BUT...... again, it's an assesment situation, rather than a "3 games out of last WC spot and you're not competitive" situation.... the Sox had Chris Sale returning. That's something that any team in competition would have been pretty hopeful about. Paxton was looking really good. Bello was looking good. The bullpen was solid with the way Pivetta was contributing. Houck and Whitlock were both on their way back. The shitty middle infield defense was getting plugged by Story returning. There was plenty to be optimistic about and I know for 100% that a lot of posters here felt that IF the Sox could get in, they were actually built to be a playoff team more than a regular season team. So if Bloom dealt for Montgomery that would have provided them with a rotation absolutely capable of going toe to toe against anyone. I was cautiously optimistic and would have pushed for adding Montgomery rather than selling..... or doing nothing. But even doing nothing, as pointed out above... the team had so many key players returning and were THREE games out... AND had a playoff roster IMO. Everyone claiming that they knew the team was garbage is seriously revisionist.
I still think the biggest flop was '22, not last season.
And again... I also think that ownership had contraints on how they wanted the team to be built/cost post Mookie which was sort of a conservative luck/hope based contention. I was expecting to see that change and for them to get two major new starters which would put them as a 90-92 win team. They're just one damn Montgomery/Snell away from that and it seems so obvious I can't understand what the issue is other than Henry is being a cheap PoS
Assuming you mean this in the colloquial term of revisionist history, this just isn't fair to say.
I can't speak for "everyone" claiming it, but I can speak for myself. I spent last off-season saying the pitching wasn't good enough (I also said the same about the middle of the order) and the way they were going about building the rotation wasn't good enough. My prediction for the season reflected those beliefs.
Once the idea of trade deadline approach came up, I continued to say that they didn't have enough pitching, and they should (in order) 1) trade really good prospects for top half starting pitchers with term, and if they couldn't / wouldn't do that they should b) trade "meh" prospects for rentals of starting pitching and if they couldn't / wouldn't do that then they should c) sell and sell hard because what they had wasn't good enough and wouldn't be close to good enough once teams close to them started adding.
I said that all off-season, and all summer.
Feel free to say I got lucky, or that "a broken clock is right twice a day" or whatever else, but to say it's revisionist (or wasn't brought up as a criticism in real time without any benefit of hindsight) isn't fair.
*I'm saying the exact same thing about this year's pitching, and I expect a similar outcome in terms of wins and losses. But that's for a later thread.