Respectfully Cantor, it's not really a critique. These points have already been made quite often on the board, and you'll find many who'd agree that 1B/OF depth was a weakness, certainly in retrospect.
But a critique implies the ability to say what could have been done better, and how to do better in the future. To do that, you have to look at the situation on the ground when the choices were made. (That is to say, the lack of depth does not exist in a vacuum.)
https://www.mlb.com/news/red-sox-2022-opening-day-roster
For example, 1B, the plan was obviously Dalbec (Shaw as an emergency fix) with Casas being a mid-season call up. And Casas is why you can't sign a long term 1B for 2022-24. And I'm not sure that's an unreasonable plan in May of 2022. It took a lot going wrong for it to implode as it did - none of the main options worked, and none of the creative ones (Franchy) did either. (If Bloom had traded away a completely serviceable 1B platoon partner for Dalbec this year, I think we have a much better argument for a gross failure.)
For the OF, there's much more of an argument something more should have been done - and I think
many here were skeptical at the time that JBJ could rebound offensively, even if he was a sure thing to carry his weight defensively. But even there one has to look at the team as a whole. We had Verdugo and Hernandez. Can a team carry one or two "potentially rebounding" players? Sure. Teams do that all the time. We had some AAA promise in Duran, but maybe they should have signed a just-as-risky rebounding Pham at the beginning. Instead they rolled the dice with a rebounding JBJ (who they acquired for prospects.)
In terms of the pitching staff, you (or someone) has already made these points elsewhere. Basically the argument comes down to "Bloom signed free agents that mostly did a very good job and unfortunately all got injured at the same time, along with our regular pitchers."
Which is a big
so-what? What was he supposed to do differently
that's subject to criticism? Expecting Bloom (or any GM) to only sign the year's best free agent pitchers (measured retrospectively) is 100% childish. And I'm not sure there's any other "critique" that springs from Blooms FA pitcher signings. Overall he did well. (If they were all duds you'd have to wonder about the scouting - but they weren't all duds.)
You can't mistake volatility and risk for after-the-fact certainty.
Was Barnes cooked in May of 2022? He was throwing hard. He had previous tail-offs to seasons. There's volatility and some risk, but is it an actionable risk? Here's two contemporary examples, I'd actually like you to think about: should Bloom have traded JD yesterday for a bucket of balls because his back is going flare up this month? Should he have shopped Trevor Story because the man just can't seem to get his head into Boston and may have a chronic wrist problem now? Or should he have held onto JD because his power-drought is a blip and he'll recover his stroke as we make a run? Is Trevor Story going to come back just fine?
If you can't answer the unknowable, it's a little weird to expect others to perfectly hedge their bets on the same.
As a separate matter, if you want to say it's Bloom's
responsibility to field a good team, I have no pushback for you at all. It is. But just because a team fails does not mean Bloom didn't discharge that responsibility in a competent and reasonable way. If you're looking at an ongoing pattern of team failure that's not directly attributable to something like a come-backer snapping off your ace's pinky, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say "I don't know what the solution is, but Bloom does not either." But I don't think we're there yet.