With the Red Sox being so bad, I have been filling a lot of time by rewatching Modern Family. Today's events made me think of one particular episode in which Phil and Claire take the kids on one last adventure in their old Volkswagen. As they get to the top of the mountain, the car begins to roll down the cliff. A desperate Phil make a last-second attempt to stop the car by jumping of the hood, prompting an exasperated Claire to scream “What’s the plan Phil!”
That’s what I feel like screaming right now. In my 14 years of being a Red Sox fan, I have seen it all: World Series championships, epic collapses, last-place finishes, franchise cornerstones traded and shocking firings. The one constant through it all has been the Henry-Werner ownership group, yet even that has been anything but predictable. It seems that every five years they change their mind about how to run the Red Sox, swinging back-and-forth from trying to build a sustainable, homegrown core and pushing all the chips in the middle and going after the biggest free-agent fishes.
The honest truth is that this ownership group should earn the benefit of the doubt with their unrivaled four World Series rings this century. But that’s just not the case. The last four years have shown us that we really don’t know what their priorities are, that we don’t know how much they are willing to commit to the big league team, and we don’t know what they are going to do next.
What we do know is that they didn’t trust Chaim Bloom to be the one to take them to the next stage, and in a sense, I agree with them. Bloom hit gold in 2021 with Hunter Renfroe, Kiké Hernández and others, but his 2022 construction can best be described as “half-baked,” leaving Franchy Cordero and Yolmer Sanchez as everyday players by midseason. 2023 was overall a successful offseason, but counting on Corey Kluber to be a key member of the rotation was a catastrophic mistake that doomed the pitching rotation for the entire season.
I’m not here to nitpick every Chaim Bloom mistake, because every GM makes missteps, and he has as many if not more wins. The reason I began to truly sour on him was because of his organizational philosophy of extreme conservatism and extreme fear of losing a trade. Over his four years, Bloom actions can best be described as passive, and nowhere was that more evident than at this year’s tradeline. For the second straight year, while teetering on the edge of the playoff race, Bloom neither bought nor sold, refusing to pay even modest prospect packages for desperately needed pitching while simultaneously setting the price way too high on his own expiring contracts.
This is not how you run a baseball team. Bloom never seemed to realize that to get players worth value, you need to give up players or prospects you like. Over four years, the best prospect he gave up was probably Aldo Ramirez or Bradley Blalock. The best player he acquired via trade (besides the Mookie Betts trade) was an injured Kyle Schwarber. All signs, both the tangible results and the reports from executives around the league, point to a guy who was extremely difficult to make deals with.
I also soured on Bloom because his words just did not line up with actions. He called Xander Bogaerts ``priority A” before getting outbid by nearly $100 million by the Padres. He said they were looking to add two topline starting pitchers last offseason, and they walked away with one Corey Kluber. He said they needed pitching at this year’s trade deadline, and they got absolutely nothing. Bloom can say that they “were just trying to make the right move with the future in mind” and he didn't want to rob Peter to pay Paul,” but here’s what I say: Those are failures.
Even with all that being said, I have a serious issue with Bloom being fired. While he made his fair share of mistakes, I believe he operated his Red Sox tenure with his hands tied back behind his back. He was dealt a terrible hand from the beginning, with a bloated payroll, a terrible farm system and a superstar who was nowhere close to an extension. The expectation was that he would rebuild the Red Sox from the ground-up, creating a sustainable winner by overhauling the farm system and identifying young, controllable stars. And he did just that, with Triston Casas, Brayan Bello, Jarren Duran and now Cedanne Rafaela at the big league level and Marcelo Mayer, Kyle Teel and Roman Anthony at the minor league level.
Yes, there were plenty of mistakes at the big leagues enough to make you wonder if he was the right guy to take the Red Sox to the next level, but was he ever really given a fair opportunity to build a winner? In every offseason, it felt like Bloom was working under some sort of budgetary constraints, never quite going in the deep end of free agency. This year, it felt like the organization was finally in the point where they could go after the big-name free agents, especially with so much of the offensive core already in place. That may still be the case, but it will be with someone other than Bloom calling the shots.
So then what was the point of this? What was the point of hiring Bloom if you were just going to hire him once he rebuilt the system? It felt like Bloom has spent the last few years building for this offseason, and it begs the question whether he would have acted with more urgency if he knew that his job was on the line.
We’ll never know the answer to that, but that doesn’t matter now. What matters now is where the Red Sox go from here, and that starts with who they hire to take Bloom’s spot as Chief Baseball Officer. Henry and Co. cannot afford to get this one wrong, not with such a strong free agent pitching market and so much talent ready to explode at the big league level. I’m not going to speculate on exactly who they might get, but it simply can’t be a Dombrowski type. The worst thing would be for the new guy to tear everything that has been built the last four years to shreds, sacrificing the top prospects for short-term success. Sure, I want the new guy to be a little more aggressive than Bloom, and getting at least two big-time starting pitchers is a priority, but long-term success is still the name of the game. Teel, Casas, Devers, Mayer Anthony, Rafaela, Bello: If the Red Sox want to do anything over the next five years, it’s going to be because of those guys, with veteran free agents and trade acquisitions sprinkled in.
Let me finish with this. I have no agenda. I don’t care who runs the Red Sox. I just want to win. I devote an ungodly amount of time and energy into this franchise, and I’m sick of the result being mediocrity. The firing of Chaim Bloom doesn’t mean that all the reasons I was excited about the team in the first place, from the young MLB talent to the prospects to the farm system to the payroll flexibility. 2024 needs to be the year. Not the year of a championship necessarily, but of true competitiveness. No more Kyle Barrclough pitching in the sixth inning of a must-win game, or Franchy Cordero and Christian Arroyo starting in the outfield. It may not be time to push all the chips in the middle of the table, but it’s time to realize that the time of treading water and holding back is over.
I have an idea of how I would like the offseason to go, from which free agents I would be interested in to an utterly necessary Alex Verdugo trade. Yet before the most consequential Red Sox offseason of the last l20 years begins, the Red Sox need to hire a president of baseball operations, one who shares the belief that this team is just a few pieces away.
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