and all that you could think to do at 19 and took an unpaid summer internship to work in baseball.
The first day the General Manager of the team sat all the new interns down for a conversation that went like this... not verbatim, but pretty damn close...
"Welcome everyone. I love baseball just like you all do. But this is an ass business. We need to get asses in the seats. And we need to get the $20 out of that ass pocket before they leave the stadium. That is our business."
I was crushed. Along with tarp-pulling and 14 hour days during homestands, the cold calling prior ticket buyers during road trips, etc., etc., just completely and totally destroyed my interest in working in the sport. If I was going to continue to love it and be at all romantic about it, I needed to be MUCH further away from it. So now SoSH is as close as I get outside of my annual summer pilgrimage to Fenway.