And it's not like Bloom was brought in to assemble an expansion team or inherited the '62 Mets, the '18 Orioles or the '03 Tigers. The 2019 Red Sox had a winning record and the intact core of the 2018 World Champions. I know you can't keep everyone forever and there's bound to be some down years as one era closes and another takes shape, but to falling this far this fast won't build confidence in the fan base.
The goal is to win at the major league level, not to build a great minor league organization. If one leads to the other, that's great, but collecting prospects isn't a success on its own.
Two actually. Although the Dodgers have a good argument that the Astros don't deserve the 2017, due to the cheating scandal.
Nobody said their objective was to collect prospects. Bloom ran a great show in Tampa for years, largely based on having a world-class farm system and making some wise, judicious moves. Houston's success has come largely through having a tremendous farm system (that took a bunch of atrocious years to build). The Yankees have a great farm system and back that up with big spending here and there. The Dodgers have a great farm system that is the backbone of their organization, and it allows them to spend because they always have cheap, great players coming into the majors.
The only way you can consistently do the 1st thing is by doing the 2nd thing, though.
Along the same lines as the Dodgers believing that they "could have won the 2017 World Series if not for the Astros", one of the Red Sox or the Yankees would likewise have been in the 2017 World Series if not for the Astros. Maybe the Sox would have won '17 and '18 back to back, who knows?
This offseason is key. We’ll see what Chaim can do, especially on the Devers front.
Probably not much, unless he is allowed to open the purse strings. Henry needs to bite the bullet and allow a long term contract. To a deserving, young, mostly healthy generational talent.
Please, please, can we stop with the EEI accusations. It's not all or nothing: either you see the brilliance of Bloom's long term plan, or you are a spoiled, uninformed EEI screamer. Maybe Bloom deserves some criticism. Being that reflexively critical and diminishing of his critics, seems itself kind of sophomoric.
My personal thoughts are that the big league team sucks. The depth sucks, the 40 sucks, and there's really no one outside of Whitlock and maybe Devers and maybe Bello or Wincko that are going to be on this roster in two years (and if they are, the team is in a perpetual loop of mediocrity).
How about we occupy a space that criticizes different points of view (ideas) and legitimizes only those which are not either patently childish or off the deep end?
That's exactly what he's saying, isn't it? One last-place finish, one deep playoff run, one middling team. Mixed.
That they drafted well is part of the "long term plan" you refer to.
I mean, if spending money that gets you a championship in 2013 and 2018 isn't spending meaningfully, then I don't really know what to tell you.
But that's only two WS titles ... and the Yankees and Dodgers have that, combined, in the past 13 years!
To this I would only add that the team has been much better when they spend smartly vs. simply spending BIG. A good chunk of the real splash signings over the years have been flat-out bad and regularly result in paying guys to play for other teams.
He's decent and presumably the Sox wouldn't pay full freight. Let's see what a deal might look like.
Bingo. He's exactly the type of prospect to be asking for if we're taking Hosmer off their hands. And FWIW, I live in SD and have heard nothing but good things about him as a person and the players on the team love him (he still stinks as a baseball player, tho).
I agree that the next few months will be critical. And I know it's early-ish to say this, but I am more than a little concerned that the man calling the shots will be Chaim Bloom.
Buying a prospect makes it more palatable, for sure. I just hope we’re not getting Eric Hosmer for the sake of getting Eric Hosmer.
I was thinking more like Corbin: he's 3/$70 left and is absolutely terrible. If WAS wanted to cover ~half of that and send us Hassell III for a lesser prospect, I'd be pretty interested in adding $12m AAV of dead money for three years to get a 50FV corner outfielder into our high minors.
Or else something like this.
Any player can be a good acquisition or a bad acquisition, depending on the price.
I remember being pretty optimistic heading into 2016. Needless to say, we had Betts, Bogaerts and Bradley all showing immense promise at the major league level. We had Ortiz and Pedroia as foundational pieces. And we signed Price as a FA.
Well, you take your opportunities as you find them. But we're down to 4 hours. At some point they'll have to commit to a strategy instead of looking for possible trades to build a strategy around. . .and frankly, I'm not sure that they have enough time to pursue one if the wind turns on them.
This is a great description of exactly why I have been and remain skeptical of the Red Sox from 2020 up to mid-decade or so. The fortunes of our divisional rivals have all been rising for the past couple of years and are likely to peak within the next year or two. The Dombrowski sell-off and uncontrollable events like the tragic death of Daniel Flores left the Sox with a gap in the farm system during the early 2020's. Our divisional rivals have been filling their roster with homegrown talent during this time, and we have not.
I think if you give Chaim 10 years, he’ll be able to build an organisation like the Dodgers, able to compete year-in year-out.
Hosmer is only being paid $13M per season for those 3 years. I would think the Sox could move him to another club in the offseason, paying down some of that contract.
If we took Hosmer and assumed $20m (or whatever) of his outstanding deal to obtain the rights to pay Campusano $700k to catch for us for the next three years, the money we're taking on is the price for Campusano. It sucks for Campusano that it is being paid to Hosmer instead of him, but he should take that up with his union rep. In such a scenario, Hosmer takes up a roster spot for precisely as long as it is convenient for the Red Sox. Perhaps he'd be useful for the remainder of this year; afterwards, he'd probably get flipped to a rebuilding team or just DFA'd.
